Phil Windley points to an interesting site called HowManyOfMe.com that shows the inutility of names for distingushing among people (when there are lots of them).
I was struck when visiting it, though, that the site requires users to declare their age. The reason? The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
COPPA is one of my favorite superfluous laws. It starts from the premise that parents can’t or shouldn’t be responsible for their children’s online experiences, and it has probably diminished the availability of educational content online for children, particularly children on the margins.
I had fun with it a few years ago (as a novice self-promoting think-tanker) by pointing out the government’s bald hypocrisy in regulating the private sector without regulating itself.
The COPPA declaration on this site illustrates well how dumb regulation gums up the Internet (and other media too). Someone with an interesting idea had to spend a bunch of extra time on his or her project to put it in compliance with a federal law (that I think probably doesn’t actually apply in this case). And just as importantly, millions of people will have to click an extra couple of clicks (I had to go back and do the age declaration) just to get a couple of interesting tidbits of info.
Take these modest inconveniences and multiply them by thousands of Web sites, then by millions or billions of clicks. Then, consider that two or three such gummy inconveniences are added to the burdens Web businesses carry every year. You start to realize that fresh, invigorating ideas and entertainments we could be enjoying are being slowly but surely sapped of energy and vigor. All so the government can do stuff like insinuate itself into the rearing of children.
Many thanks to Jim Lippard for naming the Tech Liberation Front as one of his “5 Blogs that Make Him Think.”
He did so as part of this new “Thinking Blogger Awards” contest. It’s not really a contest per se, rather, you’re just suppose to nominate 5 more blogs that make you think after someone else has already nominated your blog on their list.
So, to keep things going, here are 5 blogs that make me think (and I encourage my TLF colleagues to nominate others):
(1) Nick Carr’s “Rough Type”
(2) Mark Cuban’s “Blog Maverick”
(3) Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”
(4) Jay Rosen’s “Press Think”
(5) Reason’s “Hit and Run”
I know that it has become a bit passe to talk about personal responsibility these days. Ours is a “it takes a village to raise a child” world. We’re told that we have to look out for each other in this big village to ensure that no one becomes the village idiot. And so we get laws like this new one from New York that would ban the use of electronic devices such as iPods, BlackBerrys and cell phones while crossing streets in major cities.
According to CNet’s description of the soon-to-be-released bill, “The bill would effectively make it illegal to use any kind of portable electronic device–a music or video player, cell phone, smart phone, gaming device, etc.–while crossing the street in cities such as New York, Albany and Buffalo. Offenders would be slapped with a $100 fine and a criminal court summons. Joggers and bicyclists would have to limit their iPod use to city parks in which no street crossing would be involved.” Apparently the sponsor of the bill became concerned after a 23-year-old Brooklyn man walked into the path of a city bus while listening to his iPod.
That certainly is a tragic story–and I hate to sound cold-hearted about this–but is the problem here the iPod or the guy simply failing to look both ways before he crossed a busy street? Personally, when I’m walking the busy streets of Washington, DC, I am usually listening to my MP3 player and reading a newspaper or magazine at the same time. When I look around, plenty of people around me are doing the same thing. But there’s no epidemic of deaths from us all stumbling into oncoming traffic while in a zombie-like trance from listening to music or reading papers.
Moral of the story: Most of us know how to walk and chew gum at the same time. For the handful of those who don’t I suppose you could make a Darwinian argument: Banning portable media devices on streets isn’t going to stop that crowd from doing stupid things that put their lives in danger anyway.
As regular visitors will notice, we’ve refreshed the design of the site a bit. Nothing radical, but we hope the changes will make the blog easier to read and navigate. New features include author pages that list the posts of individual contributors, Google results in the search bar, and new Digg and Reddit buttons for your convenience–please feel free to use them!
We want to thank all of our readers for making this blog a success. If you enjoy the site, consider telling a friend or linking to it from your blog. ¡Viva la liberation!
Last week, my organization, ACT, announced its intention to scour the European
Commission’s FLOSS
report and read and analyze this lengthy (and heavy) 287 page study. The goal: go beyond the executive summary and provide an in-depth analysis of the report, and in the process initiate a real conversation about the paper and its conclusions. As the recent
disputes over the report suggest, informed analysis is still sorely needed.
In a nutshell, the authors of the UNU-Merit report argue that an aggressive commitment to FLOSS – Free/Libre/Open Source Software – will provide an innovative spark for the EU. Using what the authors suggest is Europe’s competitive advantage in open source developers, the European ICT industry will be able to better compete with America’s tech leaders.
It is a provocative and ambitious strategy. But is it sound? If the EU desires to adopt FLOSS as its competitive advantage in ICT, would the data and proposals presented in the UNU-MERIT study help? How do they authors support their strategy in the 274 pages that follow the executive summary?
Those are some of the key questions I hope to answer in the coming weeks. Starting with Section 6 next week, we’ll analyze the report section by section, identifying the value but also the pitfalls of the report.
I’m also looking forward to constructive feedback from TLF readers. The report implicates software licensing models, market analysis, innovation, immigration, antitrust/competition policy, interoperability, and even society/culture. It’s impossible to be an expert on everything! But the long and the short of it is that the paper and its policy implications deserve to be topics of conversation, not just bits of rhetoric.
Full commentary on sections 2 through 5 of the study (essentially the paper’s introduction and reason for being) is here.
Brian Emmett, a self-described space buff (who has even attended space camp) won a trip to space in an Oracle competition, but he won’t be able to take the ride. That’s because the government counts contest winnings as income, and the tax on the ride would be about $25,000–a huge chuck of money that the average person (including Emmett) cannot afford to pay.
In an interview with CNN, Emmett said, “There was definitely a period of mourning. I was totally crestfallen. Everything you had hoped for as a kid sort of evaporates in front of you.”
This is a sad story that should be recalled not only in the lead-up to tax season. We should be asking what precisely the government planned to do with that $25,000. Social security is broken, the health care system is a mess, and the education system is failing miserably. It’s time for citizens to demand that government become less wasteful and more accountable.
Cindy Skrzycki, The Washington Post’s outstanding regulatory affairs reporter, notes in her column today that The Center for Auto Safety has asked federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to “restrict the use of systems that carmakers are building into their vehicles so motorists can’t make phone calls or fiddle with other interactive gear while they drive.” The Center for Auto Safety’s complete petition can be found here.
Skrzycki notes that on-board communications, navigation and entertainment systems are gaining in popularity. For example, GM’s “OnStar” system is now being countered by “Sync,” which is Ford’s new offering that is being developed in partnership with Microsoft. (I saw a demo of it out at CES this year and it is very cool. It allows the music from a PC in your house to be zapped directly to your car as soon as you pull in the garage). And many other auto makers currently integrate such systems into their cars, or at least plan to in the near future.
But the Center for Auto Safety claims that this is all just a disaster waiting to happen and want the government to regulate to restrict the use of these technologies within our cars:
Continue reading →
Related to our discussion a couple of weeks ago about immigration for high-tech workers, Katherine Mangu-Ward cites a study illustrating one way that a “brain drain” can be good for the country from which the brains drain:
Imagine, if you will, foreign movie makers who come to California. They are much more likely to make excellent movies there–or even to make movies at all, really–and more of their countrymen will get to watch them when they appear, especially if their countrymen have few qualms about bootlegs.
The authors, economists Peter J. Kuhn and Carol McAusland, write that those who remain behind “benefit because ‘their’ brains produce ‘better’ knowledge (such as more effective medicines, more entertaining movies, or more effective software) abroad than if they had remained at home.” This is particularly true in situations where a discrepancy between protections for intellectual property at home and abroad makes it easy for residents of the innovators’ countries of origin to enjoy the fruits of their labors with low transaction costs.
Personally, I find the notion that someone should be forced to live in an impoverished country solely so that his countrymen can benefit from his presence morally repugnant. But even if you buy that premise, it’s not at all clear that liberal immigration of high-skilled workers is, on net, harmful to poor countries. And liberal immigration is undeniably beneficial to the world as a whole.
I’m excited to announce that Brooke Oberwetter is joining the TLF team. Brooke has been a friend of mine since we worked together at Cato. She’s one of the sharpest and funniest people I know. Brooke earned my admiration for her tireless (and sadly, futile) fight to stop the smoking ban in DC. Also, with the possible exception of Julian, she throws the best parties in DC.
And (despite my occasional nitpicking) she has many interesting and worthwhile things to say about tech policy. She’s a policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and she tells me her work at CEI will be more focused on tech policy in the coming months. She’s currently seeking a masters degree in public policy at American University, and she also blogs at the CEI blog and her personal blog.
Today, the Progress & Freedom Foundation released a “Tech Agenda for 2007” containing ten policy recommendations for the 110th Congress and the FCC. It’s a set of market-oriented proposals covering a wide array of Digital Economy issues. What follows is just a brief summary of the 10 priorities we came up with. Please review the complete study for our detailed recommendations:
1 – Renew fundamental reforms of communications regulations.
2 – Leave network neutrality concerns to the market and antitrust.
3 – Leave content business models and fair use to the market.
4 – When addressing patents, take a first-principles approach to property and innovation.
5 – Enact meaningful reform of archaic media ownerships laws and regulations that hinder media marketplace experimentation.
6- Pursue greater First Amendment parity among modern media providers by leveling the playing field in the direction of greater freedom for all operators / platforms.
7 – Subject data security and privacy proposals to careful benefit-cost analysis, including full examination of consumer benefits from services and technologies affected by these proposals.
8 – Promote pro-competitive, non-regulatory internet governance.
9 – Avoid open-ended, intrusive data retention mandates.
10 – Promote more efficient taxation of telecom services and Internet sales.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.