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Twilight for TV Critics?

by on April 7, 2008 · 5 comments

Broadcasting & Cable notes that:

“The fraternity of the nation’s television critics at daily newspapers was once a thriving milieu, dominated by a great diversity of committed voices. The critics’ opinions were sought, revered — in many cases, even feared — and blurbed in network on-air promos. That reality has changed drastically of late as the ranks of critics have grown noticeably leaner. Caught in the financial turmoil roiling the newspaper industry, they have become a beleaguered lot, a growing part of the collateral damage of the digital revolution. In the past two years, more than one-dozen longtime critics at major-market dailies — including the Dallas Morning News, Seattle-Post Intelligencer, New York Newsday, New York Daily News and Houston Chronicle — have been either let go, shunted to different beats or been forced to take the ubiquitous buyout…”

This is not altogether surprising. I think there are three main culprits:

(1) Growing outlet competition and audience fragmentation: There’s just a lot more to read, watch and listen to now, so something’s got to give.

(2) Continued decline of newspaper business in general: For reason #1, newspapers are hurting and losing revenue. [see James Gattuso’s recent post on this]. That has meant ongoing staff cuts, and critics (TV, music, art, or otherwise) are likely to be the first with their heads on the chopping blocks.

(3) Explosion of independent voice & critics via blogosphere: Finally, anyone can be a critic these days. That does not mean anyone can be a good critic–there are plenty of blithering idiots out there in the blogosphere when it comes to armchair media criticism–but there are many “amatuers” who do a fine job critiquing mass media programming (especially television).

So, while I am sad to seem some mainstream critics struggling, I just don’t see this newspaper beat surviving much longer.

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Should White Spaces be Unlicensed?

by on April 2, 2008 · 16 comments

The white space debate has been the subject of much attention lately, with Microsoft, Dell, and Google pitted against the CTIA on the question of how to allocate white spaces between UHF channels. The two competing proposals are 1) auction off white spaces, similar to the 700mhz auction, or 2) leave them unlicensed and managed (like 2.4Ghz) but allow devices which don’t cause interference.

This controversy again raises the issue of the desirability of unlicensed spectrum. I’ve been reading about the merits of unlicensed spectrum, inspired by a 2006 exchange between Jerry Brito and Mike Masnick on TLF and TechDirt. Jerry makes a compelling argument that command-and-control commons rules might hinder the emergence of superior networks operating with devices emitting greater than 4w EIRP.

The public interest is to allocate the spectrum in the most economically efficient manner, so if unlicensed spectrum uses do not make the best use of scarce airwaves, unlicensed bands should be auctioned off. Tim envisions privately managed commons that would provide for much the same openness now offered by unlicensed spectrum, but without a monolithic regulator imposing centralized rules.

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coverage from Tech Policy Summit

by on March 27, 2008 · 0 comments

I had planned on blogging from the Tech Policy Summit out here in Los Angeles this week, but Andrew Feinberg is doing an amazing job of it over at the Capitol Valley blog that I don’t need to. Andrew Noyes of National Journal also has good coverage over at the Tech Daily Dose blog.

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The New War on MP3s: EMI’s Push to Ban Remote Music Storage

by on March 26, 2008 · 4 comments

In the latest C:Spin over at CEI’s website, I examine the record industry’s latest Internet copyright battle and the shortcomings it reveals about U.S. intellectual property laws:

The next potential casualty of America’s deficient copyright regime is MP3Tunes, a San Diego startup founded by Web entrepreneur Michael Robertson, which lets users store digital music files in a secure, Web-based locker they can access from anywhere. MP3Tunes lets listeners access only music they have uploaded themselves. Like a handheld MP3 player, MP3Tunes frees music lovers from dragging around massive album collections on physical discs.

But now Robertson’s service has run into a major obstacle. EMI, a major British record label, has sued MP3Tunes for copyright infringement. EMI contends that since users are transferring their music to a third party without getting permission from the record label, MP3Tunes is violating EMI’s exclusive right to distribute its music. MP3Tunes faces tough odds given past rulings in copyright infringement cases.

EMI’s argument seems tenuous. MP3Tunes doesn’t “share” files with anybody but the original owner, and paying a third party to act as a custodian does not imply a transfer of ownership. Individuals can already store digital files online using myriad services from Flickr to Mozy. We increasingly back up our entire lives to online repositories, and the individual, not the website, remains the owner.

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The New Smoots OR Silicon is the New Steel

by on March 26, 2008 · 4 comments

Remember the Smoot-Hawley Act? The famous, or perhaps rightly called infamous, act was seen as a solution to America’s economic woes during the deep economic downturn of the 1920s. The results, much to the confusion and dismay of the bill’s author’s Representative W.C. Hawley and Senator Reed Smoot were nothing short of disastrous.

Why does this matter to us today? Well, we’re seeing a lot of Smoots and a lot of Hawleys running around Capitol Hill these days. With free trade agreements with South Korea and Columbia floating around the offices in Congress offering potential relief from high prices for consumers, members of Congress are increasingly tempted to ignore these consumer benefits in order to benefit their individual constituencies. Rather than seeing trade as something that benefits consumers, Congressmen only see a loss in jobs.

But will blocking agreements help domestic producers? Not tech powerhouses like Apple, Google, Microsoft and Cisco. For these firms to continue to innovate, create investor value, and create jobs, they need to have affordable raw materials.

Much of this raw material comes from places like Korea, a country with a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) currently pending in Congress. By not removing trade barriers with Korea, we not only force consumers to pay more, we also force our domestic tech firms to pay higher prices.

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Google’s excellent new online safety campaign

by on March 26, 2008 · 0 comments

Google has just launched an excellent new online safety campaign and website that includes new tools, materials and videos for parents looking for help in protecting their kids from potentially objectionable online material. Over at the Google blog, Elliot Schrage, Vice President of Global Communications and Public Affairs, outlines the new offerings. Schrage discusses the partnerships Google has struck with other safety groups and the other initiatives it has underway. He also mentions Google’s excellent “Safe Search” tool, which I have praised in my report on parental controls & online child safety. It really is amazing how well that tool works. (Note: other search engine providers also offer excellent safe search tools).
Google safe search

Google also has released an excellent new online safety video with the forks at Common Sense Media:

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Supreme Court Will Hear Indecency Case

by on March 18, 2008 · 2 comments

By Drew Clark

Here’s a maxim for Supreme Court watchers: the high court likes to be entertained.

The justices’ decision to take the Federal Communications Commission v. Fox Television Stations case means that the court will finally hear a case pitting broadcast-style indecency regulation against the more recent rulings that the First Amendment forbids restrictions on the Internet and cable television.

The tension between the rules governing broadcasting and the rules governing cable television and the Internet has become extreme. The FCC has been vigorously enforcing broadcast indecency over the past five years — at the very time in which technological developments are making the broadcast versus Internet distinction meaningless.

Some First Amendment observers believe that the FCC v. Fox case could result in a decision overturning the entire framework of broadcast indecency.

Although the Supreme Court could rule more narrowly, the fact that it took the case may signal that the justices are finally ready to square what appears to be the single most glaring inconsistency in First Amendment jurisprudence.

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Gates Admirable as Entrepreneur

by on February 22, 2008 · 13 comments

When reading an interesting piece on morality by Steven Pinker in The Age, I read a line that has become all to familiar to me. Pinker, in an effort to be contrarian and illustrate why our moral inclinations may be incorrect, pointed out that even guys like Bill Gates aren’t bad, noting:

Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world such as malaria, diarrhoea and parasites.

This refrain is repeated throughout the popular media when discussing Bill Gates. While I agree that Bill Gates ought to be admired for his monumental charitable efforts, can’t we also admire him for being an entrepreneur and creating countless billions in wealth?

After all, Gates didn’t just create wealth for himself or Microsoft, he’s also made the world a whole lot richer. Like it or not, it was Windows that provided the platform for much of the information revolution, which subsequently created a worldwide economic boom. We shouldn’t relegate this accomplishment to a mere footnote in Mr. Gates’ biography and it’s certainly worth considering the moral implications of that sort of wealth creation.

In a Christopher Hitchens-like move, Pinker also speaks about Mother Teresa:

Mother Teresa extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and primitive medical care.

He goes on to note that:

These examples show that our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish.

By that standard, even if Gates spent his fortune solely on mega-yachts and sports franchises he’d still beat Mother Teresa hands down. If we’re talking human flourishing, how can you beat creating an operating system that runs on 90+ percent of PCs has likely contributed trillions to global GDP over the last quarter century? Only super heroes to humanity like Norman Borlaug, also mentioned by Pinker and winner of CEI’s Julian Simon Award, can rise above Gates.

Love him or hate him, it’s hard to deny that Bill Gates has done a lot of good for the world, both as a philanthropist and as a CEO.

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Soghoian or AT&VerizoMicrosNexis: Who Knows Better How to Handle Data Breach?

by on February 13, 2008 · 4 comments

How about neither?

Chris Soghoian has an interesting post at his Surveill@nce St@te blog on C|Net decrying the “evisceration” of a data-breach bill in the Indiana legislature. He’s a big advocate of the bill and evidently spent a lot of time working for its passage.

“In a committee meeting Tuesday morning,” he reports, “Republican committee members successfully eviscerated the bill, reducing it to a mere 17 lines of text from the original 72. The Web site report provision and the requirement that companies notify the state attorney general whenever a data breach is discovered were stripped.” Etc.

I’m somewhat bemused to sense the excitement a young person has getting his first experience with the legislative process, then being disappointed with the results. I’m less amused – annoyed, frankly – that someone would use the length of a bill as a proxy for its quality. By that measure, the Consolidated Appropriations Act must be a real gem.

But it’s downright troubling to see a smart young man so thoroughly fallen victim to the fatal conceit. Top-down planning is no better in data security than it is in distributing bananas, but Soghoian is pretty sure he’s figured out how data security should be done across the economy (at least the economy of Indiana). I’m not sympathetic when his plans to have the legislature in his state carry out his will are quashed by others similarly situated.

Better than the regulatory contraption Soghoian desires is the use of simple common law rules, letting liability bring distributed knowledge about data breaches and data security together to construct the practices that best serve the public. There’s more to law than legislation, and people need to learn that.

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Winback Wars: The Politics of Customer Retention

by on February 12, 2008 · 4 comments

Cable and telecom operators have long fought like cats and dogs in the political marketplace. And now that they are competing more intensely for customers in the real marketplace, we can expect relations between the two camps to grow even more acrimonious inside the Beltway.

Case in point: Yesterday, cable operators Bright House, Comcast, and Time Warner filed a complaint at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) alleging that telecom giant Verizon has been offering “unlawful inducements to customers” in an effort to retain those customers looking to switch over to cable-based voice offerings. The cable companies want to FCC to force Verizon to halt those “winback” tactics which take place before a customer switches over. And the cable operators also want the FCC to award damages based on past harm supposedly done to them.

It’s an example of just how cut-throat the marketplace competition has become between the two sectors recently. As Cynthia Brumfield of IP Democracy points out, telecom operators have been hemorrhaging customers in recent years and cable operators have been the primary recipient of those telco-defectors. As Cynthia notes:

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