The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently released new “Internet, broadband, and cell phone statistics” based on surveys conducted in late 2009. The survey, among the most respected industry, reveals the shocking racism of the cell phone industry, which is clearly discriminating against historically disadvantaged European-Americans: 62% of Hispanics and 59% of non-Hispanic blacks are “wireless Internet users” compared to only 52% of white Americans.
Congress must act to correct this clear racial travesty. Since it appears that white Americans still use home broadband at higher rates, the clear answer is to create an “Internet Truth & Reconciliation Commission” responsible for reallocating (by force, if necessary) un-cool home broadband connections to more mobile minority users and much “hipper” wireless connections (which are more popular among the technologically trendsetting 18-29 crowd) to coolness-challenged white users until a perfect numerical parity is reached. Only then will digital Racial Justice be achieved for
all Americans.
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Last year there was discussion of a possible return of the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine” that used to apply to broadcasters. This year, we should all be aware of the FTC’s stepped-up rhetoric toward an “Unfairness Doctrine” for privacy–an increased effort toward enforcing the “unfair” part of Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive practices.
Historically, the approach of the FTC toward privacy has been one of notice and consent and to hold companies to the word of their privacy policies — if companies say one thing and then do another, the FTC goes after them for being deceptive. This is the “deceptive” part of the FTC’s power to enforce the law against unfair or deceptive commercial practices.
For privacy, we really haven’t seen the “unfair” part being enforced. But if public comments from high-ranking officials is any indicator (and it is), that’s about to change.
A recent New York Times article summarizes its interview with FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz and David Vladeck, chief of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. It’s another insight into how aggressive the commission wants to be toward privacy.
Advise-and-consent “depended on the fiction that people were meaningfully giving consent,” Mr. Vladeck said. “The literature is clear” that few people read privacy policies, he said.
But even if people did read privacy policies, Vladeck still doesn’t think it is
fair that people give consent to data practices, often in exchange for free services: Continue reading →
Today I appeared on CNBC [video here and embedded down below] to discuss concerns about emerging “smart-sign” technology, which could give rise to a new generation of interactive retail advertising and marketing efforts. This is in the news because, as Don Clark and Nick Wingfield report today in The Wall Street Journal (“Intel, Microsoft Offer Smart-Sign Technology: Retailers, Product Marketers Could Discern Viewer, Make Choices on What to Display and Transfer Coupons Via Phone“), Intel and Microsoft have announced that:
they will collaborate to help companies create and use new forms of digital signs. By exploiting Intel chips and Microsoft software, the companies hope to bring more interactivity to such devices and help retailers customized marketing offers to consumers.
Signs equipped with cameras and specialized software could recognize the age, gender and height of people in front of them, and tell what products and images received the most attention, the companies said. By gathering information about which messages are more effective, they add, traditional retailers could develop marketing approaches that better counter Web-based competitors. “Every year retailers lose more ground to online [sellers], and they have to do something about that,” said Joe Jensen, general manager of Intel’s embedded computing division.
Down below, I have jotted down a couple of thoughts about the rise of “digital signage” and more targeted forms of retail marketing, only a few of which I was able to get across in this short TV spot. I think it’s an exciting new development for both retailers and consumers for the reasons I explain down below:
http://plus.cnbc.com/rssvideosearch/action/player/id/1383744249/code/cnbcplayershare
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AFF’s Doublethink has a nice story on “Open Source Democracy,” featuring TLF’s own Jerry Brito, founder of StimulusWatch.org.
Yours truly and WashingtonWatch.com get a little mention too. Media darling Jerry gets top billing because he’s so darn good looking. And yes, a very clunky early version of WashingtonWatch.com was launched in 2001. The story slightly overstates the capabilities of my project, but we’ve got improvements along those lines in the works.
Vivek Kundra, the Obama administration’s Chief Information Officer, may want to turn his attention to the The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which begins its public hearings tomorrow. Here’s a screen shot of the Commission’s website as of 11:02am EST today:
I also grabbed a copy of the PDF-only Notice of Open Meeting, as the site, located at http://www.fcic.gov, is scheduled to launch in its full form later today. This is according to Ray Lehmann, Senior Editor with SNL Financial who spoke to a representative of the Commission this morning.
Launching a site for a Commission the day before it holds its first hearing is unacceptable. The “page and a PDF” placeholder above, which cannot be found using any of the major search engines, hardly makes up for this.
A good CIO should outline clear guidelines about how and when sites go live, especially in an administration that professes to have a strong commitment to making government more transparent. Either Kundra hasn’t established these protocols or the FCIC isn’t following them. Either way, Kundra needs to do his job and make sure this sort of slap-shod approach to making government information available on the web is no longer accepted.
Kundra was recently named 2009 CIO of the year by Information Week for his efforts to modernize the antiquated hulk that is the federal IT infrastructure. It would seem he still has much work to do.
If this robotic girlfriend—unveiled last weekend at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo and costing $7-9k—actually goes mainstream, I’ll bet it’s only a matter of time before we see some state lawmaker somewhere propose to ban the toys. The FCC well, no doubt, follow suit, by demanding the incorporation of parental control tools into the devices so Junior doesn’t have his way with Ms. Roxxxy (or her soon-to-be-released male counterpart, Rocky) while Mom and Dad are out at NASCAR the opera.
Laugh if you will, but if Moore’s Law holds true, such robots will become smarter, cheaper, and probably sexier as microchips continue to plummet in price and meaningful artificial intelligence becomes marketplace reality. Move over, Roomba, Roxxxy has arrived—and she ain’t no Rosie the Robot Maid from The Jetsons! Telegraph reports that there’s a whole book about this:
In a 2007 book, “Love and Sex with Robots,” British chess player and artificial intelligence expert David Levy argues that robots will become significant sexual partners for humans, answering needs that other people are unable or unwilling to satisfy.
But the most interesting part of the telegraph article is creator Douglas Hines’s motivation:
Inspiration for the sex robot sprang from the September 11, 2001 attacks, he said, where a friend died and he vowed to store his personality forever.
This sounds an awful lot like the plot of Caprica, the new SyFi television series, a prequel set 58 years before the beginning of Battlestar Galactica, the cult phenomenon that even seduced hardened TV-refusenik like me. Continue reading →
The fun folks at Cracked.com tried to imagine what the world would be like without the Internet. Think porn, piracy, and pranks . But beyond that, the remaining examples point out how ill-suited the offline world is for the types of interpersonal communications that take place online. Maybe that’s why, without the Internet, these Photoshop pundits predict we’ll all be reading newspapers and getting perfect scores on grammar tests.
A funny thing happened to the FCC Friday on its way to regulating the Internet: a federal appeals court panel questioned the agency’s authority to regulate the web. There’s no final decision yet, but an adverse ruling could stop the agency’s Internet regulation plans in their tracks. And for good reason.
In proposing new neutrality rules last October, the FCC one rather inconvenient obstacle: there isn’t anything in the Communications Act, or any other statute, actually giving them power to regulate such things. Internet service, by the FCC’s own reckoning, is not a telecommunications service, nor is it cable TV, or broadcasting, or anything else the law give the FCC authority to regulate. Continue reading →
Connect Safely, which is great parenting and online child safety resource run by my friends Anne Collier and Larry Magid, has just released some excellent “Virtual World Safety Tips for Parents of Teens.” Tons of good advice in there worth checking out, especially the thing I always focus on in all my online safety work—talk to your kids!! Here’s Anne and Larry on that point:
Talk with your teens about the virtual worlds they use – ask them to show you around. See what their avatars look like and what screen names they’ve chosen to represent themselves. What do their profiles and the appearance of their avatars say about them? Try to hold back snap judgments (long-term guidance usually works better than control if the goal is learning rather than short-term compliance – see this). Are their virtual-world profiles linked to social-network ones, and how much do those linked-up profiles together reveal about them – too much? Are their in-world friends mostly friends they know in real life? If not, do they know that they can’t really know who people are online unless they know them offline?
It’s about getting a dialogue going with your kids. That is so absolutely essential and it would help head off about 90% of the problems that develop online today with kids. Kids need mentoring, whether its in meatspace or cyberspace. But make sure to read all the Connect Safely tips. They are excellent.
Incidentally, I talked about some of these issues when I did a virtual guest lecture in Second Life last October hosted by Metanomics. The show was called “Live Free and Prosper: Government’s Place in Virtual Worlds and On-line Communities,” and I posted all the video clips here. I also encourage those of you interested in these issues to check out these recent TLF guest posts by Joshua Fairfield an Associate Professor of Law at Washington & Lee University School of Law. He recently posted and interesting essay entitled, “Virtual Paternalism” as well as a summary and discussion of the recent “FTC Report on Kids and Virtual Worlds.” Worth reading.
“It was then, and is now, the largest merger in American business history,” notes Tim Arango of the New York Times about the AOL-Time Warner mega-merger, which happen ten years this month. And yet, as he points out in his essay, “How the AOL-Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong,” things didn’t end up going so well for this marriage:
The trail of despair in subsequent years included countless job losses, the decimation of retirement accounts, investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department, and countless executive upheavals. Today, the combined values of the companies, which have been separated, is about one-seventh of their worth on the day of the merger.
To call the transaction the worst in history, as it is now taught in business schools, does not begin to tell the story of how some of the brightest minds in technology and media collaborated to produce a deal now regarded by many as a colossal mistake.
Arango goes on to interview several of the principals involved in the deal to get their take on why things unfolded so miserably and, ultimately, came to an end this year. I highly recommend the essay because it should serve as a cautionary tale to those worrywarts who are constantly predicting that the sky is going to fall if we allow a truly free media marketplace–including freedom for firms to structure themselves as they wish. Reality usually plays out quite differently. As I argued in my recent paper, “A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria: From AOL-Time Warner to Comcast-NBC,”
The point here is not that media mergers are inherently good or always make sense. Indeed.. mergers sometimes prove to be huge blunders. But the hysteria sometimes heard before media mergers are consummated rarely bears any relationship to reality once the deals move forward. Media markets are extremely dynamic and prone to disruptive change and technological leap-frogging. Mergers are often one response to that turbulence… Given how difficult it is to predict the future course of events in this chaotic sector, humility—not hubris—is the sensible disposition when it comes to media merger policy.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.