There’s a movement afoot in Congress to advance legislation that would eviscerate the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, empower a state-based tax cartel, and potentially decimate the Internet economy in the process. Business Week has the details:
In the next week, legislators are expected to introduce bills in the House and Senate promising to do away with the “physical presence” requirement. If a bill passes — and that’s a big “if” — it would require all online retailers, except for the tiniest companies, to collect sales taxes in the 23 states that are part of the Streamlined Sales Tax Project. The states would compensate the retailers for the trouble, while promising not to sue them for tax collection mistakes that are made.
The Streamlined Sales Tax Project, or “SSTP”, sounds good in theory but would be disastrous in practice. Michael Graham of the
Boston Herald penned an editorial about the SSTP today and he does a nice job pointing out why, when it comes to “tax simplification,” the devil is always in the details and those details are typically anything but “simple” (or taxpayer-friendly for that matter).
The real danger of the SSTP, however, is what it means for the Constitution and tax competition among the states. In this 2003 paper I penned with Veronique de Rugy for the Cato Institute, we showed why the SSTP would not only fail to simplify the sales tax code, but would actually cede dangerous taxing powers to state and local governments over the interstate marketplace. In the process, Veronique and I argued, a multi-state sales tax cartel would be spawned: Continue reading →
As anyone who has spent time searching for comments on the FCC’s website can tell you, the agency doesn’t exactly have the most user-friendly website. In the interest of making it easier for others to read the comments that came in last week in the agency’s “Child Safe Viewing Act” Notice of Inquiry, I have compiled all the major comments (those over 3 or 4 pages) and provided links to them below the fold.
Again, this proceeding was required under the “Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007,” which Congress passed last year and President Bush signed last December. The goal of the bill and the FCC’s proceeding (MB 09-26) is to study “advanced blocking technologies” that “may be appropriate across a wide variety of distribution platforms, including wired, wireless, and Internet platforms.” I filed 150+ pages worth of comments in this matter last week, and here’s my analysis of why this bill and the FCC’s proceeding are worth monitoring closely.
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If you happen to be in the New York city area next Tuesday, April 21, stop by Cardozo Law school for what promises to be a great event starting at 11:15:
The Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal is pleased to present a symposium on Internet openness, net neutrality, content diversity and competition. What is the new definition of net neutrality and what are the developing mandates? How do policymakers promote or harm the richness and diversity online content/media? Join the lively debate with speakers including Sascha Meinrath (New America Foundation); Berin Szoka (Progress & Freedom Foundation); John Morris (Center for Democracy & Technology); Matthew Lasar (Ars Technica); Fred Benenson (Creative Commons); Jonathan Askin (Brooklyn Law School).
During the 11:30-1 pm panel, I’ll be talking about “Unrecognized to Internet Openness: Regulatory Mandates & Increased Liability”—explaining how the work Adam Thierer & I have been doing about privacy regulation, online advertising, Section 230, age verification mandates,
etc. are all fundamentally issues of “openness.” As we noted in our recent response (PDF) to the FTC’s self-regulatory guidelines:
We stand at an important crossroads in the debate over the online marketplace and the future of a “free and open” Internet. Many of those who celebrate that goal focus on concepts like “net neutrality” at the distribution layer, but what really keeps the Internet so “free and open” is the economic engine of online advertising at the applications and content layers. If misguided government regulation chokes off the Internet’s growth or evolution, we would be killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.
Earth Day is fast approaching, yet despite the awareness this day brings, most people are powering their computers with electricity from coal-burning power plants, delivered by “dumb” networks. Change is long overdue, and it’s not a difficult matter.
The electricity grid’s basic structure hasn’t changed much since Thomas Edison came up with the idea back in 1882. That’s a long time with little innovation, especially since electricity demands continue to rise. Some might argue that the grid didn’t need changes and it’s not wise to mess with a system already working. That argument no longer holds, anyone who lives in California’s Silicon Valley knows. Blackouts and shortages are a constant worry every summer and the grid is unable to properly handle newer and cleaner sources of energy such as solar and wind.
Worse, when a blackout does happen, the utility company usually doesn’t know until someone phones in the problem. That’s because the system can’t sense the problem — it is “dumb” and only sends inputs one way. So how come the grid isn’t smarter, and what can we do about it? The answer is not as complicated as one might imagine.
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Read more here.
Today I filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in its proceeding examining the marketplace for “advanced blocking technologies.” This proceeding was required under the “Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007,” which Congress passed last year and President Bush signed last December. The goal of the bill and the FCC’s proceeding (MB 09-26) is to study “advanced blocking technologies” that “may be appropriate across a wide variety of distribution platforms, including wired, wireless, and Internet platforms.” My colleagues will no doubt laugh about the fact that I have dropped an absurd 150 pages worth of comments on the FCC in this matter, but I had a lot to say on this topic! Parental controls, child safety, and free speech issues have been the focus of much of my research agenda over the past 10 years.
In my filing, I argue that the FCC should tread carefully in this matter since the agency has no authority over most of the media platforms and technologies described in the Commission’s recent Notice of Inquiry. Moreover, any related mandates or regulatory actions in in this area could diminish future innovation in this field and would violate the First Amendment rights of media creators and consumers alike. The other major conclusions of my filing are as follows:
- There exists an unprecedented abundance of parental control tools to help parents decide what constitutes acceptable media content in their homes and in the lives of their children.
- There is a trade-off between complexity and convenience for both tools and ratings, and no parental control tool is completely foolproof.
- Most homes have no need for parental control technologies because parents rely on other methods or there are no children in the home.
- The role of household media rules and methods is underappreciated and those rules have an important bearing on this debate.
- Parental control technologies work best in combination with educational efforts and parental involvement.
- The search for technological silver-bullets and “universal” solutions represent a quixotic, Holy Grail-like quest and it will destroy innovation in this marketplace.
- Enforcement of “household standards” made possible through use of parental controls and other methods negates the need for “community standards”-based content regulation.
My entire filing can be found here and down below in a Scribd reader. All comments in the matter are due tomorrow and then reply comments are due on May 18th.
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Patient Privacy Rights is playing an essential role in the developing information economy with their campaign against Oprah Winfrey’s promotion of RealAge.com.
I’m not an Oprah-watcher, but apparently she’s been having a guest on named “Dr. Oz” – where does she get these people? – who shills for a site called RealAge.com. RealAge entices visitors to take a 105-item questionnaire about their personal health habits. The people who agree to be “members” receive, among other things, promotions from drug companies that are tailored to their potential health issues.
Patient Privacy Rights doesn’t like this, and they make a good case that RealAge, “Dr. Oz,” and Oprah should give people a better idea of what’s going on with personal information in this little transaction.
My own review of the RealAge privacy policy shows it to be a pretty good, typically complex policy that restricts information sharing pretty well. If I was interested in anything other than destroying my health with booze and cigarettes, I might be inclined to take RealAge’s quiz. It has real potential to educate people and get them informed about health conditions and treatments. But Patient Privacy Rights would like that to happen with a little more awareness all around about the personal information terms of this bargain.
The brilliant thing, from my perspective, is that PPR is taking it to the people with a petition rather than running to mommy government, embodied by the Federal Trade Commission. That’s the straightforward way to work on shaping the marketplace, convincing consumers themselves rather than relying on the threat of government coercion.
ACT will host an event on open government tomorrow morning that will feature TLF’s own Jerry Brito and Andrew Plemmons Pratt of the Center for American Progress. I’ll moderate and tee-up the discussion.
We’ll focus on how governments can move from merely posting information online (e-government) to a more participatory process (we-government). We’ll discuss core concepts of “we” government—including the social media technologies that enable access, accountability and participation—and how Congress can create processes for a more transparent government:
- Define what being “open” means for the executive, legislative and judicial branches
- Review and update procedures and rules within government to better deliver information to citizens
- Create mechanisms for accepting and integrating increased constituent correspondence and comments on rulemakings
The Details: Tuesday, Apr 14 from 9:30 to 10:45am. It’s at the newly opened Capitol Visitors Center, Congressional Meeting Room South (the new main entrance to the U.S. Capitol, is located on the East front at First Street and East Capitol Street, NE). Coffee and morning snacks will be served. Please let me know if you’d like to attend!
This morning, Cato put out a TechKnowledge of mine called “The Promise that Keeps on Breaking.” It deals with the policy issues surrounding President Obama’s yet unfulfilled promise to post bills sent to him by Congress online for five days before he signs them.
A Cato@Liberty post last week went through the President’s progress so far on the five-day promise.
I wrote a piece about PACER last week, which Katherine Mangu-Ward at Reason was kind enough to link to from Hit and Run. In the comments to her post, a reader asked a reasonable question about the fees you pay to access PACER: “Are you buying the data or paying the court’s bandwidth costs?”
Now I’m usually pretty sympathetic to the idea that the people who benefit from government services should pay for those services through user fees. But there are two reasons this doesn’t apply in a case like this.
First, there’s the math. As it happens, I’m working on a project that will involve hosting large amounts of content, so I’ve been researching hosting costs. One of the most popular managed hosting services is Amazon’s EC2/S3. You can see the pricing for that system here. It provides a good point of comparison for PACER’s fees.
To make the math easy, let’s assume you’ve got a lawyer who downloads 20 documents per week, each of which is 10 pages long and 1 MB in size. Over the course of a year, this lawyer will download around 1000 documents, and he’ll be charged 1000 10 $0.08 = $800 for those documents. (This is actually an underestimate because the lawyer also has to pay for search results) And because each document is about 1 MB in size, the total quantity of data transferred from PACER will be around 1 GB.
Now, if you click over to Amazon’s S3 pricing page, you’ll see that the going rate for a GB of data transfer in the private market is… 17 cents. In fairness, Amazon also charges for CPU time on the EC2 cluster, so if the courts actually built their system on EC2/S3, the marginal cost of a GB of data delivery might be more like 50 cents. But charging $800 is three orders of magnitude too much.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.