Matt Lasar of Ars
tells us not to worry about the Fairness Doctrine being revived, only to go on and cite several lawmakers who have said they’d like to revive it. Meanwhile, over at the American Spectator, somebody called “The Prowler” seems to have all sorts of unnamed sources on the Hill telling him the Fairness Doctrine will be revived any day now.
Who knows what to believe. But let’s keep our eye on the real issue here. The danger is not that the Fairness Doctrine gets back on the books in the same form; it’s that versions of it sneak in through the back door via other regulatory initiatives. As Cord Blomquist pointed out here last April, “localism is the new Fairness Doctrine.” There are a lot of people are running around Washington today insisting that government must intervene in the marketplace to “save media localism” and “strengthen the public interest obligations” of local TV and radio broadcasters. There’s been an FCC proceeding open on this issue for some time, and everything about it reeks of the Fairness Doctrine in drag.
This effort is being spearheaded by the media reformistas whose short-term goal is to reinvigorate the amorphous “public interest standard” such that the FCC has open-ended powers to regulate everything under the sun going forward. That’s why a key part of the “localism” battle is their effort to breathe new life into “ascertainment rules,” which used to be more formal and required broadcasters to strictly report everything they aired and did in their communities. There’s lots of talk of ensuring more “accountability” from broadcasters regarding how they serve their local communities, and there’s even rumblings of “local community boards” who will sit as mini-free speech Star Chambers and pass judgment on whether local media outlets are doing their job. Again, it’s all just the Fairness Doctrine by another name. Continue reading →
Much like the Beacon incident before it, I have mixed feeling about this latest kerfuffle over Facebook’s changes to its privacy policy.
On one hand, I just don’t see what the big deal is. People act like Facebook is taking away all their “rights” or possessions, which is just silly. They were just clarifying how information would be used. In one sense, I feel like saying ‘Chill out. And if you don’t like Facebook’s policies, go use some other social networking site for God’s sake!’
On the other hand, I appreciate the fact that some people are far more sensitive about these things and are seeking to collectively pressure Facebook to change its approach to information use and ownership, and I’m fine with that. In fact, like the Beacon hullabaloo, it’s an example of what Berin Szoka and I have argued is the power of voluntary persuasion and social pressure to remedy privacy concerns before we call on government to adopt coercive, top-down, ham-handed, one-size-fits-all regulatory solutions. As we noted in our recent paper about the looming threat of online advertising regulation:
there are many indirect pressures and reputational incentives that provide an important check on the behavior of firms and the privacy policies they craft. Just as the Internet increases the ways advertisers can reach audiences, it increases the power audiences have to influence advertisers. For example, when Facebook introduced its Beacon program in 2007, which shared users’ online purchases with their friends without sufficient warning about how the program worked and the ability to opt-out of the program, the response was swift and effective: Users “collectively raised their voices” and “the privacy pendulum [swung] back into equilibrium” [according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.] Within two weeks of the Beacon program being first deployed, Facebook had created an opt-out procedure.
Continue reading →
Here’s a great new video on economic growth from my friend and colleague Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute and the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.
One of the innovations in this video that I love is the real-time score that it provides on how intelligent and persuasive Dan is being. The needle visible over his right shoulder indicates zero in the due north position (12:00). Improvements in Dan’s work are reflected by the movement of the needle clockwise around to the 9:00 position, which equals 100% informative and persuasive. So take a look at the video and watch how Dan does as he makes his case!
http://www.youtube.com/v/jCaUA5l_bYc&hl=en&fs=1
As the Associated Press put it recently, “Talk of a New York tax increase just got a little, er, hotter.” But seriously, at a time when the nation is about to spend $787 billion on a so-called “stimulus,” new taxes on top of what we will already be paying is scandalous. New York is going to go through very hard times, and new taxes on digital downloads will only make things worse. In a recent story by NPR, the hosts noted that to avoid the tax, porn makers could just leave the state. Such a move might make local conservatives happy (although they are unhappy with the tax because they see it as legitimizing porn), but it would indeed push more businesses out of the state (as was the case with overstock.com) and ironically harm tax revenues in the long run.
The much anticipated site Recovery.gov has just been launched. It has been advertised by the administration as the place where stimulus spending will be completely disclosed to the public. As President Obama says in an introductory video on the home page, “once the money starts to go out to build new roads, modernize schools, and create new jobs, you’ll be able to see how, when and where it is spent” on the web site.
Reading the transparency and accountability portion of the stimulus bill today, however, I’m left with a few questions:
- The House bill called for the creation of a site to be called Recovery.gov, but that was stripped out from the final legislation. Instead, the Act calls for the independent Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to create a website to house stimulus-related disclosures. Is the newly launched Recovery.gov that website? If so, is it indeed under the control of the independent Board? Right now the site’s content is certainly not independent of the president. If Recovery.gov is not the same thing as the legislatively created Board website, then won’t the launch of Recovery.gov serve to confuse citizens?
- I don’t see any mandate in the legislation for deep reporting of how stimulus funding is spent. The Act requires fund recipients to report on a quarterly basis to the agencies from which they received funds (HUD, DoT, DoE, etc.) how they have spent the funds. Thirty days after receiving these reports, the Act requires agencies to publish not necessarily the recipient reports themselves, but “the information submitted in reports” publicly available on “a website.” That is, not necessarily on Recovery.gov or the board website (if they are separate sites).
Can we be assured that the full text of all recipient reports will be published? And can we be assured that they won’t be scattered across dozens of sites, but placed in a central and easy to access place?
- Finally, how deep will the data go? The Board website mandated in the Act only requires the publication of “detailed information on Federal Government contracts and grants that expend covered funds” in the same fashion that USASpending.gov now employs. (Emphasis added.) The problem is that a federal grant could be $10 million to Miami from DoT for roads, and that’s it. There is no requirement that the city then publish its contractors and subcontractors on the Board site. This is a big gap; if the only that must be disclosed on the Board site is the contract or grant award, then the trail will run cold very quickly.
That said, there is a requirement for contractor and subcontractor reporting, but it comes in the recipient report mandate I explained in question 2, and like I said, there is no guarantee that we will get the full report data, nor that it will be centrally housed. Can we get that assurance?
As Recovery.gov and any other official stimulus accountability sites come on line, StimulusWatch.org and other will be looking to make the data useful to citizens. We can only do this, however, if the administration keeps its pledge to be transparent. Mr. President, just give us the data.
David Margolick has penned a lengthy piece for Portfolio.com about the AutoAdmit case, which has important ramifications for the future of Section 230 and online speech in general. Very brief background: AutoAdmit is a discussion board for students looking to enter, or just discuss, law schools. Some threads on the site have included ugly — insanely ugly — insults about some women. A couple of those women sued to reveal the identities of their attackers and hold them liable for supposedly wronging them. The case has been slowly moving through the courts ever since. Again, read Margolick’s article for all the details. The important point here is that the women could not sue AutoAdmit directly for defamation or harassment because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 immunizes websites from liability for the actions of their users. Consequently, those looking to sue must go after the actual individuals behind the comments which (supposedly) caused the harm in question.
I am big defender of Section 230 and have argued that it has been the cornerstone of Internet freedom. Keeping online intermediaries free from burdensome policing requirements and liability threats has created the vibrant marketplace of expression and commerce that we enjoy today. If not for Sec. 230, we would likely live in a very different world today.
Sec. 230 has come under attack, however, from those who believe online intermediaries should “do more” to address various concerns, including cyber-bullying, defamation, or other problems. For those of us who believe passionately in the importance of Sec. 230, the better approach is to preserve immunity for intermediaries and instead encourage more
voluntary policing and self-regulation by intermediaries, increased public pressure on those sites that turn a blind eye to such behavior to encourage them to change their ways, more efforts to establish “community policing” by users such that they can report or counter abusive language, and so on.
Of course, those efforts will never be fool proof and a handful of bad apples will still be able to cause a lot of grief for some users on certain discussion boards, blogs, and so on. In those extreme cases where legal action is necessary, it would be optimal if every effort was exhausted to go after the actual end-user who is causing the problem before tossing Sec. 230 and current online immunity norms to the wind in an effort to force the intermediaries to police speech. After all, how do the intermediaries know what is defamatory? Why should they be forced to sit in judgment of such things? If, under threat of lawsuit, they are petitioned by countless users to remove content or comments that those individuals find objectionable, the result will be a massive chilling effect on online free speech since those intermediaries would likely play is safe most of the time and just take everything down. Continue reading →
Savvy TLF Readers probably realize that the TLF was preceded by the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front. I suspect neither group has much of a sense of humor (although I’m glad to see from their Wikipedia pages that neither organization appears to have actually killed anyone, despite their use of terrorist tactics).
A TLF reader just called my attention to another group that most definitely does have a sense of humor: the Beard Liberation Front. I also discovered the The Hamster Liberation Front through Google. Then there’s the classic People’s Liberation Front of Judea (or is it the Judean People’s Liberation Front?) from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian:
http://www.youtube.com/v/hSELOCMmw4A&hl=en&fs=1
It’s my pleasure to welcome Wayne Crews to the TLF as a regular contributor. Wayne is the vice president for policy and director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. For about four years, Wayne and I worked together at the Cato Institute, where we spent most of our time debating the greatness of various guitarists in southern rock bands, the best Harley Davidson motorcycle designs of all time, and our favorite types of BBQ sauce. Oh, and we co-authored three books, dozens of papers, and countless op-eds together on various aspects of tech policy. But we didn’t let that distract us from those other, more important activities.
Wayne’s full bio can be found here. We very happy to have him join our merry band of cyber-libertarian rebels here on the Tech Liberation Front. Welcome Wayne!
I often ponder what the TLF is all about. Of course, our official mission is “keeping politicians’ hands off the ‘net and everything else related to technology.” You can read more on our “About Us” page. But this quote from Robert Heinlein‘s 1973 classic Time Enough for Love (among my top five favorite novels) really hits the nail on the head for me:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.”
“Man is the measure of all things,” said Protagoras of Abdera (c. 480-410 B.C.). So it is for me: technology is ultimately a means—indeed, the means—by which the condition of humanity is improved. By “liberating technology”—i.e., defending the freedom to innovate and to profit from bringing innovation to the marketplace—we’re all doing our small part to prevent “right-thinking people” from squelching the creative minority whose toils will sometday take the species to the stars.
I can’t wait to see what the coming decades will bring. In the words of the immortal 1970s rock band, Bachman-Turner Overdrive: You ain’t seen nothing yet!
http://www.youtube.com/v/lJmBPCYt5LY&hl=en&fs=1
(The full version of the video—not the embedded player—includes an ad to buy the song, a new YouTube feature. Heinlein would be proud.)
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.