The DHS Privacy Committee will be meeting in Washington, D.C. – well Arlington, VA, actually – on February 26th.
Here’s the meeting notice in the Federal Register.
Yesterday I testified before the Maryland General Assembly to oppose HB 114. It’s a bad bill for consumers and online companies, and another iteration of the continuing war that traditional retailers have waged against e-commerce for the past few years. Last year NetChoice testified before Congress to oppose legislation that would would give retailers the power to force online marketplaces to interrogate their own customers about how they obtained items listed for sale.
HB 114 would require Maryland businesses and residents selling cosmetics, medicines, baby food and infant formula via an Internet auctions to notify the Department of Health & Mental Hygiene at least seven days prior to the auction. The bill applies only to sales using Internet auctions, not fixed-price format, and not newspaper classified ads. That right there makes you wonder.
The bill has been introduced under the theory of product safety. Safeway, Target, and the state retailers association all trumped up the dangers of selling baby food and infant formula online without citing any sort of actual harm. Or at least harm that is disproportionate to what exists at the physical store retail level.
There was also a lot of desperate hyperbole. A representative from Mars supermarkets (a Maryland chain) asserted that Internet auctions fund heroin addiction! Yes, testifying before state legislatures can be fun!
When you have bill proponents demonizing the Internet, it’s easy to see that the bill is about competition prevention. Namely, to prevent Internet auction sites from benefiting Maryland consumers and helping businesses compete with traditional retailers in the sale of food and drug items.
Getting back to the window dressing of public health, Continue reading →
Wall Street Journal columnist Gordon Crovitz writes that
In Japan, wireless technology works so well that teenagers draft novels on their cellphones. People in Hong Kong take it for granted that they can check their BlackBerrys from underground in the city’s subway cars. Even in France, consumers have more choices for broadband service than in the U.S.?? The Internet may have been developed in the U.S., but the country now ranks 15th in the world for broadband penetration. For those who do have access to broadband, the average speed is a crawl, moving bits at a speed roughly one-tenth that of top-ranked Japan. This means a movie that can be downloaded in a couple of seconds in Japan takes half an hour in the U.S. The BMW 7 series comes equipped with Internet access in Germany, but not in the U.S.
Then he adds that the economic stimulus package before Congress will not fix the real reason the U.S. now ranks 15th in the world for broadband penetration because
nothing in the legislation would address the key reason that the U.S. lags so far behind other countries. This is that there is an effective broadband duopoly in the U.S., with most communities able to choose only between one cable company and one telecom carrier. It’s this lack of competition, blessed by national, state and local politicians, that keeps prices up and services down.
A couple of observations come to mind.
One is that the U.S. has the most successful wireless market in the world. Cellphone calls are significantly less expensive on a per minute basis in the U.S. (6 cents per minute) than in France (17 cents) or Japan (26 cents), according to the FCC’s latest analysis of wireless competition (Table 16). U.S. mobile subscribers continue to lead the world in average voice usage by a wide margin.
The explanation for why fourth generation wireless technology is further along in Japan than it is here would have to include the fact that the Japanese government years ago decided to make leadership in 4G wireless technology a national priority and invested heavily with taxpayer money ( see, e.g., this).
This is a form of industrial policy, which involves picking winners and losers, and it is how the Japanese do things. Back in the late 1980s or early 1990s the Japanese government decided Japan needed to be the world-leader in high-definition television, which prompted some in our own government to argue we couldn’t afford to let that happen, so we needed a public-private partnership and a national high-definition television transition plan (which some now want to postpone).??
The good news is that AT&T, Clearwire and Verizon Wireless have all successfully acquired spectrum for the rollout of their own 4G services over the next couple years without government subsidies and oversight.??
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Commerce Ranking Member Kay Bailey Hutchison, I hear, have received approximately one dozen recommendations for filling the vacant seat on the FCC which, by law, must be filled by a Republican. Although the president will make the appointment, the views of the Senate Republican Leader, in particular, are usually accorded significant weight.
The most prominent candidates include Lee Carosi Dunn (Senator McCain’s assistant for communications policy), Brian Hendricks (Hutchison’s assistant for communications policy), Ajit Pai (Senator Brownback’s assistant for judiciary matters) and two officials from the Bush administration (David Gross, ambassador for international communications and information policy; and Meredith Baker, former acting assistant secretary of commerce for telecommunications and information policy). All sound like good choices. The Senate staffers have the inside track.
Aside from the current vacant seat, it’s also possible one of the candidates could replace current FCC Commissioner Robert M. McDowell, whose term expires in June. By law his seat would also have to be filled by a Republican.
The DHS Privacy Committee meets at 1:00 p.m. (Eastern) today, via telephone, and you can listen in! From the Federal Register notice:
Members of the public are welcome to listen to the meeting by calling (800) 320-4330 and entering Pin Number 215132. The number of teleconference lines is limited, however, and lines will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.
I’ve been following President Obama’s early moves on government transparency here on Tech Liberation and on the Cato@Liberty blog.
Last week, Obama’s first broken campaign promise was the pledge to post legislation online for five days before signing it.
Well, the White House is working to address that, but it appears to be doing so with a half-measure that comes up short. On Sunday, the White House blog announced that the SCHIP legislation pending in the Senate was up for public comment. And it is, of course, but it hasn’t passed the Senate yet.
It was implicit in the promise to post bills online for five days prior to signing that the bill posted would be the one passed by the House and Senate and presented to the President.
If the White House were to implement the promised practice of leaving bills sitting out there, unsigned, after they pass Congress, that would have significant effects. The practice would threaten to reveal excesses in parochial amendments and earmarks which could bring down otherwise good bills. President Obama’s promised five-day cooling off period would force the House and Senate to act with more circumspection.
Taking comments on a bill as it makes its way through the House and Senate does not have the same salutary effect. If the White House is trying to start the five-day clock on the SCHIP bill with the posting of a comment page on Sunday, that is not consistent with President Obama’s promise.
The Senate version of the economic stimulus package (H.R. 1) winding its way through Congress would provide $9 billion in direct public subsidy for broadband network deployment subject to a “non-discrimination” requirement which, like the “open access” requirement in the House bill, could turn into onerous “network neutrality” regulation.
Meanwhile, Britain has outlined its digital transition plans in “Digital Britain – Interim Report.”
It is interesting to compare the substantially more free-market direction Britain is taking with the silly approach our own Congress is considering. For one thing, Britain is going to let private investors finance network upgrades.
The Government is not persuaded that there is a case now for widespread UK-wide public subsidy for Next Generation Network deployment, since such widespread subsidy could simply duplicate existing private sector investment plans or indeed chill such plans.
Another reason direct public subsidies should be avoided is they distort competition. Over at the Progress & Freedom Foundation blog, Ken Ferree cites a recent U.S. government audit report (analyzing significant problems with the current broadband grant and loan programs of the USDA Rural Utilities Service) which asked the evident question: “What is the government’s responsibility if, due to subsidized competition, a preexisting, unsubsidized broadband provider goes out of business?”
Next, the British report touches on the third rail of broadband policy, by noting that if Internet service providers offer guaranteed service levels to content providers in exchange for increased fees, it could lead to “differentiation of offers and promote investment in higher-speed access networks. Net neutrality regulation might prevent this sort of innovation.” The report adds that
the Government has yet to see a case for legislation in favour of net neutrality. In consequence, unless Ofcom [Britain’s FCC-equivalent] find network operators or ISPs to have Significant Market Power and justify intervention on competition grounds, traffic management will not be prevented.
So the British digital transition is based on some sound free market insights, and keep in mind that Britain has a Labour government! Here in this country we are heading in the other direction due to some muddled thinking, and not just on the Left. A prominent Republican writes that “conservatives should cheer” over the fact the stimulus package will include billions to promote broadband deployment and adoption.
Online child safety — especially the fear of predators lurking on social networking sites (SNS) — continues to spur calls by state and federal lawmakers for regulation. At first, some federal lawmakers advocated outright bans on SNS in schools and libraries via the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA). Meanwhile, state and local lawmakers — specifically state Attorneys General (AGs) — have been even more vociferous in their calls for regulation in the form of mandatory age verification for social networking sites, which would cover a broad swath of online sites and activities according to their definitions of SNS. But the question that ultimately gets lost in this debate is: Just how much risk do social networking sites really pose for teens? Which risks are real and which are overblown? And what’s the best way to deal with the risks that we find to be legitimate?
Nancy Willard devotes her life to answering those questions. Willard is one of America’s leading experts on online safety and risk prevention. She runs the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use and she is the author of two outstanding books, Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats and Cyber-Safe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Teens. In my opinion, Willard’s general approach to online child safety is the most enlightened, level-headed, and likely to be effective. That’s because Willard focuses on putting fears in perspective, identifying the actual risks that kids face online, and devising sensible strategies to deal with risks and problems as they are discovered. Her approach is holistic and built upon sound data, targeted risk-identification strategies, and time-tested education and mentoring methods. For my money, it’s the most sensible approach to online safety issues. In fact, when other parents ask me for “just one thing” to read on the topic, I usually recommend Willard’s work — especially her amazing book Cyber-Safe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Teens. And her background in early childhood education, special education for “at risk” children with emotional and behavior difficulties, as well as experience in computer law, means she is uniquely suited to be analyzing these issues. In sum, this is woman we should all be closely listening to on these issues.
Recently, Willard has been responding to criticisms that state AGs have leveled against the Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF) and its final report. [Disclaimer: I was a member of the ISTTF.] I’ve already outlined the ISTTF’s work at length here, but the three key takeaways from the report were that:
- the risk of predation on social network sites has been over-stated; the data suggest that cyber-bullying is the bigger problem on SNS;
- there is no silver-bullet technical solution to online child safety concerns, and mandatory age verification, in particular, would not make kids safer online but could even create bigger problems in the long-run;
- education and empowerment are the real keys to keeping kids safer online.
I finally got around to reading Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know, by Randall Stross. It’s very well done. Stross is a frequently contributor to the New York Times and the author of several other interesting books on the technology industry. He knows how to weave a story together, and it helps that Google’s story is a pretty amazing one.
Each chapter discusses a different part of Google’s growing family of services — GMail, Google Maps, Google Earth, Book Search, and YouTube. Of course, it all started with search and Stross does a good job explaining how the ingenious Google search algorithm has grown from dorm room project to the greatest aggregator of human knowledge that the world has ever known. This, in turn, has powered Google’s hugely successful online advertising system. The real secret of their success with online advertising, Stross argues, is that “Google’s impersonal, mathematical approach search also provides you with the ability to serve advertisements that are tailored to a search, rather than to the person submitting the search request, whose identity would have to be known.”
Despite the benefits of such generally anonymous searching, as Google has grown and added new services and capabilities, concerns about the sheer volume of data that the company collects have led to heightened privacy concerns. Indeed, privacy is a core theme that Stross uses in the book to tie many of the chapters and issues together. Google is constantly struggling to strike the right balance between providing more access to the world’s information while also being careful not to raise privacy concerns. But it’s unclear exactly how much more information collection that users (or public officials) will tolerate before advocating stricter limits on Google’s reach. As Stross points out:
Guided by its founding mission, to organize all the world’s information, Google has created storage capacity that allows it to gain control of what its users are you doing in a comprehensive way that no other company has done, and to preserve those records indefinitely, without the need to clear out old records to make way for new ones. Moreover, Google differentiates its service by refining its own proprietary software formula to mine and massage the data, technology that it zealously protects from the sight of rivals. This sets up a conflict between Google’s wish to operate a “black box” (completely opaque to the outside) and its users’ wish for transparency.
Via engadget, here’s a fun video showing how easy it is to pick up information from passport cards and “enhanced driver’s licenses.” (Enhancement is in the eye of the beholder, of course.)
These cards use RFID to broadcast information when properly interrogated, and this information can be used (at a minimum) to track people’s movements. Hacker Chris Paget demonstrates this and discusses the weakness of using RFID on people.
San Francisco ex-pats like myself will take special delight from the video as Chris drives past Red’s Java House at minute 1:56. Burger me – NOW!
And he would scrap WHTI. I’ll have one of those too.
http://www.youtube.com/v/9isKnDiJNPk&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.