Larry Lessig is a great writer and a brilliant legal scholar, but my goodness does he have bad political instincts:
I can’t begin to understand why in a war where soldiers go to jail for breaking the law, the US Congress is so keen to make sure telecom companies don’t have to fight a law suit about violating civil rights. Obama doesn’t support that immunity. He promises to get it removed. But he has signaled agreement with the compromise, which I assume means he will not filibuster immunity as he had indicated before he would. I wish he had decided differently.
But the key thing we need to keep in focus is what the objective here is. This is a hugely complex chess game. (Or I’m assuming it’s complex, since how else can you explain losing twice (ok once) to this President.) The objective of this chess game is to keep focus on the issues that show America why your candidate should win. Keeping focus (in this media environment, at least) is an insanely difficult task. But one tool in that game is picking the fights that resonate in ways that keep focus on the issues that show America why your candidate should win.
That doesn’t mean you (as a candidate) should change what you would do as President. Or change what you would fight for. But it does me that we (as strong supporters of a candidate) need to chill out a bit for about five months.
We (and I think that means all of us) can’t afford to lose this election. When we win, we will have elected a President who will deliver policy initiatives I remain certain will make us proud. If he doesn’t, then loud and clear opposition is our duty.
If “our” goal is to elect a Democrat president, then Lessig’s advice is spot on. If, on the other hand, “our” goal is to use politics as a way to improve public policy, Lessig’s advice couldn’t be worse. Continue reading →
Barack Obama is supporting the FISA bill. That pretty much seals it: Russ Feingold and Chris Dodd may filibuster, but we already know that there are enough Democrats willing to break ranks to reach cloture, and with the party’s figurehead on board, none of them are likely to switch sides. Obama says he’s going to try to strip out the immunity provision, but this is obviously so much political theater. If he were serious about doing that he’d be saying he planned to oppose the “compromise” until the immunity provision got stripped out. The fact that he’s committing himself to support the overall bill whether or not it comes with immunity is proof that he doesn’t really care about getting rid of immunity. And why would he? A few angry liberals may decide not to give to his campaign, but he’s already got a lopsided fundraising advantage over John McCain, and in the long run he probably wants to stay on the good side of a powerful lobby that could prove useful to him once he’s in the Oval Office. Same goes for Steny Hoyer: Obama will need his support when it comes time to nationalize the health care system, so why risk alienating Hoyer just to make Glenn Greenwald happy?
I’ve talked plenty about why this deal was bad policy on this blog, and you can get more from Julian if you’re interested, but at this point I’m more interested in the politics of the deal, since it turns out that’s all that mattered. It’s important to remember that when you’re in the majority, you control the calendar and so hardly anything goes to the House floor unless you want it to. Nancy Pelosi could have continued to keep the FISA issue bottled up in committee for the remainder of this Congress. Hell, Harry Reid could still refuse to take up the House legislation, although he has made it clear that he won’t. So despite Reid’s protestations to the contrary, he supports this deal.
Why? Not only have Hoyer, Reid, and company sold out our civil liberties, but they’ve angered their core supporters as well. Glen Greenwald has a gem of a poll showing that while Congress is wildly unpopular with everyone, the nominally Democratic Congress is currently polling substantially worse among Democrats than among Republicans. And that was before this FISA “compromise” was announced. This kind of spinelessness is likely to depress donor and volunteer enthusiasm come the fall.
But I think the even worse problem, from Obama, Reid, and Pelosi’s perspective, is that this means the return of the narrative of Democratic weakness on national security issues. As I wrote back in March, the Democratic Congress got some of its best press this Spring in the wake of its successful showdown with the White House:
Continue reading →
A friend points out this MP3 featuring a Andrew Rasiej of the Personal Democracy Forum and Allison Fine of Demos appearing on WNYC radio. They’re the authors of this book about the future of democracy.
Rasiej and Fine mention Internet voting as the wave of the future. They then took three or four calls, all of which consisted of cogent arguments for why Internet-based or electronic voting is a disaster in the making. One pointed out that it will be too complicated to make sure your vote is complicated. Another contended out that Internet-based voting disenfranchises poor people. When Fine responded that poor people could vote with their cell phones, a third caller pointed out that this would undermine the secret ballot.
Fine and Rasiej, obviously exasperated, conceded that, yes, current voting technologies had some kinks. But they insisted that once those kinks get worked out, we’ll all be able to choose our next president on our cell phones.
Fine and Rasiej struck me as irritatingly airheaded. If current e-voting technologies are deeply flawed (which they are) it’s irresponsible to be writing book chapters and giving radio interviews disparaging paper ballots as outdated. And it’s especially irritating that their support for e-voting seems to be entirely based on a gee-whiz sense that paper is old-fashioned and boring while touch-screen machines are new and exciting. This is not a serious argument, and if that’s all you have to say on the subject, you should leave scarce radio time to people who know what they’re talking about.
Incidentally, the book in question is an edited collection featuring a bunch of really great writers, including Clay Shirky, Yochai Benkler, and Brad Templeton. So I’m sure there’s some great stuff in there, even if the chapter on e-voting isn’t so good.
Verizon’s Tom Tauke and NCTA’s Kyle McSlarrow take to fisticuffs in their comments (well worth reading and remarkably… candid) on the Verizon Policy Blog after Tom asked “Will Cable and FCC Thwart Consumer Choice?” In case you missed it, Verizon has been feuding with cable providers before the FCC about Verizon’s practice of calling customers who ask to cancel their telephone service and offering them incentives to stay with Verizon rather than switch to a cable VoIP service.
Adam Thierer very capably addressed this subject several months ago:
there are two issues here: (1) Is Verizon technically violating any existing FCC regulations; and (2) do those rules make any sense?
I’ll leave it to the legal beagles to sort out the answer to question #1. From my perspective, the more important question is, regardless of what the regs say, what’s the impact of all this is on consumers and competition? On that point, it’s hard for me to see how those old number portability regulations make sense if they limit the ability of incumbents to play hard-ball in an attempt to retain customers. After all, that’s what we should want more of in the marketplace: good ol’ fashion head-to-head, facilities-based competition….
Bottom line: the FCC should be careful about regulating customer inducements by incumbents whether those offers happen before or after the porting process. The better approach would be to make sure that the incumbents can offer whatever inducements they want but then also make sure that rivals have a clear opportunity to respond and beat the offer.
Amen!
Remember that old Saturday Night Live character, the Pathological Liar, played by Jon Lovitz? He’d deliver outrageous lies, like the recurring one that he was married to Morgan Fairchild. When he realized he’d thought of a particularly good lie, he’d exclaim “Yeahhh! That’s the ticket!”
Future references to tickets may only be idiomatic if a new paperless trend for concerts and sporting events takes off. Ticketmaster has introduced what it calls a “Paperless Ticket” and Veritix has a paperless ticketing technology called Flash Seats. The concept is the same – no more paper tickets.
But to me paperless tickets are
not the ticket for consumer convenience.
Ticketmaster touts the convenience of paperless tickets: “Fans will no longer have to stand in line to pick up tickets at will-call”, it says, and the “entire process is quick, secure and simple.”
And, after all, it sounds appealingly convenient. It’s similar to ordering movie tickets from home on Fandango. But this is one advancement in technology that heads in the wrong direction.
First of all, check out this line from the Ticketmaster press release:
Fans who ordered tickets can simply present venue door staff their credit card, along with a valid photo ID, and they’ll be given a receipt and granted immediate access.
I added the italics for emphasis. So fans must present the credit card used in purchasing the tickets and a government-issued photo identification for admittance? Continue reading →
TCS Daily on June 18 ran an essay by me on regulatory policy. I excerpt thus:
In a sense, both models – market and regulatory — are flawed. But there is a difference. For every theory contending that markets fail, there is usually an answering argument that they tend to self-correct. Once, economic theory worried that markets would fail to fund “public goods” like lighthouses—until more careful economics revealed markets doing exactly that. More theory pointed to the evils of monopoly. But in reality a monopolist reaping substantial profits is a big target, with every entrepreneur looking for a substitute good or service. Many of the markets’ self-correcting mechanisms are simple Darwinism. Poor investors and badly run businesses lose (their own) money until they go under. Technology and other factors that bring change keep even established firms on their toes.
In contrast, self-correction is not a common response to regulatory failures. There is no good explanation for how an agency or a system of rules can be designed to
systematically succeed or self-correct.
I’ve previously praised Rush Holt before for his thoughtful and energetic leadership on behalf of civil liberties issues. Over at TPM Cafe, he’s got a post explaining why he will not be supporting the FISA “compromise” tomorrow:
In reviewing the FISA legislation now under consideration, it is clear to me that it does not meet the criteria or the principles I shared with you earlier.
The bill lacks the very specific “reverse targeting” protections I secured in the two previous House FISA bills we’ve passed. This goes to the issue of not being precise in who we are targeting. It appears to me that innocent Americans who are not “targeted” still may have their communications intercepted with ultimately damaging results.
Also, the telecom immunity provisions are tilted in favor of the government and telecommunication firms, not the citizens. If enacted, this bill will ensure the plaintiffs never get their day in court. This bill contains an “exigent circumstances” provision–something so broad and undefined that virtually anything could be considered an “exigent circumstance.” That is not the way to conduct targeted intelligence collection designed to provide us with reliable, actionable intelligence on verified bad actors.
This bill also has a four year sunset provision, which is entirely too long and which would have the effect of tying the hands of the next Congress and the next President in terms of making changes to the law.
I agree with others who have commented that we have time to get this right. We do. The existing FISA statute has served us well and will continue to do so until we pass a more balanced FISA reform bill. This is not that bill.
Quite so. It’s too bad the majority of Holt’s colleagues don’t seem inclined to listen.
AP sends nastigrams to blogs for citing as few as 39 words from its stories.
Mike Arrington blogs about it at TechCrunch.
The AP quotes 22 words from Arrington’s post.
Arrington responds:
Now the A.P. has gone too far. They’ve quoted twenty-two words from one of our posts, in clear violation of their warped interpretation of copyright law. The offending quote, from this post, is here (I’m suspending my A.P. ban to report on this important story).
Am I being ridiculous? Absolutely. But the point is to illustrate that the A.P. is taking an absurd and indefensible position, too. So I’ve called my lawyers (really) and have asked them to deliver a DMCA takedown demand to the A.P. And I will also be sending them a bill for $12.50 with that letter, which is exactly what the A.P. would have charged me if I published a 22 word quote from one of their articles.
Brilliant.
Google has begun including the “load time factor” into the quality score for ads on its AdWords program. This means that “Keywords with landing pages that load slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.”
Google provides two reasons for the change: “First, users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate [and thus lower profits for both the advertiser].”
One could easily imagine that some might complain that Google is “discriminating” against slower-to-load pages, and even hypothesize that this would introduce a systemic bias towards sites that can afford faster server throughput. True, this change makes the AdWords system non-“neutral” in ways that will benefit some advertisers over others.
But so what? Google is simply engaging in smart management of their network: Giving priority to ads that load faster introduces a strong incentive for all advertisers to speed up their pages in any manner possible. This small change in pricing structure could have broader effects on the efficiency of Internet browsing for all users–at least in terms of building home pages that load faster–particularly if other advertising platforms follow suit. Continue reading →
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