Not quite, says my boss Ken Ferree, president of PFF, in testimony this morning before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. Even though there’s a heated battle going between large sports leagues and video distributors over where sports programming sits on the dial and what the price is charged for it, the bottom line is that there is no reason for the government to be called in to regulate this game. As Ken argues:
there are powerful forces acting on both sides of the bargaining equation. On the one hand, sports programming networks own extremely valuable content, which, generally speaking, distributors wish to carry. On the other hand, program distributors are under tremendous pressure to control consumer rates; limiting programming costs is perhaps the most direct means of achieving that end. The market, not regulatory authorities or appointed arbitrators, is best positioned to balance those interests.
Read Ken’s entire statement to the Committee here. [And there’s more coverage of the hearing over at Broadcasting & Cable.]
Over at Ars, I have a new piece up that draws a (somewhat provocative, perhaps) parallel between today’s copyright debates and the property rights debates of the 18th and 19th centuries:
The American property system is based on the British common law system, but colonists quickly discovered that British property law was inadequate to the realities of the New World. In England, land was scarce and titles were well established. The American colonies, in contrast, had an abundance of land but poorly-defined boundaries and inadequate record-keeping. As a result, squatting became extremely common. Landless Americans would move to the frontier, clear some land, and begin building on it without first securing a property title.
This was illegal, and governments worked hard to prevent it. The resulting conflicts made today’s battles over file sharing look tame. In 1786, when Massachusetts tried to eject squatters in Maine (a Massachusetts territory at the time) the result was what one historian describes as “something like open warfare.” Squatters refused to pay for their land or vacate it, and the government tried to forcibly evict them. One sheriff was killed trying to evict a squatter, and juries refused to convict the accused murderer.
Copyright maximalists love to draw parallels between property rights and copyrights. But if we take that analogy seriously, I think it actually leads in some places that they aren’t going to like. Our property rights system was not created by Congressional (or state legislative) fiat. Property rights in land is an organic, bottom up exercize. The job of government isn’t to dictate what the property system should look like, but to formalize and reinforce the property arrangements people naturally agree to among themselves.
The fact that our current copyright system is widely ignored and evaded is a sign, I think, that Congress has done a poor job of aligning the copyright system with ordinary individuals’ sense of right and wrong. Just as squatters 200 years ago didn’t think it was right that they be booted off land they cleared and brought under cultivation in favor of an absentee landowner who had written a check to a distant federal government, so a lot of people feel it’s unfair to fine a woman hundreds of thousands of dollars to share a couple of CDs’ worth of music. You might believe (as do I) that file sharing is unethical, just as many people believed that squatting was unethical. But at some point, Congress has no choice but to recognize the realities on the ground, just as it did with real property in the 19th century.
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Business Week media columnist Jon Fine penned a “Requiem for Old-Time Radio” this week that illustrates the troubles facing one of America’s oldest media sectors. Fine expresses the same sort of reverence and nostalgia I often do when talking about what radio meant to some of us in our youth:
“I remember what we now call “terrestrial radio” with ridiculous fondness. I recall huddling with it long past bedtime, the volume set low, hoping to hear something I loved. Thus the truism of how radio is the most intimate medium: You’re in bed with the lights out, the music and the DJ’s voice going straight into your brain, the images created are yours alone.”
Radio really did inspire the imagination of a entire generations like that in the past. But, as Fine notes, those generations got old, and so did radio. “Realities of the music world—the explosion in both expression and availability, first on independent labels and now everywhere, thanks to the Internet—began overtaking commercial radio stations well over 20 years ago.” Indeed, as I documented in part 5 of my “Media Metrics” series, the competition for our ears has never been more intense:
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Gary Gygax, the father of role-playing games, died today at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. As a fellow Wisconite and lover of video games–the modern forum for Gary’s roll-playing games–I have to say this is a sad day.
Wired has a post on his passing and for those of you who don’t know much about gaming and the contribution that Gygax made to the field, it’s worth reading the Wikipedia entry on his life.
Gygax with Stephen Hawking and Lieutenant Ohura on an episode of
Futurama.
Though his passing isn’t a policy issue, Gygax was one of the founders of early gaming culture which has been carried through to the PC and console platforms which are under attack today. Gygax’s passing should remind us that attacks on gaming aren’t anything new. Role playing games were also attacked when they arrived on the scene. In fact, Tom Hanks starred in Mazes & Monsters, a movie based around the death of gamer James Dallas Egbert III, resulting in hype similar to the stuff we hear today about the effects of violent video games.
Today such objections to board games seem silly. Hopefully in the next decade we’ll look back on the proposed game burnings of the 90s and today as just as foolish.
Mari Silbey of MediaExperiences2Go has an interesting post about “The Changing Face of Concurrency.” She examines the various metrics companies and analysts use to study bandwidth flows or to model network activity. These include households passed, penetration ratio, concurrency ratio, and bandwidth. Concurrency represents the number of subscribers likely to be tuned in or logged on at any given time, which is obviously important for cable bandwidth measures or estimated since it is a shared network. It’s not enough to simply be examining penetration ratios or aggregate bandwidth measures when debating network management policies. Concurrency ratios give us a better way to measure what is possible on existing cable infrastructure.
More broadly speaking, the reason all this is important is because we need to have a common set of metrics when evaluating issues that come up in Net neutrality debates since opponents often use different terms and measures when discussing these issues. Anyway, just thought I would highlight her article for that reason.
Congressman Ed Markey (D-Mass) has introduced legislation aimed at ridding the cell phone world of the much criticized practicies of phone subsidies, long-term contracts, and termination fees. In the name of contract “consistency” Markey’s bill mandates that cell companies offer alternative plans that contain no subsidy for the handset and plans that offer month-to-month service.
The bill contains a long section of “findings,” which are intended to point out what, from Rep. Markey’s perspective, are the illogical practices of cell phone providers. However, if you look at the issue of termination fees, you’ll find that Rep. Markey’s bill ignores the role of competition in decreasing costs to consumers and fails to take into account long-term investment in increasing nation-wide wireless capacity.
The bill claims that termination fees “Do not reflect the cost of recovering the monetary amount of a bundled mobile device or any other expenditure for customer acquisition.” The most glaring problem with this finding is that it’s already outed. Sprint, which is currently hemorrhaging money, instituted a new policy in November that allows customers to change plans without extending contracts and prorates termination fees. This came on the heels of similar announcements from Verizon and AT&T in October of last year. So, the bill’s $175 average termination fee figure is likely an incorrect one based on old policies.
But termination fees don’t just serve the purpose of cost recovery, they also provide an incentive for customers staying loyal to their wireless provider and giving these providers revenue predictability. With predictable revenues, it’s easier for cell phone network companies to get the financing they need to build the multi-billion dollar networks of tomorrow. Rep. Markey’s bill may save consumers in the short-term, but in the long run adding volatility to the marketplace will stem investment and slow the roll-out of 4G and Wi-Max networks.
We often talk about the unintended consequences of legislation in our work at CEI–this is a prime example of some very significant and costly unintended consequences that will ultimately hurt consumers and threatens to put America behind the curve on cell phone technology.
Rep. Markey’s bill also deals with wireless broadband, coverage maps, and spectrum efficiency. Topics that Ryan Radia and I will be addressing in future posts.
I have long been intrigued with the effort to regulate online gaming activities because it represents the most sophisticated effort by our government yet to eradicate a specific class of online speech or commerce. (My TLF colleague Tom Bell has done seminal work in this field). In her weekly “The Regulators” column, The Washington Post’s outstanding regulatory columnist Cindy Skrzycki writes about the enforcement challenges at work here:
It’s not easy making rules for a U.S. law intended to deter illegal Internet gambling by choking off the flow of funds to offshore sites. That’s because no one seems to agree on what the law covers. Officials at the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve found that out after sifting through more than 200 comments from banks, gamblers, church groups and members of Congress on recommendations for the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. The basic sentiment was that their Oct. 4 proposal, which depends on financial institution enforcement, won’t work.
The outcome will affect 23 million online gamblers, some 2,500 Internet sites and the growth of an industry with an estimated $15 billion in annual global revenue. The law bars financial institutions from processing payments involving Internet gambling — with the notable exceptions of Indian gaming, state gaming and horse racing. “If the federal agencies themselves cannot agree on the law, what hope is there that banks can resolve these confounding legal issues?” the American Bankers Association said in commenting on a conflict between the Treasury and Justice departments on the legality of betting on horses. The Washington trade group said the suggested rules are more likely to catch its members in a compliance trap than stop profits from illegal gambling from escaping offshore.
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Awesome:
By loosenut (Seattle, WA)
I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger’s shoes cannot be removed.
Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger’s scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said “that’s the worst security ever!”. But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried to hijack it, she was mobbed by a couple of other heroic passengers, who only sustained minor injuries in the scuffle, which were treated at the Playmobil Hospital.
The best thing about this product is that it teaches kids about the realities of living in a high-surveillance society. My son said he wants the Playmobil Neighborhood Surveillance System set for Christmas. I’ve heard that the CCTV cameras on that thing are pretty worthless in terms of quality and motion detection, so I think I’ll get him the Playmobil Abu-Gharib Interrogation Set instead (it comes with a cute little memo from George Bush).
My fianceé wants to know if it comes with miniature plastic baggies for putting your miniature miniature bottles of shampoo in.
They ought to make John Gilmore and Bruce Schneier action figures to go with it.
This story from the SF Chronicle is interesting in a number of ways. First, what does this baby step by Google into phone services mean in the long run? I’m not sure if the phone companies ever tried anything like this before (if you know, pls comment), but if they haven’t, it makes them look bad and reinforces the left’s “big, bad, telecoms” paranoia. Second, it is shocking to see Google working with Gavin Newsom again after the WiFi fiasco that ended SF’s attempt to provide “free” (read: government-controlled) WiFi and demonstrated how difficult it is to partner with SF’s local officials.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.