Technology Liberation Front

2 good WSJ op-eds on net neutrality dangers

by Adam Thierer on February 25, 2008 · 4 comments

Got busy last week and failed to blog about this Wall Street Journal column by my colleague Bret Swanson and tech visionary George Gilder about the dangers of net neutrality regulation. They argue that:

The petitions under consideration at the FCC and the Markey net neutrality bill would set an entirely new course for U.S. broadband policy, marking every network bit and byte for inspection, regulation and possible litigation. Every price, partnership, advertisement and experimental business plan on the Net would have to look to Washington for permission. Many would be banned. Wall Street will not deploy the needed $100 billion in risk capital if Mr. Markey, digital traffic cop, insists on policing every intersection of the Internet.

And there’s another editorial in today’s WSJ by business author Andy Kessler entitled “Internet Wrecking Ball.” Kessler also points to the innovation-killing nature of NN regulation:

“With net neutrality, there will be no new competition and no incentives for build outs. Bandwidth speeds will stagnate, and new services will wither from bandwidth starvation. … The trick to an open and innovative Internet is not sneaky technical fixes nor more rules and regulations and bureaucracies to enforce them. The Internet will only expand based on competitive principles, not socialist diktat. The more we can do to clear a path, the greater our national wealth will be.”

Make sure to read both pieces.

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The Struggle of Self-Motivation

by Tim Lee on February 25, 2008 · 3 comments

The OC Register has a profile of our own Tom Bell and his struggle to finish his forthcoming book on copyright law:

Every morning that he spends writing, Bell sets a goal for what he needs to complete, gets into his truck with his laptop and surfboard and drives to San Onofre Surf Beach. There, the Chapman University law professor gets out of his truck, gazes longingly at the surf break, turns away and boots up his laptop. Sometimes he works at a picnic table overlooking the beach, other times in his Toyota 4 Runner. If he gets his assigned amount of writing done in the morning, he allows himself to get out his board and surf. If not, he eats his sack lunch, and then sits there until it’s time to go pick up his kids from school.

I can relate to the challenges of keeping oneself motivated. Sadly, I don’t think I have a hobby that excites me as much as surfing does him. Maybe I need to move to California.

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Martin: Greater Transparency by Broadband Providers

by Drew Clark on February 25, 2008 · 2 comments

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin said today that broadband providers need to “provide transparency” about the speeds, service and prices that they are offering to consumers.

Martin, speaking after Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., headlined the FCC’s monthly meeting here today at Harvard Law School, said the FCC’s four principles on Net Neutrality — promulgated in 2005 — will not permit broadband providers to block applications from lawful Internet services.

Speaking at a hearing on the “network management” practices of broadband carriers, Martin said the agency’s neutrality principles were all subject to “reasonable network management.”

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What Part of FOREIGN Don’t You Understand?!!

by Tim Lee on February 25, 2008 · 2 comments

This has got to be the best defense of warrantless wiretapping I’ve seen yet:

One seems to forget what FISA stands for—Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “Foreign” doesn’t stand for “Americans”. But another mass-casualty terrorist attack might be unavoidable for Democrats, because it involves “nonviolations of the nonrights of nonAmericans” (Rich Lowry/ TownHall). FISA gave the government a way to monitor foreign communications and to act. But it requires a warrant to do so. The Protect America Act changed that–temporarily.

Don’t you understand?!? If the word “foreign” is in the bill’s title, then it only applies to foreigners! Kind of like how the title of the No Child Left Behind Act guaranteed that Pres. Bush’s education agenda would succeed in educating every child. It’s amazing how dense these left-wingers can be.

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Deregulation Used to Be a Liberal Idea

by Tim Lee on February 25, 2008 · 6 comments

One of my favorite things about Matt Yglesias’s blog is that he’s considerably better-informed than his commenters, and is willing to say things that he knows perfectly well will piss them off. The latest example is a post where Matt opines that “the movement, started under Jimmy Carter then of course continued by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, to deregulate important aspects of the American economy was basically a good thing.” This provokes almost unanimous condemnation from Matt’s readers. But Matt’s right.

I think it’s amazing how many commenters here appear to have absolutely no knowledge of the nature of a lot of regulations in the 1970s and before. I’m not talking about meat inspections or environmental laws here, but the regulation of trucking, airlines, telecommunications, securities, and a number of other industries were thinly veiled attempts to create government-supported monopolies for the benefit of incumbent businesses. The ICC, for example, which regulated surface transportation, carefully controlled which trucking companies could drive which routes. They routinely denied applications to provide new service on the grounds that the route in question already had “enough” competition. The result, not surprisingly, was that prices were significantly higher than they would be in a competitive market. Airlines were the same way. The CAB actively prevented the airlines from cutting prices or expanding service. And until the early 1970s, the FCC actively worked to prevent competition in the long-distance market to keep AT&T’s profits up.

Not only did consumers get screwed from higher prices, but this created a lot of waste too. Trucks would commonly drive from one city to another, and then drive back empty because they couldn’t get permission to carry cargo on the return trip. In the 1960s, airplanes were almost half empty, on average, because they weren’t allowed to cut prices in order to attract more passengers.

Airline, trucking, and long distance deregulation were a win from just about every ideological perspective. It was good for consumers (especially low-income consumers), free markets, and economic efficiency. The major losers were incumbent businesses who no longer enjoyed monopoly profits. It’s a rare example in which elite opinion across the political spectrum converged on a set of changes that benefitted almost everyone in society.

A final thing to note is that these policies were championed by liberal Democrats. The key players were Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, and Stephen Breyer, who worked for Kennedy in the 70s. This was a great triumph of liberal intellectuals over corporate interests. Yet a generation later, the smart lefties who read Matt’s blog seem to be completely oblivious to what was probably Jimmy Carter’s most important domestic policy accomplishment.

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Is InfraGard a Privacy Threat?

by Tim Lee on February 24, 2008 · 6 comments

Gary D. Barnett at the Libertarian Future of Freedom Foundation sounds the alarm about InfraGard, a collaboration between the FBI and private-sector people interested in security. Barnett paints InfraGard as a sinister effort by the FBI to get private information about American citizens.

Jim Lippard has a different perspective, explaining in some detail what InfraGard does, and convincing me, at least, that there’s nothing especially sinister going on. It’s perfectly legitimate for law enforcement to cooperate with the private sector to inform one another of potential security threats. Obviously, companies shouldn’t disclose their customers’ private information without a warrant, but Barnett offers no evidence that companies do that as part of InfraGard. It’s great that Barnett is working to ferret out potential threats to Americans’ privacy, but it looks like he might have raised the alarm prematurely in this case.

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Gates Admirable as Entrepreneur

by Cord Blomquist on February 22, 2008 · 13 comments

When reading an interesting piece on morality by Steven Pinker in The Age, I read a line that has become all to familiar to me. Pinker, in an effort to be contrarian and illustrate why our moral inclinations may be incorrect, pointed out that even guys like Bill Gates aren’t bad, noting:

Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world such as malaria, diarrhoea and parasites.

This refrain is repeated throughout the popular media when discussing Bill Gates. While I agree that Bill Gates ought to be admired for his monumental charitable efforts, can’t we also admire him for being an entrepreneur and creating countless billions in wealth?

After all, Gates didn’t just create wealth for himself or Microsoft, he’s also made the world a whole lot richer. Like it or not, it was Windows that provided the platform for much of the information revolution, which subsequently created a worldwide economic boom. We shouldn’t relegate this accomplishment to a mere footnote in Mr. Gates’ biography and it’s certainly worth considering the moral implications of that sort of wealth creation.

In a Christopher Hitchens-like move, Pinker also speaks about Mother Teresa:

Mother Teresa extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and primitive medical care.

He goes on to note that:

These examples show that our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish.

By that standard, even if Gates spent his fortune solely on mega-yachts and sports franchises he’d still beat Mother Teresa hands down. If we’re talking human flourishing, how can you beat creating an operating system that runs on 90+ percent of PCs has likely contributed trillions to global GDP over the last quarter century? Only super heroes to humanity like Norman Borlaug, also mentioned by Pinker and winner of CEI’s Julian Simon Award, can rise above Gates.

Love him or hate him, it’s hard to deny that Bill Gates has done a lot of good for the world, both as a philanthropist and as a CEO.

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Radio to the People

by Sonia Arrison on February 22, 2008 · 0 comments

As James pointed out below, this week marked the anniversary of the announcement that the satellite radio firms Sirius and XM plan to merge, yet so far the companies have not been allowed to consummate the marriage. That’s because regulators are standing in the way, backed by well-heeled Washington lobbyists out to prove that ridiculous ideas still have an impact if they come with dollar-sign attachments.

For instance, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has spent more than US$4 million lobbying to convince regulators that the XM-Sirius deal would create a radio monopoly. That’s like arguing that the Kindle, Amazon’s new wireless reading device, is a monopoly because it is the only e-book reading device that can download books using EVDO (evolution-data optimized) technology so the user can read them immediately. Yet neither new way of enjoying books or radio excludes all others.

NAB’s claims don’t hold up to scrutiny, especially when they try to have it both ways. As the Pacific Research Institute’s Daniel Ballon has pointed out, “the NAB concocted an absurd notion of competition” with its statement that “Sirius and XM compete directly with us, but we don’t compete directly with them.” George Orwell savaged that kind of logic in his novels, and it does not belong in the debate halls of the most powerful nation in the world.

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Network Neutrality == End-to-End Principle?

by Tim Lee on February 21, 2008 · 23 comments

I’m currently putting the finishing touches on a forthcoming paper on the network neutrality debate. Amanda was kind enough to review an early draft, and raised an issue I hadn’t thought of. I had proceeded on the assumption that network neutrality and the end-to-end principle were more or less synonymous. Certainly, I recognize that non-technical activists don’t always conceptualize it in those terms, but I thought that it was widely agreed that that’s more or less what the term refers to. Amanda disagrees, arguing that by treating the terms as synonymous, I’m unilaterally changing the terms of the debate.

The best example we were able to come up with of a policy that does not violate the end-to-end principle but is widely perceived as a network neutrality violation is Verizon’s broken DNS server, which Ed Felten, at least, regards as a network neutrality violation. At the time, I disagreed, arguing that because users had the option to use another DNS server if they preferred, the obnoxious behavior of Verizon’s DNS server isn’t a network neutrality issue.

What do y’all think? Is network neutrality synonymous with the end-to-end principle? Can you think of other examples of network neutrality violations that are not end-to-end violations? And if they’re not synonymous, how would you define network neutrality?

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Is John McCain Uncomfortably Close to Lowell ‘Bud’ Paxson?

by Drew Clark on February 21, 2008 · 0 comments

By Drew Clark

Sen. John McCain’s close relationship with media and telecom company lobbyist Vicki Iseman poses a challenge for his presidential campaign – if it can be demonstrated that he took specific actions on behalf of one of the companies she represented.

Today’s story in The New Times Times about McCain’s interactions with Iseman reports on legislative actions that he took on behalf of television broadcaster Paxson Communications from 1998 to 1999. That was the period of time in which Iseman’s relationship with McCain, then chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, was of concern to members of McCain’s staff, according to The Times.

A spokesman for the Arizona Republican said that The Times story was “gutter politics,” and that there was nothing in the article “to suggest that John McCain has ever violated the principles that have guided his career.” The Page provides additional reactions from McCain.

The Times does not report about a more recent – and potentially more dramatic – action by McCain on behalf of Paxson.

After a brief period of Democratic dominance, McCain returned to become chairman of the committee in 2003 and 2004. During that period, he took crucial legislative action that saved Paxson Communications from a bill that would have, in the words of CEO Lowell “Bud” Paxson, finally ruined his company.

Even more ironically, McCain took this action for Paxson in spite of his long-standing position that television broadcasters had inappropriately used the transition to digital television (DTV) to benefit themselves financially at the expense of the American public.

McCain initially supported legislation that would have forced Paxson and handful of broadcasters – but not the great bulk of television stations – off the air by December 31, 2006. Bud Paxson himself personally testified about this bill with “fear and trepidation” at a hearing on September 8, 2004.

Two weeks later, McCain had reversed himself. He now supported legislation that would grant two-year reprieve for Paxson – and instead force all broadcasters to stop transmitting analog television by December 31, 2008. Paxson and his lobbyists, including Iseman, were working at this time for just such a change.

The Times reports none of this more recent history of McCain’s actions benefitting Paxson Communications, which renamed itself Ion Media Networks.

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