With the death of the last year’s video franchising-Net neutrality bill, Democrats have now firmly taken the reins on telecommunications policy in Congress. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii., has legislation designed to map out the availability of broadband, or high-speed Internet connections, in the United States, and it passed out of committee on July 19. Now, this week, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., announced an online effort to write national broadband strategy legislation. He will joined by several telecommunications and Internet experts in open-comment blogging sessions for four nights from July 24 – 27 at OpenLeft.com. Durbin says he will be crafting legislation based on the input he gets during those sessions. He will then post drafts of that legislation online for more feedback before filing it as a bill.
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As Braden mentioned, we were both down in Raleigh, North Carolina this week testifying at a big hearing on mandatory age verification for social networking sites.
It was quite a heated battle. The legislation, SB 132, was supported at the hearing by North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper, several of his staff attorneys, a couple of NC senate lawmakers, and some folks from Aristotle, a company that claims it has devised a workable age verification solution for social networking purposes. A vote on the proposal was delayed and we’re still awaiting the final outcome.
Down below, I have attached the outline of my remarks in which I argued that age verification mandates would actually make kids
less safe online. Here’s why:
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PFF has just released Version 2.2 of my book, “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods.” It can be found online at: http://www.pff.org/parentalcontrols
As promised when we launched book last month, we plan on making ongoing updates available to ensure that the report offers a timely, comprehensive snapshot of the amazingly diverse marketplace of parental control tools and methods, as well as the ongoing state of child safety efforts.
Toward that end, Version 2.2 offers the following updates:
- over 20 new color exhibits or screen captures that highlight the many excellent websites or products on the market to help parents better manage media;
- a new section on how the “power of the purse” and sensible media budgeting can serve as the ultimate parental control strategy;
- a short section of good books on Digital Age parenting and online child safety;
- various other additions, clarifications and improvements to many other sections.
If you have other suggested additions, updates or corrections, please let me know. Version 2.3 of the book is already in the works!
I earlier posted our amicus brief in the Cablevision case, along with most of the others, here.
The brief of Americans for Tax Reform, affiliated with the Property Rights Alliance, is here in two parts:
Part I
Part II
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Ars has a report on a new study showing that college students are shockingly prone to phishing if the email they receive appears to come from an acquaintance:
To generate a database of relationships, the authors used a publicly-available Perl module to crawl social networking sites, including Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, and LinkedIn. They selected Indiana students from this database and picked a target population based on the quality of the personal information that was obtained.
Test subjects received an e-mail with headers spoofed so that it appeared to originate from a member of the subject’s social network. The message body was comprised of the phrase “hey, check this out!” along with a link to a site ostensibly at Indiana University. The link, however, would direct browsers to www.whuffo.com, where they were asked to enter their Indiana username and password. Control subjects were sent the same message originating from a fictitious individual at the university.
The results were striking: apparently, if the friends of a typical college student are jumping off a cliff, the student would too. Even though the spoofed link directed browsers to an unfamiliar .com address, having it sent by a familiar name sent the success rate up from 16 percent in controls to over 70 percent in the experimental group.
Of course, men were far more likely to respond to emails from women than from other men.
Last week, Jerry Ellig and I filed a reply commment (PDF) in the FCC’s ongoing broadband competition proceeding. In it we examined the evidence put forth during the comment period. Today we summarize our findings in an op-ed in TCS Daily:
The Federal Communications Commission recently asked for evidence that broadband Internet companies currently engage in data discrimination that would justify regulation of the Internet. …
… the Commission explicitly asked commenters to “provide specific, verifiable examples with supporting documentation, and [to] limit their comments to those practices that are technically feasible today.” Close to 10,000 comments were submitted to the FCC, yet all but 143 were what the FCC calls “brief text comments,” many of which were form letters generated at the behest of advocacy groups.
Of the 143 more extensive comments, only 66 are longer than two pages, and of these only 20 advocate some form of new regulation. None of these 20 offers any significant empirical evidence to suggest that there currently exists a “market failure” or other systemic problem justifying regulatory intervention in the name of net neutrality.
The WSJ has an article by the FCC’s Robert M. McDowell on July 24, 2007, p. A15, “Broadband Baloney,” critiquing among other things the OECD’s discouraging data on broadband in the United States:
American consumers are poised to reap a windfall of benefits from a new wave of broadband deployment. But you would never know it by the rhetoric of those who would have us believe that the nation is falling behind, indeed in free fall.
Looming over the horizon are heavy-handed government mandates setting arbitrary standards, speeds and build-out requirements that could favor some technologies over others, raise prices and degrade service. This would be a mistaken road to take — although it would hardly be the first time in history that alarmists have ignored cold, hard facts in pursuit of bad policy.
Tyler Cowan has further remarks on the topic, with comments.
Adam and I are heading down to North Carolina tomorrow to testify against a bill pending in the state legislature that would require anyone under 18 to have a parent’s permission to join a social networking site such as MySpace. Adam has written extensively about Internet safety. Here’s my take.
At first glance, that might seem like a sensible idea. But, as I keep pointing out to anyone who will listen, it just won’t work. How can a website be sure that someone signing up is really over 18? How can a website be sure that a person giving parental consent is really a parent? Experience and common sense suggest that education and prevention are a far better approach to Internet safety.
Indeed, a study published earlier this year in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine suggests that a lot of the advice we have been giving young people about Internet safety may be off the mark anyway. The researchers found no evidence that sharing personal information online increases the chances of online victimization, like unwanted sexual solicitation and harassment. Victimization is more likely to result from other online behavior, like talking about sex with people met online and intentionally embarrassing someone else on the Internet.
These findings are in line with earlier research by the University of New Hampshire that examined 2,500 cases where juveniles were victims of sex crimes committed by people they met on the Internet. The study found that these children, almost all teenagers, were not victims of strangers who had lured them into situations where they could be abducted or assaulted. In fact, just the opposite was the case.
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On Wednesday this week (7/25; 11:00 a.m.), the Cato Institute will be having a policy forum on the dispute between the United States and the Caribbean island nation of Antigua and Barbuda over U.S. restrictions on Internet gambling.
The U.S. has lost a series of World Trade Organization rulings on its Internet gambling laws, and its intransigence threatens the viability of the WTO. Will the U.S. burn down an institution of free trade to protect American grown-ups from their own entertainment choices?
Register, watch the live webcast, or watch the recorded webcast here.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.