As faithful readers no doubt know, I’m a big fan of Section 230 and believe it has been the foundation of a great many of the online freedoms we enjoy (dare I say, take for granted?) today. That’s why I’m increasingly concerned about some of the emerging thinking and case law I am seeing on this front, which takes a decidedly anti-230 tone.
Consider, for example, how some might weaken Sec. 230 in the name of “child safety.” You will recall the friendly debate about the future of Sec. 230 that I engaged in with Harvard’s John Palfrey. Prof. Palfrey has argued that: “The scope of the immunity the CDA provides for online service providers is too broad” and that the law “should not preclude parents from bringing a claim of negligence against [a social networking site] for failing to protect the safety of its users.” Similarly, Andrew LaVallee of The Wall Street Journal reported from a conference this week that Sec. 230 became everyone’s favorite whipping boy, with several participants suggesting that the law needs to be re-opened and altered to somehow solve online “cyber-bullying” problems.
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A few months ago, Adam Thierer penned The Pragmatic (Internet) Optimist’s Creed in response to calls from “Internet pessimists” for increased regulation of the Internet on many fronts. Adam‘s recent 4-way debate with pessimists Larry Lessig and Jonathan Zittrain (as well as optimist Declan McCullagh) inspired me to pen the following cheeky homage to Lessig, the Father of Internet Pessimism, whose work has launched a thousand efforts to increase government control of the Internet in the name, ironically, of “freedom:”
Our Lessig, who art in Harvard,
Hallowed be thy blog.
Thy Free Culture come.
Thy Code be done,
In Washington as it is in thy Ivory Tower.
Today, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced the members of the new Online Safety and Technology Working Group (OSTWG). I am honored to be among those chosen to participate in this new task force and I look forward to continuing the work started last year with the Harvard Berkman Center’s Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF), which I also served on. I was very proud of the work done by the ISTTF and the impressive final report that Prof. John Palfrey crafted to reflect our findings. I am eager to investigate these issues further and take a look at the latest research and technologies that can help us better understand how to protect our kids online while also protecting the free speech and privacy rights of Netizens.
The new NTIA working group, which was established under the “Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act,” will report to the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information on industry-implemented online child safety tools and efforts. Within a year of convening its first meeting, the group will submit a report of its findings and make recommendations on how to increase online safety measures.
Below the fold I have listed the complete roster of OSTWG task force members. I very much looking forward to working with this outstanding group. And I’m happy to report that my TLF blogging colleague Braden Cox will be joining me on this task force!
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Here’s a terrific piece by Harry McCracken over at Technologizer asking “Whatever Happened to the Top 15 Web Properties of April, 1999?” McCracken goes through the hottest web properties of April 1999 and asks, “How many of 1999’s Web giants remain gigantic today — assuming they still exist at all?” Instead of reproducing his entire list here, I’ll just encourage you to go over to Technologizer and check it out for yourself, especially because McCracken also compares the old list to today’s top 15 Web properties. Anyway, here’s the key takeaway from his piece:
to summarize, four of April 1999’s top Web properties remain in the top fifteen (plus AltaVista, Excite, and GeoCities, which are extant and part of top-10 properties). Four more are in the top 50, or are part of properties that are. Two exist but have fallen out of the top 50. And two (Xoom and Snap) no longer exist. Bottom line: If you were one of the Web’s biggest properties a decade ago, chances are high that you remain in business in some form in 2009… but you probably aren’t still a giant.
In other words, it’s a dynamic marketplace with a lot of churn and creative destruction. Sure, some big dogs from the late 90s remain (Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, and CNet). But they have all been humbled to some extent. Moreover, lots and lots of other players were driven from the top ranks or disappeared altogether. (GeoCities, Lycos, Excite, AltaVista, Xoom, Snap). And there have been new technologies, platforms, and players that have come out of nowhere in a very short time to become the household names of 2009 (Google, Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia). But, as McCracken points out, it’s anyone’s guess which of today’s top Web properties will still be booming in 2019. Anyway, I encourage you to check out McCracken’s very interesting essay, and if you find this sort of restrospective piece interesting, you might also want to check out my essay from earlier this year, “10 Years Ago Today… Thinking About Technological Progress“.
My friend Anne Collier of Net Family News, one of America’s great sages on child safety issues, has produced a terrific list of reasons “Why Technopanics are Bad.” Technopanics and moral panics are topics I’ve spent quite a bit of time commenting on here. (See 1, 2, 3, 4.) Anne is a rare voice of sanity and sensible advice when it comes to online child safety issues and I encourage you to read all her excellent work on the subject, including her book with Larry Magid, MySpace Unraveled: A Parent’s Guide to Teen Social Networking. Anyway, here’s Anne’s list, and I encourage you to go over to her site and contribute your thoughts and suggestions about what else to add:
Technopanics are bad because they…
- Cause fear, which interferes with parent-child communication, which in turn puts kids at greater risk.
- Cause schools to fear and block digital media when they need to be teaching constructive use, employing social-technology devices and teaching new media literacy and citizenship classes throughout the curriculum.
- Turn schools into barriers rather than contributors to young people’s constructive use.
- Increase the irrelevancy of school to active young social-technology users via the sequestering or banning of educational technology and hamstring some of the most spirited and innovative educators.
- Distract parents, educators, policymakers from real risks – including, for example, child-pornography laws that do not cover situations where minors can simultaneously be victim and “perpetrator” and, tragically, become registered sex offenders in cases where there no criminal intent (e.g., see this).
- Reduce the competitiveness of US education among developed countries already effectively employing educational technology and social media in schools.
- Reduce the competitiveness of US technology and media businesses practicing good corporate citizenship where youth online safety is concerned.
- Lead to bad legislation, which aggravates above outcomes and takes the focus off areas where good laws on the books can be made relevant to current technology use.
- Widen the participation gap for youth – technopanics are barriers for children and teens to full, constructive participation in participatory culture and democracy.
There’s a movement afoot in Congress to advance legislation that would eviscerate the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, empower a state-based tax cartel, and potentially decimate the Internet economy in the process. Business Week has the details:
In the next week, legislators are expected to introduce bills in the House and Senate promising to do away with the “physical presence” requirement. If a bill passes — and that’s a big “if” — it would require all online retailers, except for the tiniest companies, to collect sales taxes in the 23 states that are part of the Streamlined Sales Tax Project. The states would compensate the retailers for the trouble, while promising not to sue them for tax collection mistakes that are made.
The Streamlined Sales Tax Project, or “SSTP”, sounds good in theory but would be disastrous in practice. Michael Graham of the
Boston Herald penned an editorial about the SSTP today and he does a nice job pointing out why, when it comes to “tax simplification,” the devil is always in the details and those details are typically anything but “simple” (or taxpayer-friendly for that matter).
The real danger of the SSTP, however, is what it means for the Constitution and tax competition among the states. In this 2003 paper I penned with Veronique de Rugy for the Cato Institute, we showed why the SSTP would not only fail to simplify the sales tax code, but would actually cede dangerous taxing powers to state and local governments over the interstate marketplace. In the process, Veronique and I argued, a multi-state sales tax cartel would be spawned: Continue reading →
As anyone who has spent time searching for comments on the FCC’s website can tell you, the agency doesn’t exactly have the most user-friendly website. In the interest of making it easier for others to read the comments that came in last week in the agency’s “Child Safe Viewing Act” Notice of Inquiry, I have compiled all the major comments (those over 3 or 4 pages) and provided links to them below the fold.
Again, this proceeding was required under the “Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007,” which Congress passed last year and President Bush signed last December. The goal of the bill and the FCC’s proceeding (MB 09-26) is to study “advanced blocking technologies” that “may be appropriate across a wide variety of distribution platforms, including wired, wireless, and Internet platforms.” I filed 150+ pages worth of comments in this matter last week, and here’s my analysis of why this bill and the FCC’s proceeding are worth monitoring closely.
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Today I filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in its proceeding examining the marketplace for “advanced blocking technologies.” This proceeding was required under the “Child Safe Viewing Act of 2007,” which Congress passed last year and President Bush signed last December. The goal of the bill and the FCC’s proceeding (MB 09-26) is to study “advanced blocking technologies” that “may be appropriate across a wide variety of distribution platforms, including wired, wireless, and Internet platforms.” My colleagues will no doubt laugh about the fact that I have dropped an absurd 150 pages worth of comments on the FCC in this matter, but I had a lot to say on this topic! Parental controls, child safety, and free speech issues have been the focus of much of my research agenda over the past 10 years.
In my filing, I argue that the FCC should tread carefully in this matter since the agency has no authority over most of the media platforms and technologies described in the Commission’s recent Notice of Inquiry. Moreover, any related mandates or regulatory actions in in this area could diminish future innovation in this field and would violate the First Amendment rights of media creators and consumers alike. The other major conclusions of my filing are as follows:
- There exists an unprecedented abundance of parental control tools to help parents decide what constitutes acceptable media content in their homes and in the lives of their children.
- There is a trade-off between complexity and convenience for both tools and ratings, and no parental control tool is completely foolproof.
- Most homes have no need for parental control technologies because parents rely on other methods or there are no children in the home.
- The role of household media rules and methods is underappreciated and those rules have an important bearing on this debate.
- Parental control technologies work best in combination with educational efforts and parental involvement.
- The search for technological silver-bullets and “universal” solutions represent a quixotic, Holy Grail-like quest and it will destroy innovation in this marketplace.
- Enforcement of “household standards” made possible through use of parental controls and other methods negates the need for “community standards”-based content regulation.
My entire filing can be found here and down below in a Scribd reader. All comments in the matter are due tomorrow and then reply comments are due on May 18th.
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Ever wonder about this? In researching COPPA, I noticed the following definition of “Internet”
collectively the myriad of computer and telecommunications facilities, including equipment and operating software, which comprise the interconnected world-wide network of networks that employ the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or any predecessor or successor protocols to such protocol, to communicate information of all kinds by wire, radio, or other methods of transmission.
16 CFR § 312.2 (added in 1999). This definition comes from the COPPA law itself.
My quick and by no means exhaustive research (looked for the term “Internet means” in the CFR and U.S. Code) suggests that this is one of two definitions used, with slight variations, in Federal law (in less than a dozen places total).
The earliest reference I can find to this definition is from the Internet Tax Freedom Act of 1998 (the sales tax moratorium), which differed only slightly: “comprise” instead of “constitute” and omitting the “or other methods of transmission” part. This definition appears again in the child pornography rules issued in 2005 (28 CFR § 75.1).
The other definition I see is appears in the bankruptcy code (15 USCS § 163) and in the 2005 Internet gambling ban (31 CFR § 132.2 and 12 CFR § 233.2): “the international computer network of both Federal and non-Federal interoperable packet switched data networks.”
So which definition is better? Do both suck? Should we care? “Discuss amongst yourselves!”
But no kvetching about the use of the word “myriad.” Someone already beat you to the punch—and got smacked down: Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.