Over at Discourse magazine I’ve posted my latest essay on how conservatives are increasingly flirting with the idea of greatly expanding regulatory control of private speech platforms via some sort of common carriage regulation or new Fairness Doctrine for the internet. It begins:

Conservatives have traditionally viewed the administrative state with suspicion and worried about their values and policy prescriptions getting a fair shake within regulatory bureaucracies. This makes their newfound embrace of common carriage regulation and media access theory (i.e., the notion that government should act to force access to private media platforms because they provide an essential public service) somewhat confusing. Recent opinions from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as well as various comments and proposals of Sen. Josh Hawley and former President Trump signal a remarkable openness to greater administrative control of private speech platforms. Given the takedown actions some large tech companies have employed recently against some conservative leaders and viewpoints, the frustration of many on the right is understandable. But why would conservatives think they are going to get a better shake from state-regulated monopolists than they would from today’s constellation of players or, more importantly, from a future market with other players and platforms?

I continue on to explain why conservatives should be skeptical of the administrative state being their friend when it comes to the control of free speech. I end by reminding conservatives what President Ronald Reagan said in his 1987 veto of legislation to reestablish the Fairness Doctrine: “History has shown that the dangers of an overly timid or biased press cannot be averted through bureaucratic regulation, but only through the freedom and competition that the First Amendment sought to guarantee.”

Read more at Discourse, and down below you will find several other recent essays I’ve written on the topic.

• “FCC’s O’Rielly on First Amendment & Fairness Doctrine Dangers“
• “A Good Time to Re-Read Reagan’s Fairness Doctrine Veto“
• “Sen. Hawley’s Radical, Paternalistic Plan to Remake the Internet“
• “How Conservatives Came to Favor the Fairness Doctrine & Net Neutrality“
• “Sen. Hawley’s Moral Panic Over Social Media“
• “The White House Social Media Summit and the Return of ‘Regulation by Raised Eyebrow’“
• “The Not-So-SMART Act“
• “The Surprising Ideological Origins of Trump’s Communications Collectivism“

There is a war going on in the conservative movement over free speech issues and FCC Commissioner Mike O’Reilly just became a causality of that skirmish. Neil Chilson and I just posted a new essay about this over on the Federalist Society blog. As we note there:

Plenty of people claim to favor freedom of expression, but increasingly the First Amendment has more fair-weather friends than die-hard defenders. Michael O’Rielly, a Commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), found that out the hard way this week. Last week, O’Rielly delivered an important speech before the Media Institute highlighting a variety of problematic myths about the First Amendment, as well as “a particularly ominous development in this space.” In a previous political era, O’Rielly’s remarks would have been mainstream conservative fare. But his well-worded warnings are timely with many Democrats and Republicans – including some in the White House – looking to resurrect analog-era speech mandates and let Big Government reassert control over speech decisions in the United States.

Shortly after delivering his remarks, the White House yanked O’Rielly’s nomination to be reappointed to the agency. It was a shocking development that was likely motivated by growing animosities between Republicans on the question of how much control the federal government–and the FCC in particular–should exercise over speech platforms, including platforms that the FCC has no authority to regulate.

For the 30 years that I have been covering media and technology policy, I’ve heard conservatives rail against the Fairness Doctrine, Net Neutrality and arbitrary Big Government only to see many of them now reverse suit and become the biggest defenders of these things as it pertains to speech controls and FCC regulation. It will certainly be interesting to see what a potential future Biden Administration does with the various new regulations that some in the GOP are seeking to impose.

But all hope is not lost. There are still brave voices in Republican and conservative circles who continue to stand up the the First Amendment, freedom of speech, and limits on federal regulatory meddling with speech platforms and outcomes. Commissioner O’Reilly basically lost his job because he acted as the equivalent of an intellectual whistle-blower; he called out the ideological rot seen in recent statements and actions by the White House, Senator Josh Hawley, and many other Republicans.

There is nothing remotely “conservative” about calls for reinvigorating the Fairness Doctrine and FCC speech controls. That represents repressive regulation that betrays the First Amendment and which will ultimately backfire badly and come back to haunt conservatives down the road.

Read my new essay with Neil for more details. And down below I have listed all my recent writing on this topic.

Additional Reading:

• “FCC’s O’Rielly on First Amendment & Fairness Doctrine Dangers“
• “Sen. Hawley’s Radical, Paternalistic Plan to Remake the Internet“
• “How Conservatives Came to Favor the Fairness Doctrine & Net Neutrality“
• “Sen. Hawley’s Moral Panic Over Social Media“
• “The White House Social Media Summit and the Return of ‘Regulation by Raised Eyebrow’“
• “The Not-So-SMART Act“
• “The Surprising Ideological Origins of Trump’s Communications Collectivism“

Thirteen years ago I penned an essay entitled, “Your Soapbox is My Soapbox!” It was condensed from a 2005 book I had released at the same time called Media Myths. My research and writing during that period and for fifteen years prior to that was focused on the dangers associated with calls by radical Left-leaning media scholars and policy activists for a veritable regulatory revolution in the way information and communication technology (ICT) platforms were operated. They pushed this revolution using noble-sounding rhetoric like “fairness in coverage,” “right of reply,” “integrity of public debate,” “preserving the public square,” and so on. Their advocacy efforts were also accompanied by calls for a host of new regulatory controls including a “Bill of Media Rights” to grant the public a litany of new affirmative rights over media and communications providers and platforms.

But no matter how much the so-called “media access” movement sought to sugarcoat their prescriptions, in the end, what those Left-leaning scholars and advocates were calling for was sweeping state control of media and communications technologies and platforms. In essence, they wanted to socialize private soapboxes and turn them into handmaidens of the state.

Here’s the way I began my old “soapbox” essay:

Imagine you built a platform in your backyard for the purpose of informing or entertaining your friends of neighbors. Now further imagine that you are actually fairly good at what you do and manage to attract and retain a large audience. Then one day, a few hecklers come to hear you speak on your platform. They shout about how it’s unfair that you have attracted so many people to hear you speak on your soapbox and they demand access to your platform for a certain amount of time each day. They rationalize this by arguing that it is THEIR rights as listeners that are really important, not YOUR rights as a speaker or the owner of the soapbox. That sort of scenario could never happen in America, right? Sadly, it’s been the way media law has operated for several decades in this country. This twisted “media access” philosophy has been employed by federal lawmakers and numerous special interest groups to justify extensive and massively unjust regime of media regulation and speech redistributionism. And it’s still at work today.

That was 2005. What’s amazing today is that this same twisted attitude is still on display, but it is conservatives who are now the ring-leaders of the push to socialize soapboxes!

Conservatives were squarely against such soapbox socialism when I penned my earlier essay and book. During that time, they feared that the media access movement would devolve into a political witch hunt aimed at singling them out and eliminating the many new popular personalities and platforms that offered the public Right-of-center voices and viewpoints.

But it’s a new day in America and conservatives have now flipped this script and are using the media access movement playbook to call for massive state control over private media and technology platforms in the name of eradicating supposed “bias” against them and their views.

Apparently everyone’s a Media Marxist these days, beginning with President Trump! Claiming that there is some sort of grand anti-conservative conspiracy afoot, President Trump and many of his defenders are pushing for greater government control of the media and tech companies. The White House is apparently “taking a look” at the idea of regulating Google because it is part of the “fake news media.” (Over at TechDirt, Zach Graves has a thorough debunking of such nonsense.) Of course, this follows Trump’s seemingly endless jihad against older media outlets, especially large newspapers and cable news enterprises that he disfavors.

Meanwhile, a new White House “We the People” petition to “Protect Free Speech in the Digital Public Square” already has almost 40,000 signatures. “The internet is the modern public square,” the manifesto begins. It continues on to claims that “the free and open internet has become a controlled, censored space, monopolized by a few unaccountable corporations” and that “[b]y banning users from their platforms, those corporations can effectively remove politically unwelcome Americans from the public square.” It concludes with the following call to action: “The President should request that Congress pass legislation prohibiting social media platforms from banning users for First Amendment-protected speech. The power to block lawful content should be in the hands of individual users – not [Facebook’s] Mark Zuckerberg or [Twitter’s] Jack Dorsey.”

Such rhetoric and proposals are indistinguishable from what the Left-leaning media access advocates were calling for in the past.

Is “media Marxism” too strong a term to use in this regard? Well, the textbook definition of Marxism involves state control of the means of production. In the case of information platforms, control of the means of production would involve the forcible surrender of some combination of the underlying editorial control that the owners have over their speech platforms as well as potential state control of the algorithms and other technical foundations of digital platforms.

And so let’s hear from former White House strategist Steve Bannon commenting to CNN on what he thinks needs to be done next:

>> Bannon said Big Tech’s data should be seized and put in a “public trust.” Specifically, Bannon said, “I think you take [the data] away from the companies. All that data they have is put in a public trust. They can use it. And people can opt in and opt out. That trust is run by an independent board of directors. It just can’t be that [Big Tech is] the sole proprietors of this data…I think this is a public good.” Bannon added that Big Tech companies “have to be broken up” just like Teddy Roosevelt broke up the trusts.” >> Bannon attacked the executives of Facebook, Twitter and Google. “These are run by sociopaths,” he said. “These people are complete narcissists. These people ought to be controlled, they ought to be regulated.” At one point during the phone call, Bannon said, “These people are evil. There is no doubt about that.” >> Bannon said he thinks “this is going to be a massive issue” in future elections. He said he thinks it will probably take until 2020 to fully blossom as a campaign issue, explaining, “I think by the time 2020 comes along, this will be a burning issue. I think this will be one of the biggest domestic issues.” Bannon said the “#MeToo movement has brought the issue of consent front and center” and argued that “this is going to bring the issue of digital consent front and center.”

On one hand, Bannon no longer works in Trump’s White House, so perhaps it isn’t fair to say that his views and prescriptions are tantamount to the President’s views. But Bannon was saying similar things while he was in the White House with Trump and the President’s surrogates have been continuously upping their rhetoric to suggest that they are serious about moving against the ICT sector in some fashion.

So, apparently we now inhabit a Bizarro World where the Hard Right has replaced the Hard Left in the U.S. in the never-ending drama of speech control. In past decades, some conservatives favored media regulation, of course. In fact, in the heyday of the Fairness Doctrine, many leading conservative voices insisted that regulation was needed to counter supposed “liberal bias” in broadcasting. It was only when Rush Limbaugh and many other conservatives came along in the late 1980s / early 1990s and gained a significant audience on talk radio that conservative sympathy for the Fairness Doctrine completely disappeared. In fact, conservatives then became vociferous critics of the Doctrine and demanded a stake be driven through its heart. Eventually, they did just that.  But even during the time when some conservative pundits supported the Fairness Doctrine, that support was fairly limited and tepid. And you almost never heard conservatives supporting radical state control of the press as a solution to perceived bias.

Yet, here we are now with Trump and many of his allies floating proposals to treat information platforms as the equivalent of essential facilities or “public squares” which would have some sort of amorphous fiduciary obligations or “public interest” responsibilities to serve the public however politicians and bureaucrats in Washington see fit. That could entail anything from “search neutrality” to a new Fairness doctrine / right of reply mandate to a full-blown antirust breakup.

Like the Hard Left before them, the Hard Right has apparently come to view ICT platforms as just another part of the socio-political superstructure to be controlled from above to achieve their own ends. Trump and his allies have repeatedly referred to the press as the “enemy of the American people.” (His latest tweet using that phrase has already racked up almost 84,000 likes.) That’s totalitarian talk, and it softens the ground for the sort of takeover that Bannon and others desire. The “Fake News” that President Trump and his surrogates decry includes not just traditional journalism outlets but all forms of information production and dissemination. Trump wants them all to bend the knee before him. Because they won’t, apparently they are to be punished.

If Trump and his allies get their way, America would join the ranks of repressive states around the globe who seek to control speech platforms for their own ends. That sort of totalitarian impulse is repugnant to the values of a democratic republic that values open inquiry, freedom of speech and expression, press freedom, and the freedom to know about and report on the world around us.

As I concluded my earlier “soapbox” essay back in 2005:

This arrogant, elitist, anti-property, anti-freedom ethic is what drives the media access movement and makes it so morally repugnant. Freedom doesn’t begin by fettering the press with more chains, it begins by removing those that already exist and then erecting a firm wall between State and Press. The media access crowd has succeeded in breaching that wall with seven decades of misguided and unjust regulation of the press. The movement back toward a truly free press begins by understanding the error in their thinking, rejecting that reasoning, and then embracing, once again, the original vision of the First Amendment as a bulwark against government control of speech and the press.

In closing, this is a good moment for those on the moderate Left to reflect upon what they have enabled by sketching out and defending this intellectual blueprint for media control. The Left helped make the bed that Donald Trump is now getting cozy in. Many Hard Left scholars repeatedly told us that it was with the very best of intentions that they advocated more state control of the ICT sectors. There’s no bringing those radicals around to seeing the mistake they made. They will just double down on their proposals and claim that once “their team” gets back in power, all will be fine. It is utter poppycock, but they won’t care one bit.

The moderate Left, however, should be more sensible than that because they have been the great defenders of the First Amendment and freedom of speech in modern American history. And they understand that the danger of the slippery slope is very real when it comes to speech controls and how they might undermine our First Amendment heritage. When the moderate Left allows radical media theorists and regulatory advocacy groups to push extreme media control measures, however, they are creating speech control mechanisms that are very susceptible to being overtaken by their enemies and then used against them later on. And now we have a President who is doing exactly that.

It is a truly horrifying moment in the history of the American Republic. Hopefully we get through it and learn something from it.

Twenty years ago, one of the best books ever penned about freedom of speech was released. Sadly, many people still haven’t heard of it. That book was Freedom, Technology and the First Amendment, by Jonathan Emord. With the exception of Ithiel de Sola Pool’s 1983 masterpiece Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age, no book has a more profound impact on my thinking about free speech and technology policy than Emord’s 1991 classic. Emord’s book is, at once, a magisterial history and a polemical paean. This is no wishy-washy apologia for free speech, rather, it is a celebration of the amazing gift of freedom that the Founding Fathers gave us with the very first amendment to our constitution.

Unlike most people, Emord assumes nothing about the nature and purpose of the First Amendment; instead, he starts in pre-colonial times and explains how our rich heritage of freedom of speech and expression came about. Like Pool, Emord also makes the case for equality of all press providers and debunks the twisted logic behind much of this century’s corrupt jurisprudence governing speech transmitted via electronic media. Pool and Emord make it clear that if the First Amendment is retain its true meaning and purpose as a bulwark against government control of speech and expression, electronic media providers (TV, radio, cable, the Internet) must be accorded full First Amendment freedoms on par with traditional print media (newspapers, magazines, books and journals).

After developing his thorough history of free speech and the First Amendment in the first part of the book, Emord turns his attention to competing modern theories of First Amendment construction and interpretation. He outlines and critiques the Literalist Perspective, the Narrow Intentionalist Perspective, and the Relativist Perspective. Emord instead advocates what he labels a “preservationist perspective” which is composed of two essential elements: (1) Static Barriers again government intervention and (2) Adaptive Definitions for the terms “speech” and “press.”  He elaborates:

The effect of the Preservationist Perspective is to rely on the private sphere as a self-correcting mechanism. Should the government attempt to violate the private sphere, it will be barred by a high constitutional barrier. … Under the Preservationist Perspective, government regulation of who may speak or what  may be said would be strictly scrutinized and presumptively invalid. (p. 129)

Employing that framework, Emord spends much of the rest of the book demolishing the most dangerous variant of modern “relativist” thinking: the so-called “Media Access” school of thinking. Media access theories presume the existence of a mythical “right to be heard,” or a “right to respond publicly.” In essence, media access advocates believe that once a given media provider becomes popular enough, everyone has a “right” to speak through it. By this logic, if you build a large soapbox in your backyard, and are informative or entertaining enough to attract and retain an audience, the media access advocates apparently believe that the government should mandate that you share time on your soapbox with others in the name of “diversity.” They care little about the property rights you have in that soapbox, the effort and cost associated with your efforts to build that soapbox, or your editorial freedom to determine what is uttered on that soapbox. As Emord summarizes:

In short, the access advocates have transformed the marketplace of ideas from a laissez-faire model to a state-control model. For them, if the marketplace of ideas can be viewed as the contents of a cauldron, it is not enough to await random stirring; government must burn an eternal flame beneath the cauldron, keeping it at the boiling point. Silence is not an option; the government implores: Let there be speech! (p. 293)

He continues on to point out how silly that notion is:

The First Amendment does not require any set amount of diversity in the marketplace. If everyone were to choose to remain silent, the First Amendment would not be violated, for the amendment’s purpose is to deprive government of a power over the press and to leave to private citizens the decision of when to speak or not to speak and what to say. (p. 228)

While citizens certainly are at liberty to speak freely and communicate their views to others who will listen to them or air them, they do not have a right to demand access to the property of others to do so. If lawmakers could mandate that anyone who has taken the time and expense to build a soapbox to speak on must allow the rest of the world to stand on that soapbox with them in the name of “access” and “fairness,” it would contort the First Amendment into a tyrannical government mandate. This would retard, not expand, genuine freedom of speech and expression. Indeed, when such media access theories have been translated into public policy — as was the case with the old Fairness Doctrine — the effect has been generally to chill speech and expression throughout media.

What is really going on here is that media access advocates are looking to transform the First Amendment into a tool for social change to advance specific political ends or ideological objectives. “Rather than understanding the First Amendment to be a guardian of the private sphere of communication, the access advocates interpret it to be a guarantee of a preferred mix of ideological viewpoints,” notes Emord. “When the access advocates speak of minority views, they are almost always referring to views they believe to be inadequately represented in our society.”

Thus, the danger with media access mandates is that they ultimately transform the First Amendment into an affirmative tool of the state that legislators and regulators can wield to control content and influence the editorial judgments of the press. The ultimate danger of this twisted conception of the First Amendment, Emord rightly argues, is that, “It fundamentally shifts the marketplace of ideas from its private, unregulated, and interactive context to one within the compass of state control, making the marketplace ultimately responsible to government for determinations as to the choice of content expressed.” It converts the First Amendment from a shield against State action into a sword that the State can use as it sees fit. Nothing could be more dangerous and it is a complete contradiction of the original purpose and meaning of the First Amendment.

Emord’s book is the perfect antidote to such misguided thinking. If you care about the First Amendment and the continuing fight for freedom of speech and technological freedom, I beg you to read Freedom, Technology and the First Amendment. It’s as fresh and important today as it was 20 years ago.  A wide range of current policy tech policy debates will ultimately be decided by the courts, and which theory of the First Amendment guides them will make all the difference for the future of our digital society and real Internet freedom.

2009 was not as big of a year for Internet and information technology (“info-tech”) policy books as 2008 was, but there were still some notable titles released that offered interesting perspectives about the future of the Net and the impact the Digital Revolution is having on our lives, culture, and economy.  So, like last year, I figured I would throw together my list of the 10 most important info-tech policy books of the year.

First, let me repeat a few of the same caveats and disclaimers that I set forth last year.  What qualifies as an “important” info-tech policy book? Simply put, it’s a title that many people are currently discussing and that we will likely be referencing for many years to come.  However, I want to be clear that merely because a book appears on my list it does not necessarily mean I agree with everything said in it. In fact, as was the case in previous years, I found much with which to disagree in my picks for the most important books of 2009 and I find that the cyber-libertarianism I subscribe to has very few fans out there.

Another caveat: Narrowly-focused titles lose a few points on my list. For example, if a book deals mostly with privacy issues, copyright law, or antitrust policy, it does not exactly qualify as the same sort of “tech policy book” as other titles found on this list since it is a narrow exploration of just one set of issues with a bearing on technology policy.

With those caveats in mind, here are my choices for the Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2009.

(1) Chris Anderson – Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Chris Anderson’s 2006 book The Long Tail will be remembered as one of the most influential tech policy books of the decade.  It changed the way we talk about the digital marketplace and it instantly garnered a huge audience outside of the nerdy world of Internet policy.  While Free: The Future of a Radical Price will forever live in the shadow of The Long Tail, it too is an important book and in many ways it is a much better one.

In The Long Tail, Anderson tried too hard to invent the latest business theory du jour, and in doing so he went much too far in proclaiming that, as the subtitle of the book argued, “the future of the business is selling less of more.”  That’s just not true. While there’s certainly a lot more action in the long tail than ever before since it is so much more accessible, that does not mean the entire future of business lies in “selling less of more.”  To the contrary, the fat head of the tail is just as profitable as ever.

Free certainly contains some of the flamboyance on display in The Long Tail, but Anderson has matured as a writer and is now far more willing to point out the limitations of his theories in a business sense.  He does a splendid job in Free of creating a taxonomy of free-oriented business models to guide discussions about these issues.  And he explains how “free” can be part of many different business models and strategies. His historical treatment of the issues is outstanding and includes many entertaining examples of how these “free” strategies have been used over time to offer innovative new goods and services.

The reason his book is important for Internet policy discussions is obvious: “free” is increasingly viewed as a threat to many existing companies, industry sectors, and traditional media business models.  For example, battles about the future of journalism and search engine indexing of news sites are obviously tied up with battles over “free.”  And, it goes without saying that the traditional entertainment industry business models are increasingly challenged by “free” as many struggle to adapt to the new realities of the online world, in which “free” (primarily advertising-supported  and “freemium” models) seems to be the only model with any legs.

Much like my top pick for 2008 book of the year, Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Net and How to Stop It, Chris Anderson’s Free is the most important information technology book of the year because it is the one we will still be talking about the most a decade from now.  However, unlike Zittrain’s book and thesis, which I think will be largely discredited in another ten years, Anderson’s book will likely be viewed as an important and lasting contribution to the field.

(2) Larry Downes – The Laws of Disruption: Chaos and Control in Your Virtual Future

The Laws of Disruption is the closest thing you will find to a genuine cyber-libertarian manifesto these days.  But Downes isn’t a rigid ideologue; his skepticism of government regulation of the high-tech economy is based more on practical considerations and the fundamental “law of disruption”: “technology changes exponentially, but social, economic, and legal systems change incrementally.” Downes says this law is “a simple but unavoidable principle of modern life” and that it will have profound implications for the way businesses, government, and culture evolve going forward. “As the gap between the old world and the new gets wider,” he argues, “conflicts between social, economic, political, and legal systems” will intensify and “nothing can stop the chaos that will follow.” In this sense, The Laws of Disruption reads like an addendum to one of Alvin Toffler’s old books on technology and futurism in that Downes is essentially walking us through the practical consequences of life in a “post-industrial society.”

In terms of what it all means for public policy, Downes doesn’t so much fear legal and regulatory over-reach the way many cyber-libertarians do. Rather, he thinks most regulatory schemes just won’t work. In essence, he is a technological fatalist or consequentialist: Progress happens whether we like it or not, so get used to it!  Thus, the “laws of disruption” he articulates serve primarily as “Just-Don’t-Bother” warnings to over-eager government meddlers. “The best way to regulate innovation is to leave it alone,” he counsels.

In terms of structure, The Laws of Disruption resembles Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion by Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis, (which I reviewed here last year and named to my 2008 list). Both books survey a vast swath of territory — privacy, copyright, security, etc — and each chapter offers unique perspectives on each debate. In that sense, the book is useful to readers if for no other reason than you get a taste for how a wide variety of issues are playing out. Downes also owes much to Clayton M. Christensen and his seminal 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Like that book, The Laws of Disruption is a business book with a strong policy hook.  That is, both books focus on advice-dishing for companies and innovators looking to “stay ahead of the curve” in the midst of relentless, gut-wrenching technological change, but the books also include important lessons regarding the public policies that should govern high-tech sectors.

I highly recommended The Laws of Disruption and found it to be the most enjoyable of all the books I read this year.

(3) Dawn C. Nunziato – Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age

Dawn Nunziato is the perfect foil for Larry Downes. Her book is a manifesto for cyber-collectivism and “media access theory.”  (For those unfamiliar with media access theory, see my old essay: “Your Soapbox is My Soapbox! Thoughts on the Media Access Movement in General and the Media & Democracy Coalition’s ‘Bill of Media Rights’ in Particular.”)  She attempts to bring media access theory up to date by taking the ideas made famous by Jerome Barron, Owen Fiss, Cass Sunstein, and others, and applying them to the Internet and digital technologies.  Like those earlier legal thinkers, she argues for “an affirmative conception” of the First Amendment that would allow government to use the First Amendment to “facilitate the conditions necessary for democratic self-government” (whatever that means). Net neutrality regulation becomes one of many ways she would put this theory into action. Importantly, she would not stop with ISPs. She makes the case for extending the entire regulatory regime to Google and search platforms. Welcome to the Brave New World of the the FCC as the Federal Search Commission or Federal Cloud Commission!

Her attempt to cast Net neutrality as the Internet’s First Amendment is a grotesque contortion of the real First Amendment, and a complete betrayal of the Founder’s original intentions.  As I made clear in my recent essay on “Net Neutrality Regulation & the First Amendment,” the Internet’s First Amendment is the First Amendment, not some new, top-down, heavy-handed regulatory regime that puts the Federal Communications Commission in control of the Digital Economy. Her conception of the First Amendment would convert it from a shield against government control into a sword that the government could use as it wished. It would mean that “Congress shall make no law…” would suddenly be replaced by “Congress shall make whatever law it wants” so long as it serves some amorphous “public interest.” Can you say “tyranny of the majority”?

Regardless, event though I find her views to be morally repugnant and the antithesis of true digital freedom, Nunziato’s book is a concise articulation of that vision and it deserves everyone’s attention. It serves as a blueprint for where the Net neutrality wars are taking us.

(4) David Bollier – Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own

David Bollier’s Viral Spiral is the first major history of the “digital commons” / “free culture” movement, and despite my many person disagreements with him and this movement, it is an excellent treatment of the topic. Bollier surveys this growing intellectual movement from its early open source days to the rise of the Creative Commons and on into the present.  The cast of characters in this drama will be well-known to anyone involved in modern tech policy debates: Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain, Yochai Benkler, et al.

There is absolutely no doubt that this intellectual movement is winning the war of ideas in cyberlaw front today, as I noted in a recent debate with Lessig and Zittrain over at Cato Unbound.  As a cyber-libertarian, I find myself occasionally at odds with these guys and this movement on a variety of policy issues, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying David Bollier’s treatment of this movement and these issues.

(5) David Post – In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace

David Post is one of the early intellectual giants in the field of cyberlaw. Back in the days when most of us were still just trying to get our 14.4 modems to work properly to get on Al Gore’s “Information Highway,” David Post was writing essays and law review articles that were a decade ahead of their time.  In particular, his work on Internet governance and jurisdictional matters was path-breaking, and much of it is updated and extended in Jefferson’s Moose.

I must admit, however, that I was hoping for a bit more from David in this book.  Beyond just being a first-rate intellectual in this space, he is also one of the few remaining defenders of “Internet exceptionalism,” and he has genuine cyber-libertarian leanings.  After waiting almost 10 years for David to wrap this thing up after he first told me about it back around 2000, I was thinking he might come up with the sort of cyber-libertarian manifesto I’ve always hoped he would write.  Although he fell a bit short in that regard, it doesn’t mean it’s not a good book. It is. You will enjoy it no matter what cyber-philosophy you subscribe to.

Read my entire review of Jefferson’s Moose here.

(6) Dennis Baron – A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution

Baron’s A Better Pencil is a splendid history of techno-pessimism and the endless battles about the impact of new technologies on life and learning, something I have written about here before in my essays on “Internet optimists vs. pessimists” (See: 1, 2, 3).   Baron notes that almost as soon as people learned to put chisel to stone and then quill to paper, a great debate began about the impact of new communications technology on culture and education. And that debate rages on today with a new generation of optimists and skeptics battling over the impact that computing, the Internet, and digital technologies have on our lives and on how we learn about the world.

Baron walks us through a litany of historical examples—the printing press, the telegraph, telephones, typewriters, pocket calculators, personal computers, word processors, webpages, blogs, social-networking sites, and more—and identifies the usual pattern: we greet each new technology with deep distrust and dire warnings, but in time we adapt to the new realities. Indeed, as a species, we have an unparalleled ability to learn new ways of doing things. We don’t always like technological change, and often we deeply resent or fear it, but in the end, we learn to live with it and eventually to embrace it.  With the rise of the Internet and digital technologies, we see this pattern unfolding once again. But Baron counsels patience and understanding instead of the sort f hysteria and backlash we see from the likes of Andrew Keen, Lee Siegel and others.  It’s a refreshing and uplifting perspective.

Highly recommended. See my complete review of Baron’s A Better Pencil over at the City Journal website.

(7) Mark Helprin – Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto

No book has been more disappointing to me in recent memory than Mark Helprin’s Digital Barbarism. As someone who still finds a lot to defend in copyright law, I was excited when I learned that one of America’s most gifted authors–and the author of my favorite literary work of the late 20th century (A Soldier of the Great War)–was taking a crack defending copyright in a short manifesto.

Alas, as I argued in my review of the book for National Review, while Helprin occasionally rises to great heights in his defense of copyright, he too often sinks to lamentable lows–by resorting to the same unbecoming rhetorical tactics used by the “cyber-mob” he seeks to condemn. Indeed, his book is filled with gratuitous vitriol and neo-Luddite ramblings about the Internet and Information Age that severely detract from his defense of copyright. Channeling the ghost of the late social critic Neil Postman, Helprin’s critique of copyright skeptics quickly turns into an all-out assault on modern digital culture and cyberspace. He argues that we are witnessing “the decline of culture,” the “mechanization of the soul,” our “intellectual and spiritual destruction,” and the rise of a movement of “wacked-out muppets led by little professors in glasses” that “threatens in a decade or two to dissolve the accomplishments of millennia, reordering the ways in which we think, write, and communicate.” And it just gets worse from there. Much like recent rants by Andrew Keen and Lee Siegel, Helprin speaks repeatedly about the “surrender of human nature” to “the machine revolution” and the corresponding need to “control the machine.”

How a man who has penned some of the most beautiful prose in modern times could craft an off-the-rails screed of this magnitude remains incomprehensible  to me.  What’s worse is that he set back the cause of defending what’s best about copyright in the process. Luckily for Helprin, there’s plenty of hysteria on the other side, as the next book on my list makes clear.

(8) William Patry – Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars

Bill Patry is an angry man. He is the anti-Helprin. The vitriol that Helprin directs against the copyright-haters is reversed in this screed and turned against not just copyright holders and content creators, but against the entire capitalist system. Patry, who is the author of a multi-volume treatise on copyright law, has done the intellectual equivalent of “going postal” within his own intellectual community. He has turned his intellectual guns on anyone and everyone who has ever had a kind word to say about copyright. He cannot find one nice thing to say about copyright or anyone who defends copyright in this book. Not one.

What’s most ironic about the book is that Patry seems utterly oblivious to the fact that in the process of critiquing the inflammatory rhetoric and “misuse of language” occasionally emanating from some copyright defenders, he goes completely over the top himself and engages in even more egregious rhetorical flourishes. Choice gems from the book include: “digital guillotines,” copyright as “cancer,” “copyright dwarves,” Maoism, the “sins” of copyright, “socialism for the wealthy,” and a comparison of the DMCA to “Mussolini’s Fascist Italy.”  Apparently when it comes to the “misuse of language,” Patry believes that two wrongs make a right.

And then there is his mind-boggling conclusion that: “I cannot think of a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries.”  Apparently, every great book, every great movie, every great video game, and ever great musical composition of the past century was done solely for the love of it all. Copyright had apparently had absolutely nothing to do with it according to Patry’s logic. That is just an astonishingly naive notion, in my opinion. Apparently this man’s hatred for copyright-related industries is so intense that it has blinded him to any potentially positive effects of copyright law. If nothing else, it would have been nice to see Mr. Patry address how it is that America is the world’s leading creator and exporter of creative arts.  Certainly copyright law must have had something to do with that!

Chapter 5 of his book makes it clear that Patry’s critique of copyright is actually rooted in a much deeper suspicion about capitalism itself.  He speaks of “the myth of economic freedom” and claims that “free market fundamentalism… destroyed much of the world’s economies.”  He then launches into a neo-Marxist critique of property rights more generally, treating property as a zero-sum game of winners and losers.  At times it all begins to sound like a rant from an old Herbert Marcuse book with questions like: “why are the interests of one social group favored over another?” and “What social objective is being furthered by the decision to privilege one group over another?”  And there’s all sorts of talk about “regulation in the public interest,” which I have critique as a meaningless non-standard here many times before.

In the end, Patry’s book will–along with Helprin’s–long be remember as marking the nadir in the “copyright wars;” a moment when grown men of great intelligence decided to trade in their integrity for the opportunity to engage in below-the-belt rhetorical cheap shots that would typically be reserved for college student debating politics over beers and shots at two in the morning.  They should both be ashamed of themselves.

(9) Gary Reback – Free the Market!  Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive

Gary Reback’s over-the-top ode to antitrust as the great savior of capitalism reads like an extended love letter. As I noted in my lengthy critique of his book, his fairy tale narrative of antitrust as the savior of capitalism is hopelessly one-sided, and his recommendations to expand antitrust enforcement wouldn’t “Free the Market” as he argues in his book’s shameful title, but would instead wrap it in regulatory chains.

He repeatedly insults the intelligence of the reader by claiming antitrust is supposedly not a form of economic regulation and that is can only have beneficial effects. He wants antitrust officials to intervene early and often in high-tech markets to guide markets to a supposedly better place. Reback considers just about everything “the Chicago School” taught us to be antitrust apostasy and he would like to erase four decades worth of economic literature and evidence that suggests antitrust law is a form of economic regulation and does have unintended consequences that often hurt consumer welfare.  Even if you are not an inherent antitrust skeptic like me, I think most people would hope for a better treatment of the other side of this story.

Read my lengthy review of Reback’s Strangle Free the Market here.

(10) tie – Tyler Cowen – Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World and John Freeman – The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox

OK, so I just couldn’t figure out which of these two to cut from the list so I took the easy way out by having them tie for the last slot!  In this case, however, there’s another reason it makes sense for both of them to round out the list: Both Freeman and Cowen explore how humans are coping with information overload–albeit from two very different perspectives.

As I noted in my lengthy essay on the topic earlier this year, Cowen is an unrepentant optimist. He believes humans have the ability to adapt to new technological realities and a world of information abundance. In fact, Cowen argues, new tools and information gathering and processing technologies actually “lengthens our attention spans in another way, namely by allowing greater specialization of knowledge.”

John Freeman, by contrast, wants us all to take a high-tech time out. Like other Internet skeptics, he is worried that cyberspace and digital technologies are reshaping humanity–and not for the better. “If we are to step off this hurtling machine, we must reassert principles that have been lost in the blur,” he argues. “It is time to launch a manifesto for a slow communication movement, a push back against the machines and the forces that encourage us to remain connected to them.”

Unlike most other Internet pessimists, however, Freeman’s tone is more measured and his recommendations more reasonable.  Of course, it helps that he is magical wordsmith. Even if you find yourself disagreeing with many of his ultimate conclusions–as I did–you should read The Tyranny of E-Mail for a lesson in how to construct an argument and to appreciate the gift of fine writing. It’s easily the best tract by any Net skeptic since Nick Carr’s The Big Switch, and a much better one in many ways. It will force you to ask tough questions about the impact of the Information Age on you and the world around you.  Nonetheless, I remain an unrepentant techno-optimist (albeit a pragmatic one)!

Honorable Mentions: Here are a couple of other books that I couldn’t fit on my list but that you might want to also consider adding to your bookshelf:

• Manuel Castells – Communication Power
• James Boyle – The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
• Randall Stross – Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know [my review]
• Ken Auletta – Googled: The End of the World As We Know It [my review]
• Scott Rosenberg- Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters
• John W. Dozier Jr. and Sue Scheff – Google Bomb

Please let me know what titles might be missing from this list and which books you think are the best of the year.

And speaking of bookshelves, here’s my Shelfari digital bookshelf in case anyone is interested. If you hadn’t figured it out yet, I am a bit of book nerd!  My life is spent swimming through oceans of paper.  My friends often ask me, “How can you spend so much time reading?” My question back to them is: “How can you not?”

Today I visited the Federal Communications Commission meeting room to attend a workshop on “Speech, Democratic Engagement, and the Open Internet.”  Honestly, I think I was stuck in the Twilight Zone, because from what the speakers at this ridiculously one-sided panel had to say: (1) the First Amendment means something entirely different than what the Constitution says; and (2) the whole Internet world is set to go to hell unless government intervenes and saves us a litany of corporate conspiracies to “silence” us.

Seriously, I thought the FCC was trying to make their broadband workshops and Net neutrality proceeding “balanced” and “evidence-based.” This one was neither.  One speaker after another regaled us with spooky stories and asked us to imagine how their particular group or service would be “blocked” or “silenced” unless Net neutrality regulations were put on the books.  But no evidence was offered supporting their scary tales.

By the time Michele Combs of the Christian Coalition got done breathlessly delivering her conspiratorial rant, for example, I half expected her to ask “What would Jesus do?” about Internet regulation.  She really laid it on thick, suggesting that ISPs were hell-bent (excuse the pun) on blocking Christian messaging across multiple platforms.  Yeah, cause it would be a brilliant business strategy to piss off tens of millions of Christians in this country. Sure, that makes a lot of sense.

Similarly, a woman from an online video company spoke of “gatekeepers” and “filters” that were supposedly lurking around the corner that would shut her down. But no evidence was presented supporting that fear. Instead, she asked us to believe Big Brother was coming in the form of private ISPs and that the “filters” would be imposed on us were private ones, not governmental. Uh-huh.

Popular blogger Glenn Reynolds had plenty of tales of impending doom of his own as did a couple of other minority-oriented site providers who testified. Lots and lots of spooky stories were told but, again, no evidence was offered that ISPs were currently doing anything to hurt their businesses or speech.  I sure would have liked to hear Glenn at least develop a theory about why ISPs would want to block his blog and millions of others like his. After all, it’s really hard for me to understand how they’d make any money by blocking content and angering all their customers.

Then there was Jack Balkin of Yale Law School and Andy Schwartzman of the Media Access Project who, as they have always done, told us that the First Amendment was a club that government could use to basically beat private media providers into submission. (Funny, because I always thought “Congress shall make no law…” was a pretty clear statement.  But perhaps I missed some footnotes in the Constitution.) Like the other panelists, they told spooky stories of their own about how ISPs would not allow “participation” in the “new town square.”  At least Andy tried to cite some evidence to back up his scary tales, but it was the same rehashed stuff from the past. Seriously, how many times can someone say “Madison River” without getting bored?

The only thing missing from the event was an appearance by Stephen King to do a reading from his forthcoming books: “ISPs Kitten Killers” and “How Broadband Providers Stole Our Souls and Sent Us to Hell.”  Perhaps the agency can invite him next time.

The token opposition to all this insanity was Robert Corn-Revere, one of America’s greatest living defenders of the First Amendment.  Thankfully, Bob was able to take some time out of his busy court schedule – since he spends much of his life in court fighting various FCC efforts to control speech – to come to the FCC and set the record straight on the true meaning of the First Amendment and the dangers of empowering federal regulators to oversee online content more generally.  Bob cited a litany of history examples – and these would be the only actual facts that made an appearance at this particular FCC event – showing how it is GOVERNMENTS, not private actors, who have historically been the primarily threat to our freedom of speech and expression. Bob reminded the crowd that, over the past 15 years, Congress has tried continuously to impose speech controls on the Internet and impose a host of other content-based regulations.

In conclusion, I just want to repeat to those FCC officials who care: This was one of the most insanely one-sided panels I have ever seen in my life and it was in no way, shape, or form “evidence-based.”  At least panel moderator Stuart Benjamin had the courage to push back against the conspiracy theories and ask a couple hard-nosed questions to bring the semblance of balance to the event. But if our broadband plan and Net neutrality rules are built on the sort of conjectural harms, scary stories, and a completely contorted view of the First Amendment that we heard at the FCC today, then God help us all.

PS: FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell delivered some excellent remarks to kick off today’s session that are well worth reading.

One of the more troubling aspects of the contentious debate over Net neutrality regulation is the way some proponents have sought to cast Net neutrality as “the Internet’s First Amendment.” As a die-hard free speech advocate, I find this truly outrageous and a complete contortion of the true purpose of the First Amendment.  As I have argued here before, it is incredibly dangerous thinking that puts our real First Amendment liberties at stake by empowering a regulatory agency with more means of controlling online speech and expression. Simply stated, the Internet’s First Amendment is the First Amendment, not some new, top-down, heavy-handed regulatory regime that puts the Federal Communications Commission in control of the Digital Economy.

On this point, I wanted to bring two things to your attention. The first is an outstanding address delivered today by Kyle McSlarrow, President & CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, at a Media Institute event here in Washington, DC.  And the second is this new paper by my PFF colleague Barbara Esbin.

McSlarrow’s speech was entitled, “Net Neutrality: First Amendment Rhetoric in Search of the Constitution” and it squarely addressed the fundamental fallacy set forth by the Net neutralitistas when it comes to the First Amendment. “Whatever our present-day policy disagreements about net neutrality, or even differing politics, let’s not forget that the First Amendment is framed as a shield for citizens, not a sword for government,” he argued. “By its plain terms and history, the First Amendment is a limitation on government power, not an empowerment of government,” McSlarrow said. “And… if there’s one thing the Supreme Court has made clear, it’s that rules that directly restrict protected speech cannot be justified by a government interest that is merely hypothetical.”

Absolutely correct. And these views are buttressed by the comments of Barbara Esbin in her new paper, in which she argues that “Net Neutrality is not the First Amendment for the Internet.”  She continues:

Today we live in a world with no FCC-imposed network neutrality rules. Can anyone seriously maintain that the Internet’s potential for commercial, political, artistic, and social expression has been hobbled in this country? Or that diversity is lacking? It is far more likely that the Internet has thrived, as Congress has stated, in the absence of federal or state regulation.

“Nor has the evidence, amassed after years of trying, painted a picture of persistent market failure or consumer harms,” she argues.

Turning the First Amendment on Its Head

Both she and McSlarrow note that twisted rationales for Net neutrality “turn First Amendment protections on their head” by making private platforms and actors in the enemies of speech instead of the government, which has traditionally acted to curtail speech liberties and freedom of expression. And it has succeeded at times because the government has the coercive ability to imprison, fine or otherwise punish speakers in ways that no private media or communications platform can.

There’s also the question of whether Net neutrality regulation might constitute a form of “compelled speech.” As Barbara notes, “Under traditional First Amendment jurisprudence, the government compelling a speaker to speak or transmit a message that it does not wish to transmit is just as much a free speech infringement as it is to prevent a speaker from transmitting or posting messages it wishes to transmit or post.” She cites remarks delivered at a 2007 Progress & Freedom Foundation event by noted First Amendment scholar Lawrence Tribe on this issue, in response to a question about broadband ISP control of content delivered over their networks:

The general question that raises is the extent to which the government can, in effect, force media to act as common carriers, to be transparent, to force them simply to convey whatever content comes along. To the extent that someone, or an entity, is a content provider engaging in discretion is not simply an empty pipeline. It has the fundamental right of editorial discretion. For the government to tell that entity that it cannot exercise that right in a certain way, that it must allow the projection of what it doesn’t want to include, is a violation of its First Amendment rights.

The Madness of “Media Access” Theory

All this should seem logical to anyone who has taken a look at the plain language of the First Amendment. It could not be more clear when it says, “Congress shall make no law…”  There aren’t any caveats or footnotes. And the First Amendment most certainly was not intended as a tool for government to control the editorial discretion of private individuals or institutions. It was about restricting the power of the government to curtail speech and expression.

So how did this twisted theory of the First Amendment gain currency in Net neutrality circles? To answer that you need to go back to the 1960’s when a handful of liberal legal scholars began concocting a new theory of the First Amendment that eventually came to be known as the “media access” school of thinking. George Washington University law professor Jerome A. Barron’s 1967 Harvard Law Review article, “Access to the Press — a New First Amendment Right,” as well as the work of Yale University law professor Owen Fiss, gave rise to this new intellectual movement. Its goal, in essence, was to convert the First Amendment into a club to beat demands out of private media providers. Basically, these theorists wanted to expand “Fairness Doctrine”-like right-of-reply notions to newspapers, and simultaneously grant the government more leeway to use the First Amendment to alter media structures and outputs. As Fiss argued in a 1986 law review article, under the “media access” approach, a proper reading of the First Amendment requires “a change in our attitude about the state” such that we learn “to recognize the state not only as an enemy, but also as a friend of speech… [that should act] to enhance the quality of public debate.” (Iowa Law Review, Vol. 71, 1986, p. 1416).

Other left-leaning intellectuals and activists groups would come to integrate that logic into their work and public policy proposals. Now you know, for example, where the Media Access Project gets their name!  But many other regulatory-minded groups — Free Press, Public Knowledge, the Center for Digital Democracy, MoveOn.org, New America Foundation, and others — trace much of their intellectual heritage back to Barron, Fiss, and the other media access theorists. [Read my lengthy debunking of media access theory here.]

And now we have books being written with titles like Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age, by Dawn Nunziato of George Washington University. I’ll have a review of Nunziato’s disturbing new book up shortly, but suffice it to say, she has taken media access theory, put it on steroids, and brought it into the Information Age.  At least the media access old-timers could more reasonably use “media scarcity” as an excuse for their regulatory machinations. But Nunziato just dispenses with all that and instead conditions all the new regulation on “democratic participation” and other amorphous theories.

Will the Real Big Brother Please Stand Up

Indeed, with Nunziato’s book, we see how the seeds of misguided intellectual thinking sometimes spring into wild gardens in which the weeds slowly take over everything in sight.  This twisted conception of the First Amendment is so thoroughly ingrained in leftist media policy thinking today that even an abundant medium like the Internet is not exempt from potential regulations based on it despite the death of media scarcity. And that’s how we got to the point we are at today in the net neutrality regulatory debate, with many policymakers and activists groups painting private broadband operators as the supposed real Big Brother problem that the First Amendment must address.

Consider, for example, the comments then-Sen. Hillary Clinton made in 2006 regarding why she supports net neutrality regulation: “Each day on the Internet views are discussed and debated in an open forum without fear of censorship or reprisal.” As I noted at the time, when I read her statement I practically fell off my chair. It’s not just that Mrs. Clinton was asking us to believe in some asinine conspiracy theory about how broadband companies are supposedly out to censor our thoughts or engage in reprisals. (”Reprisals”? For what?) No, what really blew my mind here was the fact that Sen. Clinton had the chutzpah to declare that the private sector was somehow the real threat to online speech. After all, as I inventoried in that old essay, Sen. Clinton has led several notable efforts over the past decade to expand government regulation of television, video games, and even the Internet.

Where’s the Evidence? And How Would They Even Do It?

And yet Clinton and many other Net neutrality advocates continue to insist that it is the private sector, not the government, that is the real threat to our free speech rights. Practically speaking, these advocates of Net neutrality regulation have little to fear in this regard. It is almost impossible to believe that any Internet operator could limit speech or expression in the ways these regulatory advocates fear.  Unlike the government, which possesses the coercive power to completely foreclose all speech under threat of fine or imprisonment, the private sector lacks the ability to use force to bottle up speech or speakers. And even if private operators tried it, there would be hell for them to pay with the press, industry watchdogs, and their even subscribers. More importantly, there’s just no good business angle to censorship; they make more money by delivering more bits, not fewer. Finally, any attempt by one actor to stifle something becomes a prime incentive for another to offer it.

Tim Lee nailed all these points in an excellent paper from last year, “The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation.” Tim noted:

Concerns that network owners will undermine free speech online are particularly misguided. Network owners have neither the technology nor the manpower to effectively filter online content based on the viewpoints being expressed, nor do profit-making businesses have any real incentive to do so. Should a network owner be foolish enough to attempt large-scale censorship of its customers, it would not only fail to suppress the disfavored speech, but the network would actually increase the visibility of the content as the effort at censorship attracted additional coverage of the material being censored.

I think that’s exactly right and, later in his paper (between pgs 22-3), Tim nicely elaborates about the “Herculean task” associated with any attempt by a broadband provider to “manipulate human communication.” Not only is it true, as Tim argues, that “no widescale manipulation would go unnoticed for very long,” but he is also correct in noting that the public and press backlash would be enormous.

Shield from Government or Sword for the Government?

But let’s get back to the principle of the matter at stake here because, for those of us who cherish the real First Amendment and seek to protect it, it is essential we not let regulatory advocates get away with their effort to convert it into something it isn’t and was never meant to be.  Jonathan Emord, author of the brilliant 1991 book, Freedom, Technology and the First Amendment, put his thumb on the real threat here: “In short, the [media] access advocates have transformed the marketplace of ideas from a laissez-faire model to a state-control model.” The ultimate danger of this twisted conception of the First Amendment, he noted, is that, “It fundamentally shifts the marketplace of ideas from its private, unregulated, and interactive context to one within the compass of state control, making the marketplace ultimately responsible to government for determinations as to the choice of content expressed.”  Or as Kyle McSlarrow noted in his speech today, these regulatory advocates are essentially saying that the First Amendment “a sword for government” instead of “a shield for citizens” from coercive government actions that would infringe our legitimate rights of free speech and expression.

In sum, “media access” philosophy and the regulatory approach its adherents counsel  is completely at odds with a proper understanding of the First Amendment.  Government — not the private sector — remains the true threat to our liberties.  And, most horrifyingly of all, empowering the state to use the First Amendment to regulate private actors will almost certainly backfire and result in more, not less, regulation of speech online.

Jesse Walker has a terrific feature story looking “Beyond the Fairness Doctrine” in this month’s issue of Reason magazine. I highly recommend it. It’s an in-depth exploration of what an Obama Administration means for the future of tech and media policy. Walker rightly opens the piece by noting that “The fairness doctrine is still dead, and it probably will stay dead even if Barack Obama becomes president.” The danger, however, is that an Obama FCC will still pursue a variety of onerous regulatory objectives that could do a great deal of damage to markets and free speech.

Walker touches upon the various issues that will likely be a priority for an Obama Administration and the Left-leaning media reformistas like Free Press, Media Access Project, Public Knowledge, and New America Foundation. Those policy issues include: net neutrality, “localism” mandates and increased “community oversight” regulations, media ownership rules, minority ownership requirements, increased merger meddling, spectrum policy, and other new “public interest” obligations.

Of course, as Walker also correctly points out, it is difficult to see how things could get much worse than they have been under Bush Administration’s FCC and the leadership of Chairman Kevin Martin.  Walker was kind enough to quote my thoughts on this point: “Martin is the most regulatory Republican FCC Chairman in decades,” I told him. “He wants to control speech and will use whatever tools he has to get there.”

I stand by those words, but I am also aware that things could get worse — much worse — under a Democratic FCC influenced by radical Leftist activists like Free Press.  Indeed, in our new book A Manifesto for Media Freedom, Brian Anderson and I inventory the many looming threats to media and technology freedom that exist today and show how most of them arise from the Left.  As Walker notes in his article, however, it is unlikely that a re-empowered Democratic FCC would come right out of the gates with the same sort of command-and-control approaches they’ve employed in the past.  And we’ll still have to worry about some right-of-center lawmakers and regulatory joining some of these misguided campaigns. “The real danger,” Walker concludes in his piece, “is more subtle and more mundane.  It’s a bipartisan bureaucracy slowly, steadily increasing its power.”    Make sure to read Jesse’s entire piece.  Great stuff.