On July 27th, The Progress & Freedom Foundation hosted a Capitol Hill panel discussion entitled “Online Child Safety, Privacy, and Free Speech: An Overview of Challenges in Congress & the States.” The event featured remarks from:

• Parry Aftab, Executive Director, WiredSafety.org
• Todd Haiken, Senior Manager of Policy, Common Sense Media
• Jim Halpert, Partner, DLA Piper
• Berin Szoka, Senior Fellow, The Progress & Freedom Foundation

We’ve just released the transcript of the event, which I have also pasted down below the fold in a Scribd document reader. Also, the audio for this event can be heard by clicking below:

Download mp3

Here is the full event description:

Online child safety, privacy, and free speech remain hotly debated issues at both the federal and state level. Bills introduced in Congress to address cyberbullying concerns propose either educational initiatives or a criminalization approach. Access to objectionable content also remains a concern and a new, government-mandated task force is looking into those issues. Meanwhile, state officials, including many state attorneys general, continue to explore age verification mandates for social networking sites and some have considered building on the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) to expand “parental notification” mandates. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently announced an expedited review of COPPA to see if it is keeping up with new developments. The FTC is also exploring child safety in virtual worlds. New concerns about “sexting,” or the sending of sexual explicit images over mobile devices, has also raised new concerns led some lawmakers to ponder penalties.

How serious are these concerns? Is legislation or regulation needed to address them? What free speech issues are at stake? Should Congress take the lead or leave it to the States to experiment with different models? These and other issues were discussed by a panel of leading experts in the field of online safety and privacy policy.

Transcript PFF Online Child Safety Privacy Hill Event (7-27-2009) http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=18756666&access_key=key-1blb7az1ag406howibuk&page=1&version=1&viewMode=

The latest edition (Version 4.0) of my PFF special report on “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods” is now up.  For those not familiar with the report, it explores the market for parental control tools, rating schemes, education and media literacy efforts, and various other tools, methods, and initiatives aimed at promoting online child safety.  After evaluating that state of this market, I conclude: “There has never been a time in our nation’s history when parents have had more tools and methods at their disposal to help them decide what constitutes acceptable media content in their homes and in the lives of their children.”  Moreover, I believe that the parental controls and content management tools cataloged in the report represent a better, less restrictive alternative to government regulation.

Version 4.0 of the report is now over 250 pages long (up from 200 pages in Version 3.0) and it contains almost 70 exhibits (up from 50), 725 references (up from roughly 500), and numerous updates in all five sections of the book. Major updates have been made to the Internet, social networking, and mobile media sections, reflecting the growing importance of those sectors and issues. Other new sections or appendices have also been added to the report, including:

• a new section examining how many households really need parental control tools;
• a new appendix on the downsides of mandatory parental controls and restrictive default settings;
• a new section on the dangers of “deputizing the online middleman” solution as an approach to solving child safety concerns;
• a new appendix reviewing the findings of 5 past online safety task forces;
• … and much more.

I issue major updates once a year and 1 or 2 minor tweaks during the course of the year to reflect the evolution of the parental control and online child safety marketplace and debate. The report is available free-of-charge on the PFF website, and the previous editions of the report are housed there too in case you want to see how it has evolved over the past couple of years. For those interested in taking a quick look at the report, I have embedded it down below the fold as a Scribd file. Finally, as is always the case, I encourage readers to send me updates and suggestions for how to improve the report and I will incorporate them into future versions.

In an earlier post, I mentioned an important new online child safety task force report that has just been released from the “Point Smart. Click Safe.” Blue Ribbon Working Group. It’s a great report and I encourage you to read the whole thing. It was my great pleasure to serve on this task force, and as we started finalizing our conclusions and recommendations, I started thinking about how much of what we were finding and recommending was consistent with what past online safety task forces had also concluded.

By way of background, over the past decade, five major online safety task forces or blue ribbon commissions have been convened to study online safety issues. Two of these task forces were convened in the United States and issued reports in 2000 (“COPA Commission”) and 2002 (“Thornburgh Commission“). Another was commissioned by the British government in 2007 and issued in a major report in March 2008 (“Byron Review“). Finally, two additional online safety task forces were formed in the U.S. in 2008 and concluded their work, respectively, in January (“Internet Safety Technical Task Force“) and July (“Point Smart. Click Safe.“) of 2009. [And yet another task force — the Online Safety Technology Working Group — was recently formed and has now gotten underway.]

In a new PFF white paper, ” Five Online Safety Task Forces Agree: Education, Empowerment & Self-Regulation Are the Answer,” I walk through a chronological summary of each of these past task forces [click on covers of each report below to read them in their entirety] and highlight some of the similar themes and recommendations from them.

Altogether, these five task forces heard from hundreds of experts and produced thousands of pages of testimony and reports on a wide variety of issues related to online child safety. While each of these task forces had different origins and unique membership, what is striking about them is the general unanimity of their conclusions. Among the common themes or recommendations of these five task forces:

• Education is the primary solution to most online child safety concerns. These task forces consistently stressed the importance of media literacy, awareness-building efforts, public service announcements, targeted intervention techniques, and better mentoring and parenting strategies.
• There is no single “silver-bullet” solution or technological “quick-fix” to child safety concerns. That is especially the case in light of the rapid pace of change in the digital world.
• Empowering parents and guardians with a diverse array of tools, however, can help families, caretakers, and schools to exercise more control over online content and communications.
• Technological tools and parental controls are most effective as part of a “layered” approach to child safety that views them as one of many strategies or solutions.
• The best technical control measures are those that work in tandem with educational strategies and approaches to better guide and mentor children to make wise choices. Thus, technical solutions can supplement, but can never supplant, the educational and mentoring role.
• Industry should formulate best practices and self-regulatory systems to empower users with more information and tools so they can make appropriate decisions for themselves and their families. And those best practices, which often take the form of an industry code of conduct or default control settings, should constantly be refined to take into account new social concerns, cultural norms, and technological developments.
• Government should avoid inflexible, top-down technological mandates. Instead, policymakers should focus on encouraging collaborative, multifaceted, multi-stakeholder initiatives and approaches to enhance online safety. Additional resources for education and awareness-building efforts are also crucial. Finally, governments should ensure appropriate penalties are in place to punish serious crimes against children and also make sure law enforcement agencies have adequate resources to police crimes and punish wrong-doers.

The consistency of these findings from those five previous task forces is important and it should guide future discussions among policymakers, the press, and the general public regarding online child safety.  As I note in the paper, the findings are particularly relevant today since Congress and the Obama Administration — including 3 federal agencies (NTIA, FCC, & FTC) are actively studying these issues. So, in light of all that, I hope this short paper can shed some light on the collective wisdom of the past task forces. While more study of online child safety issues is always welcome — including additional task forces or working groups if policymakers deem them necessary — thanks to the work of these five task forces, we now have better vision of what is needed to address online safety concerns.

Five Online Safety Task Forces Agree [PFF – Adam Thierer] http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=17181137&access_key=key-z6cxfgrjkqaqtxbix&page=1&version=1&viewMode=

A major new online child safety task report by the “Point Smart. Click Safe.” Blue Ribbon Working Group has just been released. First, some background. In June 2007, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), the principal trade association of the cable industry in the United States, announced “Cable Puts You in Control: PointSmart. ClickSafe.” a new campaign by its members to offer parents assistance in keeping their children safe online.   As part of the initiative, the NCTA hosted a major online child safety summit and also announced the formation of the “Point Smart. Click Safe. Blue Ribbon Working Group” in partnership with the Internet KeepSafe Coalition (iKeepSafe) and Common Sense Media. These three organizations, along with the cable industry’s “Cable in the Classroom” program, agreed to bring together a collection of online safety experts from many disciplines to study these issues and develop a set of “best practice” recommendations that could be implemented across the Internet industry. [Disclosure: It was my pleasure to serve as a member of this blue ribbon working group.]

Today, the “Point Smart. Click Safe.” working group produced its final report and concluded that:

Ensuring children’s online safety is a difficult and complex task that calls for input from and action by a wide variety of stakeholders. There is no “silver bullet”—no single technology or approach that has proved effective. Rather, what is required is:

• A combination of different technologies,
• Continuing digital literacy education for parents, educators, and children, and
• Active participation by all concerned companies, groups and individuals.

Similarly, a singular focus on safety is insufficient. Children must learn to minimize risks but also learn appropriate and ethical behaviors in this digital world. In addition, they need an understanding of media literacy, in order to be able to think critically about the content they consume and increasingly create. Therefore, best practices must be part of a larger effort to provide an entertaining, educational, and safe experience for children.

Compared to previous online child safety task forces, which I will discuss in a subsequent post, the major contribution of this task force was its focus on detailed industry best practices that various online providers could adopt to help parents, policymakers, and law enforcement better keep kids safe online. As the working group’s final report noted:

It should be easy for parents and others to find clear and simple explanations of what information and safety elements exist, how they function, and what a user can do in various circumstances. Therefore, best operating practices should:

• Use clear and common language,
• Be consistent and transparent, and
• Provide information and tools that can vary by age and stage of the user.

These best operating practices should be crafted so that they can be:

• Modified for a specific service or application (e.g. ISP, blog, chat, social network),
• Scaled based on the number of intended or actual users,
• Designed and created as part of the product development cycle, and
• Continuously updated to reflect growth and change in the application or service.

The task force then provided a detailed outline of the many tools and strategies that industries could use to accomplish these goals. I encourage you to check out the “Recommendations for Best Practices” section of the report for more detail since there are far too numerous to itemize here.

As I will point out in a related post later, the “Point Smart. Click Safe.” working group’s findings and recommendation were very much in line with what 4 previous online safety task forces have concluded.  Again, more on that later.  For now, read this report!

Update: Here’s a few links to what others are saying about the report:

• Tech Daily Dose
• PC Magazine
• Broadcasting & Cable
• Internet News.com
• Education Week

• Statements from various members of Congress
• David Burt of Filtering Facts
• iKeepSafe
• Paul Rodriguez of Cable Tech Talk
• Microsoft
• Google
• Verizon
• Family Online Safety Institute

As I mentioned in a post last month, dozens of comments were filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as part of the agency’s “Child Safe Viewing Act” Notice of Inquiry.  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, and here’s my analysis of why this bill and the FCC’s proceeding are worth monitoring closely.

Anyway, this week saw many of the same groups that filed before (and some new ones) file reply comments about those earlier submissions.  To make things simple, I have collected most of the notable reply comments down below in case anyone is interested.

• Association of National Advertisers
• American Legislative Exchange Council
• Children’s Media Policy Coalition
• Coalition for Independent Ratings
• Comcast
• Consumer Electronic Association
• Digimarc
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Entertainment Software Association
• Funai Electric Co.
• ION Media Networks
• Microsoft
• Motorola
• NAB, NCTA, & MPAA
• Nintendo
• Parents Television Council
• Smart Television Alliance
• TiVo
• T-Mobile
• TV Guardian

Readers of Tech Liberation Front may be interested in a new breakfast series that BroadbandCensus.com has recently begun.

The next event in this series, “Should Government Funding Be Part of a National Broadband Plan?” will be held on Tuesday, November 18, from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., and will include Stan Fendley, the director of legislative and regulatory policy for Corning, Inc., Kyle McSlarrow, CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA), and John Windhausen, Jr., president of Telepoly Consulting. I will moderate the discussion.

Two weeks after Election Day, this Broadband Breakfast Club meeting will consider one of the hottest topics in telecom: can and should funding for broadband work its way into a pending fiscal stimulus package?

Future meetings of the breakfast club (December 2008 through March 2009) will consider the role of broadband applications in harnessing demand, how the universal service fund will be changed by high-speed internet, the role of wireless in universal broadband, and the extent of competition in the marketplace.

The Broadband Breakfast Club meets monthly at the Old Ebbitt Grill, at 675 15th Street, NW, in Washington. (It’s right across the street from the Department of the Treasury.)

Beginning at 8 a.m., an American plus Continental breakfast is available downstairs in the Cabinet Room. This is followed by a discussion about the question at hand, which ends at 10 a.m. Except for holidays (like Veteran’s Day), we’ll meet on the second Tuesday of each month, until March 2009. The registration page for the event is http://broadbandbreakfast.eventbrite.com.

Because of the limited size of the venue, seated attendance will be reserved the first 45 individuals to register. There are no restrictions on who may register to attend. With the exception of speakers, there is a $45.00 charge (plus a modest Eventbrite fee) to attend. The events are on the record.

We kicked off this series earlier this month with a well-attended breakfast on “10 Years Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: Success or Failure?”

I started the Broadband Breakfast Club for the same reason that I started BroadbandCensus.com earlier this year: I believe that American consumers, policy-makers and broadband providers need better information about the issues surrounding high-speed internet access.

Today, broadband is (or could) the driver of citizen engagement, commerce, democratic participation, education, entertainment, health care and potential environmental gains through wider telecommuting. And yet basic information about where particular broadband company offers service – and at what price and at what speed – is not conveniently available in a single, public source. The free web service BroadbandCensus.com aims to change that by going directly to individual internet users for their feedback.

Our Broadband Breakfast Club series is directed more at Washington policy-makers and influencers. But again, we are seeking to broaden the discussion by allowing all to participate. The goal of this breakfast series is to bring an informed consensus – or, failing that, an informed disagreement – around key broadband policy questions.

With the dawn of a new administration – and the prospect of a systematic approach to high-speed internet issues for the first time in nearly a decade – now is the time to undertake these discussions.

Further, the breakfast events that we’re hosting now will lead up to our Spring 2009 conference, “Broadband Census for America: The New Administration.” The Spring 2009 conference – bringing together federal, state and local officials, academic researchers and other interested parties around the issue of broadband data – is tentatively scheduled for Friday, March 27, 2009, here in Washington.

If you have questions or thoughts about upcoming events in the Broadband Breakfast Club series, or about the Spring 2009 conference, “Broadband Census for America: The New Administration,” or about BroadbandCensus.com in general, feel free to contact me: drew at broadbandcensus.com, or at 202-580-8196.

As with everything on BroadbandCensus.com, this blog post is under our Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License. That means you can copy, send, repost and redistribute it. Please do so! The URL for this post is http://broadbandcensus.com/blog/?p=923, and the URL for the registration page is http://broadbandbreakfast.eventbrite.com.

Just FYI, the latest update of my booklet on “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods” is now live. The new version, Version 3.1, provides minor updates to all sections of the book and a new appendix of relevant research in the field. I issue major updates early each year and 1 or 2 tweaks during the course of the year to reflect the evolution of the parental control and online child safety market and debate.

For those not familiar with the report, it explores the market for parental control tools, rating schemes, education efforts, and initiatives aimed at promoting online child safety. I believe that the parental controls and content management tools cataloged in the report represent a better, less restrictive alternative to government regulation. As I conclude after evaluating that state of the market: “There has never been a time in our nation’s history when parents have had more tools and methods at their disposal to help them decide what constitutes acceptable media content in their homes and in the lives of their children.”

The report is available free-of-charge on the PFF website, and the previous editions of the report are housed there too in case you want to see how it has evolved over the past two years. For those interested in taking a quick look at the report, I have embedded it down below the fold as a Scribd file. Finally, as is always the case, I encourage readers to send me updates and suggestions for how to improve the report and I will incorporate them into future versions.

Verizon’s Tom Tauke and NCTA’s Kyle McSlarrow take to fisticuffs in their comments (well worth reading and remarkably… candid) on the Verizon Policy Blog after Tom asked “Will Cable and FCC Thwart Consumer Choice?”  In case you missed it, Verizon has been feuding with cable providers before the FCC about Verizon’s practice of calling customers who ask to cancel their telephone service and offering them incentives to stay with Verizon rather than switch to a cable VoIP service.

Adam Thierer very capably addressed this subject several months ago:

there are two issues here: (1) Is Verizon technically violating any existing FCC regulations; and (2) do those rules make any sense? I’ll leave it to the legal beagles to sort out the answer to question #1. From my perspective, the more important question is, regardless of what the regs say, what’s the impact of all this is on consumers and competition? On that point, it’s hard for me to see how those old number portability regulations make sense if they limit the ability of incumbents to play hard-ball in an attempt to retain customers. After all, that’s what we should want more of in the marketplace: good ol’ fashion head-to-head, facilities-based competition…. Bottom line: the FCC should be careful about regulating customer inducements by incumbents whether those offers happen before or after the porting process. The better approach would be to make sure that the incumbents can offer whatever inducements they want but then also make sure that rivals have a clear opportunity to respond and beat the offer.

Amen!

PFF has just releasing an updated edition of my booklet on “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods.” The new version, Version 3.0, includes two new appendixes and updates to each section to reflect new parental control tools and programs developed in the last nine months.

The updated report is timely as it comes on the heels of the recently-announced Internet Safety Technical Task Force, which is being chaired by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. I am privileged to serve as a member of the Task Force, which is evaluating various online safety technologies and strategies and then reporting back to state attorneys general with our findings.

Those issues and much more are covered in the latest edition of my report. The report explores the market for parental control tools, rating schemes, education efforts, and initiatives aimed at promoting online child safety. I believe that the parental controls and content management tools cataloged in the report represent a better, less restrictive alternative to government regulation. As I conclude after evaluating that state of the market: “There has never been a time in our nation’s history when parents have had more tools and methods at their disposal to help them decide what constitutes acceptable media content in their homes and in the lives of their children.”

Version 3.0 of the special report, now over 200 pages, contains over fifty exhibits and numerous updates in all five sections of the book. Major updates have been made to the Internet, social networking, and mobile media sections, reflecting the growing importance of those sectors and issues. A greatly expanded section on video empowerment technologies has also been included. Finally, two appendices have also been added: a comprehensive legislative index cataloging over thirty bills introduced in Congress on these issues (complied with John Morris of Center for Democracy & Technology), and a glossary of 35 relevant terms and cases.

The report is available free-of-charge on the PFF website, as are the previous editions. And I am happy to provide hard copies to those who are interested.

PFF has just released my latest paper entitled “Parental Control Perfection? The Impact of the DVR and VOD Boom on the Debate over TV Content Regulation.” In the report, I focus on the extent to which new video technologies, such as digital video recorders (DVRs) and video on demand (VOD) services, are changing the way households consume media and are helping parents better tailor viewing experiences to their tastes and values. I provide evidence showing the rapid spread of these technologies and discuss how parents are using these tools in their homes. Finally, I argue that these developments will have profound implications for debates over the regulation of video programming. As parents are given the ability to more effectively manage their family’s viewing habits and experiences, it will lessen—if not completely undercut—the need for government intervention on their behalf.

This 16-page report can be found at: http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/pops/pop14.20DVRboomcontentreg.pdf