Two great articles today about the dangers of government getting too involved in the newspaper business as the industry experiences serious marketplace difficulties. Slate’s Jack Shafer (“Saving Newspapers From Their Saviors“) and Mark Hopkins of Silicon Angle (“Obama Administration ‘Open’ to State Run Newspapers“) both raise concerns about President Obama’s recent comments hinting that he is open to legislation that might grant struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses.
In a piece for the
City Journal back in March entitled “Socializing Media in Order to Save It,” I discussed the specific proposal in question, Senator Benjamin L. Cardin’s (D-MD) bill, S. 673, the “Newspaper Revitalization Act,” which would allow newspapers to become nonprofit organizations in an effort to help them stay afloat. Importantly, however, the measure would also disallow political endorsements on their editorial pages as part of the deal. In my essay, I pointed out how “If the FCC received grant-making authority to dole out subsidies to media operators… it’s hard to imagine how journalists won’t be expected to surrender something in exchange.” And that something would be their journalistic independence.
Shafer and Hopkins raise similar concerns in their essays. Continue reading →
Read Part II here
In February, Congress passed the Obama Administration’s “(Five Year) National Broadband Plan,” part of the so-called “Stimulus.” (As economist Russ Roberts put it, government “stimulus” is “like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end.”) The Plan transfers $7.2 billion from taxpayers to broadband providers in subsides to promote broadband build-out. More than 10,000 comments have been filed on the plan. Once you get past the constitutional nicety of whether Congress has the power to subsidize “internal improvements” like broadband (it doesn’t), you might wonder just how well your money will be spent by all these techno-supplicants for the latest craze in corporate welfare.
The good news is that these comments are available online. Hurray for transparency! The bad news is that…
they’re available online—specifically on the FCC’s Electronic Comments Filing System (ECFS). Anyone who’s used the web more recently than 1998 will cringe the first time they try to use ECFS to find anything, as Jerry has noted. Apart from the cumbersome, highly unintuitive interface, the problem is that there’s no way to search the text of comments
! You can only search pre-defined fields like like “law firm,” and if you don’t enter a value in precisely the right way, you get nada.
Bill Cline, the Chief of the Reference Information Center for the FCC’s Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau tries hard to put the best face on this farce of e-government, explaining:
Continue reading →
This clip from Fox News shows why more reporters need to contact the experts here at TLF:
http://www.youtube.com/v/mpDs1ii5n6w&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b
The “security expert” being interviewed in the clip, Robert Siciliano, doesn’t seem to understand what cookies do. He claims that “cookies closest cousin is spyware.” Siciliano also implies that the Obama Administration might somehow be in league with Google to gather our private information.
I think there may be some valid concerns with cookies being implemented on certain government sites, but this sort of hyperbole only feeds into the baseless fears that already exist about technology.
I should note that Judge Andrew Napolitano provides some interesting analysis on the topic after the Siciliano interview, which is included in the clip.
Hat tip: dvorak.org/blog
Maybe Obama should invite Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer over to the White House for a beer to settle the two companies’ differences!
http://www.youtube.com/v/Q0umKaGxkkE
While he’s at it, Obama might want to invite Apple CEO Steve Jobs, too, since the common cause Apple and Google once made against Microsoft now seems to be giving way to increased rivalry between the two titans of Internet cool. Or how about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, given Facebook’s growing challenge to Google? Yahoo!’s Carol Bartz seems to get along much better with everyone than the boys in the group, so she’d probably help Obama keep things under control.
The Internet industry’s war-of-all-against-all is reminiscent of Tom Lehrer‘s classic 1960s satire “National Brotherhood Week”:
http://www.youtube.com/v/aIlJ8ZCs4jY
Continue reading →
The Obama administration has been greeted with enthusiasm by scientists who see the potential for “research-based policy.” Reason, not ideology, will govern. The New Scientist, among other zines, headlines “Let Science Rule: the Rational Way to Run Societies.” (May 28, p. 40-43) This is part of a larger theme: Behavioral economics is taking off. Continue reading →
Our readers may be interested in this excellent WSJ article, Too Risky for Venture Capitalists: Why proposals for a government bailout were roundly rejected. We should all take heart in the the fact that the venture capital community itself resoundingly opposed the notion of accepting a massive infusion of taxpayer money, especially Tom Friedman’s suggestion:
“You want to spend $20 billion of taxpayer money creating jobs?” Mr. Friedman wrote. “Fine. Call up the top 20 venture capital firms in America” and invest the money with them.
But I see three more reasons why those interested in technology policy should pay attention to this encouraging episode.
First, the groundswell of opposition seems to have been driven largely by the Internet, both as a vehicle for disseminating the bailout proposals and for voicing opposition to them:
Venture capitalists certainly agree that innovators and start-up companies, not bailed-out GMs or Chryslers, will create the new jobs. They rightly brag that almost 20% of U.S. gross domestic product is generated by companies built by venture capital, such as Intel, Apple and Google. Still, they almost universally panned the notion of taxpayer support. Their real-time rejection is an excellent example of how social media — here, the venture community dissecting a proposal online — can now quickly take down bad ideas.
Second, it should almost go without saying that venture capital is the fountainhead of innovation, especially the disruptive innovation that is constantly pushing the envelope of technology policy. A healthy VC sector is the bedrock of a dynamic, free and innovative economy. The VCs realize that this requires, more than anything else, avoiding the market distortions caused by government funding: Continue reading →
Looks like we can count on another tax landing on our cell phones soon thanks to the taxaholics in the Obama Administration. According to Jeff Silva of RCR Wireless:
Though details on the Obama budget are few and far between, some information was made available. The administration estimates that spectrum license fees would raise $4.8 billion over the next 10 years.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that wireless carriers will just eat those fees. Those fees will be coming to bill near you soon in the form of another stupid government tax burden on our wireless phones.
You know, because we’re not already paying enough in taxes on our phones.
(P.S. I’m actually a little surprised that the “progressives” in this administration would support this proposal since a tax on mobile phones will end up being about as regressive as taxes can get.)
On this week’s show, we discuss government transparency—a topic a number of us here at the TLF have written about lately. Among other things, we discuss:
- Why transparency is important
- What data the government should provide and how
- Good and bad examples of transparency
- President Obama’s promise to have the most accountable administration in history
- Obama’s plans to appoint a Chief Technology Officer
My guests for this show are:
You can subscribe to our podcast here or through iTunes here. Or, you can play or download this podcast using the online player below.
[display_podcast]
I can’t believe we’re actually asking whether Obama—the candidate who promised to bring the Federal government (and perhaps everyone else) into the Web 2.0 era whether they like it or not—will have a “personal computer.”
The “webiness” of Obama’s predecessors is just embarrassing:
Clinton famously sent only two e-mails while he was president, one to test whether he could push the “send” button and one to John Glenn, sent while the former Ohio senator was aboard the space shuttle…
During his presidency, George W. Bush didn’t have a personal log-in to the White House Internet server, nor did he have a personal whitehouse.gov e-mail address. (He gave up his private e-mail account, G94B@aol.com, just before his first inauguration.) When he did go online, there were some things he couldn’t access. During Bush’s tenure, the White House’s IT department blocked sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and most of MySpace. The ability to comment on blogs was blocked, as was certain content that was deemed offensive. According to David Almacy, who served as Bush’s director for Internet and e-communications from 2005-07, only two people had access to the iTunes store during that period: Almacy, who had to upload speeches to the site, and the president’s personal aide, so that he could download songs for Bush’s iPod.
Pipes and tubes, pipes and tubes, my friends…
If Obama decides not to implement whatever legal or technical changes would be required for him to do something so simple as having a computer on his desk, I suppose we’ll know that he’s not really all that interested—at least on a personal level—in all his rhetoric about the power of the Internet to make government more transparent and accountable. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.
Just before the New Year, Mike Masnick reported:
It’s been well over five years since we first heard about a plan in Oregon to attach GPS devices to cars and tax drivers based on how much they drove and the idea hasn’t become any better in the intervening years… but apparently it’s still being pushed. Oregon’s governor is trying to move forward with the plan. One of the reasons behind the bill has nothing to do with a more efficient way to tax drivers, but because the state is gaining less revenue from its gas tax since there are more fuel-efficient cars on the roads these days. Of course, rather than reward drivers for driving more fuel efficient cars, this sort of tax punishes them, and actually encourages the use of less fuel efficient vehicles. And, of course, that doesn’t even begin to get into the potential (and likely) privacy problems brought about by any system whereby the government has full access to a GPS system on your car.
This is a great example of the problems that often arise when trying to bring into the digital age areas of the economy monopolized or dominated by government. There’s a clear (if imperfect) analogy here to Obama’s ambitious goal of digitizing health records: both are great ideas that raise special privacy concerns because of the heavy involvement of government. These privacy concerns are certainly not unwarranted: I wouldn’t want the government to have access to my car’s location or my medical history at any given moment or a complete record of where I’ve driven or what doctors I’ve seen. But just as relying on paper health records is clearly stupid (and dangerous), it would make a hell of a lot more sense for drivers to pay for road use depending on “where, when and how far they drove”—as in a small pilot project in the UK.
Today, state and Federal taxes on every gallon of gasoline are intended to serve two conflicting purposes—but do a poor job with both. Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.