The Entertainment Software Association, which represents the video game industry, has just released its latest “Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry” publication.  It’s a handy annual resource that I always look forward to reading. There are many interesting facts and figures found in the report, but here a few worth calling out from the data they have aggregated:

• 93% of the time parents are present at the time games are purchased or rented
• 64% of parents believe games are a positive part of their children’s lives
• 86% of the time children receive their parents’ permission before purchasing or renting a game
• 48% of parents play computer and video games with their children at least weekly
• 97% of parents report always or sometimes monitoring the games their children play
• 76% of parents believe that the parental controls available in all new video game consoles are useful

The survey also bolsters the findings of many other polls and reports which have found that parents employ a variety of what I have labeled “household media rules” to monitor or control their children’s media consumption:

• 83% of parents place time limits on video game playing
• 78% of parents place time limits on television viewing
• 75% of parents place time limits on Internet usage
• 66% of parents place time limits on movie viewing

Once again, these findings illustrate that parents are parenting!  Parents are playing an active role in the lives of their children, monitoring their media use, and mentoring them with the assistance of the ratings and parental control technologies / methods at their disposal.

I sure hope the Supreme Court is listening as they prepare to take up the constitutionality of laws regulating video game sales.

Note to Washington regulators and would-be censors… Don’t look now but parenting is happening!  Yes, it really is true: Parents are parenting. That’s the result of this new survey by Yahoo & Ipsos OTX.  Please pardon my snarky-ness, but I’ve been going at it for years with mobs of people here in DC who think that all parents are asleep at the wheel and kids are heading straight for the moral abyss. It’s a bunch of bunk, as I’ve pointed out here before. This new Yahoo!/Ipsos survey illustrates that, once again, parents are monitoring what their kids are up to online and taking an active role in mentoring them about web use:

• 78% of parents are concerned about their children’s online safety.
• 70% of parents talk to their children about online safety at least 2-3 times a year; 45% talk to their children at least once a month.
• 74% of parents are connected to their children’s profiles on social networking sites.
• 71% of parents have taken at least one action to manage their children’s use of the Internet or cell phones such as: Check to see where children are searching online; Set time limits for children’s use of computers or cell phones; Set parental controls on video sites; Use filters to limit where children go on the Web.

These results are consistent with what I have found and described in my ongoing PFF special report, Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods.  Obviously, many parents utilize the growing diversity of parental control technologies that are at their disposal to better control/monitor their children’s online activities/interactions. But what’s really impressive (and far more important) is that so many surveys and studies continue to show that the vast majority of parents utilize a variety of household “media consumption rules” as a substitute for, or compliment to, parental control technologies. In fact, in many ways, these household efforts represent the most important steps that most parents can take in dealing with potentially objectionable content or teaching their children how to be sensible, savvy media consumers. In my work, I have divided these household media rules into four categories: (1) “where” rules (assigning a place for media consumption); (2) “when and how much” rules (creating a media allowance); (3) “under what conditions” rules (carrot-and-stick incentives); and, (4) “what” rules (specifying the programming kids can and cannot watch).  Again, many households reject technical blocking tools in favor of these household media rules.

For example,  the U.S. Census Bureau’s ”A Child’s Day” reports, conducted from 1994 to 2006, illustrate how the use of household media rules appears to be growing. Parents are crafting more TV rules for their kids today than they were in the past. The press release for the 2004 report reveals that, “Parents are taking a more active role in the lives of their children than they did 10 years ago.” The 2006 study found that 72.4 percent of parents of children age 6 to 11 imposed family television rules on which programs, how early or late, and how many hours children were allowed to watch.

Other surveys and studies have confirmed this. A 2003 Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that “Almost all parents say they have some type of rules about their children’s use of media.” More recent Kaiser surveys have bolstered that finding. For example, a 2006 Kaiser survey of families with infants and preschoolers revealed that 85 percent of those parents who let their children watch TV at that age have rules about what their child can and cannot watch. Of those parents, 63 percent say they always enforce those rules. About the same percentage of parents said they had similar rules for video game and computer usage. Likewise, a June 2007 Kaiser poll revealed that:

• 65% of parents say they closely monitor their children’s media use;
• 73% of parents say they know a lot about what their kids are doing online;
• 87% of parents check their children’s instant messaging “buddy lists;”
• 82% of parents review their children’s social networking sites; and,
• 76% of parents look to see what websites their children have visited.

Finally, a 2007 poll commissioned by Common Sense Media and Cable in the Classroom revealed that 85 percent of parents and legal guardians of children ages 6 to 18 who go online say they have talked to their child in the past year about how to be safe and smart online. And I cite many additional numbers like these in my Parental Controls & Online Child Protection report.

Incidentally, one of the most interesting findings of the Yahoo! survey is that, “Dads are doing their part, and then some.” “Today’s fathers spend more time with their children than three decades ago and take on more household responsibilities,” the survey notes. Specifically:

• 71% of dads (compared to 63% of moms) say they are taking at least one action to help manage their children’s online behavior including having conversations about respecting the privacy of others and checking their children’s privacy settings. — More dads than moms have had a conversation with their children about their digital reputations and how to promote a positive online reputation.
• Fathers more often check to see what personal information can be easily found about their children by searching for their names online. — 53% of dads surveyed told us they plug their children’s names into a search engine at least 2–3 times per year (compared to 38% of moms) — 33% of dads told us they do this search at least once a month.
• Dads spend slightly more time talking to their children about online safety. 47% of dads have the conversation at least once a month or more; 42% of moms have the conversation at least once a month or more.
• According to the survey, more dads than moms use filters to limit where their kids go online, and more dads monitor the time children send text messages and how many text messages they send.

As the father of two elementary school kids, I can only say… Dads rule!

While some might protest that more can and should be done by parents — which is always going to be the case about everything — I would hope those critics wouldn’t lose sight of how much is already being done by parents to monitor and mentor their children’s online actions and interactions.  Let’s give parents some credit for once!

Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hosted an all-day workshop on “Protecting Kids’ Privacy Online,” which looked into the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) and challenges posed to its enforcement by new technological developments. The FTC staff did a nice job bringing together and moderating 5 panels worth of participants, all of whom had plenty of interesting things to say about the future of COPPA.  But I was more struck by what was not said yesterday. Namely, there was:

• ZERO explanation of the supposed harms of advertising, marketing, and data collection. Advertising-bashing is an old sport here in Washington, so I guess I should not have been surprised to hear several panelists yesterday engaging in teeth-gnashing and hand-wringing about advertising, marketing, and the data collection methods that make it possible. But this grousing just went on and on without any explanation by the critics of the supposed harms that would result from it.
• ZERO appreciation of the benefits of advertising, marketing, and data collection. Not once yesterday — NOT ONCE — did anyone pause to ask what it is that makes all these wonderful online sites, services and content free (or dirt cheap) to consumers.  Everyone at this show was guilty of the “manna fallacy” (that all this stuff just falls magically to Earth from the Net Gods above). Well, back here in the real world, something has to pay for all those goodies, and that something is advertising and marketing, which are facilitated by data collection! Or would you like to pay $19.95 a month for each of those currently free sites and services? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

• Almost ZERO discussion of the excellent steps that so many websites are taking today above and beyond COPPA to make sure online communities are safe. What I found most amazing about the day’s discussion was the way many people seem to assume that COPPA is the most important approach to keeping kids safe online. In reality, as I have pointed out in my past work, COPPA is one the least important things that keeps kids safe online. It’s what sites do after kids get into their communities that is really important. And, until the last panel of the day, we heard very little about the important steps that countless online sites and communities take to make sure they offer more safe and secure environments for kids. In particular, beyond basic parental controls, moderation and intervention efforts by site operators are increasing within social networking sites, virtual worlds, and many other sites to ensure that they offer such “well lit” neighborhoods. Failure to integrate this into the discussion was the major failing of the day.

• Little discussion of the role of parents should play in mentoring their kids online. So, I’m a parent.  Two kids. Ages 8 and 5. Guess what? They love commercial messages! I let them see them. Online and off. We talk about them. I explain to them not to believe everything they see. I explain that sometimes people are just out to sell them silly stuff they don’t need or, worse yet, scam them out of their money. I explain that there’s a lot of crap out there. And I explain to them that they should always consult with mom and dad about purchasing decisions to get our advice and consent. Hey… there’s a word for this: mentoring (otherwise known as “good parenting.”) Yes, yes, I know COPPA is suppose to aid parents in this regard, but honestly, I only think of COPPA as a small speed bump.  It can slow people — either kids or marketers — down a bit, but it will never stop companies from wanting to sell products or people (including kids) from wanting to buy them.  This is life in a capitalistic society, folks. Unless you want to live in some Marxist “Worker’s Paradise” where we ban all commercial messages and tightly limit consumption and consumer choice (and “wasteful capitalist” competition!), you better get used to it. And, to go back to point #1, you have yet to show me how exposure to commercial messages “harms” kids.  I’m not saying I want to subject my kids to an endless bombardment-by-ads, but as with everything else in this world, there is a sensible way to educate them using a combination of good mentoring and media literacy.
• ZERO acknowledgment that COPPA expansion puts the law on a collision course with COPA, which has already been litigated and found unconstitutional. During the fourth panel yesterday on “Emerging Parental Verification Access and Methods,” there was some troubling talk of turning schools or mobile phone operators into online credentialing authorities. I’ve discussed the dangers of these approaches to online age verification here before (especially the insanely misguided suggestion that schools should become DMVs for our kids and be passing out digital credentials). Which brings up a broader concern not really discussed at all yesterday: At what point would an expansion of COPPA’s “verifiable parental consent” requirements converge with the unconstitutional mandatory age verification model found in the Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA)? We fought an epic, decade-long legal battle over COPA only to have the entire framework tossed out as a violation of the First Amendment. This issue was at the heart of the COPPA 2.0 paper Berin Szoka and I released last year, and a theme Berin recently explained in his Senate testimony and subsequent answers to questions for the Congressional Record.

Anyway, I could go on but I’ll just stop there and reference a few other things that we’ve been doing on COPPA and age verification issues more generally. But everyone should stay tuned to this debate because the prospect for COPPA expansion is quite real and it will have profound ramifications, as the subtitle to our first paper down below explains:

• COPPA 2.0: The New Battle over Privacy, Age Verification, Online Safety & Free Speech, by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer
• Response of Berin Szoka to Questions from Sen. Mark Pryor Regarding Hearing on “An Examination of Children’s Privacy: New Technologies & the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act”
• Written Testimony of Berin Szoka, Hearing on “An Examination of Children’s Privacy: New Technologies & the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act” before the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, U.S. Senate, April 29, 2010
• Final Statement of Adam Thierer to the Internet Safety Technical Task Force
• “USA Today, Age Verification, and the Death of Online Anonymity,” by Adam Thierer, PFF Blog, Jan. 23, 2008
• Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions, by Adam Thierer, March 21, 2007.
• “Age Verification for Social Networking Sites: Is it Possible? Is it Desirable?” event transcript, May 11, 2007.

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.

When it comes to theories about how to best raise kids, I’m a big believer in what might be referred to “a resiliency approach” to child-rearing.  That is, instead of endlessly coddling our children and hovering over them like “helicopter parents,” as so many parents do today, I believe it makes more sense to instill some core values and common sense principles and then give them some breathing room to live life and learn lessons from it.  Yes, that includes making mistakes.  And, oh yes, your little darlings might actually gets some bump and bruises along the way — or at least have their egos bruised in the process.  But this is how kids learn lessons and become responsible adults and citizens.  Wrapping them in bubble wrap and filling their heads without nothing but fear about the outside would will ultimately lead to the opposite: sheltered, immature, irresponsible, and unprepared young adults — many of whom expect someone else (the government, their college, their employer, or still their parents!) to be there to take care of them well into their 20’s or even 30’s.  Again, you gotta let kids live a little and learn from their experiences.

This explains why I find Lenore Skenazy’s new book, Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry , to be such a breath of fresh air.  [Here’s her blog of the same name.] She argues that “if we try to prevent every possible danger of difficult in our child’s everyday life, that child never gets a chance to grow up.” (p. 5) As she told Salon recently:

You want kids to feel like the world isn’t so dangerous. You want to teach them how to cross the street safely. You want to teach them that you never go off with a stranger. You teach them what to do in an emergency, and then you assume that generally emergencies don’t happen, but they’re prepared if they do. Then, you let them go out. The fun of childhood is not holding your mom’s hand. The fun of childhood is when you don’t have to hold your mom’s hand, when you’ve done something that you can feel proud of. To take all those possibilities away from our kids seems like saying: “I’m giving you the greatest gift of all, I’m giving you safety. Oh, and by the way I’m taking away your childhood and any sense of self-confidence or pride. I hope you don’t mind.”

Exactly right, in my opinion. Again, let kids live and learn from it.  Teach lessons but then encourage ‘learning by doing’ and let them understand these things for themselves.  That is resiliency theory in a nutshell.

When writing about Gever Tulley’s brilliant “Tinkering School” in this post last year, I noted how I have already started teaching my kids how to use various tools even though they are both under the age of 8.  One of my safety-obsessed yuppie friends stopped by one day to get something and saw my kids playing with hammers, nails, and saws and he thought I was nuts.  But it is he who is nuts for shielding his kids to the joys of learning to build something with their own hands (and for denying them the skills to actually do some honest-to-God manual labor when they get older)!  Have my kids hammered their thumbs on occasion? Yep.  Have they cut or poked their fingers? Check.  But you know what? They bounced back and learned how to be more careful. It’s not like I put a nail gun or power saw in their hands and let them go at it!  But there will be a day that they will be competent enough to know how to use such tools properly, especially because I drill some basic lessons into them each time we pull out those tools. Without me even saying so anymore, they already put on their safety goggles and take other common sense precautions before they use such tools.

Why is it that things have gotten so out of whack, with parents instilling so much fear in their kids about the world?  Skenazy rightly notes that the fundamental problem is that “a lot of parents today are really bad at assessing risk.” (p. 5)  Parents today suffer from “extravagant worry,” she notes. “Extravagant in that it inflates remote possibilities into looming threats that we think we have to watch out for.” (p. 93) “Worrying,” she argues, “has become our national pastime.” (p. 94) “What has changed over the past generation or so is than now people worry… about every activity, even ones that used to be considered simple and pleasant,” she says. (p. 42). Camping, ball games, bike rides, walking to school, etc., are increasingly going out of style. “Millions of moms and almost (but not quite as many) dads now see the world as so fraught with danger that they can’t possibly let their children explore it.” (p. 5)  “And the result is a lot of people so busy preparing for the hideous and unpredictable future that they think nothing of trampling the safe and happy present.” (p. 44)

This has spawned the rise of what Skenazy refers to as the “Just In Case” and “Total Control” mentalities that exist among many parents throughout society today. Many modern parents seem to believe that with just enough safety locks, knee pads, toilet locks, stair gates, and so on, they can keep their kids perfectly safe from all the harms of the world —  both real or (more likely) imagined. Alas, Skenazy argues, “Control is a figment of our imagination. Seeking it only make us more anxious.” (p. 92)  Worse yet, after wrapping those kids in all that bubble wrap, a lot of these same parents force nonsense on them like Baby Einstein videos and Mozart tapes at very young ages hoping that will make those kids geniuses in later life.  It’s more likely they’ll grow up to be Ted Kaczynski.

But if Skenazy is right in arguing that most parents now behave as if “normal childhood has just become too risky to permit,” think of the long-term consequences that has on kids.  Such a relentlessly fear-based mentality breeds distrust, even loathing, of the outside world and all others in it.  Moreover, as I mentioned at the outset, excessive coddling makes it impossible to learn life lessons and build resiliency and responsibility into youngster such that they can go on to become productive citizens.

Skenazy also has some common sense thoughts on the over-hyped issue of Internet sexual predation. As she told Salon:

The world online turns out to be not very different from the world offline. There are some really seedy neighborhoods where you wouldn’t want your kids hanging out, especially if they were wearing high-heeled shoes and fishnets stockings at night. If your kids don’t go there, then your kids are not going to be stalked by predators just looking up prom pictures on Facebook.

Again, exactly right.  And yet, as I have pointed out here before, an irrational “techno-panic” has taken place in recent years over this issue even though the research just doesn’t back up the claim that predators are lurking on every cyber-corner.  Moreover, there’s not a stalker or a child abductor hanging out on every real world corner either. As she notes in the book, “the number of children abducted and killed by strangers [has held] pretty steady over the years — about 1 in 1.5 million. Put another way, the chances of any one American child being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are almost infinitesimally small: .00007 percent.” (p. 16)  And yet, parents today are practically paralyzed by the fear that if they let their kids out of their sight for even a millisecond, they will be snatched.

Skenazy blames sensationalized news coverage for much of this, and I tend to agree.  Even though there are many other tragic ways young kids die each year — and do so in far greater numbers — the media tends to focus on the freakishly rare missing child or abduction scenario until they have whipped up a full-blown public panic.  Incidentally, when those exceedingly rare abductions do take place, it is almost never at the hands of a complete stranger. Generally speaking, abductions by strangers “represent an extremely small portion of all missing children [cases].”  That conclusion was a central finding of the 2002 National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART), a study conducted by the Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.  Instead, it’s known acquaintances and family members that represent the overwhelming portion of offenders. As psychologist Anna C. Salter, author of Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders, points out, “[Sex offenders] are part of our communities, part of our network of friends, worse yet, sometimes part of our families.” Same goes for the abductions. In the vast majority of cases, it is relatives or parties close to the family (say, a disgruntled nanny) who snatches the child.  In other words, instead of being obsessed about letting your kids ride their bike around the neighborhood or play in the center of the mall, parents should be far more concerned with those they marry, date, or employ!!

In any event, read Lenore Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids.  It is beautifully written and immensely enjoyable. She is an insanely gifted writer that will keep you thinking and laughing at the same time.  That’s a rare gift, and her book is a much-needed gift to over-worried parents everywhere.  Read this book, stop worrying, and then tell you kid to go outside and play!

P.S. Quick closing rant… Can I just tell you how much I hate the scumbag trial lawyers who have made it impossible for my kids to experience the joys of diving boards at the local pool.  Steve Moore of The Wall Street Journal, who takes his kids to the same McLean pool my kids go to, explains how some greedy leeches lawyers have made it impossible for pools like ours to keep high-dive board around like we had growing up.  Maybe we should just ban pools altogether while we’re at it.  Fence-off all the lakes and streams, too.  After all, kids could drown!!

Incidentally, this reminds me of the most sensible thing every written about online child safety. In 2002, a blue-ribbon panel of experts was convened by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences to study how best to protect children in our new, interactive, “always-on” multimedia world.  Under the leadership of former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, the group produced a massive report that outlined a sweeping array of methods and technological controls for dealing with potentially objectionable media content or online dangers. Ultimately, however, the experts used a compelling metaphor to explain why education and sensible mentoring was the most important tool on which parents and policymakers should rely:

Technology-in the form of fences around pools, pool alarms, and locks-can help protect children from drowning in swimming pools. However, teaching a child to swim-and when to avoid pools-is a far safer approach than relying on locks, fences, and alarms to prevent him or her from drowning. Does this mean that parents should not buy fences, alarms, or locks? Of course not-because they do provide some benefit. But parents cannot rely exclusively on those devices to keep their children safe from drowning, and most parents recognize that a child who knows how to swim is less likely to be harmed than one who does not. Furthermore, teaching a child to swim and to exercise good judgment about bodies of water to avoid has applicability and relevance far beyond swimming pools-as any parent who takes a child to the beach can testify. (p. 187)

“A child who knows how to swim is less likely to be harmed than one who does not.”  We could apply that lesson to just about everything in this world.  Teach your children well, and then let them live and learn.  And swim!

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.

Along with my friends John Morris and Sophia Cope of the Center for Democracy & Technology, I have just submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the potentially historic free speech case FCC v. Fox, which will be heard in November.

[Reminder: The FCC v. Fox case is the indecency case involving the FCC’s new policy for “fleeting expletives.” I wrote about the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision here. The full decision is here. By contrast, the so-called “Janet Jackson case” — CBS v. FCC — took place in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and that court recently handed down a decision that also went against the FCC. I wrote about the Third Circuit’s decision here.]

The FCC v. Fox case could become the most important First Amendment-related Supreme Court case since FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, which just turned 30 years old last month. Of course, it could be that the Supreme Court simply sticks to the procedural questions regarding whether the FCC moved too far, too fast in reversing it’s long-standing policy of restraint regarding “fleeting expletives.” That’s essentially what the Second Circuit did. On the other hand, the Supremes might reach the substantive First Amendment issues tied up in the Pacifica case. We just won’t know for sure until the case is handed down.

Regardless, in the joint CDT-PFF amicus brief filed today, we argue that the FCC has both gone too far procedurally and that “the time is rapidly approaching for this Court to find that broadcast, like the Internet and other means of mass communication, ‘is entitled to the highest protection from government intrusion’ and that there is no longer a factual ‘basis for qualifying the level of First Amendment scrutiny that should be applied to this medium.'” Citing Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. at 863, 870.”

A more detailed summary of our argument follows below. Our brief contends that the “pervasiveness rationale,” which is the basis of the FCC’s authority to regulate broadcast programming, is being challenged by technological convergence, the proliferation of new media platforms, and the widespread availability of parental control technologies. Video content available over broadcast television is available over a variety of other platforms, such as the Internet and mobile devices, and an increasing number of households subscribe to satellite or cable video services. “With broadcast television being just one of the myriad of ways that people can access lawful content (including indecent content), it no longer makes sense from a constitutional or policy perspective to give broadcast speech less First Amendment protection,” we argue.

Parental controls, such as the V-Chip and set-top box controls, allow parents to block content they deem offensive or inappropriate. Better yet, the rise of VCRs, DVD recorders, video on demand, and digital video recorders means that parents can tailor media consumption to their specific needs and values. Those tools are widely available and provide a less restrictive alternative to government regulation. As a result, the FCC can no longer justify broadcast television content censorship on “pervasiveness” grounds. [I have written much more about that point here, here and here.]

Our joint brief also states that complaint data the FCC cites as justification for the expansion of indecency enforcement, has been inflated through accounting changes. These changes in the way the complaints are counted, which were only instituted for indecency complaints, are in violation of the APA. These complaints, mostly generated by a single advocacy group, cannot be a substitute for an analysis of “community standards” and essentially represent a “heckler’s veto” that violates the First Amendment rights of other viewers.

The brief also cites the Commission’s inconsistent analysis of what it deems “indecent” as a violation of both the First Amendment rights of broadcasters and the APA. The inconsistency in what the FCC finds as indecent has a chilling effect on the free expression of content providers and provides inadequate guidance to broadcasters, which is required under FCC statutes.

The CDT-PFF brief can be found online here and I have also embedded the document below via the Scribd reader. [And those interested in this case might also be interested my recent law review article: “Why Regulate Broadcasting: Toward a Consistent First Amendment Standard for the Information Age.”]

Incidentally, other briefs that have been filed in the matter can be found here. And, last month, I wrote about how personally troubled I was about the lack of support from liberals who have already filed in this case. See: “Liberals Abandoning the First Amendment, Part 3: The Fox Case.”

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.

Over at the popular gaming site 1up.com, a gentleman who worked briefly for the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) has posted a provocative article entitled, “How to Fix the Game Ratings System: An insider’s take on what’s wrong with the ESRB.” In the piece, Jerry Bonner, who worked at the ESRB for 6 months according to GamePolitics.com, argues that “Something desperately needs to happen [to reform the ESRB] because the alternative — a government mandated and controlled rating scheme — is a downright frightening concept.” He continues:

“let’s fix [the ESRB ratings process] before things really get out of hand and a new government-appointed ‘Secretary of Interactive Entertainment’ is making the decisions as to what we can and can’t play. I know I don’t want that. I know you don’t want that. And I know that the people at the ESRB don’t want that. Let’s all make damn sure it doesn’t happen, shall we?”

Well, I can certainly agree with Mr. Bonner that a “Secretary of Interactive Entertainment,” or any sort of extensive government regulation of video games, is a very frightening prospect. The problem is, the “solutions” he outlines in his essay could actual put us on that path.

Re-shuffling ratings & discarding labels

Consider his first recommendation:

the ESRB’s ratings system desperately needs to be updated.” .. “The ESRB should be flexible, ready to change quickly or move forward as fast as this rapidly evolving industry. They did adopt the E10+ rating in 2005 and hired six full-time raters this past spring. While these changes are nice, I believe they need to go a bit further.

Well, as he points out, the ESRB system has been updated occasionally, and it will almost certainly continue to evolve in the future as needed. But Mr. Bonner has two suggested changes that he says will immediately improve the system. First, he wants the “Adults Only” (“AO”) rating wiped out and the current ratings scale adjusted such that Mature (“M”) becomes the new AO:

My suggestion is this: Change the letter ratings to E(veryone), E(veryone)10+, T(een)13, T(een)16, and M(ature). AO goes the way of the dodo and Mature now becomes the top of the scale, recommending that players be 18 and older to purchase.

His rationale is that the Adults Only rating has become the equivalent of the death penalty for some games since they cannot be played on major consoles or sold in store due to voluntary commitments. In one sense, that is a fair point. How can adults who want to play adult-rated games play them? The answer, of course is: on a PC. But there will be increasing pressure on console makers to change that policy to accommodate adult-only households.

But wouldn’t the better approach here be to just lobby console makers for some flexibility in that regard? Why screw with the ratings system? Indeed, the change Mr. Bonner suggests will invite far more pressure by critics and lawmakers for oversight or direct regulation of games since they will make the old “ratings creep” argument and say that the industry has done little more than water-down the upper ratings designations in an attempt to make AO-rated games more accessible.

Moreover, whether any of us care to admit it, the fact that AO-rated games are currently kept off the major consoles and off the shelves at some major retailers (ex: Wal-Mart and Target) is probably the most important thing holding back a full-on legislative assault on video games. Still, I think Mr. Bonner makes a fair point about finding a way to accommodate AO games, but his solution would lead to undesirable results in the form of even more pressure from critics and politicians on game makers and the ESRB.

Mr. Bonner also says that, “My other strong suggestion is to do away with the static content descriptors (“cartoon violence,” etc.) and use a more free-form approach like the Motion Picture Association of America, which tailors its descriptors for specific movie content.” I could not disagree more. The more than 30 content descriptors that ESRB applies to games provide consumers (especially parents) with highly detailed information about the games they are buying or letting their kids play. By simply glancing at the back of each game container, parents can quickly gauge the appropriateness of each title for their children. How can that be a bad thing? The more information the better, I say.

Play It All?

Mr. Bonner’s second recommendation is that “raters play the games to completion and carefully log their findings throughout the playtest.” He argues:

What the general public may not know is that the ESRB’s current pool of full-time raters (six people: three men and three women) does not actually play the games that they rate. They just watch submitted videotapes or DVDs of someone else playing the game. Now, when the switch was made from the use of a large pool of part-time raters to the current group of full-timers, the ESRB did decide to have the full-time raters actually play games as well, but these were rarely games that we dealt with in the rating process. They were just “random” titles from the vast ESRB archive, culled for busywork. And the raters were only required to play the games for four hours, anyway. For some titles, this is more than enough; for others, it is woefully inadequate.

Let’s get serious. Games are not linear media like TV shows or movies. Gameplay is highly unique and multi-dimensional, and often there is no clear “end” to the game. Raters would have to spend days–perhaps weeks–trying to “finish” some titles. This just isn’t practical. But Mr. Bonner anticipates this response:

I’ve already heard the ESRB’s argument on this one: “That’ll take way too long and it will compromise our turn-around time.” My solution to that is simple: Hire more people. The ESRB is a relatively small organization with about 30 full-time employees. This can be bolstered a bit, and I’m sure the developers and publishers can wait an extra week or so for their ratings if they know that a better, more thorough job is being done.

Mr. Bonner is underestimating the challenge at hand here. The ESRB would have to hire a small army of new, full-time raters to play ALL games ALL the way through, whatever that means. Who’s going to pay for all that manpower? Answer: Gaming companies. And they aren’t going to be very happy about it. Many developers are already seriously pissed off about having their artistic endeavors rated at all. This would make them even more angry. More importantly, it would likely slow down a system that is fairly responsive right now. Are game developers or gamers themselves going to tolerate weeks of delay waiting for raters to play a game “all the way through”? I don’t think so.

Transparency: The Unintended Consequences

It’s nearly impossible to be against transparency, no matter what the context. The more visibility about a process, the better. So, in one sense, it’s easy to sympathize with another of Mr. Bonner’s recommendations: Make the ESRB less secretive. He says:

I never understood why the board was so secretive about their modus operandi and why we, as raters, couldn’t be known to the general public or ever speak to a reporter. I finally asked about this and was told that it was for our protection, to ‘save’ us from unscrupulous publishers or journalists who might offer us money for a favorable rating or some inside information. The idea of it sounded absurd to me — people going to those shady lengths over game ratings? Seemed a bit excessive. Realistically, there is nothing to hide at the ESRB. Everything was above board as far as I could tell and all the employees are well-adjusted adults who can handle themselves in complicated situations. But by acting in a secretive, mysterious way, the ESRB creates an appearance of impropriety. This serves no purpose. And if the day does come when the ESRB drops the curtain, then the general public would be in a position to offer its own ideas on improving the system as well.

But let’s think this through a bit because there are actually some very good reasons for the ESRB–or any official rating system for that matter–to not be perfectly open as Mr. Bonner suggests.

With private, independent rating and labeling systems, those assigning ratings or labels are intentionally isolated from lobbying or other interest group pressures. If greater “transparency” meant forcing raters to be exposed to endless special-interest lobbying or other pressures, one wonders if that would really produce a better system. It would more likely produce a system that bowed to those pressures when they became intense enough.

For example, if those assigning video game ratings weren’t anonymous, they might be harassed by both game developers (who want to make them more lax) and game critics (who want to make them more stringent). This does not mean the raters ignore public input. To the contrary, most private rating boards and labeling bodies poll the public and monitor what critics are saying to adjust their systems occasionally. But if the ESRB was forced to make their ratings process completely open to anyone who cared to provide input (including the public policymakers themselves), it would result in a circus-like atmosphere and little content would get rated in a timely manner.

Think about it. Imagine if the ESRB was required to put out a public notice before the next installment in the “Grand Theft Auto” series was about to be rated. The raters would assemble in a public place and “play the game all the way through” in front of whoever cared to show up. Then they were to vote on their rating for the game. Can you imagine? You’d have Jack Thompson screaming bloody murder (literally!) from one side of the aisle while the guys from Take-Two would be going nuts on the opposite side claiming their First Amendment rights were under fire. Pro-censorship groups like the Parents Television Council would simultaneously be cranking their e-mail complaint generation machines into overdrive and flooding the raters with online petitions telling the them to “think of the children” or else they were all going to hell. Not to be outdone, gamers would unite with a vengeance and start sending the raters all sorts of irate messages and pasting the raters’ images into online shooting gallery games, or worse. Again, it would be a complete circus. Meanwhile, nothing would get done in a timely way. The assignment of ratings would get back-logged, especially for controversial games that “deserve more consideration,” as critics would certainly demand.

Moreover, calling for more transparency in the ratings process actually leads us right back to the grim prospect of increased government oversight of the ratings process in ways Mr. Bonner has not considered. The Federal Trade Commission or Federal Communications Commission would likely be asked by Congress to “rate the raters” using some subjective socio-political scale. And you’d have the raters hauled in front of regulatory commissions and into congressional hearing rooms to “account for their actions.” Sen. Brownback and Sen. Clinton would engage in a heated war of words about who really loved our children more, and then they would both lambaste the raters for “not doing a better job” (i.e, for not censoring games).

So let’s be careful about calling for “transparency” without thinking through the consequences.

Ratings “Competition”

Mr. Bonner wraps up by suggesting that what the ESRB really needs is some competition in the ratings business:

Who is to say that some upstart entrepreneurs couldn’t contest the ESRB’s status, especially now? Who says that the ESRB has to be the only game in town? The threat alone of a competing ratings entity would force the ESRB to take a long, hard look at how they are doing things and, in turn, make the necessary changes to move forward. Some may say that a competing system would just confuse things further, that it could invite government regulation because politicians could claim that the industry no longer has the ability to field a single, dependable regulating body. But what I’m suggesting here is capitalism at its finest — the American Way, if you will. Compete or perish.

Well, I’m about as rabid of a capitalist as you will find and believe passionately in a “compete or perish” market system. But capitalism also depends on standards. Many businesses and business methods get built upon standards that bring certainty to the occasional chaos of the marketplace. And when it comes to official industry rating systems, standards make a great deal of sense. If you hope to build acceptance and awareness about a voluntary rating system, you need a certain amount of stability and scale. Everything needs to be rated according to a widely understood benchmark and then branded accordingly. That’s how you get people to use it–both the industry, who must affix the ratings to every game, and the public, who ultimately need consistent, reliable information.

Importantly, however, I am just talking about official industry rating systems here. There is no reason that other private systems cannot develop to supplement the official rating system. And I’m happy to report to Mr. Bonner that there is a lot of competition out there already in this regard. As I reported in my book on “Parental Controls & Online Child Protection,” a wonderful and growing diversity of independent game rating services exist today. Organizations such as Common Sense Media, What They Play, Gamer Dad, Children’s Technology Review and MediaWise “KidScore” provide detailed video game reviews and information about the specific types of content that kids will see or hear in a game. Parents can use information from those sites and services to verify ESRB game ratings independently, or just to get more details about what might be in the games they buy their kids.

But if Mr. Bonner seriously believes that an entirely different, competing rating system is going to develop from within the industry as an official alternative to the ESRB, I think he’s dreaming. Developers would never tolerate it. And, as he suggests, it would lead to more pressure from critics and regulators for a single government regulatory standard.

Final Thoughts

What critics consistently forget—or perhaps intentionally ignore—is that media rating and content-labeling efforts are not an exact science; they are fundamentally subjective exercises. Ratings are based on value judgments made by humans who all have somewhat different values. Those doing the rating are being asked to evaluate artistic expression and assign labels to it that provide the rest of us with some rough proxies about what is in that particular piece of art, or what age group should (or should not) be consuming it. In a sense, therefore, all rating systems will be inherently “flawed” since humans have different perspectives and values that they will use to label or classify content.

Much ink is spilled over how rating systems can be improved. Everyone seems to have their own ideas about what “the best” system would look like. But, at the end of the day, someone has to (1) create a standard and (2) enforce it as broadly as possible so that (3) the public accepts and uses it.

The ESRB has done that quite effectively in my opinion. In fact, in many ways, although it is the newest of all industry content rating and labeling schemes, the video game industry’s system is in many ways the most sophisticated, descriptive, and effective ratings system ever devised by any major media sector in America. Is it perfect? Of course not. Improvements can always be made, but we should not lose sight of the fact that the ESRB system (1) is highly descriptive, (2) rates virtually all game content sold today, and (3) is widely understood and used by game consumers and parents today.

We should not underestimate that accomplishment. And in seeking to refine or improve the system, we should be careful not to upset the current balance of things and open the door to excessive interference by pesky politicians and censorial-minded gaming critics.

UPDATE: There’s a very interesting discussion taking place over at GamePolitics.com about these issues.

GamePolitics.com reports on a murder trial in Alabama in which the attorney for a disturbed teenager is blaming video games for his barbaric behavior:

The lawyer for a man being tried for murder is trying to convince an Alabama jury that the defendant believed he was acting out a video game when he murdered an 80-year-old man on Halloween, 2005. As reported by the Decatur Daily, Andrew Reid Lackey, 24, does not dispute that he stabbed, shot and gouged out the eye of his victim, Charlie Newman. However, Lackey’s attorney, Randy Gladden, is pointing the finger at video games. From the newspaper report:

Actions that led to a deadly confrontation between a defendant and an 80-year-old widower resembled a video game to the accused… [Attorney] Gladden described Lackey… as a computer geek who had immersed himself in video games and lived in “a different world than you and I.”

Tapes of a 911 call made by the victim during the fatal confrontation, however, indicate that old-school greed may have been the motive. Lackey is heard to demand of the victim, ”Where’s the vault?” seven different times. Charlie Newman’s grandson had previously told Lackey that the victim kept a large sum of money in a vault under the stairs. However, no such vault existed.

It’s just disgraceful–but perhaps not all that surprising–that this desperate defense attorney would employ tactics like this. Video games have become the universal excuse du jour for violent behavior. It’s absurd for all the reasons I have pointed out here before. It’s abundantly clear that old fashion greed and a disturbed mind motivated this particular crime, and if you think that sort of thing didn’t happen before video games came along, then you just haven’t read any history. Of course, they instead just blamed movies, comics, and books for the crimes back then! There’s always someone else or something else to blame. It’s the never-ending search for a universal scapegoat for irrational or criminal behavior. The twisted logic = Don’t blame the individual, blame the media.

Pathetic.

Anthony Prestia of Laws of Play, a blog dedicated to covering legal developments in the gaming industry, somehow got some face time with Supreme Court Justice Scalia and was able to ask for his feelings concerning the constitutionality of recent state video game legislation. “In particular,” Prestia says, “I asked him whether as an originalist he believed that state laws banning the sale of mature-rated video games to minors ran afoul of the First Amendment.” Here’s Prestia’s summary and analysis of Scalia’s answer:

In his most succinct reply of the day, Justice Scalia replied that he did believe such legislation was constitutional. He began by explaining his belief that sound constitutional precedent holds that minors may be subjected to prohibitions that adults are not–-he instantly drew the parallel to regulation of pornography sales. However, Justice Scalia emphasized that unprotected speech, such as obscenity–which he was unwilling to define for reasons that are immediately evident to any constitutional scholar–-can be prohibited from sale regardless of the purchaser’s age. I think the important thing to note here is that Justice Scalia did not suggest that violent and/or sexual content in games rises to the level of unprotected speech. In fact, he did not even suggest that video games themselves are not protected by the First Amendment despite his strict originalist beliefs.

That’s an interesting response in that Scalia’s latter comments imply that even older, more conservative judges are coming around to understanding how video games are a form of artistic expression deserving the protection of the First Amendment. But Scalia’s earlier suggestion that state laws banning sales of certain video games to minors maybe constitutional deserves a response.

Scalia is certainly correct that states have passed laws banning the sale of pornographic material to minors, but their are two important differences between those bans and a ban on the sale of video games to children. One is obvious: No video game has ever been defined as “obscene to minors.” Now, it may be the case that some game will be defined as such in the future. But for now, the primary concern about video games to sales has related to the violence in video games, not the sexual content. And violence has never been equated with obscenity, although Kevin W. Saunders of Michigan State University has been making the argument for many years that the two should be equated in an effort to ban violent video game sales. And there are others who agree with him. But no legislature or court has yet agreed with that reasoning. So, that’s the first difference that Scalia ignores.

The second difference Scalia ignores is the mechanism of controlling the sale of video games to children. Every legislature that has so far sought to regulate the sale of video games has proposed that the bans been linked to the sale of games rated a certain way by the game industry’s private rating body, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB). And every one of those measures has been struck down by the courts as unconstitutional. One of the reasons the laws have been overturned is because other court precedents have held that the state may not give a private, voluntary rating system the force of law.

Again, when state governments regulate obscenity, they are not doing so by co-opting some private industry rating system. In the case of video games, however, the states would seek to use “AO” (Adults Only) or even “M” (Mature) ratings that were assigned by the ESRB as the trigger for the law to kick in. That’s generally been forbidden by the courts when some states in the 1970s and 80s sought to use the movie industry’s private rating system (the MPAA system) to regulate or ban the showing of certain movies or their sale. The reason the courts have blocked such enactments is not just because it would be misguided to allow a private labeling code to become a tool of public censorship. The other reason is actually more compelling: As I pointed out in my big PFF study on video game regulation, if a state sought to use a voluntary rating system to ban certain types of content, it would likely kill voluntary rating systems:

why would game developers continue to voluntarily rate their content if the threat of fines or prosecution looms overhead? Fearing such liability, there is a real risk that many in the industry would likely stop rating games altogether since there would be no penalty for refusing to label content. If this were to occur, parents and all game consumers would lose valuable information about the age appropriateness and content of the games that they are thinking of buying.

So, these are just a few of the factors that Justice Scalia and the Supreme Court would need to consider if a case came before them dealing with the constitutionality of regulating video game sales to minors. This is not to say anyone is in favor of actually selling mature or adult-oriented games to minors. It’s just to say that there are more sensible (and constitutional) ways of handling this problem. Parents have many less-restrictive means of dealing with underage access to potentially objectionable games—such as the industry’s private rating and labeling system, third-party ratings and info, console-based controls, and the fact that they don’t have to buy the games in the first place! [See my study and parental controls book for more details on all these things.]

One of the things I find most interesting about calls to regulate “excessively violent” content on television, in movies, or in video games is the way critics make massive leaps of logic and draw outrageous conclusions based on myopic, anecdotal reasoning. I was reminded of that again today when reading through an interview with Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va), one of the most vociferous critics of all sorts of media content and a long-time proponent of regulation to censor such violent content in particular (however it is defined). (I have written about his past regulatory proposals here and here).

Here’s what he recently told the editorial board of The Register-Herald of West Virginia:

Violent content has a way of desensitizing impressionable minds, he said, alluding more than once in the interview to school shootings, especially the horrific massacre at Virginia Tech. To buttress his point, the senator told of an 80-year-old World War II veteran who visited him at home and described his wartime experiences, how he helped blow up German troop trains. “He said that he just got numb, that he lost any feeling,” he said. “One thing was that he couldn’t see them. And that’s also true with troops on the ground. It gives them post-traumatic stress disorder.” Then the senator borrowed a line from Gen. George Patton’s obscenity-laced rallying speech to troops, about making the other man die for his country — except Rockefeller omitted the salty-tongue warrior’s allusion to the enemy’s paternity. “That is the point — you get immune to it,” he said.

Except that you don’t–at least not entirely, and Sen. Rockefeller’s examples prove that point. How is it, after all, that these brave soldiers witnessed and endured unspeakable acts of violence during those years and yet came home and became known as “The Greatest Generation”? They rebuilt post-war America and turned us into the greatest economic powerhouse on Planet Earth. But if we are to believe Sen. Rockefeller’s logic, they should have instead come home and turned America into a nation of murders, thieves, and thugs. After all, it’s “monkey see, monkey do,” right? If you witness violence, you will later perpetrate violence, or so the theory goes.

But, again, they didn’t. Why is that? It’s a really interesting question and it is one that many folks continue to ask with regards to exposure to violent media content in movies, TV shows or video games. After all, many people find something intuitively appealing about “monkey see, monkey do” explanations. Namely, it provides one possible and simplistic explanation for why some people do engage in violent behavior.

In reality, however, most humans possess a sort of moral compass or moral check on their behavior. They can witness something extremely violent–whether it is real or just a dramatization–and process that information in a rational way. Millions of soldiers throughout history have witnessed (and many have been forced to engage in) horrific acts of violence on a battlefield, and yet they would never think of carrying out those same acts on a public sidewalk. Similarly, millions of average folk have watched countless acts of violence in plays, movies, TV shows and games, and yet would never consider carrying out those same acts in public. Simply stated, most people can separate fantasy from reality–even children as they come to understand social norms about acceptable behavior.

I hate to use anecdotal reasoning here but I’m going to since I think my case is not unique. I grew up watching plenty of movies and TV shows jammed packed with senseless violence. In fact–and some people with think this is sick–my Dad and I used to have a fairly impressive horror movie collection on VHS tapes and would often discuss which “slasher movie” was better or had more blood. A little sadistic? Perhaps, but we found it all quite funny. The important point is that neither of us ever picked up a machete or a chainsaw and decided to take a stroll down to a summer camp to chop up teenagers! Same goes for the millions of other people who grew up enjoying those movies.

And where do I even begin to summarize how much violent video game content I have seen through the years? From my Atari 2600 in the late 70s to my current Xbox 360 and Sony PS3, I have probably played just about ever type of violent video game imaginable. The “Resident Evil” series was a favorite and I have played every one of them start to finish, but I enjoyed most of the popular “first-person shooter” games as well. Again, there are millions of others like me out there and somehow the vast majority of us grew up, got good jobs, created the Internet, so on and so forth. We didn’t take to the streets and start murdering each other just because we played a lot of Duke Nukem or Doom.

So, while the world isn’t perfect, it isn’t the hell-hole that the “monkey see, monkey do” media critics say it is either. Matter of fact, the world seems to be getting better in many important ways–and ways that it should not be if we are to believe all those “world-is-going-to-hell” critics. Just look at the facts about leading social indicators. A new article in Commentary magazine by Peter Wehner and Yuval Levin entitled “Crime, Drugs, Welfare—and Other Good News” points out that just about all the important social indicators (murder, rape, robbery, etc) have witnessed steady decreases. (I provide all the supporting statistics in this paper, starting on page 20). They point out that:

In attitudes toward education, drugs, abortion, religion, marriage, and divorce, the current generation of teenagers and young adults appears in many respects to be more culturally conservative than its immediate predecessors. To any who may have written off American society as incorrigibly corrupt and adrift, these young people offer a powerful reminder of the boundless inner resources still at our disposal, and of our constantly surprising national resilience.

Again, how can this be happening if violent media spawns violent minds and violent acts?! After all, there’s just as much violent media content out there today as there was in the past; some critics claim much more exists now than in the past. So how is it that the kids are alright? Why are things getting so much better when the “monkey see, monkey do” theorists tell us they should be getting so much worse?

The critics, like Sen. Rockefeller, have no answer. They just continue to arrogantly ride around on their moral high horses and tell us that were are all just ignorant sheep who are being programmed to be killers by the media that we enjoy.

In the real world, of course, the rest of of us just yawn, turn off the TV or video game, go to bed happy, and wake up the next day to live a normal, productive lives. Sen. Rockefeller and his fellow media critics should try doing the same thing and leave the rest of us alone.

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

The video game industry’s string of unbroken First Amendment court victories continued this week with a win in the case of Video Software Dealers Association v. Schwarzenegger. [Decision here.] In this case, the VSDA and the Entertainment Software Association brought a suit seeking a permanent injunction against a California law passed in October 2005 (A.B.1179), which would have blocked the sale of violent video games to those under 18. Offending retailers could have been fined for failure to comply with the law.

The court’s decision overturning the law was written by Judge Ronald Whyte and it echoed what every previous decision on this front has held, namely:

• “even though mere entertainment, are nonetheless protected by the First Amendment.” (p. 5) “[T]he Act is a content-based regulation and it is presumptively invalid.” (p. 12)

• “Neither the legislative findings nor the evidence submitted by [the State] suggest that the expression in violent video games is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action…. In addition, neither the legislative findings nor the evidence shows that playing violent video games immediately or necessarily results in real-world violence.” (p. 6) “[A]t this point, there has been no showing that violent video games as defined in the Act, in the absence of other violent media, cause injury to children.” (p. 15)

• “The State has also not shown that the Act will accomplish its goal of protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors more effectively than the existing, narrower industry standards.” (p. 14) “To pass the strict scrutiny test, therefore, the state must demonstrate that the industry labeling standards, either alone or combined with technological controls that enable parents to limit which games their children play, do not equally address the state’s interest in protecting the physical and psychological well-being of children. The State has not demonstrated that the Act is narrowly tailored to address its purpose. Therefore, the Act cannot pass strict scrutiny.”

So, for those policy makers who have not been listening, let’s make it abundantly clear what this decision and the 10 slam-dunk decisions that came before it have ALL concluded:

(1) Video games are a form of expression protected by the First Amendment.

(2) Not a single court in America has supported the theory that a causal link exists between exposure to video games and real-world acts of actual violence.

(3) Parents have many less-restrictive means of dealing with underage access to potentially objectionable games–such as the industry’s private rating and labeling system, third-party ratings and info, console-based controls, and the fact that they don’t have to buy the games in the first place! [See my paper and book for more details on all these things.]

And, so, I’ll again ask the question that I have posed in every essay I write on this topic: When are state and local lawmakers going to stop wasting taxpayer dollars with unnecessary regulatory enactments and fruitless lawsuits aimed at censoring video games? After all, as I calculated before in this essay, the video game industry has recovered roughly $1.5 million in legal fees and that number doesn’t include all the money that state and local governments have wasted litigating these cases through the courts. All that money could have been plowed into educational efforts to help explain to parents and kids how to use the excellent voluntary ratings systems or console-based parental control tools that are at their disposal.

[As always, for the best coverage of this recent decision and its impact, check out the reports over on GamePolitics.com, like this, this, this, and this.]

Now that I have completed my 10-part series of essays to coincide with “National Internet Safety Month,” I thought I’d list them all in one place. All the information in this series of essays was condensed from my new Progress & Freedom Foundation special report, “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods.” I will be making constant updates to that report online, so if you have suggestions please let me know.

The links for the 10 installments in the series are listed below:

Part 1: Online Safety Metasites Part 2: Internet Filters & Monitoring Tools Part 3: Operating Systems and Web Browser Controls Part 4: Website Labeling and Metadata Tagging Part 5: Search Engine Filters and Portals for Kids Part 6: A Voluntary Online Code of Conduct for Online Safety Part 7: The Importance of Online Safety Education Part 8: Social Networking Safety Part 9: Online Safety and Law Enforcement Efforts Part 10: Good Parenting Means Everything!

This is the final installment of my 10-part series of essays that have coincided with “Internet Safety Month.” Many of these essays have focused on the variety of parental controls tools on the market that can help parents better control, or at least monitor, their children’s Internet usage or online communications. (See parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.) Other essays focused on the importance of education, building public awareness, and the need for stepped-up law enforcement efforts aimed at prosecuting online predators. (See parts 7, 8, and 9).

In this final installment, I want to focus on what I believe is the most important—and most frequently overlooked—part of the parental controls and online safety discussion: Good parenting!

Specifically, it is important to realize that many household-level rules and informal parental control methods exist that represent the most important steps that most parents can take in dealing with potentially objectionable content or teaching their children how to be sensible, savvy media users. Indeed, to the extent that many households never take advantage of the many technical tools I outlined in earlier essays, it is likely because they rely instead on the informal household media rules and strategies discussed below.

Household Media Consumption Rules

Household “media consumption rules” are a very important part of any online child safety strategy. A 2003 Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that “Almost all parents say they have some type of rules about their children’s use of media.” For example, a different Kaiser survey of families with infants and preschoolers revealed that 85 percent of those parents who let their children watch TV at that age have rules about what their child can and cannot watch. Of those parents, 63 percent say they always enforce those rules. About the same percentage of parents said they had similar rules for video game and computer usage.

Parents use a wide variety of household media consumption rules. Some can be quite formal in the sense that parents make the rules clear and enforce them routinely in the home over a long period. Other media consumption rules can be fairly informal, however, and are enforced on a more selective basis. Regardless, these household media consumption rules can be grouped into three general categories: (1) “where” rules; (2) “when and how much” rules; and, (3) “under what conditions” rules.

(1) “Where” Rules: One of the most important steps that parents can take to better control their children’s media usage is to establish firm rules regarding where their children can do so. For example, parents can assign a specific television or computer for most media usage and then take steps to ensure that those devices have screening or filtering controls installed and programmed. Additionally, parents can require that their children consume media (TV, Internet, video games, etc.) in a specific room or area of the house where they can keep an eye or ear on what their kids are doing.

At a minimum, parents can start by at least getting televisions, computers, and game consoles out of kids’ bedrooms so they can monitor what is going on. According to a Kaiser survey, 68 percent of 8 to 18 year-olds have televisions in their bedrooms and 31 percent have computers. Parents who let their kids lock themselves in their rooms with media devices have surrendered their first line of defense in protecting their children from potentially objectionable content. Luckily, the reverse appears to be true for computers. A 2006 Pew Internet & American Life Project survey of teenage media usage revealed that 74 percent of homes with teenagers have their computers in an “open family area.” That result was consistent with Pew surveys taken in 2004 and 2000.

(2) “When and How Much” Rules: Parents can also limit the overall number of hours that children can consume various types of media content, or when they can do so. (Several technological tools mentioned in my essay on monitoring tools can help parents accomplish this.) For example, parents can impose restrictions on the times of the day that children can consume media with rules like, “No Internet after 8:00 PM.” The Pew Internet & American Life Project survey mentioned above found that 69 percent limit how much time their children can spend online.

(3) “Under What Condition” Rules: “When and how much” rules represent a carrot-and-stick approach to media consumption / exposure. Parents can incentivize their children by requiring that other tasks or responsibilities be accomplished before media consumption is permitted. For example, many of us are familiar with this very common household media rule: “You have to finish your homework before you get to watch any TV.” Similar rules can be used for computer- and Internet-related activity.

More creatively, parents can formulate a “media allowance” for their children (especially as they get older) to allow them to generally consume the media they want but only within certain boundaries. Again, incentives can be used with this approach. For example, better grades at school might be rewarded by adding one more hour of media time to their overall weekly media allowance.

The Importance of a Good (Media) Diet

The efforts described above represent commonsense approaches parents can use to establish basic ground rules about how media are consumed in the home. But what about the substance of the media that are being consumed within these preestablished boundaries? This might constitute a fourth category—“what” rules—that could be added to the list of informal household media rules listed earlier. For example, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 77 percent of parents already have rules for which TV shows their kids can watch, 67 percent have rules for the kinds of video games they can play, and 85 percent have rules about which Internet websites they can and cannot visit.

How can parents do more to encourage their kids to consume media that they feel are appropriate and enriching? Although every family will have a different set of values and preferences, when it comes to media consumption, parents need to think about what constitutes a sensible “media diet” for their own families. Toward that end, parents should consider taking a “food pyramid” approach to media consumption: Teach kids the importance of a balanced media diet while also teaching them the types of things that you think they should probably avoid altogether.

The federal government has a recommended food pyramid for nutritional purposes, of course. But just as government doesn’t enforce the food pyramid through regulation, neither should it enforce a media food pyramid through mandates or restrictions. In fact, we don’t need the government to tell us what is in a “media food pyramid” at all. This is something that parents can do quite effectively on their own, especially in light of the differing values each household will bring to the job.

A family’s media food pyramid might have specific time allotments and recommended “portions” of different types of content. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than one or two hours of “screen time” per day, but families might vary that depending on their desires and their children’s ages. Once parents decide roughly how much media they will allow their children to consume, they can determine what are the best portions to be served.

Again, every family will bring a different set of needs and values to this task. And the needs of children will vary by age. The proper media diet for a 5-year-old will be much different from that of 15-year-old. In other words, no two family media diets will be the same. The bottom line: While different families will always have different values and approaches, there is something to be said for a balanced diet when it comes to media consumption, just as is the case with child nutrition.

Finally, it should be stressed that not everything in a family’s media diet must be completely educational in character. Sometimes parents and kids just want to relax and enjoy various types of entertainment, whatever they may be. A certain portion of every family’s media diet, therefore, will be non-educational media content—and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Teaching Good Etiquette in a Multimedia World

One of the most important parenting responsibilities involves teaching our children basic manners and rules of social etiquette. For example, we teach them proper dinner table manners, to cover their mouths when they cough or sneeze, to hold doors open for others, or simply to say “thank you” when given something. When we become parents, no one from the government gives us a handbook instructing us to do all this. Rather, these are social conventions that come to us naturally, just as they did with our parents and the generations of parents that came before them.

These informal social rules of etiquette are essential to well-functioning civil society. And it is commonly understood that these are “rules” that families, communities, and other social groups or institutions are primarily responsible for instilling in children. Few would seriously argue that government should have a role in mandating proper etiquette in a free society.

Why should it be any different for media usage? It shouldn’t. Proper online etiquette is a private responsibility, albeit one that is probably not taken as seriously as “offline” etiquette. Again, most parents repeatedly drill basic manners into their kids until it’s clear that they “get it.” Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for online manners. This might be the case because the Internet and digital communications technologies have taken the world by storm and caught the current generation of parents a bit off guard. Unaccustomed to using modern computing or communications devices, some parents may be neglecting their duties in terms of teaching good online etiquette. Of course, as a blue-ribbon panel of experts assembled by the National Academy of Sciences noted, “It may be that as today’s children become parents themselves, their familiarity with rapid rates of technological change will reduce the knowledge gap between them and their children, and mitigate to some extent the consequences of the gap that remains.”

Nonetheless, here are a few lessons children need to be taught as they begin using interactive communications and computing technologies, including cell phones, mobile media devices, interactive video games, instant messaging, social networking websites, blogs, and so on. To begin, kids need to be taught to assume that everything they do in the digital, online world could be archived forever and will be available to future employers, romantic interests, their children and grandchildren, and so forth. This admonition needs to be repeated frequently to remind minors that their online actions today could have profound consequences for them tomorrow. Beyond this warning, children need to be encouraged to follow some other sensible rules while using the Internet and other interactive technologies:

> Treat others you meet online with the same respect that you would accord them in person; > Do not cyber-bully or harass your peers; > Do not post negative comments about your teachers or principals online; > Do not post or share inappropriate pictures of yourself or others; > Avoid talking to strangers online; > Avoid using lewd or obscene language online or in communications; > Do not share your personal information with unknown parties; and, > Talk to parents and educators about serious online concerns and report dangerous situations or harassing communications to them.

To better formalize such guidelines in the home, parents might want to ask their children to sign the “Family Netiquette Plan” and the “Internet Respect Plan,” documents that the National Institute on Media and the Family produces. The one-page “contracts” contain many of the listed guidelines and ask both parents and children to sign the formal household agreement pledging to abide by those rules. Parents can then devise penalties if their children break the rules. The National Institute on Media and the Family recommends the following punishment if the rules are violated: “If there are any violations to expected behaviors, there will be no Internet, TV, or video games for the following three days except for necessary school work.”

Recommended Reading

Finally, I want to highly recommend that you read Cyber-Safe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Teens: Helping Young People Learn To Use the Internet Safely and Responsibly, a wonderful new book by online safety expert Nancy E. Willard. If you only have time to read one thing about sensible parenting strategies in the Internet Age, make it this book. But I do hope you have time to read one more because I also want to recommend you take a look at MySpace Unraveled: A Parent’s Guide to Teen Social Networking by Larry Magid and Anne Collier. It’s a great guide to teaching kids responsible social networking skills and proper Internet etiquette in general.

In late April, the Federal Communications Commission released a new report recommending that the government assume a great role in regulating violent video content on television.In response to that report, I penned a lengthy essay entitled, “FCC Violence Report Concludes that Parenting Doesn’t Work.”

I wasn’t kidding. Flipping through that report, one is struck by the fact that the FCC seems to think that parents are completely incompetent and that only benevolent-minded bureaucrats can save the day from objectionable fare that enters the home. And now Congress is ready to get into the game as well. During the House Commerce hearing I testified at last Friday on “The Images Kids See on the Screen,” Rep. Ed Markey, Chairman of the Telecommunications & Internet subcommittee, said that “I believe Big Father and Big Mother are better able to decide what is appropriate for their kids to watch, rather than Big Brother.” Yet, almost in the same breath, he went on to note that he was prepared to give the FCC greater authority to regulate certain things on television “for the children.” Several others members of the subcommittee made similar statements, professing on one hand to believe in parental responsibility, but then quickly listing several caveats and calling for government to regulate media content in some fashion. Not to be outdone, the Senate Commerce Committee plans a hearing tomorrow on “The Impact of Media Violence on Children.”

For those of us who continue to believe in personal responsibility (as well as that little thing called the First Amendment), this is all very frustrating. As I pointed out in my recent book, “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods,” 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 is acceptable in their homes and in the lives of their children. Parents have been empowered to make decisions for themselves and their families. And parents seem to be growing more comfortable with the idea of making these decisions for themselves instead of turning to government to do it for them. Two new public opinion polls reflect that reality.

One poll was just released today by TV Watch, a nonpartisan coalition of 27 individuals and organizations that promote parental controls and individual choices as an alternative to increased government regulation of TV content. (Disclosure: I am a member of the TV Watch advisory board). Today’s TV Watch poll reveals that:

• 73 percent of parents monitor what their children watch, including 87 percent of parents whose children are ages 0-10; • 86 percent of parents believe that more parental involvement is the best way to keep kids from seeing what they shouldn’t see on television; • 69 percent of parents were aware prior to the survey that all new televisions 13 inches or larger contained a V-Chip; and, • 83 percent of parents are satisfied with the effectiveness of the V-Chip and other blocking tools.

And when asked specifically if they agree with the statement that “the best way to prevent a child from seeing content deemed inappropriate is a parent in the home.. not a politician in Washington,” 92 percent of respondents agreed.

A different poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation was released last week and revealed similar things, although not as strongly as the TV Watch poll. The Kaiser poll found that:

• 65 percent of parents say they closely monitor their children’s media use; • 73 percent of parents say they know a lot about what their kids are doing online; • 87 percent of parents check their children’s instant messaging “buddy lists;” • 82 percent of parents review their children’s social networking sites; and, • 76 percent of parents look to see what websites their children have visited.

Both polls went on the reveal that parents continue to have concerns about what their children see, hear of play, but what parent doesn’t have some concerns about what their kids do!? The important thing to take away from both these polls is that PARENTS ARE PARENTING! They are learning to cope with new media realities and adapt to them to make sure they can monitor and control their children’s media experiences.

In my new book, I spend a great deal of time discussing the importance of informal household media rules as the ultimate in parental control efforts. Surveys show that almost all parents use some combination of informal household media rules to control or monitor their children’s media consumption. (See Part II of my book). And these new polls reflect that reality. And, yet, debates about inappropriate content get so caught up with disputes about technical controls, ratings or even government regulation that we forget that parents often view all these things merely as backup plans to their own household rules.

Bottom line: Don’t give up on parents. Parental responsibility, not government regulation, remains the best way to deal with media in our homes and their lives of our children.

Some lawmakers at the federal, state and local level have advocated video game industry regulation in the name of protecting children from potentially objectionable content, usually of a violent nature. In my opinion, the better approach–and one that doesn’t involve government censorship or regulation of games–is to empower parents to better make these decisions for their own families. And the key to that effort is an effective rating / labeling system for game content that parents understand and use.

Luckily, there are good signs that the video game industry’s voluntary ratings system–the ESRB (the Entertainment Software Rating Board)–is doing exactly that. The game industry established the ESRB in 1994 and it has rated thousands of games since then. (The ESRB estimates it rates over 1,000 games per year). Virtually every title produced by major game developers for retail sale today carries an ESRB rating and content descriptors. Generally speaking, the only games that do not carry ESRB ratings today are those developed by web amateurs that are freely traded or downloaded via the Internet.

The ESRB applies seven different rating symbols and over 30 different content “descriptors” that it uses to give consumers highly detailed information about games. Thus, by simply glancing at the back of each game container, parents can quickly gauge the appropriateness of the title for their children.

So, how effective is this system, as measured by parental awareness and usage of the ESRB ratings and labels? Since 1999, the ESRB has asked Peter D. Hart Research Associates to study that question and conduct polls asking parents if they are aware of the ESRB ratings and if they use them. As this chart illustrates, the results are impressive with both awareness and use growing rapidly since 1999:

Better yet, all gaming platforms and most PCs can read these ratings and labels and allow parents to block games rated above a certain level they find unacceptable. But the real strength of the ESRB’s ratings system lies in the content descriptors, which give parents plenty of warning about what they will see or hear in each title. That way, parents can talk to their kids about those games or just not buy them for their kids until they think they are ready.

The game industry deserves credit not only for creating such an excellent content rating / labeling system, but also putting significant resources into public education / awareness efforts to ensure parents know how to take advantage of it. So then, why are lawmakers continuing to waste millions of taxpayer dollars litigating unneeded regulatory efforts?

Over at National Review Online today, Peter Suderman has a good discussion of the current state of video game politics. As usual, a lot of politicians are playing games; political games, that is. Suderman notes that:

…attacking the video-game industry has long been a favored sport amongst politicians eager to shore up their credibility with the concerned parent crowd. At the state level, at least ten laws banning the sale of certain video games to minors have been brought to life. In California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a guy who made his name hacking and slashing his enemies to a bloody pulp on the big screen, apparently didn’t want high schoolers doing digital imitations: He tried to ban the sale of violent games to minors back in 2005. Oregon is currently considering a similar law, and New York Governor Eliot Spitzer recently stated that he intends to pursue one as well. But these laws go down like a final level boss once they hit the courts. To date, not one of the dubious proposals has stood up to a court challenge. Some lawmakers can’t even be bothered to worry about anything so insignificant as considering whether a law is constitutional. Regarding one video-game ban, Minnesota state legislator Sandy Poppas shrugged off any such responsibility, saying, “Legislators don’t worry too much about what’s constitutional. We just try to do what’s right, and we let the courts figure that out.” The recurrent bashing of the game industry tends to resemble a major league team taking on a troop of t-ballers: Politicians get to knock a couple of balls out of the park in front of parents, but the whole thing is just a show.

Indeed it is. I made a similar argument in a piece for NRO last year as well as my big PFF study, “Fact and Fiction in the Debate over Video Game Regulation.”

It is too early to say for sure but there are some encouraging signs that our public policymakers are finally starting to get the point went it comes to the sensibility (and constitutional futility) of trying to regulate video game content. Just yesterday, for example, lawmakers in the District of Columbia passed legislation that establishes a program to educate consumers about existing video game ratings and console-based controls. This represents a major shift away from the regulatory approach originally floated by incoming D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty. While serving as a D.C. Councilman, Fenty introduced a bill that would have proposed the old regulatory combo of mandates and stiff fines on game retailers who didn’t enforce the city’s approved regulatory scheme.

But the new version of the bill, entitled the “Consumer Education on Video and Computer Games for Minors Act,” takes a very different approach. The bill requires the city to “Develop a consumer education program to educate consumers about the appropriateness of video and computer games for certain ago groups, which may include information on video and computer game rating systems and the manner in which parental controls can enhance the ability of parents to regulate their children’s access to video and computer games.”

In a phrase, D.C.’s new approach is “education, not regulation.” And while some might object to the idea of government promoting education efforts about video game ratings or console controls, that approach is infinitely more sensible (and constitutionally permissible) than government censorship.

What makes D.C.’s turnabout particularly noteworthy is that is comes just a week after the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Entertainment Software Association v. Blagojevich, the Illinois case I discussed here last week. In that decision, judges once again held a state law unconstitutional for attempting to regulate video game speech. Specifically, the Circuit Court argued that the statute in question in the Illinois case was not narrowly tailored and did not represent the “least restrictive alternative” available to serve the interest of protecting children from potentially objectionable content. The Court noted that the industry’s voluntary ratings systems works quite effectively and that if the state wanted to adopt a less restrictive approach it could have simply could have adopted an educational approach. Noting that the parents are involved in well over 83 percent of their children’s video game purchases, the Court went on to argue that:

“If Illinois passed legislation which increased awareness of the ESRB [Entertainment Software Rating Board voluntary ratings] system, perhaps through a wide media campaign, the already-high rate of parental involvement could only rise. Nothing in the record convinces us that this proposal would not be at least as effective as the proposed speech restrictions.”

Again, such an approach has the added benefit of likely remaining within the boundaries of the Constitution and the First Amendment since government would not be seeking to restrict speech but simply inform and empower parents regarding the parental control options already at their disposal.

Let’s hope other lawmakers heed this advice before they waste more money litigating video game cases through the courts. According to the Electronic Software Association (ESA) which represents the video game industry and defends its rights in court, state lawmakers have had to shell out over $1.5 million in legal fees to the video game industry after losing cases in the following five cities or states:

Illinois–$510,000 Washington State–$344,000 St. Louis (8th Circuit)–$180,000 Indianapolis (7th Circuit)–$318,000 Michigan–$180,000

To be clear, that’s $1.5 million taxpayer dollars that have been squandered on fruitless efforts to censor video game content after several courts had already held similar efforts unconstitutional. And that’s $1.5 million that could have been plowed into educational efforts to help explain to parents and kids how to use the excellent voluntary ratings systems or console-based parental control tools that are at their disposal.

Say it with me, state lawmakers, and repeat it 3 times so you don’t forget it:

“Education, Not Regulation.” “Education, Not Regulation.” “Education, Not Regulation.”

It’s the right answer, and the less expensive one!