I have just released a new PFF white paper on “The Perils of Mandatory Parental Controls and Restrictive Defaults.” It points out the dangers of government mandating that parental controls be defaulted to their most restrictive position. I’ve gone ahead and just pasted the entire text below (but without the footnotes):

During ongoing debates about parental controls, ratings, and online child safety, there have occasionally been rumblings about the possibility of requiring that media, computing and communications devices: (1) be shipped to market with parental controls embedded, and possibly, (2) those controls being defaulted to their most restrictive position, forcing users to opt out of the controls later if they wanted to consume media rated above a certain threshold.

Imagine, for example, a law requiring that every television, TV set-top box, and video game console be shipped with on-board screening technologies that were set to block any content rated above “G” for movies, “TV-Y” for television, or “E” for video games, which are the most restrictive rating designations for each type of media. Similarly, all personal computers or portable media devices sold to the public could be forced to have filters embedded that were set to block all “objectionable” content, however defined.

If “default” requirements such as this were mandated by law, parents would be forced to opt out of the restrictions by granting their children selective permission to media content or online services. In theory, this might help limit underage access to objectionable media or online content. Such a mandate might be viewed as less intrusive than direct government censorship and, therefore, less likely to run afoul of the constitution.

For these reasons, such a proposal would likely have great appeal among some policymakers, “family” groups, child safety advocates, and parents. But mandating parental controls and restrictive defaults is a dangerous and elitist idea that must be rejected because it will have many unintended consequences and not likely achieve the goal of better protecting our kids. You Can Lead a Horse to Water, But…

As I have pointed out in my book on 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 constitutes acceptable media content in their homes and in the lives of their children. And this is true for all forms of media, from TV and music to video games and the Internet.

That being said, one of the enduring mysteries about parental controls is why many parents do not take advantage of the tools and options at their disposal. It’s the proverbial “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink” problem. There are a few reasons why this may be the case.

First, many households may not take advantage of parental control tools because they instead rely on a variety of non-technical “household media rules.” In chapter 2 of my book, I identified four categories of household media rules that surveys show almost all parents use in some combination to control their children’s media consumption: (1) “where” rules; (2) “when and how much” rules; (3) “under what conditions” rules, and, (4) “what” rules.

Second, in many homes, technical controls and rating systems are viewed as unnecessary if the kids are below or above a certain age. Many parents of children under 4 or 5 years of age, for example, do not let their kids consume much media, or they at least have much tighter control over their children’s media consumption habits. And after kids reach their mid-teen years, many parents eschew technical controls because they either trust their kids, or better yet, they constantly talk to them about media content or their online experiences.

Of course, it could also be the case that some parents do not use technical controls or rating systems because they find them too confusing. That may be true to some extent, but it is important to note that these controls and rating systems are getting increasingly easy to use. Most parental control tools are just one or two clicks away on most TVs, gaming systems, or personal computers. And although there are different rating schemes for different forms of media, those rating systems share much in common and are all quite descriptive. Setting up parental controls is certainly no more difficult now that programming a personal video recorder or uploading digital photographs to the Internet.

Finally, it may be the case that some parents are simply not aware of the controls or ratings. This too, however, is increasingly unlikely. Survey data suggests a growing familiarity with most rating systems, although some more than others. And companies and non-profit organizations are increasingly offering more information and tutorials along with the parental control tools that are typically embedded, free-of-charge, in almost all modern media devices. In any event, the answer to low awareness issues is not mandatory defaults but, as I explain below, increased educational efforts.

Forcing the Issue

Still, for whatever reason, many parents are not using parental controls or rating systems and, at the same time, many feel or express some concerns about being able to manage media use by their children. Regardless of the culprit—and it could be a combination of all of the factors listed above—what more could be done to encourage these parents to use these technical controls and rating systems to limit children’s access to potentially objectionable content or communications? There are two general options.

Increased Education & Empowerment Options One way to increase parental comfort levels is through better education and awareness-building initiatives. As mentioned, many companies already offer detailed information and tutorials along with the parental control tools they offer, but more could always be done to promote awareness of the tools and how to use them. Many parents may feel media use in their homes is unmanageable because they are unaware of their options or unsure how to utilize the available tools.

One sensible first step is the inclusion of easy-to-understand instructions in all user manuals. “Tip sheets” could also be bundled along with the products, which provide a summary of how set up parental controls, or what relevant ratings meant. Most vendors already offer this and much more on their websites, but sometimes the URLs for those pages can be difficult to find. All media companies should consider placing clearly labeled links on their websites to guide visitors to parental controls, ratings information, or online safety tips. Finally, customer support hotlines—whether automated and human-based—could probably be improved and expanded.

Again, most companies are already moving in this direction today. It’s simply a smart business practice since many parents increasingly expect such services to be available. To the extent some companies aren’t keeping up, others—policymakers and child safety groups, in particular—are increasing putting pressure on them to provide such tools and assistance.

Mandated Controls & Maximum Defaults The second approach to encouraging more widespread use of parental controls and rating systems would involve the sort of legal mandates described above. Presumably, this would require a law or regulation that would: (1) spell out what sort of controls or filters would be embedded in every “media or computing device” and then, (2) determine how restrictive the default control settings would be before the hardware or software in question was marketed. In essence, this would be a mandatory “opt out” regime for parental controls / filters.

The first portion of the mandate is largely unnecessary; almost all major media devices marketed today already contain some sort of parental control tools. All TVs include V-chips, all set-top boxes include additional TV screening controls, and all video game consoles include blocking tools for both games and movies. With PCs, filters and monitoring tools have been made ubiquitously available by ISPs and non-profit entities for little or no charge, and operating systems like the new Windows Vista have included parental control tools. Importantly, almost all of these tools are free-of-charge. A variety of supplementary tools can be purchased online or from electronics retailers or computer stores. As a general matter, moreover, it is rarely sound public policy to have governments—rather than markets—select a particular technology or service as a mandatory feature. This risks locking in less effective technology and, in a worst case scenario, creating financial windfalls for well-connected technology vendors.

The real debate, then, comes down to the question of how effective those embedded controls are at meeting the interests of parents, and whether the embedded controls should have pre-established defaults set to the most restrictive setting available before they are shipped or downloaded. Of course, any company could voluntarily offer such an alternative today. It’s worth asking, therefore, why are no companies currently doing so?

Enforcement Hassles

There are many reasons why no media or communications companies are currently offering such maximally restrictive defaults when they ship their products to market, and those reasons are instructive when considering the wisdom of mandating that such defaulted controls be imposed by law.

To begin, there’s just not as much demand for this as some might think. Again, not all parents see the need to use parental controls or ratings, usually because they rely on household rules or tightly monitor or restrict access to media and communications devices.

Second, not all homes have children in them. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, almost 68 percent of American homes do not have any children under 18 years of age in residence. Obviously, there is less interest in parental control technologies in adult-only homes.

Third, because there are many adults who purchase media devices for their own use, it would be illogical to ship all devices or products to market with the controls set to the most restrictive setting. In fact, many consumers (even some who are parents themselves) would likely find it annoying, and perhaps even somewhat insulting, to be forced to opt out of such controls when they purchase new media hardware or software. And it’s likely that as soon as such devices or services hit the market, consumer complaint hotlines would light up like Christmas trees due to calls from irate users griping about what they imagine to be defective hardware or software.

Could companies offer multiple versions of their hardware or software products to solve this problem? For example, some set-top boxes, gaming consoles, and PCs could be sold and labeled as “Kid-Friendly” (or “locked”) while others are “Adult-Only” (or “unlocked”). It goes without saying that this would represent a major expense to many vendors (especially hardware vendors). It could also create potential confusion when the devices are labeled and marketed for sale. And what would the penalty be for a mislabeled device, or the accidental sale of such a device to a minor?

Perverse Incentives and Possible Evasion

It may be that there is a market for such “kid-friendly” devices or services. There are, for example, some wireless device and service options designed for kids that have limited features, or some toy (and toy-like) devices that have filters on by default, or only work with certain age-appropriate internet services. Many social networking services designed for kids have strict settings on by default. These may well be fantastic choices for some parents and kids. But whether that is the case seems to be best determined by the market.

Mandating such a dual-version approach, particularly for mass-market general use devices like PCs and Televisions, seems likely to create perverse incentives, both for consumers and for media and technology providers. If services and devices are sold with the highest levels of restrictions active by default, many parents might seek to avoid the annoyance associated with the “kid-friendly” versions of the device and just purchase “unlocked” hardware or software. And kids would likely get quickly to work cracking the defaults on the locked / kid-friendly versions of the hardware or software. (Witness what happened in Australia within a few days of the government releasing subsidized filtering software). The result would be some significant degree of consumer dissatisfaction with high-default services and, except perhaps in the case of households with very young children, dissatisfaction with locked/kid-friendly services and devices.

Among the possible consequences would be a perverse incentive for service providers and device makers to avoid investing in parental control tools. If setting controls to the highest default level is mandatory, but at the same time most consumers don’t prefer that default level, some consumer backlash is inevitable. And when consumers are unhappy about a service feature—but companies are not permitted to address that unhappiness by turning off the higher settings—a likely result could be for companies to weaken or even not offer parental controls altogether.

There are other issues associated with enforcing such a mandate. Regulators would need to grapple with the possibility of widespread evasion in terms of offshore sales and black market devices. For example, would it be illegal for an eBay vendor located in Hong Kong to sell a U.S.-based customer an “unlocked” PlayStation Portable without first verifying that they are indeed an adult? If so, that’s another layer of regulation that needs to be considered in terms of online age verification.

Of course, governments could forbid the development of “unlocked” devices or software and mandate that every media or computing device sent to market had mandatory defaults set for maximum restrictiveness. Even assuming such rules would not run afoul of international trade rules, many of the same problems would still develop, however. It will likely be difficult to stem the flow of “illegal devices” or software, and hackers would likely only work harder to defeat existing controls. And what about all the existing “unlocked” devices already on the market? This mandate might breathe new life into older devices and discourage some consumers from making the jump to new hardware and software that includes superior parental control tools.

A final enforcement question relates to how broadly “media devices” are defined for purposed of this mandate. TVs, set-top boxes, gaming consoles and PCs would all be covered, of course. But what about mobile phones, iPods, MP3 players, PlayStation Portables and GameBoys, and so on? If Congress or the Federal Communications Commission defines “media devices” broadly, it would bring an unprecedented array of consumer electronic devices and communications technologies under the purview of federal regulatory authorities. Each class of devices would likely have its own set of enterprising hackers and renegade device makers, eager to evade the mandates. Presumably, financial penalties would be required and various enforcement actions would be sanctioned in an attempt to thwart such activity. Finally, as a result of these new mandates, the prices all the affected media devices would likely rise for consumers.

Unintended Consequences and Constitutional Concerns

At this point, some supporters of such an approach might be thinking: So what? Regulation is often difficult, even expensive, but we find ways to enforce many other laws if for no other reason than to try to teach the public, or kids, a lesson. In this case, some slippage in the system might be viewed as an acceptable trade-off for the increased awareness among some parents about parental control tools or potentially objectionable media content or forms of online communications.

But this mentality is quite myopic in that it ignores the many unintended consequences of such a regulatory regime. The fundamental problem with a mandate of this sort is that, while well-intentioned, it threatens to upset the current balance of things and could leave parents and their children less well off.

As was stated previously, there has never been a time in our nation’s history when parents have had more tools and methods at their disposal. It would be foolish, however, to think that this situation might not be retarded or even reversed by misguided public policy prescriptions. One of the most unfortunate consequences of such a mandate would be that it might lull some parents into a false sense of security. If parents came to believe that because a filter was installed they need do nothing more to help their children go online safely, or become engaged in their media choices, that would be an extremely troubling outcome.

Moreover, as was noted above, a rule mandating restrictive parental control defaults might create perverse incentives for industry to not rate content or build better controls at all. After all, it is important to remember that the ratings and controls that government is seeking to regulate here are voluntary and private; there is no reason they couldn’t be abandoned tomorrow. Of course, if they were abandoned that might lead to calls for government intervention / regulation and the substitution of some sort of universal ratings regime for the voluntary systems that exist today. If that scenario developed, lawmakers will be forced into making content-based determinations that would likely run afoul of the First Amendment.

But even if voluntary rating systems remained in place as the basis of a new federal enforcement regime, there are some constitutional issues in play here. Namely, it would be unconstitutional for government to enshrine a private ratings scheme into law or use it as a trigger for legal liability. That is what several courts have held in past years after some state and local governments attempted to enact laws or ordinances based upon the MPAA’s voluntary movie ratings system.

For example, in Borger v. Bisciglia a U.S. District Court held that “[A] private organization’s ratings system cannot be used to determine whether a movie receives constitutional protection.” Similarly, in Swope v. Lubbers, the court held that “[t]he standards by which the movie industry rates its films do not correspond to the… criteria for determining whether an item merits constitutional protection or not.” Roughly a dozen court cases have come to largely the same conclusion: Government cannot co-opt a voluntary, private ratings system for its own ends. Recent video game cases have reached similar conclusions. Thus, a law mandating parental control defaults based on voluntary ratings systems will likely end up in court and become the subject of another protracted legal battle between government and industry.

Is This Really Necessary?

Finally, it’s worth noting that most media, communications, and computing devices cost substantial sums of money. Televisions, movies, video games, cell phones, MP3 players, computers, and so on, do not just drop from high-tech heaven into our kids’ laps! When our kids want those things—or want things that are advertised on those media platforms—they must come to us and ask for money (usually a lot of it). This “power of the purse” is, in many ways, the ultimate parental control tool. If parents are shelling out money for such devices, presumably they are also in a good position to set some rules about the use of those devices once they are brought into the home. Whether those rules take the form of informal household media rules or technical parental controls is, ultimately, a decision that each family must make for themselves. There is no reason for government to make that decision preemptively for all households by mandating highly restrictive parental control defaults.

Moreover, there are better ways for government and industry to encourage the diffusion and adoption of parental control tools and rating systems. Instead of spending money litigating cases against the government, industry should plow their resources into improved, easier-to-use parental control tools and consumer education efforts. And, as was mentioned above, government education and awareness-building campaigns could go a long way toward improving consumer adoption. In the past, government has helped change public attitudes about safety in other contexts by undertaking (or lending support to) various public awareness campaigns, including: forest fire prevention efforts (“Smokey the Bear” campaigns); anti-littering efforts (“Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute”), and seat-belt safety. Those campaigns have helped forever change behavior and improved public safety as a result.

Policymakers should tap these more constructive, constitutional solutions and steer clear of mandating parental controls and restrictive default settings that would, ultimately, have many unintended consequences and leave parents and children worse off in the long run.

The long-awaited final report of the UK’s Byron Review on Children and New Technology is finally out. It is called Safer Children in a Digital World. It focuses on the benefits and risks associated with the Internet and video games. I will be posting more about the specifics in coming days, but the general thrust of the report–at least from the executive summary–looks quite good. Here’s a few key quotes:

* Technology offers extraordinary opportunities for all of society including children and young people. The internet allows for global exploration which can also bring risks, often paralleling the offline world. * “New media are often met by public concern about their impact on society and anxiety and polarisation of the debate can lead to emotive calls for action.” … “Debates and research in this area can be highly polarised and charged with emotion.” * “I propose that we seek to achieve gains in these three areas by having a national strategy for child internet safety which involves better self-regulation and better provision of information and education for children and families.” * “We need to take into account children’s individual strengths and vulnerabilities, because the factors that can discriminate a ‘beneficial’ from a ‘harmful’ experience online and in video games will often be individual factors in the child. The very same content can be useful to a child at a certain point in their life and development and may be equally damaging to another child.”

I like the focus on education and parental oversight that I see in the report. Here’s a particular good recommendation that closely parallels what I have called for in my own work:

* We can use these findings to help us navigate a practical and sensible approach to helping our children manage risks. This is no different to how we think about managing risk for children in the offline world, where decreasing supervision and monitoring occurs with age as we judge our children to be increasing in their competence to identify and manage risks. So, when we teach our children to cross the road safely we do it in stages: > We hold their hand when they cross the road. > We teach them to think, look both ways and then cross. > When we see that they are starting to understand this we let them cross walking beside us, without holding on to them. > Eventually we let them do it alone, maybe watching from a distance at first, but then unsupervised. > And throughout this, the environment supports them with signs and expected behaviour from others in the community – the green man, zebra crossings, speed limits and other responsible adults.

This is very much in line with the “educate & empower” focus of many past child safety reviews here in the States.

Of course, there are 200 pages more for me to get through, so I will need to review the details to see what they look like. More later.

Update: I think this paragraph on pg. 17 of the report makes an essential point:

“Deciding what is inappropriate is subjective and based on many factors including the age, experience, values, belief systems and culture of the person making that decision. Some behaviours that take place on the internet, such as children’s exploration to do with sexuality, may be considered inappropriate or even delinquent by an adult, but can play an important role in the young person’s development. So what might be offensive for one person may be empowering for another.”

Indeed. This is the “eye of the beholder” point I always try to make in all my work about content regulation. As the old saying goes, ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.’

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.]

Back in 2005, I threw away a book I was writing. Well, I didn’t exactly toss it in a garbage can or take a match to the manuscript; I just abandoned the project to work on other things, including a different book and a big law review article. I’m still mad at myself for never finishing it up because I think it put forward a provocative thesis: Censorship is dead. Specifically, as I argued in the first lines of the book, “A confluence of social, legal and, most importantly, technological developments is slowly undermining the ability of legislators and regulators, at all levels of government, to control the nature or quality of speech or media programming.” Accordingly, the running title for the book was: “The End of Censorship?: The Future of Content Controls in a World of Media Convergence.”

Anyway, I recently unearthed an old draft of this discarded manuscript and thought I might as well at least throw the introduction online. In it, I outline my thesis and the “5 Reasons Content Controls Will Break Down.” I also highlight how governments will fight back and discuss what alternatives are out there to address concerns about objectionable content. Someone out there might be interested in all this even though much of what I say here is now widely accepted or been said better by others. I’ve stripped out all the footnotes and cut out significant sections to make what follows more readable. So, here it goes…

“The End of Censorship? The Future of Content Controls in a World of Media Convergence.”

Content regulation–at least as it has been traditionally defined and enforced in the United States–is doomed. A confluence of social, legal and, most importantly, technological developments is slowly undermining the ability of legislators and regulators, at all levels of government, to control the nature or quality of speech or media programming. Specifically, it is the distribution channel-based system of content regulation employed in the U.S. and many other nations that is breaking down. That is, the ability of governments to regulate speech and expression by regulating its distribution channel or provider (such as broadcasting), represents in increasingly ineffective and illogical method of policing content flows.

The demise of traditional content controls may take many years–potentially even decades–to play out, but signs of the impending death of the old regulatory regime are already evident.

For example, we know the old regulatory regime is in trouble when consumers can use a device such as the Sony PlayStation Portable not just to play games and watch movies, but also to surf the Internet, e-mail or instant message friends, download music and videos, and even watch live TV. Similarly, Apple’s wildly popular iPod, which can be used to enjoy music and video anywhere consumers wish, has spawned a whole new world of mobile media opportunities and imitators. And in late 2005, TiVo announced it would be making its popular video “space-shifting” services available through both iPods and PlayStation Portables, meaning that almost any piece of televised video content will also be accessible over those (and other) devices in the future.

And technologies like the PlayStation Portable, the iPod and TiVo are just the tip of the iceberg. Just as wireless technologies have revolutionized the telecommunications sector, in a few years, most consumers will own some sort of mobile media gadget (probably several) that enables “anywhere, anytime” media consumption. This book will document countless other technologies and services that are currently undermining traditional content control regimes.

Importantly, content controls can be broadly defined to not only include the regulation of “objectionable” content (whatever that might include), but also the promotion of so-called “public interest” content or other media quality objectives. Examples would include children’s television programming mandates, free airtime for politicians, “must-carry” mandates, and “PEG” (public, educational, and governmental) access requirements. Such content controls are also doomed. Whether government is regulating with the intention of repressing or promoting specific viewpoints or content it makes little difference; both types of controls are being rapidly undermined by new marketplace developments and realities.

These developments are the inevitable outgrowth of the relentless pace of technological and social change and that society will need to adapt to these changes very quickly because there is no reversing these trends. For millions of parents like me, this will mean we will need to find methods of countering the problems that technology has created in terms of offering us abundant and ubiquitous media options. Parents will need to harness other technologies and services to control their children’s access to objectionable programming or lead them to the sort of programming they want them to consume. While that sounds like a formidable challenge, the good news is that there is more enriching and educational fare available today than ever before, and more ways for parents to filter access to the objectionable content they do not want their children to see or hear. Admittedly, however, the challenge of controlling access to unwanted content will be great, and parents will have to be more vigilant than ever.

Many policymakers and pro-regulatory special interest groups will dwell on the types of content that they find distasteful and continue to advocate a generous role for government as protector of morality, taste and “quality” programming. But this is fool’s errand. In our modern world of media abundance, rapid proliferation of distribution outlets, the digitization of all information, and relentless technological change and convergence, there is simply no way that government can effectively control information and content flows absent extreme measures.

From Information Poverty to Information Abundance To understand why traditional content controls are doomed, it’s necessary to step back and take stock of just how far we’ve come in recent decades in terms of media and information diffusion.

[Note: At this point in the narrative, I spent a few pages illustrating exactly how much better off society is today than ever before in terms of the abundance of information and entertainment at our collective disposal. But then I pointed out that…]

Alas, life in the “Information Age” has its detractors. The funny thing about information and media is that the more you have, the more people find to complain about. Nowhere is this more clearly evident than in the debate over the regulation of “indecent” content on television, radio, cable or the Internet. This is not a new debate, of course. The impulse to control content is as old as the press or even writing itself. The first day someone put pen (or quill) to paper was likely also the first day someone proposed censoring the message that writer sought to convey.

In the wake of a handful of high-profile incidents on broadcast television and radio over the past few years, a significant new regulatory push has been underway in Congress and at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Critics aim to crack down on indecency on broadcast radio and TV. The regulation of “excessive violence” is also a commonly stated goal of these regulatory advocates. Such efforts to regulate violence in media are based on many of the same theories or arguments as indecency regulation.

Importantly, many of the latest regulatory proposals would expand media regulation in significant new ways, not only for over-the-air broadcast licensees, but also for subscription-based outlets such as cable and satellite networks. This would be the case even though recent First Amendment judicial decisions dealing with new media outlets, namely the Internet and video games, are pushing in the opposite direction. The courts have held that attempts to regulate content on the Internet, or violence in video games, are unconstitutional burdens on freedom of speech and expression.

The 5 Reasons Traditional Content Controls Will Break Down Thus, America’s media policy is now stuck in a jurisprudential Twilight Zone. Speakers using the Internet or print outlets (i.e., newspapers and magazines) are guaranteed the gold standard of First Amendment protection, while those using broadcast radio and television to speak are only accorded the equivalent of second-class free speech rights. Meanwhile, cable and satellite speakers are caught somewhere in the middle with the courts generally granting them more freedom than broadcasters, but not as much as speakers using the Internet or newspapers. And it remains to be seen how emerging media technologies and outlets will be classified.

As the authors of one popular communications law book note: “The central problem is that communications law has always been based on different rules for different media—different regulations, different jurisdictions, even… different levels of First Amendment protection. Unfortunately, this no longer reflects technological reality.” (Carter, Dee, and Zuckman, Mass Communications Law, 2000) Indeed, this current distribution channel-based legal arrangement is unjust, indefensible, and ultimately unsustainable for five reasons:

(1) Convergence: A jurisprudence so radically divided cannot stand in an age of rapid technological convergence. Media content and outlets are blurring together today thanks to the rise of myriad new technologies and competitors. These new media technologies and competitors generally ignore or reject the distribution-based distinctions and limitations of the past. In other words, convergence means that media content is increasingly being “unbundled” from its traditional distribution platforms and finding many paths to the consumers. As a result of these developments, it is now possible to consume to the same piece of content via a broadcast TV or radio station, a cable channel, a satellite system, on a DVD player, on a cell phone or mobile media device, on a portable gaming system, or over the Internet. In this “multiplatform” environment, consumers can increasingly dictate when, where and how they consume media content. “For us, multiplatform is more than the buzzword of the day,” says MTV President Christina Norman. “It is the way this audience lives.” Thus, contrary to the famous assertion of media analyst Marshall McLuhan that “the medium is the message,” today the medium is just another medium or distribution path; it is the message (or content in general) that is now truly king.

Thus, convergence will make it increasingly complicated and intrusive for lawmakers to apply old media standards and regulations to newer technologies and outlets. “The phenomenon of convergence has… rendered obsolete a regime in which differential content regulation is applied based on the technology used to deliver content,” argued Jeff Eisenach and Randolph May of the Progress & Freedom Foundation in 2000.

The following examples illustrate how convergence renders the old regime obsolete as Eisenach and May suggest. In March 2006, following an FCC decision to impose steep new indecency fines on certain broadcast television shows, the WB Network decided to self-censor several scenes from a new drama that was about to air on its broadcast television affiliates. The network was concerned that it might be subjected to fines for airing the new show without certain edits. But before they aired the edited pilot episode on their WB broadcast television outlets, the network decided to air the unedited version on their Internet website. According to the New York Times, “It [was] the first time a network has offered on another outlet an uncut version of a program it has been forced to censor.”

But this won’t be the last time this happens in a world of proliferating media platforms and delivery options. Indeed, just a few months after WB took this step, CBS television network affiliates came under pressure from certain regulatory activist groups to self-censor or not air an award-winning documentary about the “9/11” terrorist attacks because it contained profanities uttered by firefighters or citizen under great duress. Several local CBS affiliates bowed to the pressure and decided not to air the documentary. But CBS Corp. responded by airing the entire unedited version of the documentary on its website so that consumers in areas where it had been blacked out could see it.

Opportunities for such cross-platform marketing are exploding. … [I then provided dozens of additional examples.]

In sum, because convergence is shattering the distribution-based business and regulatory distinctions of the past, it means that media regulation in general, and speech controls in particular, will be severely strained.

(2) Scale: Because technological and media convergence is now upon us, in the future, a regulatory attack on one type of media outlet or technology could be tantamount to an attack on all media. This is especially the case given the increasingly global scale of the Internet and modern media networks and digital communications technologies.

In the past, the reach of media was limited by geographic, technological, and cultural / language considerations. Today, by contrast, media can now flow across the globe at the click of a button because of the dramatic expansion of Internet access and broadband connectivity. While important cultural / language barriers remain, many traditional geographic and technological limitations are fading away. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argues, the world is becoming more “flat” or interconnected.

Thus, the scale of modern digital media content and operations will greatly complicate government efforts to impose “community standards” on one type of content or distribution outlet given the borderless nature of most modern media. Nonetheless, lawmakers–local, national, and global–will almost certainly attempt to expand regulations (including content controls) to cover emerging media technologies and outlets as they become more popular. Lawmakers in the United States are already debating how to expand indecency controls to cable and satellite networks, for example. And policymakers in Europe, Canada and Australia are also grappling with this and proposing the expansion of traditional regulatory regimes to new technologies or providers.

(3) Volume: But as policymakers continue to push out the confines of traditional media / content regulation, the sheer volume of media activity that exists today will greatly complicate the task before them. In simple terms, there is just too much stuff for regulators to police today relative to the past. As a blue ribbon panel assembled by the National Research Council reported in 2002: “The volume of information on the Internet is so large–and changes so rapidly–that it is simply impractical for human beings to evaluate every discrete piece of information for inappropriateness.”

While it may have been possible to oversee a handful of TV and radio stations in each community or nation in the past, today’s electronic media universe is so diverse and enormous—and evolving so quickly—that content controls will gradually break down in light of the enforcement burden at hand. A few numbers regarding Internet growth and usage, in particular, can help put this “problem” into perspective:

[A half dozen factoids then followed documenting the growth of online activity.]

(4) User-Generated Content: Considering the relative youth of this new communications / entertainment medium, these are astonishing growth numbers. This explosive growth is a direct result of the seismic shifts underway in our new world of organic, bottom-up media creation—what Wired editor Chris Anderson refers to as “the Age of Peer Production”:

“The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in the aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale.”

In this new world in which every man, woman and child can be a one-person publishing house or self-broadcaster, restrictions on viewing, listening or downloading will be become increasingly difficult to devise and enforce. …

[Still more examples followed that illustrated how this trend was also undermining content control efforts.]

(5) The First Amendment: Given the problems of convergence, scale, volume, and the rise of user-generated content, regulators might react by simply sticking to the regulation of licensed electronic media providers, namely, television and radio broadcasters. After all, lawmakers already have a great deal of leverage over those media outlets and they might hope that by regulating them alone, a message will be sent to other media providers regarding what is acceptable content.

But that is a false hope. Traditional “free, over-the-air” broadcasting represents a steadily shrinking portion of our modern media universe. In recent years, the hegemony of the “big 3” television networks and the powerful local radio broadcast stations has been greatly eroded. Indeed, broadcasters are now struggling to adapt and survive in a world of media abundance and intense competition. Consequently, if regulators simply continue to regulate licensed broadcasters alone, it will simply accelerate the decline of broadcasting relative to its many new competitors. Asymmetrical regulation will be the death warrant for free, over-the-air broadcasting.

Eventually, the very existence of this asymmetry will force a major Supreme Court showdown testing the legitimacy of the bedrock cases upon which America’s broadcast content control regime rests: Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC (1969) and FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978). Red Lion held that broadcast television and radio could be regulated differently than traditional print outlets (newspapers and magazines) because broadcast outlets were more “scarce” than other media outlets and, therefore, required government licenses to operate. Consequently, speech controls were viewed as a natural outgrowth of government licensing and oversight responsibilities in the name of protecting “the public interest.” Pacifica held that broadcasters shouldn’t receive the same First Amendment protections as other media because broadcasting was more “pervasive” throughout society and also more “uniquely accessible” to children. To reiterate, these standards were only applied to broadcast radio and television, not print media and generally not cable or satellite.

There have always been serious intellectual deficiencies associated with the “scarcity” and “pervasiveness” rationales for America’s schizophrenic media policy. What is increasingly obvious to most observers, however, is that the Red Lion and Pacifica rationales for asymmetrical regulation will simply no longer work in the modern media environment. Red Lion’s “scarcity” rationale is now an absurd basis for regulation in light of the sheer volume of media at our disposal. And the problem with Pacifica’s “pervasiveness” standard as a regulatory rationale is that it proves too much; it could cover anything public officials deem to be widely available or “uniquely accessible” to children. (In terms of what children see or hear, is broadcasting really more pervasive than cable, cell phones, video games or the Internet today?) Moreover, although some lawmakers would like to make it so, the new regulatory calculus cannot magically become “popularity equals pervasiveness.” Merely because a given media outlet or technology gains more widespread use throughout society, it does not mean its First Amendment status should change. The courts will likely reject any effort by government to say that 51% market penetration results in diminished speech protection for a given media outlet or provider.

But one powerful rationale for the expansion of content controls remains: the “level playing field” argument. Many lawmakers, and potentially even some traditional broadcasters, will use “level playing field” arguments to justify the extension of the old regulatory regime to new media technologies–cable, satellite, cell phones, and the Internet–in the name of fairness. But, again, as these and other new technologies and outlets come to dominate America’s media landscape, lawmakers should reject the urge to impose old rules on new technologies and services. Already, the courts have firmly rejected the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 and subsequent efforts–both federal and state-based–to impose speech controls on the Net. As a result, the Internet now receives the same level of strict First Amendment scrutiny and protection as print outlets. In choosing how to level the regulatory playing field between print, the Net, cable, satellite, broadcasting and all other media, it should be done in the direction of greater freedom for all speakers, not less. Ironically, it was the FCC that most succinctly captured this principle when it decided to abandoned the so-called Fairness Doctrine in 1987:

[T]he role of the electronic press in our society is the same as that of the printed press. Both are sources of information and viewpoint. Accordingly, the reasons for proscribing government intrusion into the editorial discretion of print journalists provide the same basis for proscribing such interference into the editorial discretion of broadcast journalists. The First Amendment was adopted to protect the people not from journalists, but from government. It gives the people the right to receive ideas that are unfettered by government interference. We fail to see how that right changes when individuals choose to receive ideas from the electronic media instead of the print media. … First Amendment protections against content regulation should apply equally to the electronic and the printed press.

The FCC was right; the standard that governs print media should apply to all electronic / digital media as well. The fact that the Internet has already won significant judicial protection from legislative efforts to regulate online content indicates that the courts have already moved to adopt this position. It is increasingly unlikely that the courts will accept the extension of broadcast-era content regulations to new media outlets and technologies. The courts appear ready to apply stricter scrutiny to all speech controls in the future, especially since judges are not blind to the convergence and scale / volume problems outlined above. This is the “higher First Amendment standard” problem which all new content-related legislative and regulatory enactments will now face in America.

The Empire Strikes Back Governments won’t give up, of course. As legal, technological and cultural changes continue to erode the effectiveness of the distribution-based regulatory methods of the past, governments will search for new ways to continue to exert control over content flows. But, as previously mentioned, it will likely take extreme measures by government to accomplish this task in the future. Two approaches deserve close consideration, and they are outlined succinctly in a new book by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu entitled Who Controls the Internet: Illusions of a Borderless World.

Goldsmith and Wu are proponents of what David Post has referred to as the “unexceptionalist” school of thinking about Internet governance and media regulation. Unexceptionalists believe that the problems created by the rise of the Internet and new digital media outlets and technologies are really not all that different than the problems lawmakers had to deal with before when the telegraph, telephone and television first appeared. “Exceptionalists,” by contrast, believe that the Internet and the many other new media technologies and developments really are quite different than previous technologies and pose a more formidable challenge to traditional legal arrangements.

While unexceptionists like Goldsmith and Wu often concede that the Internet and new media technologies present unique challenges, they argue that domestic and international legal systems can adapt to accommodate local preferences and respect territorial regulations, including content controls. At root, their argument is that we should never underestimate the power of state coercion to essentially beat people, companies and technologies into submission. Using various coercive powers, the state can contain speech flows even in our new multimedia, multiplatform world, they say.

But the two primary approaches they identify to accomplish this task are riddled with problems:

The “Great Wall” Approach: One obvious approach to controlling content flows is for government to control the underlying “means of production” and information dissemination. In today’s Internet world, that means government would seek to control of the routers, servers, and other computing or networking devices that constitute the heart of modern information infrastructure. This is the approach that more repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea and Iran have adopted to control “undesirable” information flows. Indeed, China’s highly restrictive system has been dubbed the “great firewall of China.”

But “great wall” regulatory solutions are almost completely untenable in more advanced economies since the information genie is already well out the bottle. In the United States and most European nations, for example, private ownership of means of information production is so diffuse and decentralized that it would be impossible for governments to gain control over the system and control information flows. Moreover, governments in democratic nations have a greater respect for the rule of law, property rights and various free speech values in more advance economies where the Internet has already taken root.

Thus, this solution is really only tenable in less developed economies that are just witnessing the sort of digital media renaissance we have seen in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Even in those countries that have adopted this approach, it is unlikely it is a workable solution well into the future. Networks expand. Technologies evolve. The “Net-izenry” (online population) grows. The scale and volume numbers cited above, while remarkable, only represent a trickle before the flood. Again, only 15 percent of the world’s population has found its way online so far. What happens when that number hits 25 percent, and then 50 and then 75+? And what happens as wireless and satellite-based technologies become even more advanced and every laptop and mobile media device on the planet offers wirelessly accessible Internet access? A recent story in The Washington Post noted how despite strict communications and media laws in Saudi Arabia—the country once sought to ban cell phone cameras—the youth of that country are finding ways around the restrictions:

“Cellphone technology is changing the way young people meet and date in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one of the most insular, conservative and religiously strict societies in the world. Calls and texting—and more recently, Bluetooth—are breaking down age-old barriers and giving young men and women discreet new ways around the sentries of romance.”

The Washington Post now includes a section on its website called “Digital Revolution” that highlights stories “about high technology’s impact on politics, culture and society throughout the world.” And other tools of evasion are coming… [ I went on to describe some of them]

The “Deputize the Middleman” (Secondary Liability) Approach: A more realistic solution discussed by Goldsmith and Wu that could be tapped by governments (including those in advanced economies) would involve stringent liability schemes for major communications / Internet intermediaries.

[I never finished this section up, and that’s too bad because this is exactly where the debate over content controls stands today. But, I had outlined that…]

There are serious dangers with this approach as well:

• over-reaching self-censorship
• significant costs for intermediaries
• creates incentive to move offshore or operate surreptitiously outside the confines of law using encryption, anonymizers, and host of other tools

[Note: My TLF colleague Jim Harper wrote an important essay on these issues: “Against ISP Liability,” Regulation, Spring 2005, pp. 30-33.]

The Challenge Ahead If the thesis set forth here is valid and the days of traditional content controls are truly numbered, what happens next? Specifically, if government restrictions become largely ineffective or constitutionally impermissible, will parents or others be left powerless to stop what some believe is an onslaught of objectionable material?

This is reasonable concern. Like most parents, there are some types of content that I do not want my children to see or hear, especially at a very young age. And access to such materials is growing increasingly easy as children begin using communications technologies at earlier ages. Meanwhile, children continue to grow increasing technology-savvy. Since the rise of the personal computing in the 1980s and the Internet in the 1990s, there has been a running joke about how kids have to teach their parents and even teachers how to use these new digital tools.

No doubt, there is a great deal of truth in that notion. But does that mean children will be left on their own and expected to raise themselves in cyberspace? Are we facing a sort of “Lord of the Flies” scenario in which there are no constraints on what our children can do and they are left to enact rules of the road for themselves?

This seems to be the fear many parents and policymakers have today when they express frustration about what their children can see and hear in our media-saturated culture. To some, information abundance is a curse instead of a blessing; a problem to be dealt with, possibly even through extreme government measures such as “great wall” solutions or harsh liability sanctions like Goldsmith and Wu suggest.

But, again, any effort to deal with the “problem” of information abundance must begin with a realization that there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. As China and other repressive regimes are finding out today, once a sophisticated information infrastructure is in place, it is extremely difficult to stifle political dissent or even less threatening types of unfavored speech and expression. For more liberal regimes with fewer restrictions on human expression, there will still be social standards or cultural norms that are challenged by this modern multimedia universe. Some regimes or cultures will decry hate speech online. Others will lament sacrilegious cartoons. And for many others it will be various forms of pornography that spark official condemnation. In each case, these modes of speech or expression—offensive as they may be at times—will be impossible to eradicate from our new digital Information Society. Absent extreme measures, aimed at hobbling the sophisticated communications infrastructure that undergirds it, there will simply be no way of suppressing the flow of bits in our new digital, borderless, multimedia, multiplatform world.

The challenge that lies ahead, then, is for media companies, private organizations, family groups, educators and others to work together to devise reasonably workable solutions to the problem of underage access to objectionable content.

[Actually, it was at this point that I abandoned this manuscript entirely and set off to write the booklet that would answer those questions and concerns. It resulted in “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods,” which I have discussed here many times before. In that report, I begin with the working assumption that content controls are in serious trouble and that parents and policy makers need to find constructive alternatives to traditional legal and regulatory tools. My book provides an exhaustive list of options and highlights the many tools and information that media companies and other organizations are providing parents to help them make media decisions for their families. However, I concluded my discarded manuscript by noting that…]

The traditional “mass media” era is coming to a close, however. An age of organic, bottom-up, collaborative, “we-dia” (We-Media) is now dawning. Who will play the “gatekeeper” role in this world of endless, instantaneous media creation? For example, in an online environment, parents have traditionally been concerned about what their children can download. Increasingly, however, it is what children can upload that is becoming a bigger problem. With the cost of computers, camcorders, digital cameras, cell phones, and Internet access all plummeting, the tools of information creation and dissemination are now within the reach of almost all citizens, including the youngest.

Clearly, this is not a problem that can be easily solved–if it can be solved at all–by public policy. In the end, for those parents who realize that information flows will be increasingly difficult to control, there is simply no substitute for talking to children in an open, loving and understanding fashion about the realities of this world, including the more distasteful bits.

[I had then planned to conclude the introductory chapter with a discussion of the importance of educational strategies, media literacy efforts, and parental empowerment tools and strategies that could help us address concerns about access to objectionable content as censorship efforts became increasingly less effective and largely faded away. Again, that’s when I diverted all my attention to detailing those things in my book on parental controls and online child protection. And so ends my story about the book I threw away!]

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

A few weeks ago, I outlined the amazing keynote address that Harvard University law professor Laurence H. Tribe delivered at PFF’s annual Aspen Summit. Now you can read it for yourself. PFF has just published the transcript of his speech, which was entitled, “Freedom of Speech and Press in the 21st Century: New Technology Meets Old Constitutionalism.”

Professor Tribe provides a 14-part indictment of new government proposals to regulate “excessively violent” content. But he also speaks more broadly about the importance of defending the First Amendment from attacks on many different platforms, and for many different types of content. Here’s one of my favorite passages from the concluding section of his remarks:

The broad lesson of this discussion of television violence is the centrality of the First Amendment’s opposition to having government as big brother regulate who may provide what information content to whom, whether or not for a price. The large problem that this exposes is that especially in a post-9/11 world, where grownups understandably fear for themselves and for their children and worry about the brave new world of online cyber reality that their kids can navigate more fluently than they can, it is enormously tempting to forget or to subordinate the vital principles of constitutional liberty. Even if, after years of litigation and expenditure, the First Amendment prevails, it can be worn down dramatically by having to wage that fight over and over and over.

Amen to that. And that, in a nutshell, describes what much of my research agenda at PFF has been focused on. It is a pleasure to add Prof. Tribe’s address to our growing body of research on the sanctity of freedom of speech and centrality of the First Amendment to our democratic republic as we continue “to wage that fight over and over and over.”

The Parents Television Council has a new report out this week about the supposed decline of the TV “Family Hour.” The City Journal has just posted my response to that PTC report here. It begins as follows…

Who Killed TV’s “Family Hour”? It’s not who you think. by Adam D. Thierer 7 September 2007 The nonprofit Parents Television Council (PTC) released a report this week lamenting the supposed death of broadcast television’s “family hour.” Though neither the Federal Communications Commission nor Congress ever mandated it, 8 to 9 PM Monday through Saturday (Eastern time), and 7 to 9 PM on Sunday, have traditionally been devoted to family-friendly programming. But the PTC’s new report claims that these blocks of time are now “no place for children,” because “corporate interests have hijacked the family hour” and “have pushed more and more adult-oriented programming to the early hours of the evening.” One might respond to this claim by questioning the PTC’s methodology, particularly its definitions of foul language. Simon Vozick-Levinson of Entertainment Weekly’s “PopWatch Blog” takes this approach, accusing the PTC of “cooking the numbers” to suit its cultural agenda. But I don’t want to engage in methodological nit-picking, since it quickly devolves into a subjective squabble about acceptable language and appropriate programming. Instead, I want to point out the fundamental flaw in the report’s premise. The family hour may well be dead—but parents, not broadcasters, were the ones who killed it.

… read the rest at the City Journal’s website.

I’ve written much about the potential “chilling effect” associated with over-zealous FCC regulation of speech. Some people doubt that the FCC’s regulatory wrath is really so severe that media operators will censor important programs for fear of being fined afterward. But we know that that is exactly what happened with a 9/11 documentary last year when CBS decided to censor the remarks of firefighters under duress. Imagine that, firefighters were swearing as the disaster unfolded! But apparently we need to have history whitewashed for our benefit. Absurd.

And now it’s happening again.

PBS just announced that Ken Burns’s upcoming documentary about WWII (“The War”) will now be censored during certain broadcasts. According to this article by Paul Fahri in today’s Washington Post:

[public television] stations are concerned that four words of profanity in the 14 1/2 -hour documentary could subject them to hefty indecency fines from the Federal Communications Commission. Their worries have prompted Arlington-based PBS to take the unprecedented step of distributing two versions of “The War” for broadcast next month: Burns’s original film and an FCC-friendly version from which the profanity has been removed.

The comments of these two PBS officials are particularly telling:

“It’s the world we live in right now,” said Joe Bruns, WETA’s chief operating officer. “My own view is that with the landscape of a 14-hour film about World War II, and given the overall obscenity of war, four words are not particularly shocking — especially given the fact that these are words used routinely at that time. But [nowadays], we have to exercise an abundance of caution.”

and

“The core problem is, we don’t really know what the FCC will do with a complaint because the guidelines aren’t clear,” PBS’s chief content officer, John Boland, said yesterday.

That’s because the FCC reserves the right to fine stations $325,000 if they broadcast something “indecent” between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. But the FCC refuses to tell anyone beforehand whether a particular use of a particular profanity is “indecent” or not. If you think that reeks of arbitrary, unaccountable government, you are right. And yet this is the law of the land.

And what is particularly absurd about this case is that this documentary will also contain gritty war footage and plenty of carnage. That’s what happens in war, after all. But what our government seeks to protect us (or our children) from is a few dirty words that actual soldiers utter about the grim realities of war. Absolutely absurd.