Since 2000, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has surveyed the marketing and advertising practices of major media sectors (movies, music and video games) in a report entitled Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children. (The reports can be found here). According to the agency, the purpose of these reports is to examine “the structure and operation of each industry’s self-regulatory program, parental familiarity and use of those systems, and whether the industries had marketed violent entertainment products in a manner inconsistent with their own parental advisories.” Toward that end, the agency hires a firm that conducts "secret shopper" surveys to see how well voluntary media rating systems (MPAA, ESRB, RIAA) are being enforced at the point of sale. The research firm recruits a bunch of 13- to 16-year-olds who make an attempt to purchase such media without a parent being present.

Although I've always had some questions about these undercover surveys, which I will get to in a moment, the bottom line is: Ratings enforcement has generally been improving over time, and in the case of the ESRB system for games, it has improved dramatically in a very short period of time. For example, the latest survey shows that whereas 90% of kids were able to purchase an "Explicit Lyrics" CD back in 2001, that's fallen to just over 50% in the latest survey. R-rated cinema admissions have dropped gradually, from almost 50% of kids getting in in 2001, to about 35% today. R-rated DVD sales for teens have falled from 81% in 2001 to 47% today. And the video game industry's outstanding education and awareness-building efforts have shown the most success, with M-rated video games only being sold to 20% of teens today, down from 85% back in 2000. That's an impressive turn-around in a very short amount of time.

As I have argued many times before (see 1, 2, 3, 4), some sort of usage-based bandwidth metering or consumption cap makes a lot of sense as a way to deal with broadband network traffic management. So, if this is the direction that Comcast is heading--and this recent Broadband Reports piece suggests that it is--that is fine with me. The article says it might work as follows:

A Comcast insider tells me the company is considering implementing very clear monthly caps, and may begin charging overage fees for customers who cross them. While still in the early stages of development, the plan -- as it stands now -- would work like this: all users get a 250GB per month cap. Users would get one free "slip up" in a twelve month period, after which users would pay a $15 charge for each 10 GB over the cap they travel. According to the source, the plan has "a lot of momentum behind it," and initial testing is slated to begin in a month or two.

"The intent appears to be to go after the people who consistently download far more than the typical user without hurting those who may have a really big month infrequently," says an insider familiar with the project, who prefers to remain anonymous. "As far as I am aware, uploads are not affected, at least not initially." According to this source, the new system should only impact some 14,000 customers out of Comcast's 14.1 million users (i.e. the top 0.1%).

It's always been my hope that we could potentially head-off burdensome Net neutrality regulations by encouraging carriers to deal with the problem of excessive bandwidth consumption by using time-tested price discrimination solutions instead of the sort of packet management techniques that are the subject of such heated debate today. Of course, on one of our old podcasts on Net neutrality issues, Richard Bennett pointed out to me that this still might not alleviate the need for other types of traffic management techniques to be used. And he also pointed out that the very small subset of true bandwidth hogs are almost entirely heavy BitTorrent users, so perhaps the way Comcast was dealing with them was just another way of skinning the same cat.

One vision of globalization, and the new American policies designed to cope with it, was on display this week, as Harvard's Larry Summers and the FT's Willem Buiter discussed and debated the dilemmas of a flat world, from trade and taxation to international standards and regulation.

Summers has long been an advocate of globalization and free trade, but recently -- with a number of other eminent liberal economists, from Paul Samuelson to Alan Blinder, who has argued that globalization could put 40 million Americans out of work -- Summers has rethought his robust support.

The most important reason for doubting that an increasingly successful, integrated global economy will benefit US workers (and those in other industrial countries) is the weakening of the link between the success of a nation’s workers and the success of both its trading partners and its companies.

Video calling, we've said, will be a large component of the Internet data traffic surge we call the exaflood. After a decade or two of false starts, consumer video chats began in large volume over the last year or so -- by mid-2007 Microsoft Video Calling was generating 4 petabytes per month of data traffic, equal to the entire Net of 1997. Now business video conferencing is taking off as well, with telepresence systems from Cisco and HP just coming online.

only about 1,000 of the 176,000 videoconferencing systems sold world-wide in 2007 were telepresence systems, estimates market researcher TeleSpan Publishing Corp. But unit sales of the high-end systems were up five-fold from the 200 sold in 2006, and the number should triple to 3,000 in 2008, TeleSpan estimates.

Well, this is gunna be a sure-fire sign of my uber-geekiness, but I gotta say I just love Scribd's "iPaper" service, which allows anyone to upload and share just about any type of document with the rest of the world. Think or it as YouTube or Flickr for nerds who want to share their papers and PowerPoints even more than their pictures or videos.

Like Flickr and YouTube, Scribd offers users the ability to embed things directly into blogs like this. Below, for example, I have embedded my recent slide show presentation at Penn State University's conference on the future of video games. If you play around with the buttons on the top of the iPaper player, you will see how easy it is to resize the embedded document, search within it for specific items, download or email it, print it out, and so on. Super cool. I hope my colleagues will join me in using this great tool more here on our site. I plan on posting a lot more things here this way in the future. (And I swear I didn't get paid by Scribd to say any of this!)

As I have pointed out here many times before, education is a vital part of online child protection efforts. In fact, if there is one point I try to get across in my report on “Parental Controls and Online Child Safety,” it is that, regardless of how robust they might be today, technical parental control tools are no substitute for education, media literacy and online safety awareness training. To the extent lawmakers feel the need to "do something" about online safety issues, education-based efforts will bear much more fruit than regulatory initiatives.

Unfortunately, it is clear that not nearly enough media literacy or online safety instruction is being done within America’s educational process at any level. For the most part, media literacy is not routinely integrated into the curricula at elementary school, secondary school, high school, or college. This situation must be reversed. Luckily, my home state of Virginia is helping to pave the way. This weekend, the Washington Post ran a front-page story entitled, "Virginia Tries to Ensure Students' Safety in Cyberspace," that discussed the state's effort to "launch Internet safety lessons across all grade levels, responding to a state mandate that is the first of its kind in the nation." The text of the enabling legislation can be found here and, in September 2006, Virginia produced an outstanding report entitled “Guidelines and Resources for Internet Safety in Schools” that can serve as model legislation for other states.

The Post story summarizes the focus of the program:

GamePolitics.com noted that presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama had some comments upon the release of Grand Theft Auto IV this week, and they weren't actually half bad. Indeed, instead of engaging in the typical game-bashing hysteria we've gotten used to, Obama instead focused on the need to find the right balance in terms of getting kids as interested in education as they are in games and other forms of entertainment. (This is something I was just discussing in the comments to another post I made yesterday).

Obama wondered, "How are we giving our kids a thirst for knowledge? And turning off the TV set, and getting them to be engaged and interested, like their future really does matter on how well they do in school." That's a good question, and I've provided some of my own thoughts on that here.

Importantly, I just want to remind everyone of the very sensible things Obama said when asked at a debate earlier this year about the role of government when it comes to media content. "[T]he primary responsibility is for parents," he said. "And I reject the notion of censorship as an approach to dealing with this problem." Better yet, he went on to stress the importance of making sure that parents have the tools to make these determinations for their families:

“[I]t is important for us to make sure that we are giving parents the tools that they need in order to monitor what their children are watching. And, obviously, the problem we have now is not just what’s coming over the airwaves, but what’s coming over the Internet. And so for us to develop technologies and tools and invest in those technologies and tools, to make sure that we are, in fact, giving parents power — empowering parents I think is important.”

He's got it exactly right. I just wish he'd stress personal responsibility and limited government solutions across the board!

What happens as gamers grow older and become a more dominant voice in society? UK game developer Richard Bartle has some thoughts on that issue in an acerbic, in-your-face editorial in the UK Guardian this week:

I'm talking to you, you self-righteous politicians and newspaper columnists, you relics who beat on computer games: you've already lost. Enjoy your carping while you can, because tomorrow you're gone. According to the UK Statistics Authority, the median age of the UK population is 39. Half the people who live here were born in 1969 or later. The BBC microcomputer was released in 1981, when those 1969ers were 12. It was ubiquitous in schools; it introduced a generation to computers. It introduced a generation to computer games. Half the UK population has grown up playing computer games. They aren't addicted, they aren't psychopathic killers, and they resent those boneheads – that's you – who imply that they are addicted and are psychopathic killers. Next year, that 1969 will be 1970; the year after, it'll be 1971.

Dwell on this, you smug, out-of-touch, proud-to-be-innumerate fossils: half the UK population thinks games are fun and cool, and you don't. Those born in 1990 get the vote this year. Three years from now, that 1969 will be 1972, then 1973. Scared yet? You should be: we have the numbers on our side. Do your worst – you can't touch us. We've already won. 15 years from now, the prime minister of the day will have grown up playing computer games, just as 15 years ago we had the first prime minister to have grown up watching television, and 30 years ago to have grown up listening to the radio. Times change: accept it; embrace it. Don't make yourself look even more 20th Century, even more public school, than you do already. You've lost! Understand? Your time has passed.

Over at "The Social," a CNet blog about social networking and social life, Caroline McCarthy discusses a new study that she says "reveals [a] shocking truth: Most Facebook apps are silly, pointless."

A new study from number-crunching firm Flowing Data did some eye-opening work recently, dividing 23,160 Facebook applications into 22 categories. A whopping 9,601 of them fall into Facebook's "just for fun" category, followed by "gaming" and "sports" with over 2,000 each. In other words, the majority of Facebook applications are goofy time-wasters.

She calls this "an unsettling piece of news that I don't think any of us saw coming" and says "The world of social networking may never be the same."

Two brief exaflood items from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who spoke at the Milken Conference.

(1) Users of Google's YouTube are uploading 10 hours of video to the site every minute. That's 14,400 hours worth of new video uploads each day.

(2) By 2019, your average iPod (or other personal digital device) will have enough capacity for 85 years worth of video. Start watching when you're born. Maybe you'll see the final credits in old-age.