News broke this afternoon that President Bush will nominate White House advisor Richard Russell and Director Deborah Taylor Tate of the Tennessee Regulatory Authority to the FCC. I know nothing of Mr. Russell and something of Debi and therefore will limit these comments to her (potential/pending/likely?) nomination.

Debi will be good for the Commission and the Administration won't likely be disappointed. She is amply qualified and has a variety of public sector experiences. She has worked for Governor (now Senator) Alexander and Governor Sundquist in legal and policy roles. Debi spearheaded the use of statistical mapping to improve Tennessee's juvenile justice system. Perhaps this portends good omens for USF reform - she succeeded by reforming entrenched bureaucratic interests through the use of data and technology to target services to those in need.

From the Public Notice:

Further, we expect that if an interconnected VoIP provider has not received subscriber acknowledgements from 100% of its existing subscribers by August 29, 2005, then the interconnected VoIP provider will disconnect, no later than August 30, 2005, all subscribers from whom it has not received such acknowledgements. As such, providers may wish to inform subscribers that their VoIP service will be disconnected if they do not provide their acknowledgements by August 29, 2005.

So the FCC is ordering providers to disconnect customers for failing to give a 911 acknowledgement. That will improve public safety how? Surely this is a first for a regulator: kicking subscribers off the network in the name of public safety to save them from their decision to subscribe to VoIP.

Here's my quick reaction to the introduction of Senator Ensign's Broadband Investment and Consumer Choice Act.

While Seantor Ensign's bill takes a somewhat different conceptual approach than the proposal set forth by PFF's Release 1.0 of the Regulatory Framework Working Group, it is based on the same fundamental premise and understanding: Today's increasingly competitive marketplace demands a very different regulatory framework than the one that exists today, one that is much less regulatory and much more market-oriented. Both Sen. Ensign's bill and the PFF proposal have in common an appreciation that it is time for much of the existing regulation of the communications to go away. (As noted, Senator Ensign's bill doesn't deal with USF, and in our DACA project, PFF will be dealing with that subject, as well as spectrum reform and institutional agency transformation.)

But today, what's most important to say is that Sen. Ensign has laid down a deregulatory marker that, along with PFF's own DACA releases, are likely to be counted as important steps on the road to reform.

Days after banning the sale of the Pensacola News Journal from its stores because management disliked disparaging comments by one of its columnists, AP reports that Wal-Mart has relented and once again will allow sales of the paper in its stores and from newspaper boxes on its property. From AP:

"We did make an error in judgment by removing the papers from our stores," Wal-Mart Stores Inc. spokeswoman Sharon Weber said in an e-mail from company headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. "They should be available in our stores by the end of the week."

Market pressure wins out over censorship.

During my time riding through the Colorado Rockies last weekend in the Courage Classic, I thought of the surrounding beauty, the majestic vistas, how riduculous I look in bicycling gear -- and standards and interoperability.

In many ways, bicycles are prototypical "open," interoperable systems. The wheel sizes are standardized for road bikes at 700c, component sets are interchangeable, as are the forks, stems, handlebars and saddle.

With these problems, Qwest might want to consider hiring this guy.

I have to agree with Adam's post below on taxing porn sites. The courts consistently have struck down online speech restrictions, but this one is comically easy to reject. After all, how does one determine which sites to tax? I guess each IRS agent will have to scan the Web, determining if the depiction of a nude woman on his computer screen is art or pornography. Imagine explaining that job at a dinner party!

We all know how governments enjoy levying "sin taxes" on alcohol and tobacco, so it shouldn't be at all surprisingly that someone is now proposing to impose one on online porn viewing. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, (D-Ark.) is apparently going to drop a bill next week that would impose a federal excise tax on transactions with for-profit adult Web sites.

I am not about to pen a defense for those people who spend endless hours looking at dirty pictures online, but I really do believe this bill has got to be the silliest idea to come out of Congress in a long time. Specifically, it once again proves that most members of Congress have absolutely no appreciation for what sort of enforcement difficulties they are up against in terms of regulating the Net and online content.

After all, just because a website is for-profit, it doesn't mean it will be easy to impose such a tax scheme. The tax evasion possibilities here are endless, especially considering how much activity originates overseas. How will the tax be reported? What kind of enforcement regime will be necessary to even collect a small percentage of these taxes? In a world of anonymous electronic transactions, I just can't see how enforcement would work. I guess Congress could force credit card companies to somehow become their deputized policemen and make them figure out when people are viewing online porn. Of course, there are some serious privacy issues at stake there and there's still little chance that even the financial intermediaries will be able to track everybody down. Moreover, why should financial intermediaries be forced to become the henchmen of the State in terms of enforcing morality?

Of course, I'm just focusing on the enforcement problems with this measure. I haven't said a word about the many ways in which this is likely unconstitutional as well. The courts have struck down just about every other effort to regulate online content, so I have a difficult time believing that they'll allow this one to stand for very long. Taxes on speech have been found to be every bit as unconstitutional as direct speech controls. So this bill is doomed in my opinion.

(By the way, time for a shameless plug... This issue was the subject of my fourth book, Who Rules the Net? Internet Governance and Jurisdiction. Make sure to check our Robert Corn-Revere's chapter in this book if you are interested in learning more about this subject: "Caught in the Seamless Web: Does the Internet's Global Reach Justify Less Freedom of Speech?" Here's another version of it online.)

Dateline Pensacola, Florida. A newspaper columnist with the Pensacola News Journal writes a column criticizing Wal-Mart for not providing health care for many of its workers, saying we taxpayers end up paying for those sick workers through state health programs. The columnist's editor gets a call from a Wal-Mart regional manager saying the News Journal has two choices -- fire the columnist or remove all of its newspaper boxes from all WalMart store lots. The editor chooses the latter, as he describes here, the columnist keeps his job, and the paper keeps its reputation.

This is hardly unprecedented. Steve Jobs didn't like how an autobiography by a Wiley & Sons author portrayed him, so he banned the sale of not only that book but all Wiley trade publications -- including Macs for Dummies -- from his Apple stores.

Wal-Mart and Apple both bring benefits to consumers (my mom would die without her iMac and iPod). Both have a right to dictate the terms of sale on company property. But in this modern world we live in it's hard to truly suppress speech. People will still read the Pensacola News Journal, and people will still buy Macs for Dummies. They just won't spend their money at Wal-Mart or Apple while doing it.

Today's Washington Post reports in a front page story--"Roberts Listed in Federalist Society '97-98 Directory--Court Nominee Said He Has No Memory of Membership"--that Supreme Court nominee John Roberts has said he has no memory of being a member of the Federalist Society. I do remember that I am a member, and I just (I think) paid my dues for next year.

The whole premise of the story seems to be that membership in the Society somehow might be disqualifying for Judge Roberts. About as close as one can get to understanding why this assertion by Charles Lane, the Post's staff writer, might be true is the following: "[T]he society's alignment with conservative GOP politics and public policy makes Roberts's relationship with the organization a potentially sensitive point for his confirmation process because many Democrats regard the organization with suspicion."

As the article also acknowledges, what the Society is best known for is sponsoring symposia on legal topics. While most (but I am sure not all) members of the Society have a perspective regarding legal matters that may be labeled "conservative", I've attended enough of these legal symposia to be absolutely certain that they almost always include speakers with a "liberal" perspective. (Don't you hate these simplistic labels that the labelers insist on using, especially when the labelers usually call those with a "liberal" perspective "moderates", just as they avoid using "left wing" as assidously as they throw out "right wing"?) Anyway, a list of liberal speakers would include Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Podesta, Abner Mikva, Walter Dellinger, Willie Brown, Nan Aron, Morton Halperin, Lloyd Cutler, Norma Cantu, Barney Frank, and on and on and on...