According to news reports, Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va) is planning on trying to force the Senate Commerce Committee to include a controversial cable censorship proposal in a broad-based telecom reform bill the Committee might consider shortly. Along with Republcan Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), Rockefeller introduced S. 616, the "Indecent and Gratuitous and Excessively Violent Programming Control Act of 2005." (I penned a lenghty analysis of this bill in the a PFF paper last year entitled: "Thinking Seriously about Cable & Satellite Censorship: An Informal Analysis of S. 616, The Rockefeller-Hutchison Bill.")

In a nutshell, the Rockefeller-Hutchison bill proposes to roll the old broadcast industry content control regime onto subcription-based media outlets, namely, cable and satellite television distributors. James Reid, Sen. Rockefeller's top telecom policy aide, told a crowd at a National Association of Broadcasters conference yesterday that "Sen. Rockefeller plans to offer his bill, in totality, or section-by-section, as amendments to the telecom bill as this goes forward." If implemented, the bill would:

A credit card authorization company fails to protect the records of individual card holders, and a data breach leads to millions of dollars in fraudulent charges. A nightmare scenario for sure, and a real one. But CardSystems (now part of Solidus Networks and operating as Pay by Touch Solutions) yesterday agreed to a multi-million dollar settlement with the FTC. It also agreed to be audited every other year by a third-party security professional for the next 20 years. (See FTC release, actual settlement and AP story by Jennifer Kerr.) So what does this all mean?

On Tuesday I participated in a very interesting roundtable discussion on the future of content regulation in a multi-media world. The event was held at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA and it featured representatives from a wide variety of companies and private organizations including: Google, Microsoft, AT&T, Verizon, AOL, Yahoo!, TRUSTe, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Children Now. Our discussion focused on how to craft workable, private parental controls for Digital Age media content.

The roundtable was hosted by Stephen Balkham, CEO of the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA). ICRA is an organization which works to create a safer online environment for kids by devising workable screening solutions for parents. In particular, ICRA has been a pioneer in the field of Internet content labeling and filtering. The organization has developed a system of objective content descriptors that website operators and other online media providers can use to label their content. Some of the companies and organizations listed above, as well as many other Internet, media and telecom companies, have already signed agreements with ICRA to use their content labels. Most recently, AT&T and Verizon agreed to use ICRA system to label their content offerings.

The Challenges of Controlling Content in a World of Media Abundance
I kicked off the roundtable with a "50,000-ft." overview of the challenges that lie ahead. My remarks were drawn from the introduction to my new book on content controls in a world of media convergence. At the conference, as in my book, I put forward the thesis that content regulation, as we have traditionally understood it, is doomed. This is because 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 media programming. The demise of 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.

Two weeks ago, my colleague Randy May posted a short critique of the principles announced by Senators Burns and Inouye to guide video franchise reform. Randy called for reform. Wouldn't you know it? A half dozen senators released a new set of principles just in time for the February 15 Commerce Committee hearing on the issue. The Senate hearing came on the heels of a filing deadline at the FCC for a NPRM soliciting input on franchise authority. What will come of all this activity? I sure don't know, but read below for the briefest of scorecards on who is saying what on the issue.

Reports in today's Washington Post of a new Macintosh computer virus do more than confront users of that operating system with the same vulnerability that the unwashed masses endure daily. These reports point out how quickly and unpredictably threats to the Internet experience can emerge and spread, and how little sense it makes to tie any of our hands in the collective effort to combat those threats.

Forbes makes mention of Major League Baseball's apparent closed-platform play with fantasy baseball. MLB is increasing licensing fees to fantasy baseball entities by $1.975M, up from $25k. The thought, it appears, is for MLB to grab more of the rents from fantasy baseball.

There are some interesting legal questions associated with this starting with who, if anyone, owns the stats and publicity rights? But Forbes assails MLB for alienating its fan base:

[I]t might seem odd that MLB is willing to alienate its most loyal fan base. Fantasy players subscribe to satellite service packages and watch the games that no one else cares about. On the other hand, MLB, which won't comment, dreams of taking its Internet arm public in a deal valuing the company at $3 billion. It doesn't need competitors.

I remain a staunch defender of entities' rights to "close," or at least limit the interoperability of platforms they own and develop -- see "Let Clearwire Be Clearwire", "Closed Coffee Platforms," and leave the iPod alone -- even if the business strategy proves to be wrong. This is a vastly superior system than the government mandating and monitoring the "openness" of a given platform.

Call me a romantic, a traditionalist, a stick in the mud or even a -- gasp, conservative -- but an RFID chip is simply not high on the list of gifts for the special someone in my life.

The story of cross-border, digital "love" is here. A few years back, the speaker at our Aspen Summit Chairman's Dinner suggested microchips for his children. In effect, he argued, if it is good enough for our pets why don't we chip our kids and link them to the Amber Alert system. An uneasy chuckle went through the audience. Wackiness? Perhaps. Prescience? Perhaps. Romantic? Certainly not.

Is there a policy connection between the two? Jim Baller thinks so. Baller is the Music Man -- his livelihood involves traveling from town to town, convincing city leaders that there's trouble (with a capital T and that rhymes with C and that stands for "commerce," as in commercial Internet providers) and they need to rescue their town from the evils of capitalism by spending taxpayer money on their own broadband network. At a Free Press event held at the Center for American Progress(*) last week, Baller said there is a "very close connection" between municipal broadband and net neutrality, and this is one case in which I agree with Baller completely.

Last week I outlined a few of my concerns with the FCC's new a la carte report. I was relieved to see that others are raising similar issues with the report.

For example, Fortune senior writer Marc Gunther published an essay today entitled "Why A La Carte Cable TV is a Nutty Idea." And Kansas City Star TV Critic Aaron Barnhart released an essay on Friday entitled "The Indecency Wars: Book II." Gunther and Barnhart share similar concerns about the new report.

First, Gunther and Barnhart agree that the FCC's report is remarkably ambiguous on several key issues. Gunther notes that:

"the FCC report is filled with so many 'mights' and 'coulds' that it's impossible to know whether unbundling would drive down rates. The FCC admits that it lacks data 'about what a la carte prices would be for individual networks.'"

Barnhart agrees and is even more scathing in his criticism of the report's ambiguity:

"If you actually read the report, you'll be amazed at how little [Chairman Kevin] Martin actually asserts as fact. There are a thousand "coulds," "mights" and "mays" the cumulative effect of which is to create the perception it has refuted the Powell report line by line. In reality, Martin's report has more fudge in it than Grandma's cupboard."

Ouch!

It seems that the cable industry has once again become everyone's favorite public policy punching-bag. The "government-knows-best" crowd is practically foaming at the mouth about the need for "Net neutrality" mandates on cable's broadband offerings, censorship of speech on various cable channels or programs, and "a la carte" mandates for cable's video lineup.

On this last item, the FCC has just today released a revised version of an earlier staff report conducted during Chairman Michael Powell's tenure. The Powell era FCC report revealed that a la carte would raise prices and hurt program diversity. By contrast, today's report, which new FCC Chairman Kevin Martin requested, argues that the old report got it completely wrong and that a la carte would lead to lower prices and not hurt diversity. So, within the span of 18 months, we have an expert regulatory agency coming to diametrically opposed conclusions on the same issue. (Makes you wonder about those old theories of scientific bureaucracy!) What are we to make of these contradictory results?