I've spent a lot of time here discussing my reservations about age verification and data retention mandates. I object on many grounds, but privacy and data security concerns are typically at the top of my list.

Government officials or others supporting mandatory data collection / retention always assure us that our personal information will be secure and that it will not fall into the wrong hands. And then something like this happens in Utah and reminds us why we were right to be concerned:

In a jaw-dropping embarrassment, the state of Utah has mistakenly divulged e-mail addresses of kids on its so-called child-protection do-not-e-mail list -- a registry proponents claim is foolproof. The gaffe stems from four citations the state issued recently against companies it alleges sent e-mail to children's addresses on its do-not-e-mail registry promoting alcohol, gambling and pornography.

According to court papers, when Justin Weiss, director of legislative affairs for the E-mail Sender and Provider Coalition, requested copies of the citations from Utah, the state complied but failed to redact the e-mail addresses of the children in the complaints. "I have no personal knowledge of how many other unredacted copies may have been sent out to other individuals that made information requests like mine," said Weiss in an affidavit.

State officials are reportedly mortified over the incident. "A fair amount of trust has been placed with us and this is not a good thing," Utah's Department of Commerce Director Francis Giani reportedly told the Salt Lake Tribune. "I'm sick about it."

As you should be. But I also hope others heed the lesson here: Despite government assurances to the contrary, government-collected personal information is never perfectly secure. That's why we must always be vigilant about limiting how much personal information our government can get its hands on. Read Jim Harper's fine new book, Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood, to learn more about these dangers.

At Precursor, Scott Cleland notes that Microsoft is no longer listed as a member of the It's Our Net Coaltion.

Could the organization be getting a little too radical, regulatory, government intrusive, or anti-market-forces for their taste?

Could the folks at Microsoft be worried that if they set a net neutrality fire, there may be no way to control it and they could end up getting burned down with similar net neutrality rules as broadband because they clearly have more market share (90%) of their market than any player?

Could it be that they no longer wanted to associate with rising Googleism?

New York Times media business reporter Richard Siklos penned an excellent column yesterday entitled "In a Blurry World, Ownership Is Yesterday's News." "It is hard to find any public policy question that feels less relevant by the minute than whether one person or company should be permitted to own television stations and newspapers in the same market," he argued.

That's because, as I pointed out in my book on media ownership last year, Media Myths: Making the Debate over Media Ownership, there has been an explosion of media competition and diversity that makes this entire debate seem somewhat silly and even bizarre at times. Critics want us to believe that a handful of puppet-masters in New York or Hollywood are pulling all the strings and force-feeding us propaganda. It's all a bunch of hooey. And even the traditional media sectors where some of the media "barons" have more control of ownership, it really doesn't amount to a hill of beans. As Siklos points out:

"[W]hat does it say about the appeal of cross-ownership that The [New York] Post has lost money since the News Corporation's chairman, Rupert Murdoch, acquired it for the second time, in 1993, and that Mr. Murdoch, whose roots are in ink and paper, has otherwise quit the newspaper business in the United States in favor of television, cable channels and the Internet?"

Alec Van Gelder offers a more optimistic take on an independent ICANN.

Washington Post technology columnist Mike Musgrove reminds us in his column today that the video game industry's voluntary ratings system -- the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) -- continues to come under fire in Washington and in the states. Musgrove notes that:

"Earlier this year, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) was one of several lawmakers who introduced bills that would take the video game rating system away from the ESRB, but those bills never made it out of committee. Last week, at a summit on video games, youth and public policy, Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) trashed the game industry's ratings system and called for a new, independent system. Brownback and McCollum agree that the current system--because it's run by the game industry--can't be trusted."

This is nothing new, of course. I have written extensively about the politics of video game regulation and discussed how the video game ratings system has been criticized for a number of supposed shortcomings. Most recently, I wrote about Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Sen. Joe Lieberman's (D-CT) "Family Entertainment Protection Act" (FEPA, S. 2126), which would create a federal enforcement regime for video games sales and require ongoing regulatory scrutiny of industry ratings and practices. (Note: There was also a House version of the bill).

The US Department of Commerce has recently taken additional steps to establish an independent ICANN. Some have heralded this as a step away from undue U.S. influence over ICANN, and a step towards real independence.

But I must admit I'm skeptical that ICANN independence will result in realizing benefits from genuine market forces, as opposed to a power vacuum that Europeans and other officials will step into aggressively. But I haven't followed the specefic terms of their latest agreement. Comments?

Here's some more specefics about my concern: it seems to me that for an independent ICANN to realize market forces, it needs competition, or, barring that in the short run, some other kind of accounatability to the user community, particularly in the private sector. The voting and committees established early on don't seem to have gotten us there. A good many decisions were made by the board in closed sessions. But my information might simply be out of date... did they change something fundemental? If they didn't, I'm afraid that an independent ICANN will turn out to be a sort of international Post Office.

Another way of asking the same thing: if ICANN manages the domain system in a stupid way, what are the consequences for them? Bad press? Do they lose a customer? Does a product fail? Does someone get fired? Sued? Do they take a hit in their stock price? Revenues? Can ICANN go out of business? Eventually enough annoyed people get together and figure out an alternative to the domain name system? Search engines have somewhat diminished the importance of domain names, but how much pressure does this place on ICANN?

We blog a great deal on net neutrality on this site; today I'm directing readers to other interesting perspectives.

We begin with former FCC Chairman Bill Kennard, a man who had his faults but was a tremendous breath of fresh air after the self-important reign of Reed Hundt. in Saturday's New York Times, Kennard calls the net neutrality debate what it really is:

This is essentially a battle between the extremely wealthy (Google, Amazon and other high-tech giants, which oppose such a move) and the merely rich (the telephone and cable industries). In the past year, collectively they have spent $50 million on lobbying and advertising, effectively preventing Congress and the public from dealing with more pressing issues.

Well said. Not surprisingly, Larry Lessig took issue with the editorial, and repeated his arguments against network property rights and in favor of government-mandated access and controls, a la France. Blogger Matt Sherman dissected the arguments nicely, rightly raising the First Amendment in opposition to net neutrality mandates. As for the argument that we should be more like the French -- which Lessig also made at a congressional hearing earlier this year -- Sherman eviscerates that. For more on why the French economy should not be the model read my TCS Daily piece from earlier this year.

Richard Bennett could be expected to have some insights on this front, and he doesn't fail. Bennett, knowing a wee bit about network architecture, notes that Lessig's arguments focus on painting one side as more virtuous than the other, and making the case with an odd vision of history. Bennett's take? "This is not exactly a highly sophisticated argument. In fact, it's wrong in just about every way an argument can be wrong: logically, factually, intellectually, and emotionally."

What more is there to say? Well, a fair amount, actually, which can be found in PFF's compiled works here.

Several installments of my "media deconsolidation" series have dealt with problems at AOL-Time Warner (see parts 8, 12 and 14). That's because when this marriage was struck back in 2000, media critics where in full-blown Chicken Little mode over the deal. Critics claimed the AOL-Time Warner deal represented "Big Brother," "the end of the independent press," and a harbinger of a "new totalitarianism."

What a joke. It's just another sign how irrational people get about media ownership issues. Reality is rarely so exciting. In fact, as the latest news on the AOL-Time Warner front proves, reality bites for many traditional media operators. Like so many other companies who are struggling to adjust to our modern world of media abundance, user-generated content and digital everything, AOL-Time Warner is struggling to make "synergy" work.

Unfortunately, synergy isn't working out so well for them. The company had lost a staggering $99 billion in market cap by January of 2003 and shortly thereafter Time Warner decided to dump AOL from their corporate name altogether. This summer, Time Warner President Jeff Bewkes went so far as to declare the death of synergy, famously calling it "bullshit." And this week Jonathan Miller, chief executive of AOL, admitted to the U.K.'s Sunday Telegraph that the Time Warner board is indeed mulling over a break-up of the company. When asked by the Telegraph about the possibility of an AOL-Time Warner divorce, Miller said that "It's possible, going forward. It's not a discussion that Time Warner has a problem with understanding or engaging in. Until we were on this present course, it wasn't even the right discussion. Now it becomes more interesting."

It's only a matter of time before it's finalized. I wonder what all those media kooks will say then. I'm sure that they'll find something to complain about.

The Economist had editorialized about how America's recent Internet gambling ban, The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, would actually do little to deter online betting. This week, Business Week picks this silly law apart. As Business Week's Catherine Holahan reports:

Indeed, the new law will do little to stop online gambling, say gamblers, betting companies, and industry analysts alike. Instead, the law will drive out regulated, publicly traded companies like PartyGaming, the Gibraltar-based parent of PartyPoker, and make way for private gambling companies and banks based in nations where such industries are loosely policed at best. As a result, the new law could ultimately make billions of dollars in U.S. online gambling transactions more difficult to trace, and increase the likelihood that funds end up in criminal hands. "It leaves an opening for some of the more unscrupulous companies coming in from unregulated places," says Frank Catania, past director of New Jersey's Division of Gaming Enforcement and president of Catania Consulting Group.

The exodus is under way--and the companies that are on the way out are those with the most financial transparency. PartyGaming, 888Holdings, and SportingBet, all of which are traded on the London Stock Exchange, have said they're exiting the U.S. market. Roughly 70% of PartyGaming's $319 million in second-quarter sales and 50% of 888 Holdings' revenue came from the U.S.

Private online gambling companies, on the other hand, have been defiant in the face of the new law, arguing it does not apply to them and cannot be enforced. Bodog Entertainment Group, which operates a Costa Rican online gambling site, has no plans to bar U.S. customers. "We've structured our business in such a way that we'll have no problems adapting to any changes in the online gaming environment," says Bodog founder Calvin Ayre. Similarly, PokerStars released a statement saying its lawyers had "concluded that these provisions do not alter the U.S. legal situation with respect to our offering of online poker games.

For these reasons among many others, my friend (and former Cato Institute mentor) Tom Bell labels the measure "The UnInGEn-ious Act." Read his excellent analysis here and here.

This is an example of exactly the sort of sting operation that I've been saying we need a lot more of to solve the online child predator problem. Law enforcement officials have arrested 125 people nationwide as a result of a massive sting operation to root out Internet child pornography. According to the Reuters report: "Those arrested are accused of using a commercial Web site to access videos and images of hard-core pornography involving children as young as infants engaged in sexual activities with adults, according to federal officials."

"When I say 'hard-core' pornography, I am talking about child pornography that includes images of children as young as six months involved in bondage and sodomy," U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie said. "This type of depraved conduct is something a civilized society cannot tolerate."

Amen to that. This now becomes a good case study to see if our government is really serious about this issue. Will our government do the right thing and put these scumbags behind bars for a long, long time, or will they give them a slap on the wrist and let them walk after just a few years of hard time, meaning they'll be out on the streets and behind keyboards again soon?

As always, I say lock 'em up and throw away the key. Again, that's the more sensible approach than the current move to regulate the Internet and social networking sites through intrusive age verification schemes or data retention mandates.