Yesterday, the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Progress & Freedom Foundation filed joint comments in both the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and Third Circuit Court of Appeals calling upon the courts to halt the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) recent over-zealous indecency enforcement activities. The cases are Fox Television Stations v. FCC (the Second Circuit case) and CBS Corp. v. FCC (the Third Circuit case). (The filings we submitted to the courts were virtually identical so I'm just posting the link for the Second Circuit brief which you can find here).

In our joint amicus briefs we argued that the status quo cannot stand for three primary reasons:

This week I appeared on C-SPAN's weekly program "The Communicators" and discussed a wide variety of communications and media policy issues including: the outlook for telecom & media legislation in the new Democratic Congress, the First Amendment treatment of new media technologies, Net neutrality regulation and the need for universal service and spectrum policy reform.

The video can be viewed here and I apologize in advance if I put you to sleep!

When are state and local lawmakers going to stop wasting taxpayer dollars with unnecessary regulatory enactments and fruitless lawsuits aimed at censoring video games? I ask because this week the video game industry added yet another slam dunk victory to its growing string of impressive First Amendment wins. For those of you keeping track at home, this brings the tally to 10 major court wins for the video game industry versus zero wins for would-be government regulators. With a track record like that you would think that government officials would get the point. But the censorial tendencies of public officials have once again trumped common sense.

This week's win came in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Entertainment Software Association v. Blagojevich. (Full decision here.) The case dealt with an Illinois statute that would have required that video game retailers to affix a 4-square-inch sticker with the numerals "18" on any "sexually explicit" game. It also would have imposed criminal penalties on any retailer who sold or rented a game with that designation to a minor. The statute also included signage and brochure requirements that would have forced retailers to place certain displays in their stores and provide all customers with brochures about game ratings.

The court's decision overturning the law was written by Judge Ann Claire Williams and it echoed what every previous decision on this front has held, namely:

A journalism legend has passed away -- Al Warren, whose last name lives on in Warren Communications News, publisher of Communications Daily, Washington Internet Daily, Consumer Electronics Daily and Public Broadcasting Report, among others. While not the tallest man, he was a giant in the field of trade journalism. He joined Television Digest (as the company was originally known, named after the then-flagship publication) only months after its founding as a young reporter. There was this newfangled contraption called television, and Al Warren set about seeing how those crazy regulators in Washington might seek hegemony over the industry. Lots of publications wrote about television (including TV Guide, which briefly and disastrously owned Television Digest Inc.) but only Television Digest covered television policy. If memory serves, Al Warren bought the company from TV Guide (extremely impressive move for a reporter and employee), and oversaw its growth into the significant presence it is today.

From MSNBC, an astronaut recently hit a golf ball at the International Space Station as a promotional stunt for a Canadian golf company.

Sounds like fun. But wait, look at this picture. Whats wrong with it? Any golfer will tell you that your power (if you're right handed) comes from the torgue generated by your right leg and left arm. Thus, if you're going to hit a golf club one-handed, even in a space-suit, it should be with the left hand. I'm glad Mr. "Space-Cadet" had zero-gravity on his side. Aren't astronauts supposed to be good at physics though?

Excerpts from MSNBC below the fold.

Today many worry about two aspects of broadband in the U.S. when compared to other countries -- its adoption rate by consumers and available speeds (bandwidth). Comparable data across countries is difficult to obtain. The OECD and ITU publish cross-country adoption rates, but provide little information on how they come up with their estimates. Data on available speeds is even more problematic, given the number of providers and plans in many countries.

A new report released by Analysys Consulting Group and funded by AT&T sheds new light on the issue of broadband speeds across countries. The report finds that advertised speeds are typically higher than actual available speeds, and that the gap increases as advertised speeds increase. For example, according to the report,

The report suggests that actual speeds, as opposed to advertised speeds, seem to be fairly similar across advanced countries.

A problem with the analysis is that it only partially explains the methodology. For example, did testers in each country use similar equipment? How many tests were done in each country that were averaged into a country-wide estimate? What share of consumers have access to the tested service? What do providers charge for those services?

Nonetheless, despite its problems this study makes an important contribution to the question of how to compare bandwidth available to consumers across countries.

I've just finished reading a new report by a research firm called Ramp Rate about Net neutrality and the online gaming market. Now I'm accustomed to Net neutrality supporters employing gloom-and-doom, Chicken Little-esque rhetoric in support of government regulation of broadband networks, but I was shocked to see the same rhetoric laid on so thick in a study by industry consultants.

The sky-is-falling rhetoric kicks off with the very title of their piece: "Every Time You Vote against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills a Night Elf." The authors go on to paint a picture of the coming apocalypse if we do not adopt Net neutrality regs right away:

"What will be murdered with no fallback or replacement is the nascent market of interactive entertainment -- particularly online gaming. Companies like Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Sony Online Entertainment, and countless others, have built a business on the fundamental assumption of relatively low latency bandwidth being available to large numbers of consumers. ... Killing off these blossoming networks, with their own economies (potentially taxable when converted into real-world cash), would result in drastic, irreparable harm to consumers, technology developers, the economy and tax revenue -- and even the ISPs themselves."

Murdered? Killed off? Oh my, who knew the end was so near?! Of course, the end is not upon us and the online gaming market is not about to be "murdered" because of a lack of Net neutrality regulation. In fact, just the opposite could be the case as I will explain below the fold.

Back in Part 5 of this series last April, I discussed the looming breakup of radio giant Clear Channel. And now that day is here. According to Frank Ahrens of the Washington Post, Clear Channel "has agreed to sell the company to a consortium of private-equity firms and plans to shear off more than one-third of its 1,150 radio stations, dismantling a giant that dominated the industry and became the bogyman of media consolidation for the past half-decade." Moreover, "In a separate transaction also announced yesterday, Clear Channel said it would seek buyers for all of its television stations and 448 of its smaller radio stations," mostly in smaller markets.

Again, don't expect the Chicken Little media critics to acknowledge any of this. As I've said again and again in this ongoing series, this is an example of a well-functioning, competitive marketplace at work. Media critics think every merger or acquisition is all just part of some sort of grand conspiracy to destroy democracy or competition. But when the opposite happens and firms reorganize or downsize, the critics never say a peep.

In the end, regardless of what ownership patterns and structures look like, markets sort things out and we end up with an ever-expanding universe of media options at our disposal. In sum, despite what the Chicken Littles predict, the sky never falls. Seriously, ask yourself a simple question: Do you have more media options and outlets at your disposal today than you did 5 to 10 years ago? Read my last book if you want to see the evidence.

Today the United Nations issued a 346-page document decrying the state of Internet access in developing countries. In the foreward, Secretary General Kofi Annan writes that "People in developing countries need cheaper and easier access to ICTs [Information and Communications Technologies]. They need enhanced ICT skills to better employ these technologies in their homes, schools, and jobs. And they need the freedom to create, share and exchange information and knowledge of all kinds." The report argues that every country needs a national ICT policy and outlines a "model ICT policy review framework."

Even if Mr. Annan is correct (a big assumption, as people in developing countries "need" things like clean drinking water more than they "need" the Internet) the report is unlikely to help achieve the goal. Even if its recommendations were adopted they would be unlikely to do any good.

Developing countries do not lag in Internet and broadband adoption because they lack national ICT policies. They lag because they are poor, because government regulations discourage investment, and because entrenched interests -- typically state-owned incumbent telecommunications companies or privatized monopolies -- make entry by competitors difficult.

Knowledge is a wonderful thing, and the more we can do to give people access to knowledge the better off the world will be. That's always been the vision underlying Nicholas Negroponte's bold "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC) Initiative, which aims to put $100 laptops in the hands of people across the globe (especially in less-developed countries).

It's a noble goal and one that's almost impossible to argue with in theory. But, like everything else in this world that begins with good intentions, at some point you have to get around to dealing with basic economics, political realities and other technical issues. And those are the sort of growing pains that the OLPC project is experiencing right now. James Surowiecki brilliantly documents all this in an excellent article in this month's MIT Technology Review entitled "Philanthropy's New Prototype."

Surowiecki provides a short history of other philanthropic endeavors from the past century, such as Andrew Carnegie's remarkably successful campaign to bring public libraries to even the smallest American communities. He then compares Negroponte's OLPC Initiative to those efforts. Surowiecki notes that OLPC is ambitious not only in its goal of putting a laptop into the hands of every child, but in the way it proposes to structure the program to make it happen.