Jason Riley's new book on immigration, Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders, is now available. A brief excerpt:

It's a tragedy that America's public school system is geared more toward appeasing teachers' unions than educating kids. And until that changes, the trends will be difficult to reverse. The upshot of the status quo is that Mumbai and Beijing – often by way of MIT and Stanford – are currently producing a good amount of the talent that Bill Gates needs to keep Microsoft competitive. Immigration policies that limit industry's access to that talent become ever more risky as the marketplace becomes ever more global. If we want American innovators and entrepreneurs to continue enhancing America's wealth and productivity – and if we want the United States to continue as the world's science and technology leader – better to let Apple and Google and eBay make their own personnel decisions without interference from Tom Tancredo and Lou Dobbs.

Check it out.

Barbara Esbin and I have just released a short PFF essay asking the question: "Where is the FCC's Annual Video Competition Report?" The FCC is required to produce this report annually and yet the last one is well over a year past due and the data is contains will be over two years old by the time it comes out. I've embedded our paper about this below.

Wendy Tanaka of Forbes penned a nice article this week on "Making Social Sites Safer," as in social networking sites. She interviews many members of the new Internet Safety Technical Task Force that is being chaired by John Palfrey of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Wendy was also kind enough to call me for some comments.

Wendy wanted to know how far technology could go to solve online safety concerns. Specifically, as she notes in her piece, "The discussions have centered on whether identity technologies can make social sites safer, or whether consumer education works best. State attorneys general believe more technological solutions are necessary, but some task force members contend that identity technologies on the market aren't adequate. And even if they were better, they likely can't prevent every unwanted incident and they could block contact between friends and relatives."

On that point, I told her that, even if the age verification technology worked as billed (and I have my doubts), we'd have other issues to grapple with:

"So, if he's 16 and she's 21, they shouldn't talk? Maybe they're brother and sister," says Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation. Thierer also says that too many checks and restrictions could turn off users and hamper advertising on social networks. "There's only so far the sites can go before undermining their business and cutting off their customer base," he says. "At some point, it becomes an annoyance for users."

What I meant by that is that there is a balance that must be struck between security and freedom on social networking sites because, if lawmakers (or even the site operators themselves) push too far and add too many layers of controls, their could be adverse consequences. In particular, users could flock elsewhere, including to offshore sites that have no safety guidelines or mechanisms in place. That would be a troubling outcome that could leave site users far less safe in the long-run. As I have pointed out in my big paper, "Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions,"Whatever their concerns are about current domestic sites, parents and policy makers should understand that those sites are generally more accountable and visible than offshore sites over which we have virtually no influence but that have the same reach as domestic sites."

Moreover, we need to be aware of the privacy and speech-related issues that arise when governments seek for force users to surrender the online anonymity. I have written more extensively about that issue in my essay here on "Age Verification and Death of Online Anonymity."

Finally, as I told Wendy, there is no substitute for education and awareness-building efforts as the real solution to these problems. "There are no easy technical fixes for complex human behavioral problems," I told her. "We need to teach kids 'Netiquette.' " That is, we need to do a better job teaching our kids proper online manners toward their peers while also making sure they understand what risks are out there and how best to deal with them.

Anyway, make sure to read Wendy's Forbes article for additional insights from other Task Force members.

Last week I wrote about the shift among liberal free-traders toward a more skeptical view of globalization and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers' potentially dangerous solutions. Looks like I wasn't the only one to notice. In today's Financial Times, three globalization watchers ask:

Is a liberal international economic order losing intellectual support? Should developing economies be worried? If Larry Summers is the canary in the intellectual mine, his two columns in the Financial Times (April 28 and May 5) suggest that the answers to both questions are yes.

The authors criticize Summers for laying globalization's foundation -- mobile capital, increased international IP protection, trade liberalization -- but now urging government-heavy reforms of the international order that could hurt the very nations that he nudged toward the market just a decade ago. Shouldn't the U.S., they ask, get its own house in order first?

The non-U.S. world, they conclude, should prepare for a jolting anti-globalization retrenchment from America in the coming years:

the manner in which his position is framed, the inconsistencies of the arguments across time, the inappropriate transferring of the burden of any response from domestic actions to international ones, and the susceptibility of the proposed remedies to protectionist misuse point to a more alarming prospect for developing countries. The ground is shifting under their feet. They would do well to take notice.

The recent Summers chill could mean an early autumn for free trade and global innovation.

Well, I actually didn't exactly get a chance to say quite enough for this to qualify as much of a "debate," but I was brought in roughly a half hour into this WBUR (Boston NPR affiliate) radio show featuring Jonathan Zittrain, author of the recently released: The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It. Jonathan was kind enough to suggest to the producers that I might make a good respondent to push back a bit in opposition to the thesis set forth in his new book.

Jonathan starts about 6 minutes into the show and they bring me in around 29 minutes in. Although I only got about 10 minutes to push back, I thought the show's host Tom Ashbrook did an excellent job raising many of the same questions I do in my 3-part review (Part 1, 2, 3) of Jonathan's provocative book.

In the show, I stress the same basic points I made in those reviews: (1) he seems to be over-stating things quite a bit in saying that the old "generative" Internet is "dying"; and in doing so, (2) he creates a false choice of possible futures from which we must choose. What I mean by false choice is that Jonathan doesn’t seem to believe a hybrid future is possible or desirable. I see no reason why we can’t have the best of both worlds–-a world full of plenty of tethered appliances, but also plenty of generativity and openness.

If you're interested, listen in.

The debate over social networking safety is increasingly tied up with the question of whether (and how) users should be authenticated before they are allowed onto a social networking site, however that term of art is defined. Age verification proposals have been flying for the last two years that would use a variety of approaches to determine the age / identity of users. [I have discussed those proposals in detail here.]

So, when I heard the news that the Catholic church "will set up a Catholic social networking Web site akin to a Catholic Facebook" so that Pope Benedict can text message thousands of young Catholics on their mobile phones during World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia this July, I just couldn't help but wonder if the Pope and all the site's users will be required to somehow have their identities or ages verified before they go online?

I'm being entirely serious. If anyone has information on how the site will work and whether the Church plans to use identity screening mechanisms, please let me know. I try to keep tabs on how each social networking site polices their site for underage or inappropriate use. I am personally quite skeptical that most current approaches can work effectively, but I am always willing to learn more about new tools and techniques.

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.