I recently stumbled across a Future of Media filing with the FCC that has aroused the attention of many on the Right. It was filed by the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), and has numerous "usual suspects" as co-signers (such as the Free Press, Benton Foundation, Common Cause, Rainbow Push Coalition, etc.). The bent of the filing is - there's a lot of "hate" speech out there, and the FCC should study it, exploring "non-regulatory ways to counteract its negative impacts."

According to the NHMC:

...[T]he current media landscape is a safe-haven for hate and extremism. Many communities and individuals do not have the information they want and need to intelligently engage in our democracy. This shortage of information is exacerbated by the vast media consolidation that has unfolded over the past two decades.

...[H]ate, extremism and misinformation have been on the rise, and even more so in the past week as the media has focused on Arizona's passage of one of the harshest pieces of anti-Latino legislation in this country's history, SB 1070.

Just the other day, leaders from the House and Senate said they planned on updating the Communications Act. Maybe they've finally started listening to us - we proposed doing this back in 2005, with PFF's Digital Age Communications Act (DACA). Or, perhaps the FCC's so-called "Third Way" doesn't look like the "no-brainer" that the agency spun in its press releases. Well, whatever their intentions may be, it certainly couldn't arrive at a better time.

The framing is all important, of course. Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge (ostensibly one of the groups "writing" the next Act) says Americans shouldn't worry about the FCC's "Third Way." In his view - "The government is not taking over the Internet. What the government is doing is engaging in traditional consumer protection, traditional regulation of a telecommunications service that will get people to the Internet." PK seems happy with this model - whether done at the FCC, or at Congress' hands.

Hmmm...Getting people to the Internet? Traditional, simple stuff. Sort of like strolling to the store, or peddling to the park. Or, like in childhood, making a call from tin cans and string - which is what'll result if PK and their ilk have their way.

With another income tax day behind us, this year's penance may be the last "simple," "unfettered" return we file in a while.

The CBO projects that with current policies in place, addled by a wave of retiring Americans, our tax burden as a nation (in terms of revenues received through income, payroll and excise taxes) will rise 1.5%, to nearly 20% in 2020. That growth aside, revenues will still fall nearly 5% less than Uncle Sam will be spending at that time.

Thus, according to a growing coterie of pundits and officials, more taxes are on the way (spending cuts would be nice, but I digress).

The recession has been many things to many people. For most of us, these are trying times, to say the least. But like a newscaster or mortician who profits from some of life's worst experiences, the states see the recession somewhat more optimistically than the rest of us.

Sure, in the next fiscal year states face nearly $180 billion in budget deficits, with many in dire straits (as this somewhat hyperbolic article touches upon). Yet, letting no crisis go to waste, this has honed where many of those cash-strapped states are looking for their next meal.

The Wall Street Journal recently noted that the slump has brought back to life an idea that many of us thought had died - requiring e-retailers to collect sales tax from out-of-state customers. The state's new tool of choice? The so-called "Amazon.com tax."

It works like this.

Remote / online merchants that have "local marketing affiliates" (i.e., entities essentially operating website pointers to remote merchants) in a given state, must collect state sales taxes for customer purchases of their products - all because the "local affiliate" in that given state pointed any sale (not even the specific sale) to the out-of-state retailer. This controversial tool (now being contemplated by 6 states, and in effect in 3 others) allows states to get around constitutional requirements of physical presence in a state to collect sales taxes. It also gets around the inconvenient fact that in most states with sales taxes, customers largely ignore their obligations to pay that tax (e.g., use tax) if it isn't collected by the Internet / remote merchant.

Barbara Esbin recently spoke at the Wireless U. Communications Policy Seminar on a panel on financing wireless broadband. Barbara's remarks specifically addressed the National Broadband Plan and the role of state governments.

In addition to presenting sensible suggestions for policymakers, including creating incentives to spur deployment and redirecting universal service funds, Barbara offered a bit of perspective on the issue of broadband deployment:

As important access to broadband Internet service is, if the choice comes down to clean water, Medicaid benefits, or bandwidth, I submit that limited government financial resources might be best directed first to clean water and health care.

This is particularly true of state or local efforts to finance a second, third or fourth provider of high speed Internet service, or to go into the bandwidth business itself. Government spending on broadband infrastructure should be directed primarily to those areas where market forces are unlikely, due to high costs and low prospect for returns, to extend network infrastructure without government assistance.

Her prepared remarks can be found here.

Former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin used to refer to commercial alternatives to NASA's Ares rockets as "Paper Rockets," but commercial vehicles like Atlas V, Delta IV and Falcon 1 are quite real and available today, while Ares 1 and 5 are grossly over-budget and way behind-schedule:

NASA should buy commercial space services whenever possible from NewSpace companies like SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Bigelow Aerospace. The Commercial Spaceflight Revolution is happening now!

My colleague, Berin Szoka, worries about 195 independent countries each regulating the Internet:

[I]t's likely to cause, at the very least, many companies to limit access to their sites or services by persons from countries with burdensome regulatory approaches. Even if those foreign laws are well-intentioned and laudable... the result could be to balkanize Internet services.

Szoka argues that Americans are better off because Congress or the federal courts can override burdensome regulation by the States. Others are worried too, and not just about the Internet. Financial regulators have long sought to harmonize regulations across borders, with the European Union leading the way. Szoka would prefer less regulation to harmonization, but if local regulators will not stay their hands voluntarily, a single set of regulations seems preferable to many overlapping, and often contradictory, regulatory regimes.

Yet the question remains of what these regulations should be. The Nobel Laureate Friedrich von Hayek argued that the perfect laws cannot be designed but must evolve over time through a process of trial and error. Americans are better off, not because the federal government can override regulation but because the States are, as Justice Louis Brandeis put it, "laboratories of democracy." Americans have the benefit of trying 50 different regulatory approaches and allowing the market to decide which approach works best.

One could easily look at the Internet today and see that the many different standards and protocols in use are wasteful and burdensome. Yet the many competing standards, and the continuous innovation that drives them, are the engine of growth in the Net economy. Picking a single standard and enforcing that standard would cause innovation to stagnate. Likewise, the burden imposed by competing regulatory regimes is outweighed by the benefits of innovation in the market for law.

Rather than creating a need for standardization in the law, globalization makes regulatory competition more effective. Some companies will choose not to offer content or services in countries with burdensome regulations but this will send a strong signal to those countries to change their regulations. Countries with effective regulations will be able to attract businesses more easily thanks to the web and other countries will have more incentive to replicate the most successful rules.

Competition is likely to lead to less burdensome regulation, so much so that many advocates for harmonization are concerned about a "race to the bottom." Competition can override the preferences of governments - websites around the world are hosted on American servers because the U.S. has stronger Free Speech protections - but not of consumers. Evidence from financial markets (subscription) has found that consumers are attracted to jurisdictions that offer strong protection of property rights: both from fraud and deceptive business practices, and from special interests who can corrupt the law to their own ends.

The Internet has, and will continue to, create new challenges for lawmakers which even the brightest economists and legal scholars will not be able to answer. As tempting as it is to assume we have all the answers, be it less regulation or better regulation, only trial and error can tell us for sure which approach is best.

Google stands accused of violating a California law that requires a website operator to "conspicuously post" a link to its privacy policy on its "home page or first significant page after entering the Web site" with the word "Privacy" in a larger font than the rest of the page's text.

Are we not fortunate to have state laws that make it possible for customers to actually find website privacy policies? With all the billions of documents floating out there in the dark and mysterious pipes and tubes of the so-called “Internet,” how on earth would any simple user ever find the Google privacy policy if Google were not required by law to include an obvious link to that policy on its homepage? Some modern-day da Vinci would have to invent a technology that could magically index every single webpage in existence and let users find—or “search,” to use a classic science-fiction term—for that particular webpage by typing the words “Google privacy policy” and clicking a button.

Until such fantastic Jules Verne-style technologies are developed in some distant century, it is obviously vital that each and every state government develop its own requirement as to how website operators—especially those that purport to offer fantastic-but-as-yet-clearly-impossible “search” services—must clutter their websites' homepages with links to information that no user could ever possibly find on his or her own with today’s crude technology.

My former PFF colleague Randy May, now president of the Maryland-based Free State Foundation, had an editorial in The Washington Times over the weekend about the ominous new trend of state governments pushing Net Neutrality mandates. He notes that Maryland has just introduced such a measure, joining California, Maine and Michigan as states who have tried to go at it alone on this front.

This is a dangerous development for reasons made clear in another Free State Foundation report, this one by James Speta of the Northwestern University School of Law. Speta points out that:

Although some issues in telecommunications have salience at more than one jurisdictional level, network neutrality is the quintessential federal issue. First, applications and content on the Internet are distributed nationally -- and internationally. Almost never will a user access only in-state websites. Network neutrality regulation addresses the relationship between Internet access providers on the one hand and applications and content providers on the other. As a matter of telecommunications doctrine, therefore, network neutrality is a federal issue. Indeed, the FCC has already defined what it considers to be the best network neutrality regime: a general statement of policies to be applied, if necessary, on a case-by-case basis. State attempts to regulate in this area are therefore preempted.

Second, Internet access providers themselves have national footprints, design their networks based on national business practices, and advertise in national media. As a matter of policy, any fragmentation caused by different state network neutrality rules would introduce inefficiencies at a time when expanding the availability of broadband is a high national priority.

I would hope that even supporters of federal Net neutrality regulation would understand the dangers associated with giving state government more authority over the day-to-day workings of the Net. It could be a disaster in the making if a patchwork of parochial policies was applied to this global medium, especially if states use NN rules as a way to embark on other forms of Net regulation.

Education is a hot topic for tech companies, thus I link to this commentary by Milton Friedman in the LA Times.