Are The FDA & The Patent System Getting In The Way Of Saving Lives Again?

from the that-market-ain't-free dept

There was a somewhat horrifying article in the NY Times recently about some serious drug shortages in the US, especially for certain forms of cancer. There are a few efforts underway to deal with the shortages, but as the article notes, it's pretty ridiculous that there are any shortages at all, since "the number of cancers diagnosed in a year was easy to predict." Of course, the real problem is that in a claimed effort to "protect" people, the FDA has made it almost impossible for competition to exist:

A crucial problem is disconnection between the free market and required government regulation. Prices for many older medicines are low until the drugs are in short supply; then prices soar. But these higher prices do little to encourage more supply, because it can be difficult and expensive to overcome the technical and regulatory hurdles. And if supplies return to normal, prices plunge.

Left out of this paragraph, but equally important, are patents, which clearly hinder such competition as well. We've discussed in the past how the FDA can often get in the way of medical innovation. Even if it means well (and I'm sure it does), putting in place systems that make it too costly to create real competition does the exact opposite of its intended purpose.

Filed Under: competition, drugs, free markets, patents, pharmaceuticals, pricing, regulations

The Latest Entrant Into The Economically Clueless, Luddite 'Internet Is Evil' Book Category

from the it-must-sell-well dept

Last we heard from Rob Levine, he was saying that people in the music industry shouldn't pay attention to what's popular on file sharing networks, because you can't learn anything from that. That was when he was executive editor of Billboard, and clearly was trying to defend Billboard's obsolete listings of what was popular. Very, very shortly after that he was out of a job quit Billboard. Now he's back and it seems like he's barely lost a beat on saying clueless things. He's got a new book out about how the internet is evil, destroying all of the media, and to kick up some publicity for it, he's got a piece over at The Guardian that you guys just can't stop submitting. It's provocatively titled: How the internet has all but destroyed the market for films, music and newspapers.

Of course, that's fascinating, since pretty much every study we've seen shows that the market for films and music has increased, and while for newspapers it has shrunk, that's unfairly limiting the market to the paper side. The market for news has continued to grow. Most of Levine's article seems to be made up of typical wishful thinking, carefully choosing how he defines markets, and a strong dose of traditional economic fallacies, with just a pinch of luddism. The article opens with the classic trick of pretty much anyone who's data can't back up what they're selling: use random correlations, rather than any evidence of a causal relationship. So, he talks about the declines of NBC, EMI, the Washington Post and MGM. And, somehow, that's proof that the internet is at fault. I won't go into each case, but there are many, many other reasons why each of those four companies ran into tough times recently, almost none of which has to do with the internet (and much of which had to do with ridiculously bad management).

From there he makes a massive leap to basically blame the tech industry for the entertainment industry's problems. Stop me if you've heard this one before. Apparently, you see, The Pirate Bay, Google & the Huffington Post sucked every other industry dry. This, of course, is not true. It's a made up scare story for entertainment industry executives and politicians. I mean, this kind of scare mongering has been debunked so many times that you'd think Rob must have to pay someone for rehashing such old news. Let's dig into this just a bit:

Over the past decade, much of the value created by music, films, and newspapers has benefited other companies – pirates and respected technology firms alike. The Pirate Bay website made money by illegally offering major-label albums, even as music sales declined to less than half of what they were 10 years ago.

The Pirate Bay made a tiny amount of money -- barely a blip on the radar -- and given the continued research showing that those using sites like The Pirate Bay tend to be the industry's best customers, it's entirely clear (unless you are willfully ignorant) that the issue is a business model problem, where the labels failed to offer what consumers wanted. Furthermore, since he brings up "music sales," he's flat-out wrong. Sales of recordings may have dropped, but if you actually look at the real market which Levine conveniently ignores, which includes live, publishing, advertising, direct-to-fan and others, you discover that the money that actually goes to musicians has gone up tremendously. Sure, the record labels are suffering, but that's because they set themselves up to focus only on the part of the business that got disintermediated.

YouTube used clips from shows such as NBC's Saturday Night Live to build a business that Google bought for $1.65bn.

Ah, the industry's false line again. YouTube provided free software and free bandwidth (at a huge expense to the company) and combined that with a large community to become the defacto place online for video. Lots of smart folks -- including NBC's Saturday Night Live, eventually learned to embrace that and use YouTube as a tool to gain viewers. In fact, if you want to look at who benefited more from SNL's videos showing up on YouTube, there's a pretty strong argument that it was SNL... not YouTube.

And the Huffington Post became one of the most popular news sites online largely by rewriting newspaper articles.

Nice line. If only it were true. It's not. The Huffington Post launched with a ton of new and unique content from lots of people. Huffington called in a bunch of favors and had a ton of her famous friends writing for the site from day one. On top of that, the company has a large reporting staff that does plenty of original and unique reporting -- much of which accounts for its traffic. Yes, it also does some aggregating of content -- but nothing that any other news publication couldn't do as well. If it's really true that HuffPo somehow hurt other media, they could just tack on the same sort of aggregating. Anyone who claims that HuffPo became popular by rewriting newspaper articles is lying.

This isn't the inevitable result of technology. Traditionally, the companies that invested in music and film also controlled their distribution – EMI, for example, owned recording studios, pressing plants, and the infrastructure that delivered CDs to stores.

I read this and all I see is that EMI is the horse buggy maker, who invested in wooden wheels and buggy whips just as the automobile was coming around. Look, if you invest in the parts of the business that become obsolete in the digital age, you kinda deserve to die. I'd hate to live in Levine's world where the buggy maker should have been able to stop the automaker. We had our red flag laws that required people to walk in front of automobiles waving red flags, and everyone learned they were stupid.

But, Levine thinks red flag laws are the answer to saving his incompetent buddies in the entertainment industry. You see, he blames one of the few good regulations out there, which he hopes gets taken away:

The internet changed all this, not because it enables the fast transmission of digital data but because the regulations that enable technology companies to evade responsibility for their business models have created a broken market. Scores of sites now offer music, while hundreds of others summarise news. Part of the problem is rampant piracy – unauthorised distribution that doesn't benefit creators or the companies that invest in them. It also puts pressure on media companies to accept online distribution deals that don't cover their costs.

Anyone who thinks that the market didn't change because of the ability to more efficiently distribute data is making a joke. But, let's go on. Levine is, again, misrepresenting reality. The laws he's talking about -- mainly the DMCA's safe harbor -- do not allow tech companies to evade responsibility. Levine is, again, being intellectually dishonest. The safe harbor merely means that liability is properly applied to the actors actually doing the infringement. Apparently Levine prefers to blame Ford for any car accident.

As for that last line about "pressure on media companies to accept online distribution deals that don't cover their costs," that's a howler. Just take a look at the "deal" that Pandora has for streaming music, which has set up Pandora to never be profitable. And what "costs" do the record labels have for those deals? It's a sunk cost. They recorded the album and they just hand over the digital files to Pandora. No marginal costs at all.

But the underlying issue is that creators and distributors now have opposing interests. Companies such as Google and Apple don't care that much about selling media, since they make their money in other ways – on advertising in the first case, and gadgets in the second. Google just wants to help consumers find the song or show they're looking for, whether it's a legal download or not, while Apple has an interest in pushing down the price of music to make its products more useful. And this dynamic doesn't only hurt media conglomerates – it creates problems for independent artists and companies of every size.

Another favorite of the entertainment industry. It sounds good if you aren't actually thinking this through. But there's a weasel phrase in there that lets Levine say something that he can insist is true, while it's totally and completely misleading. He says they don't care about "selling media." But that assumes that selling media is the only way for the entertainment industry to make money. Google and Apple care very much about making sure that content creators get paid, because they need content creators to keep making money to keep producing works (which, by the way, is happening, as we have record numbers of new music, movies, news and other products coming out each year -- a fact that Levine seems to completely ignore). But they know that there are better ways to get them paid than just "selling media." In fact, when you just look at the music industry alone (the industry Levine should know best), he must know that actual artists are now making significantly more than they did in the past, thanks to the industry shifting away from "selling media" to other business models.

Then he jumps in with the luddite's favorite line about how everyone who disagrees with him tosses out "information wants to be free." Of course, as Cory Doctorow pointed out last year, the only people who seem to toss out that line are entertainment industry execs pretending that's what people who disagree with them say.

The crux of Levine's argument (and the title of his book) is that all of this shows the problem of "free riders." This is another popular entertainment industry trope, which sounds good... other than the fact it's economically clueless. Yes, there are certain areas of economics where free riders can be a problem. But there are also such things as positive externalities and economic growth created because of free riders. There's a serious book to be written on the subject, but it's not this one.

Certainly, copyright laws need to be updated for the digital age. Many reformers say they favour protection, but view any attempt to enforce it as unacceptable. This doesn't make sense: a market can't be based on voluntary payments, and laws don't work if they can't be enforced. There needs to be some penalty for illegal downloading, although slowing the access speed of a lawbreaker makes more sense than cutting their account entirely. By the same token, why should internet users be allowed to access sites that clearly – and that last word is important – violate UK law? If the UK simply declines to enforce its laws online, it will leave many of its businesses vulnerable as the internet becomes more important to commerce in the years ahead.

Note the implicit -- but false -- assumption in there. Without copyright, the only business model is "voluntary payments." That's funny, I didn't realize I had ever been "forced" to pay for all of those CDs, concerts and movies... A market is always based on "voluntary" transactions between willing buyers and sellers. That's the definition of a market. How can he say otherwise?

I'm guessing he really means "voluntary" in the idea of "tips" or "donations," but that again presumes (totally falsely) that the only way to make money is from the direct sale of media. It's not. And he must know that.

Honestly, for all the trouble I've given Levine in the past, I always thought he was pretty sharp on the larger issues. But this column (and, I presume the book it advertises) seems to have simply taken all the tropes, ignored all the data, misrepresented wherever possible, and packaged it all together under a silly economically ignorant title. I'm sure it'll sell just great. Thankfully, though, if you read through the comments on his article, nearly every one of his ridiculous statements is dismantled item by item. Ah, crowdsourcing to the rescue.

Filed Under: economics, free rider, internet, regulations, rob levine

Giant Breweries Get Laws Passed In Wisconsin To Make Life Hard For Small Breweries [Updated]

from the small-businesses-are-the-backbone dept

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has presented himself as a very "business-friendly" governor in his first year in office and has specifically claimed that he's a supporter of small businesses as the "backbone" of the state's economy. But reports are suggesting that he's happy to support legislation that helps big companies at the expense of small companies. We've already covered the attempt, via AT&T, to kill Wiscnet (which only a very last minute reprieve saved). And now DoggyDork points us to the news of a new law that requires all beer makers, including tiny craft shops, to only sell beer through big middle men. That is, a small craft beer maker can't go to the restaurant down the street and sell its beer. Instead, it has to find a big distributor to sell for it. The article notes that the big beer companies, like MillerCoors, love this bill. But the small guys hate it, because it'll effectively kill off whatever sales they had. The cynical suggest that this is an attempt by the likes of MillerCoors to limit competition from these upstart competitors. Update: There's an informative, if incredibly insult-filled, comment, claiming that the story at ThinkProgress, our original link, is misreporting the details of this bill. That comment suggests that this bill is not quite as bad as they made it sound (and, of course, accuses us of being all sorts of evil for claiming otherwise). Update 2: And... a separate response suggests the explanation in that comment in the first update might not be accurate at all. Good debate going on in the comments.

Filed Under: beer, regulations, wisconsin

Can We Kill Off This Myth That The Internet Is A Wild West That Needs To Be Tamed?

from the it's-not dept

We recently wrote about Nicolas Sarkozy's push to convince the tech world and the "digerati" that it's time to clamp down on internet freedoms. While he was more blatant and direct about it, we're seeing a similar theme elsewhere, and frequently see such claims in our comments as well. It's all based on this idea that the internet is some sort of "wild west" that is a haven for all sorts of illegality, and that needs to come to an end.

The problem is that this is a myth. It makes for a compelling narrative, but it's a myth nonetheless.

The latest version of this, is a horrible, dangerous and ridiculous editorial from Martin Kettle, at The Guardian, who insists that it's time to bring the internet "under control."

Yet whatever one's qualms about Sarkozy and his plan, he is surely on to something that should not be so sweepingly dismissed. Looking at British politics this week, it is hard to make an intellectually serious case that internet regulation issues should not be raised. Not only has the balance between parliament, the courts and the media been made to look irrelevant over superinjunctions by the twitterati, but almost the first act of the new Scottish government on Thursday was to promise a clampdown on internet sectarian hate postings. The fact that Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg also popped up this week with the casual suggestion that children under 13 should be able to use social networking sites dramatically underlines the argument that there are issues of importance to discuss here.

Let's take these things one by one. First, on the issue of the superinjunction, it suggests the exact opposite of what Kettle is arguing. It's pointing out the ridiculousness of analog-era regulations in a digital age. That's not a case for controls. It's a case for removing controls. The issue of hate speech is another one where people overreact emotionally. The best way to counter hate speech (which is almost always ignorance) is with more speech. "Clamping down" only convinces those who hate that they're "onto something" and that they're being persecuted. Finally, Zuckerberg's claim -- which he's already pointed out involved taking his words out of context -- was just that there could be socially useful reasons why younger people might be helped if they could have accounts, but over aggressive internet controls prevent that. Again, that seems to argue against control, not for it.

The internet cannot exist in some undiscussable and untouchable dimension of human activity. It is a human creation. It affects human lives in all sorts of increasing ways. Morality and the rule of law should apply on the internet as elsewhere in human conduct. As such, it is an absolutely proper subject for governments to consider, though naturally with sensitivity.

And here's the myth at work. The internet does not exist as untouchable. Morality and the rule of law do apply to the actions people do there. The question is whether those laws are appropriate. In many cases, it appears they're not.

We have got to get past the fallacy that rules that existed in the pre-internet era are obsolete because the internet makes it so difficult to enforce them. To obey the injunctions of the courts over privacy, for example, is in principle right, not wrong. The fact that the internet makes it possible to circumvent those injunctions does not negate their worth or seriousness. It merely makes it imperative to consider the ways in which such constraints can be fairly enforced in the new media. That may not be as difficult as it may seem.

No, the fallacy is not that these laws are obsolete because they're difficult to enforce. It's that they're obsolete because many of them don't make any sense, such as these injunctions that seek to merely protect the rich and famous from having their own embarrassing actions discussed. Furthermore, some of these laws aren't "difficult" to enforce, they're impossible to enforce. And it's not because the internet is some "wild west," but because it's a very different platform of communication -- a many to many platform, which the world has not had before. We've had one-to-one and one-to-many forms of communication, but a many-to-many platform really does change some important fundamentals when it comes to speech.

Far more important are the questions of internet access to unsuitable material, especially but not solely by children, as well as the danger to children from inadequately policed social media. Merely to write such a sentence is to invite outrage in some quarters, but these issues are all too easy for a society to ignore until they return to haunt us.

And the proper response, if there is "unsuitable" (unsuitable to whom, by the way?) content is to go after those who produced and distributed it. Not to seek to block access and sweep it under the rug. That's denial. Let's live in reality.

It is beyond serious dispute that the internet has placed much greater amounts of pornography within far easier reach of many more people, including children, than at any other time in human history. And it is inconceivable that this is a development without destructive consequences.

"Destructive"? That certainly seems like hyperbole. Do you have any evidence to support destructive? I agree it may be inappropriate, but there are ways to deal with this that don't involve regulations. It's called educating children as to what's appropriate, and how to deal with content that is inappropriate should they come across it.

To argue for controls over the internet may not be cool. But the internet was surely not meant to be this way. The geniuses who created the modern web and made it so exciting did not do so in order to create the largest pornography bombardment in human history, to have a global email system weighed down by spam, to encourage hostile hacking into national security secrets, to embolden sectarian bigots to violent threats or mere gossipers to say ill-considered things under the protection of pseudonymity.

No, they meant to create a platform for communication in a many-to-many fashion and they knew that, as with any platform for communication, it can be used for both good and bad purposes. The response shouldn't be to automatically reach for the regulation button, with all its unintended consequences and heavy handed results, but to understand what it means to live in a world of much freer communication.

The problems can be solved by staying out the way. Kettle talks about spam and pornography. Yet, I almost never see spam any more. Why? Because technologists came in and built filters. I never see pornography either. And not because of any laws or filters, but because the websites I surf don't display any, and contrary to the myth makers, it's pretty difficult to "accidentally" run into porn. I do a lot of surfing and can't recall ever accidentally coming across any.

The internet isn't some wild west that needs taming. It's a new and different system that is sometimes used for bad purposes, but much more frequently used for very, very good purposes. And, because so many people have natural incentives to minimize the bad, they tend to take care of themselves naturally, by those who actually understand the system, and not by those who seek to implement laws and controls that don't fit the system.

Filed Under: internet, regulations, tamed, wild west

Sarkozy's Attempt To Woo The Digerati Foreshadows The Coming Conflict Between Technology & Regulations

from the but-what-happens-next dept

There's been a lot of talk about the e-G8 Conference this week, which was an attempt to bring together technology and internet leaders with government officials. The idea, apparently, was for government officials to convince the digerati that it was time for government to take a much more active role in regulating the internet. The initial reports suggest that the tech folks weren't buying what Nicolas Sarkozy and other government officials were selling -- with some putting out scathing reports about any company willing to help the government clamp down on free speech online.

We're seeing more and more stories of government attempts to exert greater control over the internet. While governments have been seeking such control for quite some time, we're finally seeing some real movement here, and I have no doubt that the pace and intensity of such efforts is only going to increase. The results of the e-G8 are not at all surprising. The politicians approached it as politicians do: looking to plead their case and create an atmosphere of political trade-offs, but many of the digerati tend not to work that way (which is why they tend to avoid policy and political debates altogether). They're not interested in tradeoffs, and that leads to a pretty serious culture clash, which is what we're seeing.

That's why this is going to get worse before it gets better. Governments are going to increase these kinds of efforts, and they're going to have significant legislative successes. There are two reasons for that. First, most elected officials don't really understand technology, and don't recognize the impact and the unintended consequences of what they're doing. They think that they're attacking "problems" online, or "bringing order" where there was chaos. They're not. Second, many large legacy companies, who are past their innovation stages, are equally frightened of the disruptions the internet has created. These are also the firms with the biggest lobbying budgets and most connections within the government. So they see this as an opportunity not to bring order to chaos (even if they claim such), but to stifle innovation and competition that might challenge their market position.

And there's no doubt that this combination of factors will win in the short term. It's hard to see what could stop them at this point.

The long term is a different situation however. As we've seen, the technologically literate recognize that such regulations are, effectively, technology problems, and what barriers the regulators and the dinosaur companies put up are simply challenges to be coded around. We're already starting to see some of that in efforts towards more distributed systems, and I would bet those will only increase rapidly over the next few years. These kinds of things take time -- and many will mock these early projects as not being very good or successful (and they won't be).

But, over time, you cannot deny what technology allows. Technology will prevail and make the regulations obsolete. The only real question is what kind of timeframe we're talking about. I'm hopeful that this confrontation is short, but I fear that it will be long.

Filed Under: e-g8, law, regulations, sarkozy, technology

UK Politicians Want To Regulate Google... Because It's Good At What It Does

from the searching-for-a-clue dept

I recognize that there's been a weird backlash against Google in the UK, since Prime Minister David Cameron has been asking questions about why companies like Google aren't starting in the UK. Rather than actually looking into the core issues, it appears that many are simply trying to take Google down a notch instead. The latest, as pointed out by Glyn Moody appears to be a bit of a retread of some older arguments. However, it's being done by British MPs. Yes, they're suddenly calling on the UK government to regulate Google.

Why? Well, as far as I can tell, the argument is that Google is good at what it does, and people like it, so thus it must be punished. I really wish there were more to it than that, but that really does seem to be the heart of it: let's regulate Google because we're jealous that it's successful.

The debate apparently was kicked off by MP Dominic Raab, repeating the old story about Foundem, whose only purpose in life seemed to be to bitch about Google. Foundem, of course, was a tiny search engine that no one heard of that offered little value, and was exactly the kind of website that people hate getting pointed to in search results, because it feels spammy. Google -- quite reasonably -- buried Foundem's results. It wasn't -- as Foundem's execs and Raab now claim -- because Google was "scared" of this competitor and was shutting it out of the market, but because Foundem sucked and people didn't like it.

Yet Raab uses this example of Google better serving its customers, as an excuse to regulate the company:

Mr Raab said that the effect was to suppress Foundem in Google search results. Mr Raab pointed out that the alleged treatment of Foundem would be sufficient to bury and kill off many businesses. He accused Google of deliberately "stacking the deck" against small competitors and called for government policy to address what he called ‘search engine transparency'.

Mr Raab accused the regulators, Ofcom and the Office of Fair Trading, of complacency. He called on them to take action against companies abusing dominance. "Search engines are the gateways to the Internet, and with a 95% share, Google is in a dominant position"

"If Google does not allow consumers to access potential competitors via its search engine gateway, they will be choked out of the market-place" he said.

First of all, search engines are less and less the gateway to the rest of the internet in an age of social media. Even if Google dominates in search traffic, more and more people are finding out about other sites online from their friends via social media. Second, and more importantly, nowhere does Raab explain why what Google did was bad. He just assumes that it must be bad. However, if Google is suppressing bad results that users don't want, isn't that a good thing? Serving customers better is a good thing, and if Foundem's having trouble getting users, the fault is clearly with Foundem, not Google. And it's pretty weak for politicians to be looking to prop up a failed company, just because another company is good at what it does.

Filed Under: antitrust, monopoly, regulations, uk
Companies: google

Does It Really Make Sense For Silicon Valley Companies To Make Friends In DC?

from the politics-is-a-dangerous-game dept

The common wisdom around Silicon Valley for the last twenty years or so, has been that companies here need to be much more active in Washington DC, and really should be more active on the lobbying front. The classic example of a tech company that didn't pay much attention to lobbying was Microsoft. And, more recently, it was joked about how Google was late to the game, and not very good at it when it started (I remember the stories of Sergey Brin showing up in DC in silver mesh sneakers and a t-shirt and finding it hard to get meetings with Congressional reps). Yet, with reports that Facebook is trying to buck this trend with a strong DC presence (including possibly hiring former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs), DCer Adam Thierer makes the case that tech companies "normalizing relations" with DC is a bad, bad idea, because when you get into the lobbying game, inevitably, you become focused on using politics to limit others, rather than on your own ability to innovate.

It's the same basic argument that Andy Kessler discussed in his recent guest post (and in his new book, Eat People) concerning the difference between entrepreneurs who create value... and those who use politics to lock up value.

In an essay I penned for the Cato Institute last November entitled “The Sad State of Cyber-Politics,” I reiterated arguments made a decade earlier by two brilliant men: Cypress Semiconductor CEO T. J. Rodgers and the late great Milton Friedman. Rodgers penned a prescient manifesto for Cato in 2000 with the provocative title: “Why Silicon Valley Should Not Normalize Relations with Washington, D.C.” in which he argued that, “The political scene in Washington is antithetical to the core values that drive our success in the international marketplace and risks converting entrepreneurs into statist businessmen.” A year earlier, Friedman penned another Cato essay called “The Business Community’s Suicidal Impulse” in which he lamented the persistent propensity of companies to persecute one’s competitors using regulation or the threat thereof. What both men stressed was that coming to Washington has a tendency to change a company’s focus and disposition, and not for the better — if you believe in real capitalism, that is, and not the abominable crony capitalism fostered by Washington.

As Adam notes, the companies like Facebook seeking greater attention in DC certainly aren't doing so with the explicit purpose of trying to limit others and seeking regulatory capture of some sort. For the most part, as he says, they're in "cover your butt" mode. But, once you get established, there certainly is a temptation to make use of that situation to limit innovation, limit competition, and push for policies that simply benefit a single company.

To be honest, I'd always gone with the conventional wisdom, that building up better relationships with folks in DC was a good idea. But Adam (and the others he links to) make a good point that's worth considering as well. Perhaps I'm too idealistic in that I believed that perhaps more people explaining and demonstrating how innovation really works, would get the message through to politicians. Instead, it seems there may really be a risk that the opposite happens: and how DC politics works is the message that gets through to tech companies. And that may not be a good thing.

Filed Under: government, innovation, lobbying, politics, regulations, silicon valley, washington dc
Companies: facebook, google, microsoft

Is It Possible To Block The 'Bad Stuff' Online Without Also Stopping The 'Good Stuff'?

from the challenges dept

Rick Falkvinge points out that Sweden's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Carl Bildt, is defending internet censorship in a recent editorial responding to the concerns of some internet activists (Google translation of the original Swedish), who he says just don't "understand" the internet.

Bildt's point is that you have to ban the "bad flows" online, or else you have "anarchy." He claims that there are limits to free speech everywhere around the world, and it's perfectly acceptable to block certain forms of "bad" speech. The problem here is that it's not as easy as Bildt makes it out to be to distinguish "good flows" from "bad flows." And it's the sort of thing that is regularly abused by governments in promoting censorship. The Chinese government, for example, regularly claims that its Great Firewall is merely protecting citizens from bad or dangerous information. The problem that many people have is that governments given the power to dictate what is a "good flow" and what is a "bad flow," usually can't resist the temptation to take things that they just don't like or which weakens their own power, and designate them as "bad flows."

As we recently noted in discussing how infrastructure for freedom often looks exactly like infrastructure for piracy, distinguishing between these two things is not so easy, and almost any attempt to stop "bad flows" runs a serious risk of massively stifling important "good" flows as well. Separately, Falkvinge highlights that Bildt and others may be confusing freedom of expression and freedom of information:

As Niklas Dougherty writes, the key problem with Mr. Bildt's reasoning is that he is unable (or unwilling) to distinguish freedom of expression from freedom of information. Freedom of expression can indeed have some limits, though always post facto. The most famous example is that you can't shout Fire! in a crowded theater, but there are plenty of other examples: you can't distribute military secrets, people's medical records, et cetera.

However, the freedom of information is a different beast. This is the freedom to seek, fetch and research information and the expressions of other human beings unfettered, and has nothing to do with sending a message to any other human being. The freedom of information must be absolutely unhindered, with no exceptions. None. Not one. If you are cracking down on this, you are interfering with private correspondence and the right to partake of the ideas of others. Such behavior would also in sharp violation of the European Convention on Human Rights (article 8).

This is an important distinction, that I don't think that many people think about or consider when discussing these ideas. So, even if you are going to segment "good" information from "bad" information, you also need to distinguish expression from information itself.

Filed Under: carl bildt, censorship, internet, regulations, speech

Why Are Canadian Regulators Telling Music TV Channels How Many Videos They Can Play?

from the going-overboard dept

Pickle Monger points us to a bit of regulatory micromanaging up in Canada, where the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has been carefully regulating exactly how many music videos various music channels can play. This results in silly situations, such as the case where it denies a request by one channel who wants to play fewer music videos... and then three months later, it denies a request from a different channel who wants to play more music videos.

Three months after the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission told MuchMusic it can't air fewer music videos than it already does, the same federal agency has denied a request to play more of them on a cable music channel that's become a launching pad for dozens of independent Canadian artists.

Filed Under: canada, crtc, music videos, regulations

European Commission Chickens Out: Allows Hungarian Media Censorship

from the no-moral-backbone dept

There was plenty of concern earlier this year, as Hungary took over the EU Presidency just at the same time it had passed a worrying new internet censorship law that lets the government fine any content provider that it judges to not be sufficiently "balanced." The European Commission apparently had planned to criticize the law... but somehow chickened out at the last minute. Glyn Moody points us to a (slightly confusing) account of what happened, where minutes before a vote was to be taken, some sort of "deal" was struck that appears to let Hungary continue to censor the media. Among the "concessions," it appears that the "balanced" part won't apply to internet-only media, but will still apply to other media. Online publications, though, still have to register with the government, and can face fines or get "dropped" from the register -- barring them from continuing to publish -- if they violate certain rules. As the report notes, this still seems like it goes against the basic concepts of freedom of expression and freedom of the press.

Filed Under: censorship, europe, hungary, media, regulations