While no legislation mandates that entertainment retailers check the age of their customers, many industries have standardized self-regulation. The MPAA-Motion Picture Association of America, the RIAA-Recording Industry Association of America, and now the ESRB-Entertainment Software Rating Board are the de-facto gatekeepers of American “morality.”  While these industry rating systems empower parents and businesses to make decisions on behalf of children, they can be more opaque and less democratic than federal agencies. The documentary “This Film is Not Yet Rated” explored how the MPAA is surprisingly secretive and demonstrates biased against both female sexuality and homosexuality in their ratings.

The real last frontier though is broadcast television.  Earlier this year, the FCC’s control on content (specifically profanity) was severely restricted by the Second Circuit.  However today the Supreme Court agreed to hear the Second Circuit case in a sign that the FCC’s authority may be upheld.  This contrasting push and pull of First Amendment freedoms reflects the technical distinctions of private purchases and public airwaves.  However, it’s unclear whether this distinction is either stable or relevant with the diminishing role of broadcast television in the American media landscape.

Local control, is not necessarily good.  When local rule forces decision makers to confront the consequences of their actions, a respect for human rights can be enforced. However, local thinking can also inhibit the big solutions needed to address big problems.  It can also threaten the needy and instill local conceptions of morality, as half way houses and planned parenthood clinics are often the targets of NIMBYism.  A matrix of progressive “goodness” and public vs private ownership reveals the wide range of policies effected by NIMBYism both good and bad.

Organizations like the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) have sought to identify corporate personhood and federal control as the critical roadblocks in the path towards progressive change.  While this does appear to be a silver bullet against Factory Farms and Big Box Retail, its worth wondering what its consequences might be.

What happens to renewable energy projects, adult stores, halfway houses, and planned parenthood clinics in this future?  Certainly, for now, for profit factory farming and mining corporations have more legal resources to exert their corporate rights.  Progressive must understand that NIMBYism is by its nature is good, bad, and ugly. A progressive future must empower those with the least power, often times that’s local communities, but sometimes it is the individual.

My home turf, Washington DC, enacted a District-wide tax on plastic bags this past January.  I and other Beltwayers now pay a 5 cent tax on plastic bags. A portion of the fee goes to the store and the rest goes to a fund to clean up the Anacostia River.

While I instinctively jumped to the conclusion that Washington DC’s method was preferable to the Californian ban, I’m now more skeptical.  The economist in me immediately identifies the problem: clearly the cost of plastic bags (free) doesn’t reflect their public cost (for example, the $25 million California spends each year cleaning them up).  A tax could address that problem.  If bags are taxed sufficiently, then fewer people will use them and the cost of their clean-up will be part of the price.

However, the scale of this problem exceeds our measure of the cost.  Less then half of a percent of plastic bags are recycled, yet they take over a thousand years to biodegrade.  For those bags that aren’t thrown away and instead blow into the ocean, they contribute to the environmentalist nightmare known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  These problems are almost beyond redress because the exceed the human capacity for understanding.  These are costs that involve an ethic of planetary stewardship that exceeds our generational expectations, though the same may not be said of future generations.

For now, we can celebrate the surprising position of the California Grocers Association (CGA),  the industry association for grocery stores, which came out in support of the bag ban. Despite the potential impact on grocery store consumers unused to shopping with their own bags, the CGA prefers the ban as  “a unified statewide standard.” They believe the alternative, a collage of city-by-city legislation, would be more disruptive to business.

It comes as no surprise that the paper and plastic industries oppose the ban. Big Paper will have to adopt better practices and produce paper bags with 40% recyclable material, and  the plastic industry will be out of the business until they can develop biodegradable plastics.

I would encourage states to replicate either the District or Californian model as the first priority should be to address the profound environmental costs of a rather insidious object of convenience (read: “plastic bags”). Hopefully, academics will pursue comparative studies on this issue over the next couple of years.  I’m particularly interested in the findings of behavioral economists or sociologists.  I wonder if the environmental ethic of choosing to carry a bag leads to further environmental action or if it will be used as justification for buying an SUV.

Also, some great related news: the state of New York — the subject of much scrutiny in Gasland — is close to passing a bill that would take decisive action to place a temporary moratorium on fracking. Here’s hoping for a happy ending.

SFpark Overview from SFpark on Vimeo.

[g]ive taxpayers the option of a pre-filled tax form to verify, sign and return to the IRS or online.  This will eliminate the need for Americans to hire expensive tax preparers and to gather information that the federal government already has on file. (Politifact)

Now what’s the bad news? Intuit, owner of Turbo Tax, is rightfully scared that if filing taxes becomes easy enough to do on your own, you won’t pay them to prepare your taxes.  So, they’ve invested over $1.25 million on lobbyists and $2.12 million on campaign donations in the state since 2005 (LA Times).  That’s a lot of money, and their only ask is to prevent this pilot program from going statewide.  Now in addition to the glowing tax payer response to the quality of the program,

it [also] costs California $2.59 to process a paper return, and only 34 cents to process a ReadyReturn, the state says. For the coming fiscal year, it expects that the program will save about three times as much money as it costs to operate, and that’s assuming that only 160,000 of the two million eligible taxpayers use it. (NYT 01/24/2010)

Sadly, Intuit — rather then focusing on improving services like Mint, a Web 2.0 financial planning software — is asserting its role as a legacy industry.  There is a reason the American people believe that government is innately less efficient then industry, but what many fail to realize is that industry often times actively  prevents better governance.  No where is this more clear then in the world of e-governance.

My frustration lies with implication that the government can claim eminent domain and take private property as long as it serves a “public use”.  Just today I read in the New York Times that the state of New York is taking several blocks in Harlem to resell to Columbia University.  While eminent domain can certainly have beneficial outcomes, it evokes a rage in property holders, even though they’ve been compensated. Reflecting on this, I realize I have a right to be angry, too:  I have not (yet) been compensated for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

I want my money as a collective owner of the public domain.  The black and white movies, classic books and photos that we collectively owned were stolen.  If the government sees a “public use” in taking from the public domain, or ruling in favor of those who take from the public, I’m fine with that. I just want to be compensated.

In the lawsuit against “illegal music downloader” Joel Tenenbaum, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) claimed that each act of infringement, or song, was worth $22,500.  Since the RIAA has already gone through all the trouble of determining the worth of a song, the rest is easy. Now, to exercise the totally legal right to remove private property from the public domain for “public use,” the RIAA follow the government’s model and compensate the American public for every work they remove from the public domain. Looking just at the music collection, that’s about $22,500 x 300 million (Americans), or $6,750,000,000,000.00 per song.

Now maybe instead of paying what you owe, the RIAA can let the 15% of Americans who admit to piracy (a felony) just put it on their tab. Seems like a fair deal to me.

Note: This is just a modest proposal. Of course copyright reform would also be acceptable…



The new economics of user generated content requires an understanding of both economic and social incentives. I’m currently reading Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, a text that underscores the huge implications these sorts of new incentives bear for tech policy.

I bring up Apps for Democracy because last week at Digital Capital Week — the so called SXSW of the mid-atlantic — I listened to Bryan Sivak (who filled Kundra’s shoes as DC’s new CIO) speak about how the DC’s local government is opening up even more public data. Now you can access information on the municipal run Circulator buses. (The metro and other bus systems are run under the transportation authority WMATA.)  Check out the Chief Technology Officer’s labs page here to see the data for yourself.

Looking at this page, I was reminded about the transformative role Google has played in making transit data public. Having helped design common (open) technological standards, Google empowered developers to build Android and iPhone Apps, mash-ups, and of course improved Google Maps.

The DC government provides Circulator data in three different formats: KML, GTFS, and CSV. A KML file is the file format used for Google Earth, originally invented by Keyhole, Inc. (which was purchased by Google in 2004).  GTFS or General Transit Feed Specification format was originally called the Google Transit Feed Specification and only went public in 2008. CSV files in the transit database provide additional information and weekly updates with GPS data points of every city bus every 15 seconds.

Google’s specifications have made releasing transit information easier than ever before, and both (the KML and GTFS) are essentially open file formats. The Open Geospatial Consortium has given its seal of approval to KML, and GTFS was released with open-source editing tools.

Transit data is essential public information that empowers anyone armed with wifi or a smart phone to control their travel from beginning to end: knowing when and where to arrive for transit and how long it will take to get to a destination gives a person an incredible amount of agency.  Although I’d like to see more file formats like OSM for Open Street Map or more information like the GPS located CSV data, the important thing is to just get the data out there. And for all its successes, there’s a lot more DC could be doing on this end. Last week techPresident reported that London is setting up its own apps challenge — and that they  released all of their transit data.  Liberating this data is a global challenge, but one we can be active in. Check out the GTFS exchange website to see if you should be contacting your local transit authority.

There are two ways of achieving better security from a macro scale: different networks or more secure networks.  If for example, we build networks to operate our nuclear weapons, electricity, satellite navigation, etc. so that they are completely disconnected from the Internet, then we achieve security…unless foreign intelligence agencies have agents physically on the ground.  Alternatively, we could just build really secure systems. I imagine these would involve limiting user privileges and developing incredibly complex passwords.

There is obviously a trade-off between these systems, but it’s helpful to be able to conceive of cybersecurity in this mindset.  For example, while separating a system from the Internet is one way of being “different;” another is to simply use an alternate  operating system.  The reason that Mac computers get less viruses has a lot to do with their being different. This is also the reason behind a new, seperate opperating system called Kylin, developed by the Chinese governemnt. A report released by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission claimed the intent of this OS was for security reasons (though there is little evidence to support this claim).

In his book, Richard Clark takes a strong anti-Microsoft stance, focusing particularly on the issue of Pentagon technology acquisition. Not only does Microsoft not claim that their OS is incredibly secure, it’s also what almost everybody else has.  As hackers focus their attention on large scale operations, Microsoft (and particularly old Windows) computers are easy targets.

And yet, I don’t know if I can be an advocate for “different” systems.  Metcalfe’s Law suggests that the more systems we have interacting together, the more valuable the system is. Why wouldn’t this apply to the Internet? It’s certainly an issue that technologists and policy wonks should reflect on.