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Culture Warriors Are Missing the Point

by Nicole Ciandella on June 21, 2010

in Culture

Viacom took a heavy-handed beating last week in The Washington Times. Robert Knight, senior fellow at the American Civil Rights Union, slammed the cable giant in the top op-ed of Friday’s Commentary section.

“All the major networks are awash in sex, profanity, violence and attacks on religion,” Knight writes. “But for sheer creepiness, Viacom wins, hands down.”

His reasons? Viacom’s Nickelodeon has a website which links to AddictingGames.com, which is BAD. Also, Viacom—or “Vilecom,” as Knight calls it—runs the “homosexual” LOGO network and Comedy Central, “which puts profanities in fourth-graders’ mouths in South Park” and which is currently developing a “blasphemous cartoon series” about Jesus Christ. MTV, also owned by Viacom, has just premiered a series about a geeky high-schooler with “abnormally-large genitalia.” This isn’t just trash, Knight explains; this is trash “aimed right at kids.”

“If someone came into your home and showed your child this stuff, under his raincoat, you’d have him arrested—at the least.” Knight fumes. “But Nickelodeon and MTV hum right along, fueled by ads from Disney, Hamburger Helper and other amoral advertisers.”

Knight is hardly the only vocal critic of Viacom. He joins legions of radical Muslims who condemned Viacom for South Park’s depiction of the prophet Mohammed.

The great defense attorney Clarence Darrow once said in a closing argument, “I am always suspicious of righteous indignation. Nothing is more cruel than righteous indignation.”

If there is a culture war being waged right now, it is not between the “moral” and the “immoral”; it is between those who would enforce their morality on others and those who believe in a free marketplace of ideas.

As America is terrorized by those here and abroad who wish to limit our freedom of expression, it is disappointing that those who claim to be patriots are attacking that which separates us from our enemies.

Policy Translated: Special Access Reform

by Richard Morrison on July 29, 2009

in Culture, Regulation, Tech & Telecom, Video, Zeitgeist

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQO84UjQ2Fg 285 234]

FCC Might Actually Roll Back an Outdated Regulation!

by Ryan Radia on October 15, 2008 · 1 comment

in Tech & Telecom

If you wanted to communicate over long distances in real-time 25 years ago, you had little choice but to rely on your local phone company for carriage. Email and mobile phones were still oddities, and neither SMS text messages nor tweets had even been conceived.

Federal regulators, concerned that some companies might not maintain a  high level of service, imposed reporting requirements so the FCC could monitor phone companies and ensure calls were being handled properly.

Fast forward to 2008, and the traditional phone company is but one of numerous firms providing voice and data services to consumers. From cable digital voice to cell phones to free, IP-based applications like Skype, there are a growing number of ways to talk to people in another part of the country. Yet federal regulators have continued enforcing strict reporting requirements on phone companies, forcing these firms to spend countless man-hours filling out forms that some Washington bureaucrat may one day glance over. And these FCC rules apply exclusively to phone companies, putting them at an unfair advantage simply because they happen to be older and more well-established.

As we’ve discussed many times before, the FCC’s paperwork-intensive service quality reporting rules impose millions of dollars in compliance costs on phone companies. These costs are passed on to customers, resulting in higher prices without any actual benefit.

The FCC’s service quality reporting requirements needlessly duplicate the function of a competitive marketplace. How could a phone company get away with subpar service without losing customers to superior competitors? Market discipline-not federal regulation-is ultimately what pushes telecom firms strive for high quality service.

Fortunately, in a notice published today in the Federal Register, the FCC describes its plans to provide regulatory relief to AT&T and Verizon, among others. This needed reform will help reduce unneeded regulations, possibly translating into more competitive offerings from telephone companies.

Of course, the Federal Register is loaded with myriad regulations that, collectively, cost Americans well over $1 trillion dollars per year (as CEI catalogues in its annual publication, Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State). The FCC’s decision to relieve telcos of reporting rules is a welcome move, but we have a long way to go before the regulatory leviathan is in check.