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FTC Looks To the Future
netbuzz writes "The Federal Trade Commission will host three days of hearings starting Monday that are billed 'Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade' — a reprise of a similar FTC event held a decade ago that attendees still credit with having provided prescient guidance to regulators. You can judge for yourself whether they got things right."
Just what we need, the technically challenged US government protecting us by _committee_. Why don't I feel better about this???
Will Al Gore be on this committee? I can't think of anybody that would be more qualified.
Ok, so a couple major things have happened in the past 10 years.
Cell phones. E-commerce. No-call lists. E-Marketing.
Now they're going to talk about HDTV, maybe a little internet regulation. If we're lucky they'll start the ball rolling for some serious anti-spam measures, but come on, technological trends are getting harder and harder to predict since things are changing at a faster and faster rate. Look at the difference in technological insertion between 1985 to 1995 and from 1995 to 2005. It's frickin' "cool" now to have a cell phone! Nerds rejoice! Things are getting crazy cool. Meeting people online isn't "psycho stalker" anymore.
Maybe I've been watching too much Back to the Future, but if you ask me an iPod nano would seem like magic to a person from 1985.
Good luck predicting what it'll be like in the next 10 years. I'm crossing my fingers for flying cars and Jaws 19.
That term makes me want to cry. At least it isn't the "Techade confrence on nettiquite". Maybe someone should "linkroll" that one. All these new words, but no new ideas.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Does anyone else suspect that the english language has run out of words? Our slash & burn marketing has almost completely exhausted the natural supply. We are cobbling new buzzwords together out of existing words at an alarming rate.
Tech-ade? Soloprenure? Fantabulous?
One recent study from a Canadian research group suggests that the meaning of of 28% of all naturally occuring English buzzwords have been reduced by as much as 90% through over-marketing. We need to act now. If we fail, none of our words will have any meaning anymore, and our children will be unable to communicate.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Is there any more frightening sentence? Ronald Reagan understood this.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
yes mr T the future, all the way to the year 2000! in the year 2000... in the year 2000..
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Okay, fine. Great. *Now* are you going to do something about the obvious pump and dump stock scams being perpetrated through spam? There should be enough counts of fraud there to put some people away for ever and ever.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I personally believe that they should just give citizens & consumers more rights for fair use, wireless access (allowing companies & individuals or the local/state goverment to create MAN in cities without interferance from companies), and other rights. Perhaps set up DRM guidelines that allow for DRM compatiablity between competetors etc. I say it again, they need to give people more rights for the media and bandwith they purchase.
A video from Dr. BJ Fogg and the Persuasive Technology Lab (at Stanford University) will be shown at these hearings. It warns of the negative sides of persuasive technology -- from credibility to games. There are a bunch more videos about persuasive technology at ahref=http://captology.tv/rel=url2html-27876http:/ /captology.tv/>.
RTFA. This is why I hate Slashdot - kneejerk reactions to anything government related, and stupid jokes.
They were spot on for almost all of the issues. They just couldn't do anything to prevent it.
I'm a concientious
Protecting consumers? Could we please stop using this word and talk about protecting people's freedom in their exchanges over the internet? Freedom not to be called or spamed, freedom to choose privacy levels, freedom to share, and freedom to express our opinions. Today we are faced with the Internet being threatened by its appropriation from network owners who are starting to choose and select content (in France they are starting to filter out p2p software). That is number one threat to everyone and Lawrence Lessig has been screaming about this for years, and rightly so. In his 1999 book 'Code Is Law' (http://www.code-is-law.org/) he literally argued that the architecture we devise for our information systems are like laws that are directly enforceable. In the real world leniency is built in because full enforceability would be too difficult, expensive, unpractical, or unrealistic. This allows a certain degree of flexibility within which exceptions can have their space, thus avoiding suffocation by complete control over everything. However in the architecture of information systems we can ensure rules are followed whatever the situation. Such level of enforceability are not necessarily desirable, and an obvious example is in the domain of copyright and how computer systems can enforce them, leaving little or no space for fair use. This is why the model of the commons is so crucial, especially where technology inserts itself in-between people's relationships. Letting just private and commercial interests be solely in charge of the network is a fundamental mistake. A social network software which cannot be changed by its users is simply a new form of totalitarism (cybertotalitarism?). How about online marketplaces where participants can't have a say in how the market should be operated, or where they can be excluded arbitrarily, or where their personal information is used for deviated purposes? We need tools and platforms that give us choices. Not just skin(deep) choices, but real choice on how to play the games and what the rules are. How we architect the next version of the internet is the crucial point, and the FTC should better (re)read Lessig and make his concerns item number one on the agenda.