Jason Riley's new book on immigration, Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders, is now available. A brief excerpt:

It's a tragedy that America's public school system is geared more toward appeasing teachers' unions than educating kids. And until that changes, the trends will be difficult to reverse. The upshot of the status quo is that Mumbai and Beijing – often by way of MIT and Stanford – are currently producing a good amount of the talent that Bill Gates needs to keep Microsoft competitive. Immigration policies that limit industry's access to that talent become ever more risky as the marketplace becomes ever more global. If we want American innovators and entrepreneurs to continue enhancing America's wealth and productivity – and if we want the United States to continue as the world's science and technology leader – better to let Apple and Google and eBay make their own personnel decisions without interference from Tom Tancredo and Lou Dobbs.

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On Thursday night, the US Senate voted, without debate, to invalidate the Federal Communications Commission's Dec. 18 decision to loosen the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rule. The measure passed on a voice vote.

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Congress is considering a resolution expressing formal disapproval of the Federal Communications Commission's new media ownership rule. Rolling back the FCC's heavy-handed rule change is good for journalism, which is threatened by the moves of big-media companies to consolidate newsrooms.

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Cox Communications appears to be impeding peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic in the same way Comcast has, according to a study released Thursday by a German research group. Germany’s Max Planck Institute, a science and technology research organization, analyzed a test of 8,175 Internet volunteers around the world and found that both Comcast and Cox are blocking peer-to-peer traffic over their networks during all hours of the day.

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Roughly one-fifth of all U.S. heads-of-household have never used e-mail, according to National Technology Scan, a forthcoming study from Parks Associates. This annual phone survey of U.S. households found 20 million households are without Internet access, approximately 18% of all U.S.

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The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, Canada's broadcast watchdog, will hold public hearings next year into the thorny question of extending its purview to the Internet, a medium that it deemed a regulatory-free zone nearly a decade ago.

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The National Association of Broadcasters wants to make sure that the government is paying sufficient attention to the potential problems with its Wilmington (NC) test of the switch to digital TV.

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A new SNL Kagan survey predicts annual multichannel-subscription growth of 2.1%, or 108.5 million by 2012, with the total multichannel market accounting for about 89% of TV households. Kagan did not predict that the digital-TV switch will drive very many over-the-air viewers to multichannel providers, saying that about 10% of over-the-air households will opt to move to multichannel, with most of those going to cable.

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The cable industry's main trade association hailed congressional passage Thursday of a massive farm bill that would reduce the flow of broadband subsidies into rural markets where the technology already exists.

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Public interest groups Public Knowledge and Media Access Project want to make sure the FCC understands their position on the Sirius-XM merger in light of a recent letter from Chester Davenport the Managing Director of Georgetown Partners.

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With the two main contestants for the presidential general election all but decided, it’s time to start covering Sen John McCain (R-AZ) again — not by trotting out the usual war-hero-turned-blunt-maverick narrative, but by taking a hard look at the strengths and weaknesses he'd bring to the presidency.

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Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, along with the state's public counsel and an attorney for the AARP retiree group, asked the Florida Public Service Commission to levy a $6.5 million penalty against Verizon for willful violation of rules on service repairs.

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Businesses alone are not doing enough to avert an impending shortage of Internet Protocol addresses, and governments must work with them to secure the future of the Internet economy, according to a report published Thursday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

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A server problem at the U.S. National Security Agency has knocked the secretive intelligence agency off the Internet.

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The Administration strongly opposes Senate passage of S. J. Res. 28, a resolution disapproving the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with respect to broadcast media ownership. The FCC rule, which is the product of years of study and extensive public comment and consultation, modestly and judiciously modernizes decades-old media ownership regulations that highly restrict cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast stations.

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Mass media company CBS will acquire new media, technology-focused, online news company CNet Networks for $1.8 billion. CNET owns such Internet entertainment, news and information sites as CNET, ZDNet and GameSpot.com.

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Barbara Esbin and I have just released a short PFF essay asking the question: "Where is the FCC's Annual Video Competition Report?" The FCC is required to produce this report annually and yet the last one is well over a year past due and the data is contains will be over two years old by the time it comes out. I've embedded our paper about this below.

Where is FCC Video Competition Report (Esbin-Thierer-PFF) - Upload a doc Read this doc on Scribd: Where is FCC Video Competition Report (Esbin-Thierer-PFF)

Wendy Tanaka of Forbes penned a nice article this week on "Making Social Sites Safer," as in social networking sites. She interviews many members of the new Internet Safety Technical Task Force that is being chaired by John Palfrey of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Wendy was also kind enough to call me for some comments.

Wendy wanted to know how far technology could go to solve online safety concerns. Specifically, as she notes in her piece, "The discussions have centered on whether identity technologies can make social sites safer, or whether consumer education works best. State attorneys general believe more technological solutions are necessary, but some task force members contend that identity technologies on the market aren't adequate. And even if they were better, they likely can't prevent every unwanted incident and they could block contact between friends and relatives."

On that point, I told her that, even if the age verification technology worked as billed (and I have my doubts), we'd have other issues to grapple with:
"So, if he's 16 and she's 21, they shouldn't talk? Maybe they're brother and sister," says Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation. Thierer also says that too many checks and restrictions could turn off users and hamper advertising on social networks. "There's only so far the sites can go before undermining their business and cutting off their customer base," he says. "At some point, it becomes an annoyance for users."
What I meant by that is that there is a balance that must be struck between security and freedom on social networking sites because, if lawmakers (or even the site operators themselves) push too far and add too many layers of controls, their could be adverse consequences. In particular, users could flock elsewhere, including to offshore sites that have no safety guidelines or mechanisms in place. That would be a troubling outcome that could leave site users far less safe in the long-run. As I have pointed out in my big paper, "Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions,"Whatever their concerns are about current domestic sites, parents and policy makers should understand that those sites are generally more accountable and visible than offshore sites over which we have virtually no influence but that have the same reach as domestic sites."

Moreover, we need to be aware of the privacy and speech-related issues that arise when governments seek for force users to surrender the online anonymity. I have written more extensively about that issue in my essay here on "Age Verification and Death of Online Anonymity."

Finally, as I told Wendy, there is no substitute for education and awareness-building efforts as the real solution to these problems. "There are no easy technical fixes for complex human behavioral problems," I told her. "We need to teach kids 'Netiquette.' " That is, we need to do a better job teaching our kids proper online manners toward their peers while also making sure they understand what risks are out there and how best to deal with them.

Anyway, make sure to read Wendy's Forbes article for additional insights from other Task Force members.

Last week I wrote about the shift among liberal free-traders toward a more skeptical view of globalization and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers' potentially dangerous solutions. Looks like I wasn't the only one to notice. In today's Financial Times, three globalization watchers ask:

Is a liberal international economic order losing intellectual support? Should developing economies be worried? If Larry Summers is the canary in the intellectual mine, his two columns in the Financial Times (April 28 and May 5) suggest that the answers to both questions are yes.

The authors criticize Summers for laying globalization's foundation -- mobile capital, increased international IP protection, trade liberalization -- but now urging government-heavy reforms of the international order that could hurt the very nations that he nudged toward the market just a decade ago. Shouldn't the U.S., they ask, get its own house in order first?

The non-U.S. world, they conclude, should prepare for a jolting anti-globalization retrenchment from America in the coming years:

the manner in which his position is framed, the inconsistencies of the arguments across time, the inappropriate transferring of the burden of any response from domestic actions to international ones, and the susceptibility of the proposed remedies to protectionist misuse point to a more alarming prospect for developing countries. The ground is shifting under their feet. They would do well to take notice.

The recent Summers chill could mean an early autumn for free trade and global innovation.

Debate over the "embedded journalist" program run by the Pentagon since the weeks before the Iraq invasion in 2003 has long raged, with some claiming that it gave reporters valuable close access to action while others saying that the journalists were severely compromised within it.

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