The debate over social networking safety is increasingly tied up with the question of whether (and how) users should be authenticated before they are allowed onto a social networking site, however that term of art is defined. Age verification proposals have been flying for the last two years that would use a variety of approaches to determine the age / identity of users. [I have discussed those proposals in detail here.]

So, when I heard the news that the Catholic church "will set up a Catholic social networking Web site akin to a Catholic Facebook" so that Pope Benedict can text message thousands of young Catholics on their mobile phones during World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia this July, I just couldn't help but wonder if the Pope and all the site's users will be required to somehow have their identities or ages verified before they go online?

I'm being entirely serious. If anyone has information on how the site will work and whether the Church plans to use identity screening mechanisms, please let me know. I try to keep tabs on how each social networking site polices their site for underage or inappropriate use. I am personally quite skeptical that most current approaches can work effectively, but I am always willing to learn more about new tools and techniques.

Since 2000, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has surveyed the marketing and advertising practices of major media sectors (movies, music and video games) in a report entitled Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children. (The reports can be found here). According to the agency, the purpose of these reports is to examine “the structure and operation of each industry’s self-regulatory program, parental familiarity and use of those systems, and whether the industries had marketed violent entertainment products in a manner inconsistent with their own parental advisories.” Toward that end, the agency hires a firm that conducts "secret shopper" surveys to see how well voluntary media rating systems (MPAA, ESRB, RIAA) are being enforced at the point of sale. The research firm recruits a bunch of 13- to 16-year-olds who make an attempt to purchase such media without a parent being present.

Although I've always had some questions about these undercover surveys, which I will get to in a moment, the bottom line is: Ratings enforcement has generally been improving over time, and in the case of the ESRB system for games, it has improved dramatically in a very short period of time. For example, the latest survey shows that whereas 90% of kids were able to purchase an "Explicit Lyrics" CD back in 2001, that's fallen to just over 50% in the latest survey. R-rated cinema admissions have dropped gradually, from almost 50% of kids getting in in 2001, to about 35% today. R-rated DVD sales for teens have falled from 81% in 2001 to 47% today. And the video game industry's outstanding education and awareness-building efforts have shown the most success, with M-rated video games only being sold to 20% of teens today, down from 85% back in 2000. That's an impressive turn-around in a very short amount of time.

As I have argued many times before (see 1, 2, 3, 4), some sort of usage-based bandwidth metering or consumption cap makes a lot of sense as a way to deal with broadband network traffic management. So, if this is the direction that Comcast is heading--and this recent Broadband Reports piece suggests that it is--that is fine with me. The article says it might work as follows:

A Comcast insider tells me the company is considering implementing very clear monthly caps, and may begin charging overage fees for customers who cross them. While still in the early stages of development, the plan -- as it stands now -- would work like this: all users get a 250GB per month cap. Users would get one free "slip up" in a twelve month period, after which users would pay a $15 charge for each 10 GB over the cap they travel. According to the source, the plan has "a lot of momentum behind it," and initial testing is slated to begin in a month or two.

"The intent appears to be to go after the people who consistently download far more than the typical user without hurting those who may have a really big month infrequently," says an insider familiar with the project, who prefers to remain anonymous. "As far as I am aware, uploads are not affected, at least not initially." According to this source, the new system should only impact some 14,000 customers out of Comcast's 14.1 million users (i.e. the top 0.1%).

It's always been my hope that we could potentially head-off burdensome Net neutrality regulations by encouraging carriers to deal with the problem of excessive bandwidth consumption by using time-tested price discrimination solutions instead of the sort of packet management techniques that are the subject of such heated debate today. Of course, on one of our old podcasts on Net neutrality issues, Richard Bennett pointed out to me that this still might not alleviate the need for other types of traffic management techniques to be used. And he also pointed out that the very small subset of true bandwidth hogs are almost entirely heavy BitTorrent users, so perhaps the way Comcast was dealing with them was just another way of skinning the same cat.

One vision of globalization, and the new American policies designed to cope with it, was on display this week, as Harvard's Larry Summers and the FT's Willem Buiter discussed and debated the dilemmas of a flat world, from trade and taxation to international standards and regulation.

Summers has long been an advocate of globalization and free trade, but recently -- with a number of other eminent liberal economists, from Paul Samuelson to Alan Blinder, who has argued that globalization could put 40 million Americans out of work -- Summers has rethought his robust support.

The most important reason for doubting that an increasingly successful, integrated global economy will benefit US workers (and those in other industrial countries) is the weakening of the link between the success of a nation’s workers and the success of both its trading partners and its companies.

Video calling, we've said, will be a large component of the Internet data traffic surge we call the exaflood. After a decade or two of false starts, consumer video chats began in large volume over the last year or so -- by mid-2007 Microsoft Video Calling was generating 4 petabytes per month of data traffic, equal to the entire Net of 1997. Now business video conferencing is taking off as well, with telepresence systems from Cisco and HP just coming online.

only about 1,000 of the 176,000 videoconferencing systems sold world-wide in 2007 were telepresence systems, estimates market researcher TeleSpan Publishing Corp. But unit sales of the high-end systems were up five-fold from the 200 sold in 2006, and the number should triple to 3,000 in 2008, TeleSpan estimates.

Well, this is gunna be a sure-fire sign of my uber-geekiness, but I gotta say I just love Scribd's "iPaper" service, which allows anyone to upload and share just about any type of document with the rest of the world. Think or it as YouTube or Flickr for nerds who want to share their papers and PowerPoints even more than their pictures or videos.

Like Flickr and YouTube, Scribd offers users the ability to embed things directly into blogs like this. Below, for example, I have embedded my recent slide show presentation at Penn State University's conference on the future of video games. If you play around with the buttons on the top of the iPaper player, you will see how easy it is to resize the embedded document, search within it for specific items, download or email it, print it out, and so on. Super cool. I hope my colleagues will join me in using this great tool more here on our site. I plan on posting a lot more things here this way in the future. (And I swear I didn't get paid by Scribd to say any of this!)

Video Games presentation (PDF format) - Upload a doc Read this doc on Scribd: Video Games presentation (PDF format)

As I have pointed out here many times before, education is a vital part of online child protection efforts. In fact, if there is one point I try to get across in my report on “Parental Controls and Online Child Safety,” it is that, regardless of how robust they might be today, technical parental control tools are no substitute for education, media literacy and online safety awareness training. To the extent lawmakers feel the need to "do something" about online safety issues, education-based efforts will bear much more fruit than regulatory initiatives.

Unfortunately, it is clear that not nearly enough media literacy or online safety instruction is being done within America’s educational process at any level. For the most part, media literacy is not routinely integrated into the curricula at elementary school, secondary school, high school, or college. This situation must be reversed. Luckily, my home state of Virginia is helping to pave the way. This weekend, the Washington Post ran a front-page story entitled, "Virginia Tries to Ensure Students' Safety in Cyberspace," that discussed the state's effort to "launch Internet safety lessons across all grade levels, responding to a state mandate that is the first of its kind in the nation." The text of the enabling legislation can be found here and, in September 2006, Virginia produced an outstanding report entitled “Guidelines and Resources for Internet Safety in Schools” that can serve as model legislation for other states.

The Post story summarizes the focus of the program:

GamePolitics.com noted that presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama had some comments upon the release of Grand Theft Auto IV this week, and they weren't actually half bad. Indeed, instead of engaging in the typical game-bashing hysteria we've gotten used to, Obama instead focused on the need to find the right balance in terms of getting kids as interested in education as they are in games and other forms of entertainment. (This is something I was just discussing in the comments to another post I made yesterday).

Obama wondered, "How are we giving our kids a thirst for knowledge? And turning off the TV set, and getting them to be engaged and interested, like their future really does matter on how well they do in school." That's a good question, and I've provided some of my own thoughts on that here.

Importantly, I just want to remind everyone of the very sensible things Obama said when asked at a debate earlier this year about the role of government when it comes to media content. "[T]he primary responsibility is for parents," he said. "And I reject the notion of censorship as an approach to dealing with this problem." Better yet, he went on to stress the importance of making sure that parents have the tools to make these determinations for their families:

“[I]t is important for us to make sure that we are giving parents the tools that they need in order to monitor what their children are watching. And, obviously, the problem we have now is not just what’s coming over the airwaves, but what’s coming over the Internet. And so for us to develop technologies and tools and invest in those technologies and tools, to make sure that we are, in fact, giving parents power — empowering parents I think is important.”

He's got it exactly right. I just wish he'd stress personal responsibility and limited government solutions across the board!

What happens as gamers grow older and become a more dominant voice in society? UK game developer Richard Bartle has some thoughts on that issue in an acerbic, in-your-face editorial in the UK Guardian this week:

I'm talking to you, you self-righteous politicians and newspaper columnists, you relics who beat on computer games: you've already lost. Enjoy your carping while you can, because tomorrow you're gone. According to the UK Statistics Authority, the median age of the UK population is 39. Half the people who live here were born in 1969 or later. The BBC microcomputer was released in 1981, when those 1969ers were 12. It was ubiquitous in schools; it introduced a generation to computers. It introduced a generation to computer games. Half the UK population has grown up playing computer games. They aren't addicted, they aren't psychopathic killers, and they resent those boneheads – that's you – who imply that they are addicted and are psychopathic killers. Next year, that 1969 will be 1970; the year after, it'll be 1971.

Dwell on this, you smug, out-of-touch, proud-to-be-innumerate fossils: half the UK population thinks games are fun and cool, and you don't. Those born in 1990 get the vote this year. Three years from now, that 1969 will be 1972, then 1973. Scared yet? You should be: we have the numbers on our side. Do your worst – you can't touch us. We've already won. 15 years from now, the prime minister of the day will have grown up playing computer games, just as 15 years ago we had the first prime minister to have grown up watching television, and 30 years ago to have grown up listening to the radio. Times change: accept it; embrace it. Don't make yourself look even more 20th Century, even more public school, than you do already. You've lost! Understand? Your time has passed.

Over at "The Social," a CNet blog about social networking and social life, Caroline McCarthy discusses a new study that she says "reveals [a] shocking truth: Most Facebook apps are silly, pointless."

A new study from number-crunching firm Flowing Data did some eye-opening work recently, dividing 23,160 Facebook applications into 22 categories. A whopping 9,601 of them fall into Facebook's "just for fun" category, followed by "gaming" and "sports" with over 2,000 each. In other words, the majority of Facebook applications are goofy time-wasters.

She calls this "an unsettling piece of news that I don't think any of us saw coming" and says "The world of social networking may never be the same."

Two brief exaflood items from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who spoke at the Milken Conference.

(1) Users of Google's YouTube are uploading 10 hours of video to the site every minute. That's 14,400 hours worth of new video uploads each day.

(2) By 2019, your average iPod (or other personal digital device) will have enough capacity for 85 years worth of video. Start watching when you're born. Maybe you'll see the final credits in old-age.

Several of the installments in my ongoing "Media DE-consolidation" series have involved Time Warner taking apart the media mega-company it created back in 2000. [See, for example, parts 12, 14 and 21]. The relationship was a bit rocky right from the start, and things have been unraveling slowly ever since. You will recall the amazing front page story in the Wall Street Journal in 2006 in which Time Warner President Jeff Bewkes declared the death of “synergy” and, more poignantly, Bewkes went so far as to call synergy “bull—t”!

Today, another major split occurred when, as many had anticipated for some time now, TW announced the spin-off of its Time Warner Cable unit. Here's the NYT's summary:
Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, continued to trim what has for years been the world’s largest media company by announcing Wednesday that it would completely spin off its cable company. The news — which was not unexpected and follows an earlier transaction in which a portion of the cable unit was spun off into a separate public company — came as Time Warner reported quarterly earnings that were largely in line with Wall Street’s expectations. “We’ve decided that a complete structural separation of Time Warner Cable, under the right circumstances, is in the best interests of both companies’ shareholders,” Mr. Bewkes said Wednesday in a statement. “We’re working hard on an agreement with Time Warner Cable, which we expect to finalize soon.”
One must remember that when the marriage was struck 8 years ago, the AOL-Time Warner deal received wall-to-wall coverage and apocalyptic-minded critics claimed it represented “Big Brother,” “the end of the independent press,” and a harbinger of a “new totalitarianism.” Now that the marriage is gradually falling apart, we hear a few things about it here and there, but no one seems to care all that much. The stories are mostly buried in the pack of the business pages and receive limited coverage online. Regardless, it serves as yet another sign of how dynamic and volatile the media marketplace is today.

Beverly Hills
Oh sure, you say, it's easy for the fat-cat financiers and globaloney experts gathered in Beverly Hills at the Milken Conference to advocate an open global economy. It's all upside for them. The hedge funds of Greenwich and venture funds of Sand Hill Road can suck up the Fed's excess liquidity and then deploy it around the globe into assorted non-dollar denominated assets. Meanwhile, the average guy is stuck spending $85 to fill up his family SUV.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, speaking on an Income Mobility and Inequality panel with The Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot, noted the irony. He said that he had finished his panel homework -- thick studies of income demographics -- the previous day sitting beside he chic pool at the Beverly Hilton. Although income mobility in the U.S. is still pretty good, even according to the more pessimistic studies, Robinson could not help but note the vast inequalities that persist, or even grow. As he sipped a cool drink surrounded by cool people, he read about 70% dropout rates in some inner-cities and real-wage stagnation on the one hand versus hedge fund billions on the other.

So, irony noted. Now, can we get back to explaining why global engagement and trade is good for all Americans, rich and poor?

Susan Crawford points out that the Yale Information Society Project recently posted its "9.5 Theses for Technology Policy in the Next Administration." It's apparently also the theme for the 18th Annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference (CFP).

What I found intriguing about the list is that (a) protecting free speech doesn't make their radar screen, which seems both sad and puzzling since it will continue to be under attack regardless of who is in charge next year; and, (b) perhaps less surprisingly, much of what they are calling for the next administration to do would involve more regulation of the Internet, broadband networks and media markets. Here's their list and how I would score each item [Note: I am using CAPS below not to scream, but just to differentiate my scoring versus their proposal]:

Bruce Owen, America's preeminent media economist--with apologies to who at least deserves an honorable mention--has written another splendid piece for Cato's Regulation magazine, this one entitled, "The Temptation of Media Regulation."

This latest essay deals primarily with the many fallacies surrounding so-called "a la carte" regulation of the video marketplace, and I encourage you to read it to see Owen's powerful refutation of the twisted logic behind that regulatory crusade. But I wanted to highlight a different point that Bruce makes right up front in his essay because it is something I am always stressing in my work too.

In some of my past work on free speech and media marketplace regulation, I have argued that there is very little difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to these issues. They are birds of feather who often work closely together to regulate speech and media. Whether it is broadcast 'indecency' controls; proposals to extend those controls to cable & satellite TV; campaign finance laws; efforts to limit or rollback ownership regulations; or even must carry and a la carte, the story is always the same: It's one big bipartisan regulatory love fest. [And the same goes for regulation of the Internet, social networking sites, and video games.]

Owen explains why that is the case:

Beverly Hills
Here at the annual Milken Institute Global Conference, what do I wake up to this morning? A big, page-one story in The Wall Street Journal entitled "Rising Nationalism Frays Global Ties."

The global economy appears to be entering an epoch in which governments are reasserting their role in the lives of individuals and businesses. Once again, barriers are rising. Call it the new nationalism.

From barriers to the free movement of financial capital (investment) and human capital (immigration) to new restrictions on the Internet, reporter Bob Davis recounts the troubling protectionist trends and finds numerous analysts who say we may be in for a long retrenchment of the global economy.

"The era of easy globalization is certainly over," says Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin, whose 1998 book, "The Commanding Heights," detailed the triumph of markets over nations, starting with British deregulation under Margaret Thatcher. "The power of the state is reasserting itself."

Just a decade ago, Asia, Latin America and Russia were on financial life support from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The U.S. was planning yet another round of global trade negotiations. The European Union was writing a constitution to shift power to Brussels from member nations.

Now borrowers shun the IMF and World Bank. Trade talks are shelved. Barriers to foreign investment are rising around the world. State-owned companies are expanding, particularly in oil and gas. Public support of immigration restrictions is growing in countries from the U.S. to India.

This is why PFF launched our new Center for Global Innovation. To combat these trends by highlighting the abundance of the world economy and the deep, dark consequences of protectionism. See our self-description which presages many of the themes in Davis's article.

As we here from Nobel economists, entrepreneurs, financiers, and policymakers at the Milken Conference, we'll have more to say. Although we agree with Davis's article that nationalism is rising and ties are fraying, we are not so convinced a new balkanized world is our inevitable fate.

New nationalism could play out over a lengthy span, says Michael Klein, chief economist at the World Bank's private-sector arm, the International Finance Corp. "Disparate national interests may pull [countries] in different directions and render global actions more difficult," Mr. Klein says. "We're in for several decades of these centrifugal forces."

It will take herculean efforts, but with enough like-minded leaders, we hope CGI will help block this illiberal tide and point the path toward more, not less, global freedom and innovation.

Several days ago we mentioned IBM's strong sales and earnings in the context of our focus on "global services" and the Dallas Fed's new report on the topic. Today, BusinessWeek illustrates the point:

Quick quiz: Which company is more "American"—Mumbai-­based Tata Consultancy Services, or Armonk (N.Y.)-based IBM (IBM)? Evaluate the two based on where they make their sales, and the answer is surprising. TCS, India's largest tech-services company, collected 51% of its revenues in North America last quarter, while 65% of IBM's were overseas.

Do we begin to see why the international trade statistics are misleading, if not utterly irrelevant? Do we understand that the "trade gap" is therefore not an argument for protectionist policies?

I don't agree with a lot of Larry Summers' economics, but he is often quite an insightful thinker on globalization. Here the former Treasury Secretary and Harvard president is talking to David Wessel of The Wall Street Journal about American universities. But his insight can be applied to the U.S. economy as a whole.

"American universities right now are pre-eminent," says Lawrence Summers, who was deposed as Harvard's president in 2006. "They have enormous advantages in wealth, in the attractiveness of the U.S. as a place to study and teach, in their demonstrated excellence. The threat to the top universities is not imminent. But Oxford and Cambridge didn't perceive the threat as imminent. The combination of Britain's losing relative economic ground and deep complacency, lack of major investment in science and technology and governance modes that favored internal equity over external competitiveness caused them to lose their position over two generations." (my emphasis)

As we know from experience, external competitiveness is usually the key to higher levels of wealth all-around and over time mostly transcends the "internal" distributional concerns. As Summers nicely points out, "equity" is a euphemism for stagnation and decline.

UPDATE: By complete coincidence, I came across this brief Forbes article on the influence of college professors on the "equity" versus "efficiency" debate.

Dr. Kourosh Dini is a Chicago-based adolescent and adult psychiatrist who has just published a new book entitled, Video Game Play and Addiction: A Guide for Parents. [You can learn more about him and his many talents and interests at his blog, "Mind, Music and Technology."] Dini's book arrives fresh on the heels of the fine book, "," by Drs. Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson. [See my review of that book here.]

Like Kutner & Olson's book, Dini's provides a refreshingly balanced and open-minded look at the impact of video games on our kids. One of the things I liked about it is how Dr. Dini tells us right up front that he has been a gamer his entire life and explains how that has helped him frame the issues he discusses in his book. "I have played games both online and off since I was about six years of age, and I have also been involved in child psychiatry, so I felt that I would be in a good position to discuss some inherent positives and negatives associated with playing games," he says. Dini goes into greater detail about his gaming habits later in the book and it makes it clear that he still enjoys games very much.

Some may find Dini's gaming background less relevant than his academic credentials, but I think it is important if for no other reason than it shows how we are seeing more and more life-long gamers attain positions of prominence in various professions and writing about these issues using a sensible frame of reference that begins with their own personal experiences. For far too long now, nearly every book and article I have read about video games and their impact on society at some point includes a line like, "I've never really played many games" or even "I don't much care for video games," but then--without missing a breath--the author or analyst goes on to tell us how imminently qualified they are to be discussing the impact of video games on kids or culture. Whenever I read or hear things like that, I'm reminded of the famous line from an old TV commercial: "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV." Seriously, why is it that we should continue to listen to those critics who denounce video games but who have never picked up a controller in their lives? It's really quite insulting. Would you take automotive advice from someone who's never tinkered with cars in their lives but instead based their opinions merely upon watching them pass by on the road? I think not.

Yesterday, I was a guest on the Kojo Nnamdi Show, which airs on WAMU 88.5 radio (Washington, DC's NPR affiliate), and had the chance to take part in an excellent discussion about the ins-and-outs of student online speech. Specifically, we discussed the sticky issues surrounding online privacy, anonymity, defamation, cyber-bullying, and so on.

The entire show can be heard on Kojo's site. The other guests were John Morris of the Center for Democracy and Technology, Parry Aftab, the Executive Director of WiredSafety.org, and Reg Weaver, the President of the National Education Association. We attempted to provide parents and educators with some helpful advice about how to deal with these issues when they pop up. We also got into the controversies raised by the anonymous comments left on sites like JuicyCampus.com and RateMyTeachers.com.

[Incidentally, this show was part of Kojo's excellent ongoing "Tech Tuesday" series. Each Tuesday he dedicates his show to "putting technology in context and assessing its relevance in your life." It's a great program. In encourage you to listen.]