youtube hotness
Thomas Lord
I shall briefly speak indirectly rather than giving explicit
point-by-point replies to the complaints my comments about the (in my
view) illegality of the recent YouTube "stunt".
Since I've touched a nerve and prefer light to heat I'll delay replying
to the several replies I got and try to consolidate a future reply.
Meanwhile:
Here is the proposal before us and below it a counter-proposal.
There's a wrong way (the current stunt) and a right way (the
counter-proposal):
The proposal we see dominating right now:
1) The houses of congress shall facilitate video communications from
members to the general public, using taxpayer money and facilities. The
resulting communications shall bear the on-net equivalent of a
congressional letterhead. This content shall be created with taxpayer
money using federal facilities.
2) A monopoly shall be granted to a private firm for the initial
distribution of this content and the leadership of the houses shall
advertise, using taxpayer money and federal facilities, for this firm.
3) That firm shall collect but not freely disseminate detailed
information, derived from Internet traffic, about which US citizens
watch each of these videos and when and via what links.
4) That firm shall, among other things, use that surveillance
information to fine-tune their ad-placement service. They shall use the
information to help advertisers reach citizens who watched specific
videos.
5) The political parties and candidates shall be advertising customers
of that firm, especially in the re-election campaigns of incumbent
members of congress.
6) That firm's surveillance records shall be generally accessible by
federal law enforcement under extremely lax terms. For example, the FBI
may wish to know if a terror suspect has viewed congressional
communications on the topic of airport security.
----------------
Counter-proposal:
1) ditto -- the same as above
2) The video content shall be made available by the houses of Congress
via an FTP site in OGG-Vorbis or other free format as public domain
material. Congress shall ensure that the ftp URL for each such
publication is valid (bit for bit the same result) for 30 years from the
date of each video's publication.
3) The problems of (4), (5), and (6) still exist but are transformed for
we can contemplate correcting the form and function of the errant firms
here without needing to fear we are disrupting the legitimate business
of congress.
-t
p.s.: How much does it cost to give every seat in each house a
half-decent consumer camera and a way to upload some free video to an
FTP site? And why didn't any of you suggest it? (Some did but they
got shouted down.)
I don't think it costs more than 5 figures per seat per year and I'm
being extremely generous there. That is to say: it costs essentially
the same as what the youtube stunt costs the taxpayer (but it costs
Google incrementally more). There is no "practicality" argument in
favor of the current youtube stunt.
John Wonderlich
I'm informed that I risk disturbing the construction of a "big tent" so
I shall briefly speak indirectly rather than giving explicit
point-by-point replies to the complaints my comments about the (in my
view) illegality of the recent YouTube "stunt".
I'm not sure who made that warning, but this sort of agreement is usually intensely productive, and is among the major goals of this list.
(more below)
Since I've touched a nerve and prefer light to heat I'll delay replying
to the several replies I got and try to consolidate a future reply.
Meanwhile:
Here is the proposal before us and below it a counter-proposal.
There's a wrong way (the current stunt) and a right way (the
counter-proposal):
The proposal we see dominating right now:
1) The houses of congress shall facilitate video communications from
members to the general public, using taxpayer money and facilities. The
resulting communications shall bear the on-net equivalent of a
congressional letterhead. This content shall be created with taxpayer
money using federal facilities.
"using taxpayer money and facilities" -- the sense in which this is true is limited at best, as far as I can tell. Again, being interviewed for a video is different from "producing a commercial."
"the on-net equivalent of a congressional letterhead." -- There's a picture of the Capitol dome, and the text "The US House of Represenatives on Youtube." That's a far cry from some sort of official letterhead, and all that that would imply.
2) A monopoly shall be granted to a private firm for the initial
distribution of this content and the leadership of the houses shall
advertise, using taxpayer money and federal facilities, for this firm.
Again, and this is important -- there is no monopoly. There's no restriction.
3) That firm shall collect but not freely disseminate detailed
information, derived from Internet traffic, about which US citizens
watch each of these videos and when and via what links.
I agree, Google does do this.
4) That firm shall, among other things, use that surveillance
information to fine-tune their ad-placement service. They shall use the
information to help advertisers reach citizens who watched specific
videos.
I don't know that they do this, but they probably could.
5) The political parties and candidates shall be advertising customers
of that firm, especially in the re-election campaigns of incumbent
members of congress.
6) That firm's surveillance records shall be generally accessible by
federal law enforcement under extremely lax terms. For example, the FBI
may wish to know if a terror suspect has viewed congressional
communications on the topic of airport security.
----------------
Counter-proposal:
1) ditto -- the same as above
2) The video content shall be made available by the houses of Congress
via an FTP site in OGG-Vorbis or other free format as public domain
material. Congress shall ensure that the ftp URL for each such
publication is valid (bit for bit the same result) for 30 years from the
date of each video's publication.
This proposal ADDS a restriction. Assuming we're still talking about member videos (not floor or committee videos), then you're suggesting that Members of Congress are REQUIRED to use a particular method for communicating with their constituents.
That seems dangerous.
The thing here is -- there's no official designation for Member videos. Committees can be made to promulgate things in a certain way, as in the case of paper or electronic records. Members, however, can do whatever they want. They can burn their papers when they retire if they want to.
I'm all for an option that adds universally accessible, non-proprietary dissemination (like the USPS, in the paper context).
A positive requirement on the way members communicate, though, seems off base to me. The only one I can think of that's justified is taking the oath of office. Beyond that, a Member could probably never show up, and if the Member is reelected, then that's what the constituents will get.
3) The problems of (4), (5), and (6) still exist but are transformed for
we can contemplate correcting the form and function of the errant firms
here without needing to fear we are disrupting the legitimate business
of congress.
-t
p.s.: How much does it cost to give every seat in each house a
half-decent consumer camera and a way to upload some free video to an
FTP site? And why didn't any of you suggest it? (Some did but they
got shouted down.)
I'm not sure who got shouted down, but Carl Malamud's proposal that was cited in the OHP chapter on video is relevant here. It doesn't deal with individual members' videos, rather floor and committee video.
Clay Shirky
>> distribution of this content and the leadership of the houses shall
>> advertise, using taxpayer money and federal facilities, for this firm.
>
> Again, and this is important -- there is no monopoly. There's no
> restriction.
I was after Greg about this earlier as well. These two statements have
nothing to do with one another. There is no monopoly in the current
rules, but restrictions can come from environmental conditions as
surely as they can come from monopolies.
Sensitivity to initial conditions, path dependence, positive returns
to scale, and network effects can all work to cement behaviors that
seem ad hoc in the beginning. There are some actions whose entropy is
so high that they can't be undone, even if starting them was a
low-energy proposition.
-clay
J.H. Snider
The thing here is -- there's no official designation for Member videos. Committees can be made to promulgate things in a certain way, as in the case of paper or electronic records. Members, however, can do whatever they want. They can burn their papers when they retire if they want to.
I have two comments on this statement:
First, it is true that members of Congress think and act as if their personal office communications are qualitatively different than their committee and floor communications. But I don’t necessarily agree. They are employees of the public and most employers believe they have a right to access all the communications of their employees while on their property and paid with their money. Certainly, that’s the dominant principle by which American companies operate. Why should members of Congress be exempt from that standard?
Second, members of Congress often archive their personal communications at great expense to the public—except that local and state governments often pick up the tab rather than the federal government. All over the country we have vast deposits of Congressional papers stored at taxpayer expense at public universities and libraries. Despite being taxpayer funded, these congressional libraries function as PR monuments. In order to get a high prestige congressional collection (and curry political favor), a library typically signs a document promising to function as a loyal PR outlet for the member. This is a bit too cynical because many former members are actually pretty open with their archives. But the point is that the public is paying a lot of money to create and maintain these archives, yet these archives are frequently operated neither efficiently nor in the public interest. Political scientists, for example, rarely use them because they are just too much a pain-in-the-ass. They’ll go to the National Archives to do research because that is fairly easy to do and many like coming to Washington, DC. But fly all over the country to hard-to-access congressional archives—no way.
--Jim Snider
J.H. Snider, MBA, Ph.D.
President
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