URLs du Jour

2008-08-13

  • People who eagerly sought government regulation to ensure "network neutrality" from Internet Service Providers will no doubt be aghast at what comes next.
    There’s a huge concern among conservative talk radio hosts that reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine would all-but destroy the industry due to equal time constraints. But speech limits might not stop at radio. They could even be extended to include the Internet and “government dictating content policy.”

    FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell raised that as a possibility after talking with bloggers at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. McDowell spoke about a recent FCC vote to bar Comcast from engaging in certain Internet practices – expanding the federal agency’s oversight of Internet networks.

    Regulation advocates imagine that regulation will happen exactly the way they want it. History says that's a myth. Once you open the door, it opens very wide. And the people who walk through it…

    James Gattuso at the Technology Liberation Front has additional commentary.

  • Also at TLF, Adam Thierer points out another promising avenue for government meddling: regulation of internet advertising. Of course, it's "for the children."

    But government has this nasty habit of thinking we're all children…

  • But it's not all matters of Internet meddling here at Pun Salad today. Charles Murray has an op-ed in the WSJ today provocatively titled "For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time".
    Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:

    First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."

    You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.

    The essay is adapted from Mr. Murray's new book which I've long had on pre-order from the Amazonians.

  • If you were embarrassed by your low score on yesterday's quiz (guessing the 100 most common English words) … today, you can embarrass yourself by trying to identify peoples' accents. (Again, via BBSpot.)