The initiative promises consumers “control” over the personal information businesses glean from “tracking and collection devices” – and seeks to restore privacy rights at a time of “accelerating encroachment on personal freedom and security.” It would apply to all businesses, ranging from internet service providers to websites to cellphone companies.

The proposal has sparked concern in tech-friendly California, given that it could impose significant costs on everything from small-time websites to major internet players such as Facebook, Google and Amazon. If the measure qualifies for the ballot and is approved by voters, it would apply not only to California-based internet companies, but to any entity that does business in the state. So, it could have national reverberations.

“Forcing companies to allow consumers to opt out of tracking, and not allowing those companies to charge more or deny service to consumers who do opt out, would be burdensome for websites and application developers, and would significantly hurt the advertising industry since it would decrease the amount of targeted advertising they can do,” said Tom Struble, tech policy manager at the R Street Institute in Washington, D.C.

The initiative would provide consumers with four new “rights” that would be inserted into the state Constitution. First, consumers would have the right to learn about the categories of personal information that any business has collected from them. Second, consumers would have the right to know how that specific personal information is being used – i.e., whether it has been sold or shared for marketing or advertising purposes.

Third, consumers would have the right to “direct a business” not to sell or share that information. Finally, the initiative grants consumers the right to “equal service or price,” which means the business would be forbidden from charging different prices or limiting services if a consumer directs a business not to use the information.

Companies would be required to honor a consumer’s information request within 30 days and provide it at no charge. The initiative requires companies to set up a toll-free telephone number and website by which consumers could make a “verifiable” request.

The initiative’s backers argue that consumers “are in a position of relative dependence on businesses” that collect this information and that it is difficult for them “to monitor business operations or prevent companies from using your personal information for the companies’ financial benefit.”

Critics, however, argue that the measure doesn’t make necessary distinctions. Unlike a bill now in the California Legislature, it doesn’t distinguish between, say, internet service providers that operate essentially like paid utilities and businesses that offer access to their websites and are paid based on advertising fees. It also does nothing about a potentially greater threat to privacy – collection of data by state and local governments.

The issue has gotten more attention since April, when President Donald Trump signed a law that repealed some Obama-era Federal Communications Commission rules. The rules would have required internet service providers to get permission before using a customer’s information, such as their browsing history, to create targeted online advertisements.

The California Legislature is now trying to restore some of those Obama-era rules. Assembly Bill 375 was designed to “protect California consumers since Congress and the Trump administration effectively halted a set of federal consumer privacy protection rules on internet service providers that were scheduled to take effect,” according to the state Senate Judiciary Committee analysis.

AB375 applies only to broadband providers. As the thinking goes, “people pay heavily for internet service,” which “is akin to a must-have utility,” explained the San Diego Union-Tribune in an editorial supporting the bill. By contrast, Facebook and Google provide their services for free. Consumers presumably know that the “cost” of maintaining a Facebook page and searching for information on a web browser is that those companies can sell targeted advertisements based on one’s search and buying habits.

The bill was referred to the Senate Rules Committee Tuesday following some technical amendments and is likely make it to the Senate floor by Friday’s end-of-session deadline. The initiative has been cleared for signature-gathering. It would go far beyond the intent of AB375 by imposing new requirements on every type of firm that operates in the state.

Consumer initiatives have met with varied levels of success in California over the years. The most recent, Proposition 45, would have “required changes to health insurance rates, or anything else affecting the charges associated with health insurance, to be approved by the California Insurance Commissioner before taking effect.” It lost 59 percent to 41 percent.

The big question with all initiatives is whether their backers have the millions of dollars necessary to collect signatures and then run a successful general election campaign. Given the far-reaching implications of the proposal, Californians can expect aggressive push-back from the tech community if this one starts looking like a serious deal.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

That could change under the FCC’s proposal to treat the Internet as if it were a 1930s telephone company. If that happens, you could see your taxes rise sharply.

Warn Grover Norquist and Patrick Gleason of Americans for Tax Reform:

The Federal Communications Commission is in the middle of a high-stakes decision that could raise taxes for close to 90 percent of Americans. The commission is considering whether to reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service and, in doing so, Washington would trigger new taxes and fees at the state and local level.

The agency would like to make Internet service a public utility, placing broadband under Title II regulation of the Communications Act of 1934. This move would make broadband subject to New Deal-era regulation, and have significant consequences for U.S. taxpayers.

Under this decision to reclassify broadband, Americans would face a host of new state and local taxes and fees that apply to public utilities. These new levies, according to the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), would total $15 billion annually. On average, consumers would pay an additional $67 for landline broadband, and $72 for mobile broadband each year, according to PPI’s calculations, with charges varying from state to state.

This would be doubly bad for California. State and local taxes would go up.

But the tax increases in the other 49 states and their local governments also would hit us, because the money, in the end, would come from California’s Internet companies: Netflix, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.

And according to Avalara, which helps businesses collect local taxes, there are “more than 14,500 local taxing jurisdictions” in America.

In the 1930s, top auto brands included Studebaker, Packard and DeSoto. There were no interstate highways or passenger jets. Going from L.A. to New York City meant taking a several-day train ride. TV was a lab experiment. And calling long-distance meant dialing an operator and paying a high bill for each call.

Does that sound like our world? It does to the FCC.

They call it “net neutrality,” but it should be called “government takeover.”

Republicans in Congress, now controlling both the Senate and the House, say they will stop it. It’s an early test of whether they are determined to enact the small-government rhetoric that brought them campaign victories last November.

This has direct implications for California because of our overwhelming dependence on a largely unregulated and prospering Internet for our economy.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

The FCC spent most of 2014 drafting the new rules for how broadband Internet providers manage their networks, and it plans to vote on a final rule in February. Shortly after the midterm elections, President Barack Obama called on the FCC to impose the strongest possible rules on providers by classifying broadband as a utility, which would make it subject to much greater regulation. The rules are designed to protect net neutrality—the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally.

What is it with Democrats and controlling the Internet? Aren’t they supposed to be the party of social liberation? Isn’t that what the Internet does?

Internet freedom

I remember back in the late 1990s it was Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Irvine, whose Internet Tax Freedom Act kept Democrats from taxing progress. I wrote numerous editorials at the Orange County Register backing his legislation, which passed, and became a foundation of America’s internet prosperity. (Cox was less fortunate later when he was the head of the SEC during the 2008 economic meltdown.)

And as the indispensable Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the Obama administration, including possible next president Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state, has waged a continuous war on Internet freedom.

Wall Street:

Concern about the rules is playing into Republican efforts to rein in what they say is regulatory overreach by the Federal Communications Commission.

Dissension over the Internet rules is so rancorous that it could end up impeding progress on technology policy areas where there is potential for agreement, such as cybersecurity and the allocation of wireless spectrum, according to telecom lobbyists and congressional aides.

‘The News Twisters’

The GOP should consider abolishing the FCC. Since it was established in 1934, supposedly to promote a diversity of views, the FCC has done the opposite, stifling health public discourse.

If you’re old enough, you remember the dominance of the three TV network news shows — ABC, CBS and NBC — plus later PBS, in the 1960s and 1970s. They all broadcast the same “bias,” as detailed in such books as “The News Twisters,” in 1971 by Edith Ephron.

In 1972 she wrote a sequel, “How CBS Tried to Kill a Book: An Expose of the Campaign by CBS to Kill The News Twisters,” on how the network worked to protect its control over American minds.

The Internet broke that all down, providing a global free-for-all that has advanced liberty. It all happened so fast the FCC and other regulators couldn’t react fast enough.

We’ll soon find out if the FCC is successful now in stifling our freedoms.

So people living in some backwater dictatorship will be able to log in and find out what’s really going on. And they’ll be able to broadcast what they see, such as government oppression, while organizing opposition to tyranny.

And where the Internet exists but is censored, such as China or Saudi Arabia or Iran, Lantern gets around that. But it has child controls to make sure your kids don’t see some of the horrible stuff out there.

Check it out:

HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. 

It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help).

We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN…

A program which provides access to the hypertext world we call a browser…

It would be inappropriate for us (rather than those responsible) to suggest specific areas, but experiment online help, accelerator online help, assistance for computer center operators, and the dissemination of information by central services such as the user office and CN [Computing & Networks] and ECP [Electronics & Computing for Physics] divisions are obvious candidates.

That seems pretty mundane today. But it revolutionized the way almost everybody lives, works and thinks.

A key aspect of the Web was decentralization. That meant escaping control by any one entity, including any government. Of course, some parts of the Net have become compartmentalized, such as Facebook. They own all the information you put on there, not you. But you don’t have to join Facebook. I know many people who use the Internet and have nothing to do with Facebook.

No gatekeepers

What the WWW critically did was to remove the gatekeepers of information. In 1989 in America, we still were dependent for information on five TV networks: ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and CNN; on a handful of news sources, including AP, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, which formed the opinions also of  local newspapers; on the Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report weekly news magazines; and on a couple of opinion magazines, in particular the Nation and the New Republic for liberals, and National Review for conservatives.

Books were what was in your local library or book store.

Lee’s Web shattered all that. Now, with a few touches of a keyboard, you can find almost anything you want. Granted, there are bad things out there, too: neo-Nazi sites, neo-communist sites, pornography, etc. But the good far outweighs the bad.

The main thing is that now you easily can get both sides of the story — and make up your own mind.

Such sites as Project Gutenberg include millions of free ebooks that, in 1989, would have meant scouring university libraries around the world. And Unz.org, from entrepreneur Ron Unz, includes hundreds of magazines. Here is H.L. Mencken’s The American Mercury, which the old curmudgeon founded and edited from 1924 to 1934.

Then there are the free education sites, such as the remarkable Khan Academy, created by entrepreneur Salman Khan. It’s mission is to provide “a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.” This and similar sites will make most, or all, government K-12 and university education obsolete. Why go $100,000 in debt for a pointless college degree when you can learn everything free online, from the world’s best teachers?

Moore’s Law

And this is just the beginning. Moore’s Law stipulates that computing power doubles (at the same cost) every two years — and some scientists calculate it’s faster. We can’t predict what will come next any more than people just a decade ago could predict Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.

The dark side, as we have learned the past year after the Edward Snowden revelations, is that the government spies on everything we do. As I noted yesterday, even Sen. Dianne Feinstein, long a defender of the snooping, now is upset because the CIA has been spying on Congress itself, an obvious constitutional and moral violation.

But the government now collects such vast amounts of data that it can’t possibly keep tabs on everything and everybody. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack the size of the Milky Way Galaxy. The government can, as the CIA snooping on Congress shows, intimidate some highly visible people. But for most of us, it can’t possibly perform a gatekeeper role the way the old Main Stream Media used to back in 1989.

The Truth Is Out There —  and it’s never going to be controlled again.

That could change as foreign countries have become upset at the NSA’s ubiquitous snooping, even on friendly countries. According to The Hindu:

Brazil plans to divorce itself from the US-centric internet over Washington’s widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward politically fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments.

President Dilma Rousseff has ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the US National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company’s network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to US tech companies such as Facebook and Google.

And according to WashingtonsBlog.com about BRICS (stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa):

A consortium of telecom and undersea cable companies competing for the contracts for the proposed BRICS cable show what they think the project should look like [see above graphic]…

The BRICS countries have the muscle to pull this off.  Each of the BRICS countries are in the top 25 largest economies in the world. China has the world’s 2nd largest economy, India is 3rd, Russia 6th, Brazil 7th, and South Africa 25th….

China is also dropping IBM hardware like a hot potato due to security concerns.  Intel and AMD may not be far behind.

Economic powerhouse Germany is also rolling out a system that would keep all data within Germany’s national borders.

If these countries drop our technology to avoid NSA snooping, that will mean fewer jobs for Americans, especially Californians. Once again, our own government will have sabotaged us.

This reminds me of the old Soviet Union, which closely controlled technology. For example, every copier had to be licensed, with examples of each copier’s “footprint” — every copier left telltale marks in its copies, sort of like fingerprints — kept on file with the KGB. Thus, if a copier was used to produce copies of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” and the copies were discovered after a dissident was tortured, the origin of the copies also could be found, and the rebels arrested.

Computers, including the few personal computers imported from the West, also were tightly controlled.

Such tight security retarded scientific development, which depends on the free flow of information. Which in turn retarded the Soviet economy until it finally collapsed in 1991.

Et tu, America?

“I’m a student of history, and I love to go back and read a particularly great book like Kissinger’s book about diplomacy where you think about the 18th, 19th centuries and the balance of power and how difficult it was for countries to advance their interests and years and years of wars. And we sometimes say to ourselves, boy, aren’t we lucky. Well, folks, ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tamped down for centuries by dictators, and that was complicated further by this little thing called the internet and the ability of people everywhere to communicate instantaneously and to have more information coming at them in one day than most people can process in months or a year.”

What an elitist. He longs for a world when the Elite, like him, “process” everything, and the rest of us are left out. He continued about the Internet:

“It makes it much harder to govern, makes it much harder to organize people, much harder to find the common interest, and that is complicated by a rise of sectarianism and religious extremism that is prepared to employ violent means to impose on other people a way of thinking and a way of living that is completely contrary to everything the United States of America has ever stood for. So we need to keep in mind what our goals are and how complicated this world is that we’re operating in.”

Actually, the Internet makes it easier for people to “find the common interest.” Just 20 years ago, it was difficult to find libertarian publications. Now it’s easy to find such sites as LewRockwell.com and Antiwar.com. Of course, those sites relentlessly criticize him. So I can see why he doesn’t like it and wants to go back to the days of the Elite controlling information.

As to “a rise of sectarianism and religious extremism,” there’s been a lot of that over the ages. Nothing new. But except for North Korea, we no longer have the secular regimes that murdered tens of millions of people in the last century, especially religious people. Even Castro’s Cuba is pretty tame now. That’s largely due to the communications revolution. It’s a lot harder to perpetrate an Auschwitz or a Gulag today because people would write about it on the Internet, and Google Maps would provide satellite pictures.

Elitists like Kerry don’t like losing control. Well, they lost control — and it’s gone for good.

By John Hrabe 

Following widespread criticism from online pundits and free speech advocates, California’s political watchdog is backing away from a plan to require news websites and bloggers to disclose payments received from campaigns and political committees.

Ann Ravel, chairwoman of the Fair Political Practices Commission, announced earlier this month her intention to pursue regulations of bloggers that are funded to advocate for or against candidates. “Ultimately I’d like to see the FPPC require it,” Ravel declared at an April 19 campaign finance conference in Sacramento, the Orange County Register reported. After listening to bloggers’ concerns, Ravel now says that that she will be looking for other ways to inform the public about any potentially biased online sources.

“There are probably insurmountable complexities to making them mandatory,” Ravel told CalWatchDog.com while on vacation in South America. “As opposed to asking the bloggers to do it on their sites, which is the most effective option for the consumer, it may be more reasonable and less problematic to require that we get an isolated accounting from the committees” for the campaigns.

“The committee should have the obligation, but not the blogger or the news media,” she added. 

In addition to greater itemization of campaign committee payments, Ravel discussed a voluntary disclosure process for voters to verify with the FPPC that a blog or website does not receive campaign funds.

“Most people get [campaign] information from the Internet, and it should be known to them if people are getting paid,” she said.

Ravel’s reversal received mixed reaction from political bloggers. 

“Today’s voluntary disclosure will be tomorrow’s mandatory regulation,” said Jon Fleischman, publisher of the Flash Report, a website for which this author serves as a senior editor. “If the FPPC starts with voluntary disclosure of campaign payments, it will inevitably become a mandatory requirement of all blogs and websites.”

Other bloggers welcomed the idea of a voluntary disclosure process. 

“I’d be happy to voluntarily post every dollar I receive,” said Scott Lay, who publishes AroundtheCapitol.com, a non-partisan news aggregation website. “Let’s face it, we have some big time flacks that take money and tweet and blog all day long for money.”

Ravel: We Have the Power to Go Out of State

Critics of a state-level disclosure requirement also complained that they would be at a disadvantage to websites that are physically based out of the state. “The Internet is global,” wrote Mark Paul on his blog, the California Fix. “The commission’s jurisdiction is limited to California.”

The state’s top campaign regulator, who spoke to us by phone from Brazil, agreed that the Internet age changes how political information is shared and campaigns are regulated. However, she steadfastly defended the agency’s authority to regulate online political activities designed to influence California elections, even if sites are physically based out of the state.

“I believe we do have the power to go out of state,” Ravel said of online political activity intended to influence the California electorate. “If there is money being spent, no matter where that money comes from, we have the power to regulate that.”

CalWatchDog.com has previously reported that some legal experts believe legal precedents could allow California’s political regulatory agency to cross state lines. UCLA law professor Stephen C. Yeazell argues that Pavlovich vs. Superior Court, a 2002 California Supreme Court case, established an “effects test” for evaluating jurisdictional claims in the Internet age. He believes it could provide a legal justification for the FPPC’s regulation of out-of-state bloggers, if the sites featured California ads or content.

Bloggers Singled Out

In response to her original proposal, many bloggers expressed outrage with being singled out and treated differently from traditional media sources.

“While more transparency is a good idea across the board, bloggers often get singled out for ethics concerns when there are far greater conflict-of-interest problems with commentators in the traditional press,” said David Atkins, who has been blogging off and on for seven years for DailyKos and Digby’s Hullaballo. “I just resent the notion that bloggers are being singled for disclosure issues that are more prevalent and more consequential in the traditional media.”

Atkins, who also serves as the first vice-chair of the Ventura County Democratic Party, said that he goes out of his way to disclose any campaign affiliations, including when he is an “unpaid super-volunteer.”

“The same newspapers that are happy to print stories by the likes of Judith Miller as ‘objective journalism’ seem overly concerned about the ethics of bloggers, and that double standard seems to be applied by the FPPC in this case as well,” Atkins said.

In Ravel’s mind, “it’s not bloggers versus regular media,” as long as the outlet accepts “advertisements at the market rate.” 

Political Watchdog to Fundraise

Ravel said that her highest priority as the state’s ethics czar has been to increase disclosure.

“My aim is to have everything on the FPPC website. That is the goal. All those forms should be in one spot and easily searchable,” she said.  

In order to achieve that goal amid ongoing budget constraints, Ravel suggested that the state agency that oversees campaign fundraising might do fundraising of its own.

“The FPPC has the ability to fundraise,” Ravel pointed out. “I’ve been going out talking to a number of foundations and other public service groups that provide some coding work to see if there are ways to get this done.”

Stephen Frank, the conservative publisher and editor of the California Political News and Views, criticized the idea of a government regulatory agency, such as the FPPC, seeking funds from private organizations or advocacy groups.

“Imagine if Al Gore could start funding the EPA, imagine what damage that could do,” Frank said. “I am surprised that as a Democrat she wants to privatize a government agency because that is the slippery slope that she is suggesting.”

Frank believes that fundraising from “organizations of her choosing” would allow biased nonprofit organizations to influence regulators.

“I would strongly suggest she approach George Soros to fund her efforts to silence freedom of speech, that is his specialty,” he said.

I subscribe to the Los Angeles Times’ Sunday edition. So I get access to their online edition without paying more.

But it’s annoying. I have virus programs that reglarly get rid of the cookies that retain my log-on information. So I have to key it in the password almost every day. Which means I have to find it. How annoying.

I know there are programs that remember all the passwords. I tried one. It was annoying.

Today, I just skipped signing in and didn’t read the Times’ stories. Based on their headlines, which I could read, I just found other sources on the Internet. So I didn’t read the Times and didn’t see their ads.

I wrote about this earlier this month in my article, “L.A. Times Attempting Suicide.”

I also noticed that the New York Times reduced to 10 from 20 the number of articles you can read there for free. Well, I’m not paying.

I used to read some sports and entertainment stories there. No more. One story I found today was about Tim Tebow, the NFL quarterback, going to the New York Jets. I skipped the N.Y. Times article and just found one on nfl.yahoo.com.

A couple of days ago, I did use one of my allotment of NYT articles. While reading it, I clicked on a Mercedes ad. I can’t afford an new Mercedes, or even a Yaris, but I love cars. The NYT probably got about $1 from Mercedes for my click. That’s how it works. The NYT would get more clicks if I read more of its articles. But I won’t.

And that’s why it should be free.

And it’s why the NYT and the LAT are losing money and subscribers.

Sixteen years into the Internet Age, they still don’t get it.

March 22, 2012