Few things are more contradictory than calling in the government -- the biggest known violator of privacy -- to "protect" privacy on the Internet. ...
This is the kind of generalized hand-waving statement I am talking about. If you are talking about the FBI or the IRS I would agree but I don't think the FTC is collecting personal information in order to violate privacy (although I think they give industry an unfair advantage when it comes to developing privacy rules). I also don't think agencies like the National Endowment for Arts or the Park Service is doing this either. I also think the government is #2 behind companies such as Experian and Metromail due the profit incentive. As for going to agencies such as the FTC for assistance, I am looking for them to develop rules so I can protect my own privacy. I do not expect them, nor do I think they are capable of, protecting my privacy (they cannot even develop their own privacy policy for their web site correctly). I want to able to find out who has information about me and be able to (in some circumstances) stop the distribution of the information if I so desire and make it unprofitable for companies to violate such regulations. Another example is the junk e-mail. CEI says the FTC should be concerned with property rights and the 'rules of law' but then go on to indicate the FTC should not get involved in junk e-mail regulations. I view the hundreds of spams I received as a violation of my property rights and I simply want to recover my expenses. I went to a telecommunications deregulation seminar at CATO about 2 weeks ago and I found some the people there to use the same hand-waving arguments. I was discussing the situation with uu.net and the 'Internet death penalty' situation when other administrators got together and stopped routing their packets for newsgroups. Who knows how this could be used in the future. My suggestion was to have some type of rule concerning the packet flow when it is necessary to depend on another provider to route your packets. The answer I received: Internet users need to get redundant paths through the Internet. That sounds real good during a debate while sitting in CATO being served lunch, but such a plan would clearly put many small operators at the mercy of large ISP's or would simply put them out of business. A presenter on the CATO board also kept discussing how good the WinTel situation has been to consumers. She did have a somewhat valid point since, even with all the problems, computers are relatively cheap and an entire operating system costs less than $100. However, what would it be like if the DOJ didn't keep talking about breaking up the monopoly? Russ Smith http://consumer.net