FTC Staff Discuss a Tax on Electronics To Support the News Business 381
dptalia links to this piece describing a staff discussion draft from the Federal Trade Commission, writing "The FTC is concerned about the death of the 'news.' Specifically newspapers. Rather than look to how old media models can be adapted to the Internet, they instead suggest taxing consumer electronics to support a huge newspaper bailout. Additionally, they suggest making facts 'proprietary' and allowing news organizations to copyright them."
Note, though, "The good news in all this is that the FTC's bureaucrats try hard to recommend little. They just discuss. And much of what the agency staff ponders are political impossibilities."
Start laughing now... (Score:5, Interesting)
This would essentially put the government in charge of choosing which press agencies to sponser... Dangerous precedent...
government meet the court system (Score:3, Interesting)
unless congress passes a law i don't see this surviving a lawsuit. and with the clout of the electronics industry i doubt a law will pass allowing this
the sound of clashing ideologies (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, this is where I laugh. I'm a socially conscious, progressive kind of guy. I believe in humanitarian capitalism, not social darwinism. But in a case like this, they're proposing a tax to support a business model that cannot support itself in light of other players able to make a living providing the same kinds of services.
I do support operating businesses with a social benefit at a deficit. Public transit does not usually support itself entirely from the fares collected but receives subsidies from the taxpayers because it's of social benefit to all. After all, how much money does the local fire department collect from you to provide emergency services? There's no fees, it's all direct 100% taxpayer support. But we all agree that this is something we need. Same with public schools.
What I find especially amusing is the same free market evangelists who would huff and puff about how awful the fire department is would probably also line up behind the newspaper bailout, especially if they happen to be columnists. Socialism for the goose but show the door to the gander.
I do agree that competition is a good thing and a major problem with government-sponsored monopolies is that there's no competition, no choice for the customer if they don't like what they're getting. But there's not a whole lot of competition amongst "private" industry, either! Smaller competitors get gobbled up until we get too-big-to-fail companies every bit as broken and inefficient as the communist state-owned industries we were warned about in our economics textbooks. Oh, it's bad when they do it but ok when our guys are doing it? Riiiight.
I like what the brits have tone with the BBC. I could get behind that kind of government support. I don't want to see Ruport Murdoch sucking at the public teat while putting out his bullshit.
Re:Start laughing now... (Score:3, Interesting)
Precisely... all the sources that don't have paper products, such as the online news sources that have been steadily replacing newspapers over time.
This would be where Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo (among many others) get to step up and be "heroes". Part of the plan? Perhaps...
Re:Let them Die (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, this sort of thing is all out of proportion because of the state of the economy and the number of unemployed people already out there. In better times, much of this would be ignored.
Did we learn nothing from the previous bailouts? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Let them Die (Score:5, Interesting)
We didn't try to artificially keep wagon wheel business alive when cars were invented.
Yes you did. [wikipedia.org]
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ayn Rand was right. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's frightening just how much modern American government has become like the nightmare Statist government in Ayn Rand's novels, constantly meddling with and attempting to control market forces that it and it's members are incapable of understanding or wanting to understand.
Regardless of what you may think of her personally, she was prescient.
Far too many people are willing to ignore good advice when they don't like the messenger, or the people associated with the advice. There is also another reason people ignore good advice that scares me even more. It's when the advice is ignored because they cannot accept the implications of what that would mean.
I guess the latter reason also scares me because I often find myself making the same mistake. It's easy and comforting.
As with Ayn Rand, it's like any other book, it takes an effort to distill the insightful portions from the author's other opinions.
No problem discussing... (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course over the past few decades, there seems to be an increasing trend for the most idiotic, most obviously flawed ideas to float to the top and become law. I attribute that to voter apathy and a press (both print and electronic) that have for a very long time been reduced to pandering for market share to survive.
Re:Let them Die (Score:3, Interesting)
Why are we always so concerned with keeping companies in business. We didn't try to artificially keep wagon wheel business alive when cars were invented. This is absurd, if a company can no longer sell something, sell something else, or die off.
While normally I agree with the idea of making businesses survive and fail on their own I'm a bit more hesitant to agree to letting the news industry fail. I wouldn't want to get all my information from blogs, word of mouth or press releases from the government. Remember most of the stories posted here are from a news source of some sort or another. If the news agencies failed It would leave a huge information vacuum that the government could fill as it wished. And lets not even think about the quality of the news when it is all done by people without editors or others to put the breaks on unsupported stories. At least right now we can get a view of the truth by reading the extremes and taking the average. The US (and other civilized countries) are better of with the news agencies then without them. As for newspapers, if you can read you have access to them which gives them an advantage over electronic media.
Re:Ayn Rand was right. (Score:1, Interesting)
Quite frankly, these discussions seem to be nothing more than the mere musings of some unimaginative folk at the FTC. Perhaps we should write letters to FTC, expressing in no uncertain terms, that such ideas are the ruminations of doofuses. Put simply, we should probably just try to tel the FTC how silly such ideas are, and ask them to come up with something better (like, say, letting print media die). Inserting a picture of yourself facepalming may help to implant the humility in the FTC folk that is so deserved.
Re:Start laughing now... (Score:1, Interesting)
I smell a conspiracy brewing. (The worst part of waking up is a conspiracy in your cup!)
No, she wasn't. (Score:2, Interesting)
...constantly meddling with and attempting to control market forces that it and it's members are incapable of understanding or wanting to understand.
Back in the 1800s, our economy would oscillate between booms and busts. Depressions were the norm during the dips in the business cycle. Sure there were corresponding booms, but the crashes would wipe out most of the wealth created. Businesses wanted government intervention to flatten out the business cycle and make things more predictable.
Completely free markets do not work. They eventually break down and we end up with a crash and an aristocracy. Start reading 19th century American business history (Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt, etc... ) and see what it was like when the Government was completely hands off.
On the other hand, it is possible to go too far, as in this case with the news or with the airlines, GM and Chrysler, the big banks - those should have been allowed to fail or in the case of the big banks, broken up so that they aren't such a threat to the financial system.
I say let the news organizations fail and the Government step in and create protections for the citizen journalist.
Rand over simplified things - she was speaking from a system and human ideal that is not attainable. Humans are just too frail, self centered, small minded, shallow and cruel for a World like Ayn Rand's to exist.
Rumours of death of news greatly exaggerated . (Score:5, Interesting)
Newspapers aren't, for the most part, loosing money. They're becoming less profitable. Historically, newspapers have enjoyed fantastically high profit margins. Due to a falloff in revenue from shrinking circulation and less interest in print classifieds, those margins have shrunk to being merely moderate.
Back in the days when newspapers were run by private companies or wealthy families most papers probably could have weathered these leaner times, these days most major papers are held by big public media companies. These companies can't tolerate a drop in profits, so they are firing reporters and closing beuros in order to maintain those margins.
Re:Rumours of death of news greatly exaggerated . (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow. An informed Slashdot reader. You dare post something meaningful in a discussion about newspapers in the midst of a mob of teenagers (along with a few right-wing idealogues) chanting "Death to Print Journalism"? ;-)
You're right, of course, about the underlying problem. You did, however, neglect to throw in the bit about how most all newspapers are finding it impossible to reconcile their viability with the pitiful revenues from online advertising. That problem has no easy solution.
There are success stories out there, of course, consisting of a few local on-line-only newspapers, specialty sites, Rupert's subscription-only WSJ, the Huffington Post, etc., but those business models represent a dramatic departure from how newspapers are current run, and those models certainly won't accomodate the public's need for a wide array of news, or the currently employed editors, reporters, etc. required to produce it.
Maybe the idea of an "enlightened benefactor" will come back in style? Deregulation has gone out of vogue, so why not the public offerings and buyouts in the print world?
Personally, I'm holding out for a magic Kindle-type device to save the industry. No secret the publishers are too. If that happens, I suspect everything will be available only by subscription only (or mostlY), and the end product will cost more (and suck in new and different ways), but it will afford a chance for the big papers to continue. Most of the smaller ones deserve to die anyway.
Re:GM (Score:4, Interesting)
Wrong.
GM deserved to die because it was mismanaged for decades. Their products have been crap for a long time, they haven't made a decent car in decades, and it shows in the sales figures. The only reason they were profitable before was because of the SUV craze. However, GM pissed away this opportunity, and instead of using the temporary windfall from the sale of highly profitable SUVs to build a "rainy day" fund or otherwise make the company strong for the next recession, they were completely caught with their pants down when gas prices rose and then again when the recession hit, killing the SUV craze suddenly. With no more cash cow to abuse, GM had no more money left.
Ford, OTOH, managed to manage their company well enough that they avoided this fate, even though they were profiting off the SUVs alongside GM, and had all the same issues with union work and costs.
So, in the end, instead of Ford being rewarded for their superior business acumen, they got to watch stupid, mismanaged GM get an unearned bailout.
GM should have been allowed to die. It could have been split up and sold off to Ford, Honda, Toyota, and the other automakers. That "vast system of suppliers" should have been able to hang on until then, as they would have been needed to supply these other companies who would now be selling more cars. Any company that can't handle a temporary disruption to their sales has no business staying in business.
Re:Isn't that libertarianism? (Score:2, Interesting)
In a society where government stands back and allows profit-driven corporations to police themselves, then eventually you will have corruption as those corporations recognize the profit value in bribing and maintaining control of government, just as communist governments tend to become corrupt as officials recognize their special privileges.
I'm always disappointed when I see people confusing "libertarianism" with "a desire for universal deregulation of businesses". Very few libertarians actually support the notion of a completely wild, unregulated economy; most libertarians simply recognize that our current economy still has way, way too many regulations. In most cases, libertarians still support a baseline of regulations for things like product safety and truth in advertising; and as with all parties/ideologies, there are disagreements about where the lines should be drawn. And of course, libertarians support rigorous enforcement of these basic laws, which is one of the main distinctions between libertarians and true anarchists (who want zero government and zero law/regulation enforcement).
The statement I quoted is central to the problem, but a libertarian sees the situation you pose and comes to a different conclusion. A libertarian says "In a society where government stands back and allows profit-driven corporations to police themselves, then eventually you will have corruption as those corporations recognize the profit value in bribing and maintaining control of government; therefore, the power of the government to control the market must be strictly contained, so that the ability of corporations to achieve gains through government corruption is limited or non-existent."
A big part of the problem is that many of the suggestions in the article are powers that the government should not have in the first place. As many have pointed out, the ability to copyright facts themselves is antithetical to the notion of a free society with freedom of speech. Most of the rest of the suggestions involve the government's appropriation of the power of the purse: imposing a selective tax on one industry to benefit another; drawing from money generated by taxes to save an industry from their own failings; making tax exemptions to favor one industry over another. All of these concepts are anathema to libertarians. To the extent that libertarians support taxation at all, they support fair and uniform taxation, which cannot be manipulated by special interests in the manner described in the article.
Take away the government's power to take from one subset of society and give to another, and the ability of greedy corporations to protect their profits through government lobbying nearly disappears.
Re:Start laughing now... (Score:3, Interesting)
> All of the news outlets that don't get the bailout, perhaps?
You don't understand how Progressives work. Everyone with any audience will get the bailouts, online, cable, legacy networks, dead tree. Just like the banks who were smart enough to see the trap and initially said "No thanks." until they were all brought into a conference room and told "You WILL take the money."
Once everyone is on the government teat nothing else will change for a while, as slowly the whole industry realigns to the 'new normal' such that operating without the subsidy becomes an utter absurdity. THEN the chains go on and there won't be anyone to object. A few decades later (see home loans, student loans, etc) Progressives will whine about the money going to huge media corporations and the whole thing gets nationalized.