The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update

Issues in the News

1. TECHNOLOGY

Big technology companies lobby Washington for data privacy legislation.

CEI Experts Available to Comment: Policy Analyst Brooke Oberwetter on online privacy and authentication:

“Although companies that don’t require anything more than a Social Security number are partially to blame for their lax authentication policies, the FTC actually encouraged the use of SSNs as identifiers beginning in the early 1990s. Some examples from a Forbes online commentary by privacy advocate Robert Ellis Smith show that Congress was particularly eager to plaster your Social Security number all over the place in 1996.”

2. SCIENCE

Following the lead of New York City, Los Angeles County looks into a ban on trans fats.

CEI Expert Available to Comment: Adjunct Analyst Steven Milloy includes the trans fat ban in his roundup of the top ten junk science stories of 2006:

“Despite the wide success of economic deregulation in the transportation, communications, and banking sectors, there has been no concerted effort to reconsider the moral and economic basis of one of the oldest forms of federal intervention—antitrust. Now, flawed antitrust theories are being ‘exported’ to Europe . A reform campaign based on the insight that antitrust is actually anti-competitive and anti-consumer is long overdue.”

3. LEGAL

Federal officials consider regulating activities in online virtual communities such as Second Life.

CEI Expert Available to Comment: Vice President for Policy Wayne Crews on the challenges of moving from real life to a virtual world:

“Can political regulation be avoided? “Second Life” is a grand experiment: Those appreciative of today’s numerous revolutions in communications, of which “Second Life” is one striking example, have a stake in keeping voluntary, private networks like “Second Life” as unregulated as possible, or at the very least, relying on existing law that obviates the need for harmful regulatory adventurism.”