As UCSC students know, I’m very concerned that they use Facebook and other social networking sites in ways that don’t jeopardize their safety or employment prospects. Jacqui Cheng over at Ars Technica has an excellent guide to best Facebook privacy practices here. Please read it ASAP.

On a more amusing note, here’s a video about the iPad that I found very salubrious.

As a very young child, I was lucky enough to  visit Steeplechase Park just before it closed down in 1964.

I have restored my full blog site. Hopefully it won’t crash again. Information about your courses can be found just to the left of this post.

thanks for your patience, Matthew Lasar

Thank you for this opportunity to speak at this event. I should start out by saying that I do not speak for arstechnica.com here, or anywhere else for that matter. I’m just one voice there, working in the status of contributor for the site.

I’m also not going to stand here in the company of these very informed speakers and represent myself as an expert on the Internet. I’m not. What am I then? Well, occasionally I write something on Ars that somebody finds so unacceptable that they devote an entire blog entry to my inadequacies. Last year one of them angrily   denounced me as a “self-appointed FCC watcher,” among other allegedly bad things.

In fairness to this detractor, I have to admit it’s true. That’s what I am: a self-appointed Federal Communications Commission watcher. In my defense, I tried to find an appointment for quite some time, but I’m certainly not going to decline to watch what I’m interested in watching in the absence of one.

Today I want to talk not about the Internet, Openness, and net neutrality per se , but about the challenge of regulating these things at the FCC, indeed, the challenge of regulating any aspect of broadcasting and telecommunications in this time. In fact, I want to talk about time-time itself-because these days it is often something that regulators do not have on their side.

At best they bequeath to the next generation regulations intended for their own time. That is, if they bequeath anything at all.

When I started paying attention to the FCC it was ten years ago and Temple University Press had just published my first book on the Pacifica radio network, and the big deal of the week in my tiny neck of the woods was Low Power FM.

Many of you know this sad story I’m sure. After a decade of persecuting pirate radio stations like Free Radio Berkeley and turning them into saintly martyrs, the agency got wise and got around to authorizing a legal service that would have rolled out over 3,000 ten to 100 watt FM licenses around the country.

The National Association of Broadcasters and National Public Radio ran to Congress and  cried signal interference-the last refuge of an incumbent. In an amazing demonstration of broadcaster power, they got Capitol Hill to add a third adjacent channel rule to the FCC’s Order that effectively banned LPFM everywhere except rural America.

But the bill also authorized a study of that alleged interference problem, and the FCC contracted out that study to the MITRE corporation, and three years later MITRE called the NAB’s claims all but bunk. And in 2007 the FCC asked Congress to rewrite its LPFM language sans the 3 rd adjacent chains. And Congressmembers Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania and Lee Terry of Nebraska have a bill to do just that in the House, with the stated support of Ron Paul of Texas and even John McCain in the Senate.

But its ten years later. And the Internet has kicked in with its wonders: Pandora, podcasting, Radio365, Slacker G2, Stitcher, who knows what else? Will any of these innovations provide the local coverage that a community based LPFM offers? I don’t think so. Have they dialed down the urgency of the LPFM question? Yes. I think they have.

We are moving through a time of furiously rapid technological change, accompanied by social movements that rush at whatever media/telecom innovation presents itself,  leapfrogging from one thing to the next. Writing this talk I started counting the leapfrogs I’ve seen over the last three decades: newsgroups to bbsses to gopher to Web 1.0 to blogs to myspace to facebook to twitter to whatever.

Within this context titanic regulatory battles take place and when you wake up the next decadal morning you wonder what the heck they were all about. Remember the great media ownership war? A technocolor extravaganza featuring FCC Chairs Michael Powell and then Kevin Martin as Bella Lugosi and Michael Copps Jonathan Adelstein as John Wayne. Tens of thousands of people packing those hearings across the country. A sweeping deregulatory order in 2003. Senate statements of disapproval. A dramatic repudiation from the 3 rd circuit court of appeals. Once more into the breach in 2006  . . .

And finally a single deregulatory order in 2007 allowing cross ownership of newspapers and TV stations in the 20 biggest Nielsen markets-it denounced in the Senate once more.

And now these newspapers are dying and everybody’s trying to figure out how to save them. Some of the blog sites that were created in response to media consolidation are almost as influential as them, and may become them, in fact. And what was it that the consolidators thought they were trying to accomplish, as Clear Channel struggles to unload stations and Tribune files for bankruptcy?

Remember the great cable 70/70 feud of 2005 through 2007? Congress says if the FCC in its annual survey of video competition identifies 70 percent of American households as able to access cable service, and 70 percent buying it, the agency may “promulgate any additional rules necessary to provide diversity of information sources.”

Suddenly with former Kevin Starr assistant Kevin Martin in the cockpit, the cable industry saw a la carte cable on the regulatory horizon and went into no pasaron mode. The second tier of 70/70 has not been reached, cable insisted, it never will be reached, and even if it is reached, it won’t be reached because the FCC doesn’t really have any statutory authority to do anything about its having been reached.

Martin, frustrated by all this, tried to get control of the process with a ham handed reversal of the agency’s own research conclusions about a la carte, at least that’s what Congress determined in its audit of his administration. The rest of the Commission balked at his conclusions, even the Commissioners who thought that the second half of 70/70 had been passed. Finally, the FCC released the 2006 report in January, and announced a catch up proceeding to get up to speed on the state of video in 2007, 2008, and through June of 2009.

This was announced at this month’s Open Commission meeting, which I attended . But it was launched under the shadow of another regulatory event: the FCC’s Notice of Inquiry about that National Broadband Plan it’s going to serve up to Congress by next February, a “transformative” proceeding, now interim Chair Michael Copps has declared.

Which will Copps and likely FCC Chair Julius Genachowski want to focus on, I wonder, a statistical Verdun with dubious regulatory payback, or a “transformative” manifesto on high speed Internet?

As I follow these food fights, I often feel in the end like somebody sitting in a huge empty stadium in the aftermath of some great spectator event. What was that all about? I ask myself, as the technology, its prophets and its adopters move on, reconstructing social stage sets in a single season.

But sometimes regulators do win. The Carterfone decision was an example of such a victory: the FCC’s 1969 decision that consumers may attach any legal device to AT&T’s network that does not harm the network.

But by the time that victory truly manifested itself, the big winners were not Thomas Carter and his little radio attachment on a telephone receiver. It took the FCC years to come to Carterfone, more years for Carter to settle his lawsuit with AT&T, more years for the FCC to defend various aspects of Carterfone in court, more years to set up standards that ended AT&T’s practice of requirement independent device users to buy a special AT&T used attachment for their devices, and more years until AT&T gave up requiring consumers to report independent device purchases to the telco and pay a fee (Kevin Werbach narrated this much better than I ever could at a Santa Clara Law conference held last year).

By then the beneficiaries looked a lot less like Thomas Carter, and a lot more like those gopher and BBS users I remember from way back when. And now, of course, they look like us.

Telecommunications regulations, then, are often time capsules launched into a very uncertain future. They are received by people with very different perspectives using very different machines for very different purposes than the legacy regulators envisioned. And much of the world that they inherit is a world contoured by the failure to reach regulatory consensus in the past, or in time to make a difference. Sirius XM radio’s year and a half merger approval process might be example of this, to some minds.

We have an order approving of unlicensed broadband, or “white space” devices, but the National Association of Broadcasters is suing over it , and the Office of Management and Budget has yet to approve certain key aspects of the process, most notably the databases requirement by the service. We have new metrics for classifying broadband, but last I checked they’re sitting at the OMB as well, waiting for approval based on whether they pass muster with the paperwork reduction act.

So if I’m conveying the idiotically obvious message that regulating this stuff is very hard, does anything make a difference? One lesson that I glean from all this comes from Carterfone and from the present era. Contrary to Oliver Wendel Holmes’ famous rule that first we solve the problem, then we make the principle-outlining principles first seems to clear the way towards a somewhat smoother regulatory path.

That’s why Carterfone is so important. And it’s also why the FCC’s Internet Policy Statement of 2005 has been important. These declarations seem to cut through the foggy future and shine a light of intention on the chaos.

It is unclear to me what the fate of the Internet Policy Statement is. The declaration will surely come up in Comcast’s suit against the FCC’s Order sanctioning it for P2P throttling. Is it a rule, given former FCC Chair Kevin Martin’s ambiguous statements about it, and the fact that it was issued without a proceeding? I don’t know the answers to these questions.

But Congress has hardwired the statement into its Recovery Act, and most of the telecommunications industry has gone on record as recognizing its legitimacy in that context. Strong expressions of principle, sparingly issued but at the right time and in the right place, seem to have a power that less guided regulations do not.

Speaking personally, the openness of the Internet is more than a philosophical question for me. Following the publication of my first book on Pacifica radio, I wrote a second following the organization up to the present. I taught many courses and dutifully wrote academic journal articles and put myself on the job market for many years, while settling into the status of adjunct instructor.

Finally in 2005 I saw that my fate was sealed, stopped writing for the academy, and joined the blogosphere. In late 2007 Arstechnica took me on as a contributor, and I have written over 270 articles for them since.

I doubt that I would be here talking to you in this context were it not for that opportunity. When Matthew Weldon contacted me, I don’t think he had any idea that I have a Ph.D.  and teach in the UC system.

There’s a funny New Yorker cartoon from the 1990s showing a cocker spaniel sitting in front of a computer, obviously involved in some sort of chat board thing. “On the Internet,” the animal says, “no one knows you’re a dog.” And, I would add, on the Internet, no one knows that you don’t have tenure.

The openness of the Internet has given many people second chances. It must continue to be allowed to do that. The complexities and challenges of that task should not dissuade us from struggling for consensus in pursuit of that larger goal.

But if you are planning to take the law route because you think that it is a safe, secure career, and you don’t know what else to do, read this article and think again. . . .

Hard Case: Job Market Wanes for U.S. Lawyers
Growth of Legal Sector
Lags Broader Economy;
Law Schools Proliferate

By AMIR EFRATI (Wall Street Journal)
September 24, 2007; Page A1

A law degree isn’t necessarily a license to print money these days.

For graduates of elite law schools, prospects have never been better. Big law firms this year boosted their starting salaries to as high as $160,000. But the majority of law-school graduates are suffering from a supply-and-demand imbalance that’s suppressing pay and job growth. The result: Graduates who don’t score at the top of their class are struggling to find well-paying jobs to make payments on law-school debts that can exceed $100,000. Some are taking temporary contract work, reviewing documents for as little as $20 an hour, without benefits. And many are blaming their law schools for failing to warn them about the dark side of the job market.

The law degree that Scott Bullock gained in 2005 from Seton Hall University — where he says he ranked in the top third of his class — is a “waste,” he says. Some former high-school friends are earning considerably more as plumbers and electricians than the $50,000-a-year Mr. Bullock is making as a personal-injury attorney in Manhattan. To boot, he is paying off $118,000 in law-school debt.

“Unfortunately, some find the practice of law is not for them,” Seton Hall’s associate dean, Kathleen Boozang, said through a spokeswoman. “However, it is our experience that a legal education is a tremendous asset for a variety of professional paths.”

A slack in demand appears to be part of the problem. The legal sector, after more than tripling in inflation-adjusted growth between 1970 and 1987, has grown at an average annual inflation-adjusted rate of 1.2% since 1988, or less than half as fast as the broader economy, according to Commerce Department data.

LAW BLOG

Join a discussion on the state of the legal market.

Some practice areas have declined in recent years: Personal-injury and medical-malpractice cases have been undercut by state laws limiting class-action suits, out-of-state plaintiffs and payouts on damages. Securities class-action litigation has declined in part because of a buoyant stock market.

On the supply end, more lawyers are entering the work force, thanks in part to the accreditation of new law schools and an influx of applicants after the dot-com implosion earlier this decade. In the 2005-06 academic year, 43,883 Juris Doctor degrees were awarded, up from 37,909 for 2001-02, according to the American Bar Association. Universities are starting up more law schools in part for prestige but also because they are money makers. Costs are low compared with other graduate schools and classrooms can be large. Since 1995, the number of ABA-accredited schools increased by 11%, to 196.

Evidence of a squeezed market among the majority of private lawyers in the U.S., who work as sole practitioners or at small firms, is growing. A survey of about 650 Chicago lawyers published in the 2005 book “Urban Lawyers” found that between 1975 and 1995 the inflation-adjusted average income of the top 25% of earners, generally big-firm lawyers, grew by 22% — while income for the other 75% actually dropped.

According to the Internal Revenue Service, the inflation-adjusted average income of sole practitioners has been flat since the mid-1980s. A recent survey showed that out of nearly 600 lawyers at firms of 10 lawyers or fewer in Indiana, wages for the majority only kept pace with inflation or dropped in real terms over the past five years.

The news isn’t any better for the 14% of new lawyers who go into government or join public-interest firms. Inflation-adjusted starting salaries for graduates who go to work for public-interest firms or the government rose 4% and 8.6%, respectively, between 1994 and 2006, according to the National Association for Law Placement, which aggregates graduate surveys from law schools. That compares with at least an 11% jump in the median family income during the same period, according to the Census Bureau. Graduates who become in-house company lawyers, about 9%, have fared better: Their salaries rose by nearly 14% during the same period.

Many students “simply cannot earn enough income after graduation to support the debt they incur,” wrote Richard Matasar, dean of New York Law School, in 2005, concluding that, “We may be reaching the end of a golden era for law schools.”

Meanwhile, the prospects for big-firm lawyers are growing richer. While offering robust minimum salaries, those firms are paying astronomical amounts to their stars.

Now, debate is intensifying among law-school academics over the integrity of law schools’ marketing campaigns. Defenders argue that the legal profession always has been openly and proudly a meritocracy: Top entrance-exam scores help win admittance to top schools where top students win jobs at top firms. Even the system that is used to issue law-school grades — a curve that pits student against student — reflects the law profession’s competitiveness.

David Burcham, dean of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, considered second-tier, says the school makes no guarantees to students that they will obtain jobs. He says it is problematic that big firms only interview the top of the class, “but that’s the nature of the employment market; it’s never been different.”

For the majority of students and alumni, he says, Loyola “turned out to be a good investment.”

Yet economic data suggest that prospects have grown bleaker for all but the top students, and now a number of law-school professors are calling for the distribution of more-accurate employment information. Incoming students are “mesmerized by what’s happening in big firms, but clueless about what’s going on in the bottom half of the profession,” says Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California-Los Angeles who has studied the legal job market.

“Prospective students need solid comparative data on employment outcomes, [but] very few law schools provide such data,” adds Andrew Morriss, a law professor at the University of Illinois who has studied the market for new lawyers.

Students entering law school have little way of knowing how tight a job market they might face. The only employment data that many prospective students see comes from school-promoted surveys that provide a far-from-complete portrait of graduate experiences. Tulane University, for example, reports to U.S. News & World Report magazine, which publishes widely watched annual law-school rankings, that its law-school graduates entering the job market in 2005 had a median salary of $135,000. But that is based on a survey that only 24% of that year’s graduates completed, and those who did so likely represent the cream of the class, a Tulane official concedes.

On its Web site, the school currently reports an average starting salary of $96,356 for graduates in private practice but doesn’t include what percentage of graduates reported salaries for the survey.

“It’s within most individuals’ nature to keep that information private, unless it’s a high amount,” says Carlos Dávila-Caballero, assistant dean for career development at Tulane, who adds that his office tells prospective students to use the median figure as a guide because starting salaries vary widely.

Academics who have studied new-lawyer salaries say that the graduate surveys of many law schools are skewed by higher response rates from the most successful students. The National Association for Law Placement, which aggregates and publishes national data based on those surveys, concedes that it can’t vouch for their accuracy. “We can’t validate the figures; we have to rely on schools to report to us accurately,” says Judy Collins, NALP’s director of research.

A prospective student studying NALP data might conclude that the study of law is a sure path to financial security. For 2006 graduates who entered private practice, or nearly 60%, NALP shows a national median salary of $95,000, a rise of 40%, adjusted for inflation, from 1994 graduates.

The NALP data also show that the percentage of graduates employed in private practice has been steady, fluctuating between 55% and 58% for more than a decade. But in law schools’ self-published employment data, “private practice” doesn’t necessarily mean jobs that improve long-term career prospects, for that category can include lawyers working under contract without benefits, such as Israel Meth. A 2005 graduate of Brooklyn Law School, he earns about $30 an hour as a contract attorney reviewing legal documents for big firms. He says he uses 60% of his paycheck to pay off student loans — $100,000 for law school on top of $100,000 for the bachelor’s degree he received from Columbia University.

A glossy admissions brochure for Brooklyn Law School, considered second-tier, reports a median salary for recent graduates at law firms of well above $100,000. But that figure doesn’t reflect all incomes of graduates at firms; fewer than half of graduates at firms responded to the survey, the school reported to U.S. News. On its Web site, the school reports that 41% of last year’s graduates work for firms of more than 100 lawyers, but it fails to mention that that percentage includes temporary attorneys, often working for hourly wages without benefits, Joan King, director of the school’s career center, concedes.

Ms. King says she believes the figures for her school accurately represent the broader graduating class. She says the number of contract attorneys is “minimal” but declined to give a number.

The University of Richmond School of Law in the last couple of years started to be more open about its employment statistics; it now breaks out how many of its grads work as contract attorneys. Of 57 2006 graduates working in private practice, for example, seven were contract employees nine months after graduation. Schools “should be sharing more information than they are now,” says Joshua Burstein, associate dean for career services who put the changes in place. “Most people graduating from law school,” he says, “are not going to be earning big salaries.”

Adding to the burden for young lawyers: Tuition growth at law schools has almost tripled the rate of inflation over the past 20 years, leading to higher debt for students and making starting salaries for most graduates less manageable, especially in expensive cities. Graduates in 2006 of public and private law schools had borrowed an average of $54,509 and $83,181, up 17% and 18.6%, respectively, from the amount borrowed by 2002 graduates, according to the American Bar Association.

Students taking on such debt may feel reassured by incessant press reports of big firms scrambling to hire and keep associates. Making headlines this year was a bump up in big-firm starting salaries to $160,000 from $145,000 in many cities.

And indeed, some law graduates of lower-tier schools do find high-paying private-practice law jobs. In recent years big firms have boomed thanks in part to the globalization of business and Wall Street deal making; firms have been casting a wider net for new lawyers, though they still generally restrict their recruiting at lower-tier schools to students at the very top of the class or on the law review. Some students have leads on a job at a family member’s or friend’s practice.

But just as common — and much less publicized — are experiences such as that of Sue Clark, who this year received her degree from second-tier Chicago-Kent College of Law, one of six law schools in the Chicago area. Despite graduating near the top half of her class, she has been unable to find a job and is doing temp work “essentially as a paralegal,” she says. “A lot of people, including myself, feel frustrated about the lack of jobs,” she says.

Harold Krent, Chicago-Kent’s dean, said it’s not uncommon for new lawyers to wait a few months to more than a year to find a job that’s a good fit. He added that there is a “small spike” in employment after his school’s grads receive their bar-exam results, several months after graduation, because some firms wait until then before hiring.

The market is particularly tough in big cities that boast numerous law schools. Mike Altmann, 29, a graduate of New York University who went to Brooklyn Law School, says he accumulated $130,000 in student-loan debt and graduated in 2002 with no meaningful employment opportunities — one offer was a $33,000 job with no benefits. So Mr. Altmann became a contract attorney, reviewing electronic documents for big firms for around $20 to $30 an hour, and hasn’t been able to find higher-paying work since.

Some un- or underemployed grads are seeking consolation online, where blogs and discussion boards have created venues for shared commiseration that didn’t exist before. An anonymous writer called Loyola 2L, purportedly a student at Loyola Law School, who claims the school wasn’t straight about employment prospects, has been beating a drum of discontent around the Web in the past year that’s sparked thousands of responses, and a fan base. (”2L” stands for second-year law student.) Some thank “L2L” for articulating their plight; others claim L2L should complain less and work more. Loyola’s Dean Burcham says he wishes he knew who the student was so he could help the person. “It’s expensive to go to law school, and there are times when you second-guess yourself as a student,” he says.

Some new lawyers try to hang their own shingle. Matthew Fox Curl graduated in 2004 from second-tier University of Houston in the bottom quarter of his class. After months of job hunting, he took his first job working for a sole practitioner focused on personal injury in the Houston area and made $32,000 in his first year. He quickly found that tort-reform legislation has been “brutal” to Texas plaintiffs’ lawyers and last year left the firm to open up his own criminal-defense private practice.

He’s making less money than at his last job and has thought about moving back to his parents’ house. “I didn’t think three years out I’d be uninsured, thinking it’s a great day when a crackhead brings me $500.”

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