ICE Boss: It's Okay To Ignore The Constitution If It's To Protect Companies
from the how-nice-of-them dept
While the folks at Homeland Security keep telling me that they simply cannot speak publicly about the seizure of various domain names -- and specifically the numerous mistakes they've made that appear to clearly violate both the First Amendment and Due Process rules -- it seems they have no problem talking about the domain seizures to folks in the press who don't bother to ask tough questions.
ICE boss John Morton did an interview with Politico, where he trots out a bunch of highly questionable statements about the domain seizures, including claiming that it's all okay for them to do this because they're trying to "protect U.S. industry" rather than "regulate the internet." But that's not the role of Homeland Security or ICE. And there are limits on what ICE is actually allowed to do, and Morton's technically clueless agents seem to have ignored many of those rules.
"We don't have any interest in going after bloggers or discussion boards," he said. "We're not about what is being said by anybody. We're about making sure that the intellectual property laws of the United States, which are clear, are enforced. When somebody spends hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the next movie or a billion dollars to develop the next heart medicine, the innovation and the enterprise that went into that effort is protected as the law provides. It's that simple."
There's so much wrong in that statement that it should be grounds for dismissal. Morton is not representing what has happened, the law or the facts accurately here. He's lying to the American public (and to Politico, who appears to have failed to call him on any of it). First of all, if they don't have any interest in going after bloggers or discussion boards, why did they? Second, if the intellectual property laws of the US are "clear" -- why did ICE not use them and actually get anyone charged with infringement? Third, the laws aren't that clear -- which is why we (normally) have trials to make sure there was actual infringement. If ICE had been willing to let due process play out, it would have avoided embarrassing mistakes, like taking down 84,000 websites because a few may have had illegal content. Or seizing a blog (yes, a blog, despite what he says) that posted links to music elsewhere that was sent by the labels and artists. And, when someone spends all that money to develop something, there are plenty of business models for them to use, and they have every right to use civil laws to go after those who violate their rights. What they shouldn't have is some government agents taking down websites with no due process, seizing plenty of protected speech in the process.
Finally, for Morton to claim "it's that simple," when the law is anything but simple should get the man fired. Seriously. No one who knows anything about the law thinks it's that simple. He shouldn't be in charge of ICE if he thinks that the laws are as simple as he makes out. It's not, and either he knows it and he's lying or he doesn't know it and he's unqualified for the job. Which is it? I figure I'll send these questions to my friendly press contact at Homeland Security, and I imagine the answer will be the same: "I'll have to direct you to the Justice Department on those questions." Because actually responding to American citizens whose rights he seems to have no problem trampling is not in his job description. Helping Hollywood by violating multiple parts of the Constitution is much more fun.
Morton also seems to think there's simply no legal questions in seizing domain names:
"We can seize and forfeit them just like we seize and forfeit bank accounts, houses and vehicles that are used in other crimes," he said. "Any instrument of a crime is subject to our jurisdiction in terms of seizure and forfeit."
Again this is incorrect on a number of levels, and again raises questions about Morton's competence to hold the job he holds. You can seize property, but the case law is pretty clear on the different rules when it comes to seizing speech. And he's never responded to that at all. Because, of course, he cannot.
John Morton seems to think it's fine to be censor-in-chief and to violate multiple parts of the US Constitution, because it protects a few businesses who have failed to adapt their business models. This is a sickening display of the takeover of the American government by corporations.
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The recent $315-million acquisition of The Huffington Post and the $75-million or so spent on AOL’s Patch.com hyper-local platform aren’t the only big bets that the media company is making According to a cover story in the latest issue of The Hollywood Reporter, the one-time web portal is also putting some big money down in Tinseltown, where CEO Tim Armstrong has been signing content deals with celebrities such as former supermodel Heidi Klum, singer Queen Latifah and the musical group The Jonas Brothers. In some ways, it appears AOL’s new “content farm” ambitions are designed in part to produce content that can be wrapped around big Hollywood brands. But can this strategy produce enough financial bang to make a difference to a fading giant like AOL?
In the case of Klum and Latifah, the deals with AOL involve websites and content produced by the stars’ production companies, but AOL is going to be helping generate content — including web-based video shows — and promoting the sites through its network as well. According to The Hollywood Reporter, these types of deals involve AOL putting up between $1 million and $10 million per project (some of which comes from advertisers that the company lines up). According to Hollywood sources quoted by the magazine, those kinds of dollars look pretty good compared to what cable networks can offer.
Armstrong suggests that some of the content for these sites will be generated by other parts of AOL, including its Demand Media-style Seed.com “content farm,” whose approach was described in a leaked memo recently entitled “The AOL Way.” The AOL chief executive told the magazine that “the system that we’ve been building — which the press has taken to calling a content farm — is simply a platform,” and gave an example where Klum might decide to produce a video about making jewelry, and the AOL platform could then generate information and other content about how jewelry is made. Armstrong made it clear that he thinks content is the future of the Internet:
The first phase of the Internet was about access, and I believe AOL was the biggest player in that phase. Then the next phase has really been about the platform, so you’ve seen Apple, Google and Facebook there. But the phase after this is going to be more of the Hollywood phase, where it’s about content, creativity and really putting a human face on the Internet.
In addition to using its content farm to generate material to wrap around these celebrity sites, AOL also used its own internal research to decide which celebrities to approach. According to The Hollywood Reporter piece, the company only took its “Planet Heidi” idea to the supermodel after its algorithmically-generated “quality score” showed that Klum was influential on topics like parenting, fashion and style — all of which appeal to the female demographic that Armstrong wants to focus AOL’s content on — and after Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble had signed on.
The big question, of course, is whether this Hollywood strategy is going to produce enough revenue to make a difference for AOL, a company that is still in fairly precarious financial shape: in the final quarter of last year, for example, revenue sank by 26 percent and advertising revenue fell by almost 30 percent.
As I’ve written before, AOL is like a train running down a track that is disintegrating rapidly underneath it. That track is the dial-up access business, which still produces gigantic amounts of revenue — close to 40 percent of the company’s total — but is declining at a rapid rate. What Armstrong is trying to do is to build new businesses that have the ability to generate similar kinds of revenue, which amounts to laying new tracks quickly enough that the train doesn’t go hurtling into an abyss. The launch of Patch was one such attempt, and the acquisition of The Huffington Post was another.
The purchase of Arianna Huffington’s content-aggregation business is part of the same strategy that has taken AOL into the celebrity circus of Hollywood. One of the things the web giant has lacked on the content side is identifiable personalities, and that is clearly something the Huffington Post founder brings to the table. Huffington’s site started as a collection of blogs written by famous people from various walks of life who were drawn together by their friendships with Huffington herself, and celebrities continue to make use of the site as a personal blogging platform when they have a cause they want to push.
Huffington, who is now in charge of all AOL’s editorial content, is also in charge of the Hollywood operation. All she has to do now is turn all those celebrity websites into cold hard cash for her new boss before AOL runs out of track.
Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):
- How Media Companies Can Compete Online
- What We Can Learn From the Guardian’s Open Platform
- The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
Post and thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user Zert Sonstige
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