Bill Threatens Independent Internet Services

A blog post on abledbody.com led me to a New York Times article on H.B. 3103, the "Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2009".  Both the blog post and NYT article gushed about what a huge boon this bill would be to the deaf community.  Unfortunately, it won't accomplish what it claims to--making internet content and new communications channels more accessible to disabled persons--and will shake the internet with a host of dangerous unintended consequences.

Though touted for its regulation of online television programming by big media, this bill also regulates small content producers, internet relay chat, instant messaging, Skype, Jingle, and other voice chat, email, and more!

Anyone who offers any internet-based communication service, or any related software will have to compile and submit annual reports to the US government.  If their service includes voice, they must pay to-be-determined fees to support the Telecommunications Relay Services Fund1.  Additionally, anyone in the US who offers an internet-based communication service, or writes client or server software for such a service, is liable for up to $100,000 per incident, up to $1,000,000 per issue if the issue is "continuing".

The overhead of writing reports, the relay fees, and the compliance liability proposed in this bill will make offering free, independent or community-driven communication services and software in the US infeasible.  In effect, this bill will shut down small and hobby instant messaging servers, voice chat services, microblogging and social networking services, and force open-source software for any type of communication to move development out of the US to somewhere more free.  Those of us who have worked hard to create alternatives to big, corporate communication networks are being shut down in favor of large corporations who can handle the overhead -- organizations like Facebook and AT&T (who have dubious-at-best records on putting their users' interests first) will control our communication.

Additionally, the bill states that "Each provider of advanced communications has the duty not to install network features, functions, or capabilities that do not comply with the regulations established pursuant to this section."  In other words, if some people cannot use a particular feature, no one may use it.  Say goodbye to voice chat.  Say goodbye to video chat.  Never mind that both of these are often used to increase accessiblity for the disabled2.  The development of new internet communication technologies, heretofore unhampered by regulation, has generated an incredible amount of choice -- text modes, voice modes, video modes -- why can't we each choose the one that suits us?

As for the online video streaming services that aren't adding closed captions fast enough for some people, this bill will not do anything to improve the situation.  It will merely cause uncaptioned content to be pulled from the market either permanently, or until the captioning backlog has been solved.

Youtube, Hulu, and others are already moving toward increased closed captioning. Market force is increasing caption availability without artificially limiting available content.  However, there is a massive backlog of media to be captioned — media from non-tv sources, and media that pre-dates closed captioning technology (neither of which must be captioned under this bill) top the list. No one has the infrastructure to caption 50 years of media as fast as you want it done. They’re already doing it as fast as existing infrastructure allows, so the *only* recourse in the event of a mandate is to pull uncaptioned content off the internet.

Closed captioning in online video hasn’t lagged because the mean mean media execs have decided that they like deaf people less than they like hearing people. There are real logistical barriers here that need to be addressed. People inside and outside the movie industry are working on it — but it takes time. Things should speed up considerably once the standard for online captions is released; it’s already in the works, and when finished will reduce the cost to produce and maintain the systems for captioning content, and for converting captions from television or DVD to a format usable online.

The effect of supporting a mandate is saying “my viewing format isn’t available yet, so no one should be allowed to watch these movies”. We all have our own issues to deal with. I don’t demand that others stop eating foods I’m allergic to because I can’t have them. Nor should anyone try to take content away from others because some subset of people can’t enjoy it yet.

This bill does nothing to speed up the proliferation of captions for online video content.  It's simply a demand that others do so, and on the government's timeline, or else.  Meanwhile, it endangers internet communication of all kinds by taking most small and hobby/community providers out of the market entirely.

If you want more captions, volunteer your time or resources to create tools that make captioning faster and less expensive for content providers so they can mow through the backlog, or start a PGDP-like distributed captioning project to crowdsource captions.

1. 1. The Telecommunication Relay Services Fund pays for a transcription service commonly referred to simply as "relay" in which a hearing person talks on the phone to a relay operator, who types what is said to a deaf person using a text display called a TTY, and reads what the TTY user types back to the hearing person.
   
   TTY has been largely supplanted by SMS (mobile phone text messages), instant messaging, email, and online chat. Compared to relay, these technologies offer greater privacy, freedom from transcription errors, more user-friendliness, and lower costs (both to the user who doesn't need special TTY equipment, and the taxpayer who isn't paying for a relay operator).
   
   Among my deaf friends, none use relay regularly (all report that TTY is mostly popular among older people), and many don't even own or want TTY devices. The consensus is that the technologies above are much more convenient and effective for them than relay. It's my belief that relay will be dead in 10 years or so.
2. 2. Many of my deaf friends use video chat so that they can sign to one another, but it isn't useful to a blind person. Conversely, some of my blind friends prefer voice chat to typing, but it doesn't work for the deaf.