Now comes the latest Federal Trade Commission “discussion draft paper” suggesting that these advances must be hobbled, taxed and maybe even reversed–because they hurt the newspaper industry. Dead-tree media’s salvation, it seems, lies in [hobbling] social media and making search engines as user-unfriendly as possible.
Oh, and newspapers will need one more thing: government subsidies. That’s why we need the tax hikes–especially on Internet and 3G phone users.
Following up on their proposal to save newspapers by subsidizing them with taxes on every news source but newspapers, the FTC has decided that books have made oral history practitioners obsolete. Said their discussion draft paper:
At one time, the history of people was passed down from generation to generation by story tellers who memorized their history, added to the history as time passed, and in time, taught the history to a younger person. Such walking repositories of history were respected members of the society and a living link to the past.
Today, books have destroyed a once thriving practice, and eliminated an entire profession. No oral history school has survived the introduction of books. Indeed, in all of higher education, there are no oral history programs available. While some concede that the practice was doomed when the first hieroglyphs were placed on a stone column, the process accelerated with the invention of the alphabet and, later, printing presses.
Why memorize when you can look it up, was a common theme in discussing the death of oral historians. The post-it note came in for particularly withering criticism in the report.
The FTC proposes a tax on paper, ink, printing presses, Kindles and other electronic readers, and the books themselves at retail sale. The FTC estimates that at least eleventy-seven billion dollars in revenue could be collected, with at least part going toward the establishment of oralism schools (already nicknamed O-schools), subsidies for oralism programs at existing schools, federal research into devising and developing new wampum belts as memory aids for the new oralists, seed money for a semi-private enforcing agency on O-school standards to be called the Accrediting Council on Education in Oralism and Wampum Bead Communications (ACEOWBC), and tax credits for the hiring of oral story tellers.
Oralists could also be registered and directly subsidized by the federal government.
Disagreements over whether "town criers" would be included in the oralism subsidy program have yet to be ironed out. Purists sneered that town criers should not be part of the program, saying "Criers just tell the stories of that day. What history or context do they know? Let them call themselves "journalists" if they want. But oralists? Please, they aren't a profession in any meaning of the word."
The FTC has opened up a public comment period to solicit views.
Civil libertarians and press organizations who would have cried "fascism" if the Bush administration had proposed this regulation are expected to roll over, hang their tongues out, and wait for a good belly scratch from Robert Gibbs.
UPDATE: More on tithes for typers from Steyn.
