What do you expect when "Einstein" and "Heroin Chic" Slow Dance Together

The Reign Of The Ban - Forbes.com

Trevor Butterworth, 08.03.10, 04:04 PM EDT

Does San Francisco's new law on cellphones signal a global panic?

"When did fun loving, freedom loving, hip, liberal people embrace The Ban as their now favorite implement, surpassing even the Joint and the Bong?" wrote "Scrubpine" some 330 comments into the 800 that greeted news of a new ordinance to ban the sale of pets in San Francisco. But while the rest of the country may laugh or sneer at the Singapore-like mentality of the city's politics, what Ban Francisco proscribes can turn into a federal prescription. What it frets about can eventually spook the nation. New York pet store owners are alreadyworried that the match has been lit on their extinction. The center often fails to hold against a motivated extreme.

This is possibly why CTIA, the wireless association that represents such companies as Apple ( AAPL - news - people), AT&T ( T - news - people ), Motorola ( MOT - news -people ) and Verizon ( VZ - news - people ), is suing the city over its recent "right to know" ordinance mandating retailers publish cellphone specific absorption rates (SAR) at the point of sale.

It's precisely the kind of slow fuse that can lead to a global panic--and just at the point where the mobile Web is set to utterly transform the way we compute. As the trade group statement put it, "displaying a phone's SAR value at the point-of-sale suggests to the consumer that there is a meaningful safety distinction between FCC-compliant devices with different SAR levels." According to CNET, just one phone on the U.S. market, theMotorola V195s comes in at the Federal Communications Commission limit SAR of 1.6 watts/kg.

What this means is that to anyone who isn't an engineer or a physicist, an SAR level will be interpreted as a radiation emission rate, and--wow--radiation is like really dangerous, so the higher the SAR level, the more likely you'll get cancer.

Think I'm underestimating the potential of the public to panic? Then it's time to remind ourselves of Maureen Dowd's slow dance in the New York Times with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, the dashing Einstein behind the ordinance. Newsom tells her he was alarmed by seeing "all these kids literally glued to their phones." He was alarmed by his pregnant wife using her cellphone. He thought about the soft skull of his baby daughter and how it was so much more at risk from radiation. "So I dusted off some studies and started doing research."

Because we live in a democratizing age of information, where it is increasingly elitist to claim expertise and utterly toxic to self-esteem to suggest that Googling a topic might not make you as knowledgeable as a physicist, Newsom's "research" carried the Board of Supervisors 10 to 1.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/03/ban-cell-phone-mobile-opinions-columnists-trevor-butterworth.html?partner=alerts