Industrial Policy is a red-hot topic once again with many policymakers and pundits of different ideological leanings lining up to support ambitious new state planning for various sectors — especially 5G, artificial intelligence, and semiconductors. A remarkably bipartisan array of people and organizations are advocating for government to flex its muscle and begin directing more spending and decision-making in various technological areas. They all suggest some sort of big plan is needed, and it is not uncommon for these industrial policy advocates to suggest that hundreds of billions will need to be spent in pursuit of those plans.
Others disagree, however, and I’ll be using this post to catalog some of their concerns on an ongoing basis. Some of the criticisms listed here are portions of longer essays, many of which highlight other types of steps that governments can take to spur innovative activities. Industrial policy is an amorphous term with many definitions of a broad spectrum of possible proposals. Almost everyone believes in
some form of industrial policy if you define the term broadly enough. But, as I argued in a September 2020 essay “On Defining ‘Industrial Policy‘,” I believe it is important to narrow the focus of the term such that we can continue to use the term in a rational way. Toward that end, I believe a proper understanding of industrial policy refers to targeted and directed efforts to plan for specific future industrial outputs and outcomes.
The collection of essays below is merely an attempt to highlight some of the general concerns about the most ambitious calls for expansive industrial policy, many of which harken back to debates I was covering in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I first started a career in policy analysis. During that time, Japan and South Korea were the primary countries of concern cited by industrial policy advocates. Today, it is China’s growing economic standing that is fueling calls for ambitious state-led targeted investments in “strategic” sectors and technologies. To a lesser extent, grandiose European industrial policy proposals are also prompting new US counter-proposals.
All this activity is what has given rise to many of the critiques listed below. If you have suggestions for other essays I might add to this list, please feel free to pass them along. FYI: There’s no particular order here.
I vented my frustration earlier today with the FCC’s failure to make comments it receives easily accessible to the public—which means, more than anything, making them full-text searchable. This may seem like Inside Baseball to many, but it’s not. It’s a failure of the democratic process, a waste of taxpayer dollars, and a testimony to the general incompetence of bureaucracies, regardless of who’s running them. It denies the public an easy way to follow what goes on inside Washington, while essentially subsidizing law firms who get to bill clients for having paralegals or junior associates do things that existing web technology makes completely unnecessary—like reading through every comment in a document (at the rate of hundreds of dollars per hour) instead of just looking for keywords in a full-text search.
Later in the day the FCC announced:
RSS feeds for all news from the agency (1 general feed + 48 issue-specific feeds);
“FCC Connect” a page for Social Media Sites—so you can follow the FCC on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook; and
A “crowdsourcing platform” to discuss the administration’s plan to transfer nearly $8 billion from taxpayers to broadband providers.
FCC Connect is also good news: once you have an RSS feed, there’s really no reason
not to pipe that feed into as many platforms as possible—which is precisely why RSS isn’t dead, even if most people will never use an RSS reader.
But I’m less thrilled about the crowdsourcing platform. Continue reading →
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) lost another major First Amendment-related case today involving its recent efforts to expand the parameters of “indecency” enforcement for broadcast programming. The case involves the now infamous “wardrobe malfunction” that occurred during an unscripted 2004 Super Bowl halftime performance involving singers Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson. When Ms. Jackson’s breast was exposed on camera for nine-sixteenths of one second, the FCC immediately launched an investigation into the incident and fines were eventually levied on the grounds that the fleeting exposure of Ms. Jackson’s breast was a violation of broadcast decency standards. CBS challenged the FCC’s decision, leading to a legal showdown in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
In today’s decision,
CBS Corp. v. FCC, the three-judge panel of the 3rd Circuit ruled that the Federal Communications Commission “acted arbitrarily and capriciously” when it imposed a $550,000 fine on CBS for the incident. The court’s 102-page decision, which can be found here, was decided squarely on procedural grounds. That is, it didn’t touch the more substantive speech-related issues or precedents such as the Pacifica or Red Lion decisions that constitute the foundations of all modern FCC broadcast regulation.
The case is important because it now joins the June 2007 decision handed down by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Fox Television Stations v. FCC. That was the indecency case involving the FCC’s new policy for “fleeting expletives.” In that 2-1 decision, the Second Circuit ruled that “the FCC’s new policy sanctioning ‘fleeting expletives’ is arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act for failing to articulate a reasoned basis for its change in policy.” As a result, the FCC’s order was vacated and remanded to the agency. [And the FCC is now challenging the decision in the Supreme Court.]
This is very similar to what the 3rd Circuit said today in the
CBS case.
Continue reading →
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
More on the FCC’s e-Government Transparency Efforts: ECFS, RSS, Social Media & Setting Priorities
by Berin Szoka on September 11, 2009 · 12 comments
I vented my frustration earlier today with the FCC’s failure to make comments it receives easily accessible to the public—which means, more than anything, making them full-text searchable. This may seem like Inside Baseball to many, but it’s not. It’s a failure of the democratic process, a waste of taxpayer dollars, and a testimony to the general incompetence of bureaucracies, regardless of who’s running them. It denies the public an easy way to follow what goes on inside Washington, while essentially subsidizing law firms who get to bill clients for having paralegals or junior associates do things that existing web technology makes completely unnecessary—like reading through every comment in a document (at the rate of hundreds of dollars per hour) instead of just looking for keywords in a full-text search.
Later in the day the FCC announced:
I’m thrilled about the RSS feeds, which go a long way in letting all Americans know what the FCC does, supposedly in the “public interest.” Still, I can’t help but note that the FCC waited until after a huge discussion about whether RSS is dead to finally start using RSS in a serious way—fully a decade after the birth of the RSS standard. Better late than never, I suppose.
FCC Connect is also good news: once you have an RSS feed, there’s really no reason not to pipe that feed into as many platforms as possible—which is precisely why RSS isn’t dead, even if most people will never use an RSS reader.
But I’m less thrilled about the crowdsourcing platform. Continue reading →