Over at Discourse magazine I’ve posted my latest essay on how conservatives are increasingly flirting with the idea of greatly expanding regulatory control of private speech platforms via some sort of common carriage regulation or new Fairness Doctrine for the internet. It begins:
Conservatives have traditionally viewed the administrative state with suspicion and worried about their values and policy prescriptions getting a fair shake within regulatory bureaucracies. This makes their newfound embrace of common carriage regulation and media access theory (i.e., the notion that government should act to force access to private media platforms because they provide an essential public service) somewhat confusing. Recent opinions from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as well as various comments and proposals of Sen. Josh Hawley and former President Trump signal a remarkable openness to greater administrative control of private speech platforms.
Given the takedown actions some large tech companies have employed recently against some conservative leaders and viewpoints, the frustration of many on the right is understandable. But why would conservatives think they are going to get a better shake from state-regulated monopolists than they would from today’s constellation of players or, more importantly, from a future market with other players and platforms?
I continue on to explain why conservatives should be skeptical of the administrative state being their friend when it comes to the control of free speech. I end by reminding conservatives what President Ronald Reagan said in his 1987 veto of legislation to reestablish the Fairness Doctrine: “History has shown that the dangers of an overly timid or biased press cannot be averted through bureaucratic regulation, but only through the freedom and competition that the First Amendment sought to guarantee.”
Read more at
Discourse, and down below you will find several other recent essays I’ve written on the topic.
After a slight delay, Jurimetrics has finally published my latest law review article, “Soft Law in U.S. ICT Sectors: Four Case Studies.” It is part of a major symposium that Arizona State University (ASU) Law School put together on “Governing Emerging Technologies Through Soft Law: Lessons For Artificial Intelligence” for the journal. I was 1 of 4 scholars invited to pen foundational essays for this symposium. Jurimetrics is a official publication of the American Bar Association’s Section of Science & Technology Law.
This report was a major undertaking that involved dozens of interviews, extensive historic research, several events and presentations, and then numerous revisions before the final product was released. The final PDF version of the journal article is attached.
Here is the abstract: Continue reading →
This week, the Trump Administration proposed a new policy framework for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that attempts to balance the need for continued innovation with a set of principles to address concerns about new AI services and applications. This represents an important moment in the history of emerging technology governance as it creates a policy vision for AI that is generally consistent with earlier innovation governance frameworks established by previous administrations.
Generally speaking, the Trump governance vision for AI encourages regulatory humility and patience in the face of an uncertain technological future. However, the framework also endorses a combination of “hard” and “soft” law mechanisms to address policy concerns that have already been raised about developing or predicted AI innovations.
AI promises to revolutionize almost every sector of the economy and can potentially benefit our lives in numerous ways. But AI applications also raise a number of policy concerns, specifically regarding safety or fairness. On the safety front, for example, some are concerned about the AI systems that control drones, driverless cars, robots, and other autonomous systems. When it comes to fairness considerations, critics worry about “bias” in algorithmic systems that could deny people jobs, loans, or health care, among other things.
These concerns deserve serious consideration and some level of policy guidance or else the public may never come to trust AI systems, especially if the worst of those fears materialize as AI technologies spread. But
how policy is formulated and imposed matters profoundly. A heavy-handed, top-down regulatory regime could undermine AI’s potential to improve lives and strengthen the economy. Accordingly, a flexible governance framework is needed and the administration’s new guidelines for AI regulation do a reasonably good job striking that balance. Continue reading →
Today, the U.S. Department of Transportation released its eagerly-awaited “Federal Automated Vehicles Policy.” There’s a lot to like about the guidance document, beginning with the agency’s genuine embrace of the potential for highly automated vehicles (HAVs) to revolutionize this sector and save thousands of lives annually in the process.
It is important we get HAV policy right, the DOT notes, because, “35,092 people died on U.S. roadways in 2015 alone” and “94 percent of crashes can be tied to a human choice or error.” (p. 5) HAVs could help us reverse that trend and save thousands of lives and billions in economic costs annually. The agency also documents many other benefits associated with HAVs, such as increasing personal mobility, reducing traffic and pollution, and cutting infrastructure costs.
I will not attempt here to comment on every specific recommendation or guideline suggested in the new DOT guidance document. I could nit-pick about some of the specific recommended guidelines, but I think many of the guidelines are quite reasonable, whether they are related to safety, security, privacy, or state regulatory issues. Other issues need to be addressed and CEI’s Marc Scribner does a nice job documenting some of them is his response to the new guidelines.
Instead of discussing those specific issues today, I want to ask a more fundamental and far-reaching question which I have been writing about in recent papers and essays:
Is this guidance or regulation? And what does the use of informal guidance mechanisms like these signal for the future of technological governance more generally? Continue reading →
[UPDATE
4/30/13: This article was subsequently published in Volume 65, Issues 2 of the Federal Communications Law Journal in April 2013. The links below now point to the final FCLJ version.]
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has just released a new paper by Brent Skorup and me entitled, “Uncreative Destruction: The War on Vertical Integration in the Information Economy.” Brent, who is the research director for the Information Economy Project at the George Mason University School of Law, and I have been working on this paper since the Spring and we are looking forward to getting it published in a law review shortly. The paper focuses on Tim Wu’s “separations principle” for the digital economy, something I’ve spent some time critiquing here in the past. Here’s the introduction from the 44-page paper that Brent and I just released:
Are information sectors sufficiently different from other sectors of the economy such that more stringent antitrust standards should be applied to them preemptively? Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu responds in the affirmative in his book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. Having successfully pushed net-neutrality regulation into the policy spotlight, Wu has turned his attention to what he regards as excessive market concentration and threats to free speech throughout the entire information economy.To support his call for increased antitrust intervention, Wu explains his view of competition in the information economy—a view that deviates substantially from current mainstream antitrust theory.
Continue reading →
Ahoy, TLFers! You’ll notice that we’ve incorporated a new comment management system on the blog: Pronounced “discuss” (not “discus” as one might well assume–a potential branding problem indeed for an otherwise promising start-up), Disqus has exploded in the last few months (Google Trends) to over 30,000 blogs.
Disqus should help the TLF become even more of a true community–in which comments can be as valuable as blog pieces themselves and in which the line between “reader” and “author” is further blurred. Here‘s a list of cool things Disqus will let you, TLF’s valued readers to do:
- Track and manage comments and replies
- More control over your own comments on websites
- Never lose your comments, even if the website goes away
- Build a global profile, or comment blog, to collect and show off what you’re saying
- Easier to comment on websites using Disqus
- Reply to comments through email or mobile
- Edit and republish comments with one click
In particular, comments can now be directed as replies to other comments, creating clear discussion threads.
You might be wondering: “If Disqus is so darn awesome, why haven’t we incorporated it before?” The answer is that, until the new Disqus plug-in for WordPress came out a few days ago, comments were stored only on the Disqus site and merely replicated on partner blogs–making comments unsearchable, among other things. Now, we get the best of both worlds: Comments will beseemlessly duplicated and synchronized between our database and Disqus’s.
While it will still be possible to comment on the blog just as before (anonymously or merely without a Disqus account), we do encourage readers to take a minute (literally) to set up a free Disqus account. (For those of you who enjoy reading Terms of Use and Privacy policies or who just stay up late at night clutching their now-constitutionally-protected firearms and worrying about being tagged, tracked and someday unceremoniously culled from the herd, here are Disqus’s policies.) For the less privacy-obsessed, here‘s a general FAQ about Discus.
There are a number of bells and whistles you can enable–like tying your Disqus account to other social networking sites and adding a small image of yourself (or some other hopefully-family-friendly image). But
the one important thing everyone who has posted comments in the past should do is to “claim” your old comments by entering the email address associated with those comments on Disqus. Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
New TLF Comment Tool (Please Read!)
by Berin Szoka on August 14, 2008 · 21 comments
Ahoy, TLFers! You’ll notice that we’ve incorporated a new comment management system on the blog: Pronounced “discuss” (not “discus” as one might well assume–a potential branding problem indeed for an otherwise promising start-up), Disqus has exploded in the last few months (Google Trends) to over 30,000 blogs.
Disqus should help the TLF become even more of a true community–in which comments can be as valuable as blog pieces themselves and in which the line between “reader” and “author” is further blurred. Here‘s a list of cool things Disqus will let you, TLF’s valued readers to do:
In particular, comments can now be directed as replies to other comments, creating clear discussion threads.
You might be wondering: “If Disqus is so darn awesome, why haven’t we incorporated it before?” The answer is that, until the new Disqus plug-in for WordPress came out a few days ago, comments were stored only on the Disqus site and merely replicated on partner blogs–making comments unsearchable, among other things. Now, we get the best of both worlds: Comments will beseemlessly duplicated and synchronized between our database and Disqus’s.
While it will still be possible to comment on the blog just as before (anonymously or merely without a Disqus account), we do encourage readers to take a minute (literally) to set up a free Disqus account. (For those of you who enjoy reading Terms of Use and Privacy policies or who just stay up late at night clutching their now-constitutionally-protected firearms and worrying about being tagged, tracked and someday unceremoniously culled from the herd, here are Disqus’s policies.) For the less privacy-obsessed, here‘s a general FAQ about Discus.
There are a number of bells and whistles you can enable–like tying your Disqus account to other social networking sites and adding a small image of yourself (or some other hopefully-family-friendly image). But the one important thing everyone who has posted comments in the past should do is to “claim” your old comments by entering the email address associated with those comments on Disqus. Continue reading →