James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, discusses the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Barrat takes a look at how to create friendly AI with human characteristics, which other countries are developing AI, and what we could expect with the arrival of the Singularity. He also touches on the evolution of AI and how companies like Google and IBM and government entities like DARPA and the NSA are developing artificial general intelligence devices right now.

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Related Links

• Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, Amazon
• About the Author, Barrat
• The Definitive Tech Books of 2013, Huffington Post

Is there a Bitcoin bubble? Jason Kuznicki thinks so and believes that he has conclusive proof. He blogs three graphs that show more or less that there is a lot of speculation in Bitcoin. But does speculation prove that there’s a bubble? Let’s use Bayes’s rule to think about this carefully.

Bayes’s rule is a mathematical tool for thinking about the incorporation of new evidence into subjective probabilities. Let’s suppose that there is some proposition A for which you have a prior belief. Somebody offers evidence B for or against A. How much should you change your belief in A based on evidence B?

Bayes’s rule boils the answer down to a simple mathematical form:

In English, the probability of A  given B equals the probability of B given A, times the probability of A and divided by the probability of B.

So to evaluate Jason’s argument and see how much we should change our estimate of a Bitcoin bubble based on the evidence that there’s speculation, we can simply assign the proposition and the evidence to A and B. In this case, A is the proposition that there’s a bubble, and B is the evidence that there’s speculation in Bitcoin. If we figure out our subjective probabilities for B|A and B, we can use those to determine how different P(A|B) should be from P(A).

So what is B|A? Since B is the evidence that there is speculation in Bitcoin and A is the proposition that there is a bubble, B|A simply states the proposition that  given that there is a bubble, there is speculation. It seems pretty much impossible to have a bubble without speculation, so I’ll go with a subjective probability of 1. Picking a different value here will only work against Jason’s argument.

So what is the probability of B, the fact that there is speculation in Bitcoin? The Bitcoin ecosystem isn’t built out yet. Most of the protocol’s most exciting uses haven’t even seen the light of day yet. As I blogged last week, multisignature transactions are barely in use yet, but they form the foundation for a decentralized architecture of arbitration. Ed Felten at Princeton is working on decentralized prediction markets. Jerry Brito points to microtransactions, or even nearly-continuous transactions, as another exciting future use scenario.

Given that we don’t know whether this ecosystem will ever materialize, holders of bitcoin are  necessarily speculating. If the ecosystem matures and is useful, bitcoins will be worth something. If none of these innovations come about, or if we decide they’re not that useful after all, then bitcoins will probably be worth nothing. There’s no way out of speculating, because we simply don’t know for sure if the ecosystem will come along. Almost the entire “fundamental value” of Bitcoin rests on future events.

So the probability of B, I think, is 1. When P(B|A) is 1, and P(B) is 1, what does Bayes’s rule reduce to?

B simply offers no information as to whether A is true.

A similar argument can be made when Bitcoin’s volatility is offered as evidence of a bubble. Bitcoin is a thinly-traded asset where supply does not adjust to accommodate demand. It is going to be volatile. So the fact that Bitcoin is volatile adds no new information to the question of whether it’s a bubble.

What  does provide information? I think the most reliable evidence is on the maturation (or not) of the Bitcoin ecosystem. If Bitcoin seemed static right now, I would interpret that as evidence of a bubble. But it doesn’t. Every day, people are working to build businesses that leverage some of the unique features of Bitcoin’s protocol. As long as that continues, I think it’s most reasonable to be highly agnostic about the correct price of Bitcoin.

Sherwin Siy, Vice President of Legal Affairs at Public Knowledge, discusses emerging issues in digital copyright policy. He addresses the Department of Commerce’s recent green paper on digital copyright, including the need to reform copyright laws in light of new technologies. This podcast also covers the DMCA, online streaming, piracy, cell phone unlocking, fair use recognition, digital ownership, and what we’ve learned about copyright policy from the SOPA debate.

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Related Links

• Sherwin Siy, Public Knowledge
• What the DMCA cell phone unlock ban means to you, Reardon
• Why The Library Of Congress Has A Lock On Your Phone, Henn

Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson published an astonishing essay today entitled, “Beware the Internet and the Danger of Cyberattacks.” In the print edition of today’s Post, the essay actually carries a different title: “Is the Internet Worth It?” Samuelson’s answer is clear: It isn’t. He begins his breathless attack on the Internet by proclaiming:

If I could, I would repeal the Internet. It is the technological marvel of the age, but it is not — as most people imagine — a symbol of progress. Just the opposite. We would be better off without it. I grant its astonishing capabilities: the instant access to vast amounts of information, the pleasures of YouTube and iTunes, the convenience of GPS and much more. But the Internet’s benefits are relatively modest compared with previous transformative technologies, and it brings with it a terrifying danger: cyberwar.

And then, after walking through a couple of worst-case hypothetical scenarios, he concludes the piece by saying:

the Internet’s social impact is shallow. Imagine life without it. Would the loss of e-mail, Facebook or Wikipedia inflict fundamental change? Now imagine life without some earlier breakthroughs: electricity, cars, antibiotics. Life would be radically different. The Internet’s virtues are overstated, its vices understated. It’s a mixed blessing — and the mix may be moving against us.

What I found most troubling about this is that Samuelson has serious intellectual chops and usually sweats the details in his analysis of other issues. He understands economic and social trade-offs and usually does a nice job weighing the facts on the ground instead of engaging in the sort of shallow navel-gazing and anecdotal reasoning that many other weekly newspaper columnist engage in on a regular basis.

But that’s not what he does here. His essay comes across as a poorly researched, angry-old-man-shouting-at-the-sky sort of rant. There’s no serious cost-benefit analysis at work here; just the banal assertion that a new technology has created new vulnerabilities.  Really, that’s the extent of the logic at work here. Samuelson could have just as well substituted the automobile, airplanes, or any other modern technology for the Internet and drawn the same conclusion: It opens the door to new vulnerabilities (especially national security vulnerabilities) and, therefore, we would be better off without it in our lives.

Samuelson does admit that “Life would be radically different… without some earlier breakthroughs: electricity, cars, antibiotics,” so it is obvious he thinks their benefits outweigh their costs. But I could just as well say that new technologies such as cars and planes bring death and destruction, both in the theater of war and in everyday life. So, one might conclude of modern transportation technology that the “virtues are overstated, its vices understated. It’s a mixed blessing — and the mix may be moving against us,” just as Samuelson concludes of the Net.  Of course, such an assertion would be absurd without reference to the many benefits that accrue to us from these technologies. I don’t think I need to cite them all here. But Samuelson is certainly a sharp enough guy that he would engage in such a cost-benefit analysis if someone made such an assertion about other technologies.

When it comes to the Internet, however, all he can say about benefits is that “the instant access to vast amounts of information, the pleasures of YouTube and iTunes, the convenience of GPS and much more.” (GPS? Really? Strictly speaking, that’s not an Internet technology, Bob. But perhaps you have something against satellite technology, too! Looking forward to your column, “Is Satellite Communication Worth It?”)

Of course the first benefit of the Internet that Samuelson cites — “instant access to vast amounts of information” — is nothing to sneeze at! The fact that he so casually dismisses that benefit is rather troubling. For the vast majority of civilization, humans have lived in a what we might think of as a state of extreme information poverty. Today, by contrast, we are blessed to live in amazing times. An entire planet of ubiquitous, instantly accessible media and information is now at our fingertips. We are able to share culture and engage with others — both socially and commercially — in ways that were unthinkable and impossible even just a few decades ago.

It’s hard to quantify the benefits associated with these facts, but I would think most of us would agree they are enormous. But it’s hardly the only sort of benefit that comes from the Internet and modern digital communications technologies. The fact that Samuelson can’t think of anything more is either a serious failure of imagination or, more troubling, an intentional effort to minimize and ignore those benefits in order to prey on people’s worst fears.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about “technopanics” and the role that journalists sometimes play in hyping them. See, for example, my essay last summer, “Journalists, Technopanics & the Risk Response Continuum,” which is based on my Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology law review article, “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle.” As I explain in that article, the model for what Samuelson has done in his essay is actually a very old logical fallacy: a so-called “appeal to fear.” Here’s how I explain it in my law review article:

Rhetoricians employ several closely related types of “appeals to fear.” Douglas Walton, author of Fundamentals of Critical Argumentation, outlines the argumentation scheme for “fear appeal arguments” as follows:

• Fearful Situational Premise: Here is a situation that is fearful to you.
• Conditional Premise: If you carry out A, then the negative consequences portrayed in the fearful situation will happen to you.
• Conclusion: You should not carry out A.

This logic pattern here is referred to as argumentum in terrorem or argumentum ad metum. A closely related variant of this argumentation scheme is known as argumentum ad baculum, or an argument based on a threat. Argumentum ad baculum literally means “argument to the stick,” an appeal to force. Walton outlines the argumentum ad baculum argumentation scheme as follows:

• Conditional Premise: If you do not bring about A, then consequence B will occur.
• Commitment Premise: I commit myself to seeing to it that B comes about.
• Conclusion: You should bring about A.

As will be shown, these argumentation devices are at work in many information technology policy debates today even though they are logical fallacies or based on outright myths. They tend to lead to unnecessary calls for anticipatory regulation of information or information technology.

I continue on in that article to provide several examples of how ” argumentum in cyber-terrorem ” logic is at work in several digital policy arenas today, especially as it pertains to cybersecurity and cyberwar fears. My Mercatus Center colleagues Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins have warned of the dangers of “threat inflation” in cybersecurity policy in their important paper, “Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy.” The rhetoric of cybersecurity debates illustrates how threat inflation is a crucial part of “argumentum in cyber-terrorem ” logic. Frequent allusions are made in cybersecurity debates to the potential for a “Digital Pearl Harbor,”  a “cyber cold war,”  a “cyber Katrina,”  or even a “cyber 9/11.”  These analogies are made even though these historical incidents resulted in death and destruction of a sort not comparable to attacks on digital networks. Others refer to “cyber bombs” even though no one can be “bombed” with binary code. A rush to judgment often follows inflated threats.

And that’s exactly what Samuelson has done in his essay. He’s rushed to an illogical, sweeping conclusion — namely, that we would be better off just bottling up the Net, or “repealing” it (whatever that means) — and he hasn’t even bothered considering the costs of such action. Worse yet, even though he admits that, “I don’t know the odds of this technological Armageddon. I doubt anyone does. The fears may be wildly exaggerated,” that doesn’t stop him from suggesting that we should live in fear of worst case hypothetical scenarios and take radical steps based upon them.

Again, it is certainly true that the Internet creates new vulnerabilities, including national security vulnerabilities, but that simply cannot be the end of the story. Those vulnerabilities need to be carefully evaluated and measured and, before we rush to panicked conclusions and advocate sweeping policy solutions, the corresponding benefits of the Internet must be taken into consideration.

Instead, Samuelson has engaged in the worst sort of fear-based, factually-challenged reasoning in his essay. It’s a model for how not to think or write about Internet policy. A more thoughtful analysis would acknowledge that the Internet is more than just “a symbol of progress;” it constitutes real progress and an improvement of the human condition.  And while it’s all too easy for newspaper columnists to suggest “we would be better off without it” and that it should be “repealed,” there are all too many government goons out there who would like to do just that since the Net has empowered the masses and given them a voice like no other technology in history.

Shame on Robert Samuelson for dismissing these realities — and the Internet’s many benefits — so lightly.

[ Note: See all my essays on “technopanics” here.]

David Garcia, post doctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and co-author of Social Resilience in Online Communities: The Autopsy of Friendster, discusses the concept of social resilience and how online communities, like Facebook and Friendster, withstand changes in their environment.

Garcia’s paper examines one of the first online social networking sites, Friendster, and analyzes its post-mortem data to learn why users abandoned it.

Garcia goes on to explain how opportunity cost and cost benefit analysis can affect a user’s decision whether or not to remain in an online community.

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Related Links

• Social Resilience in Online Communities: The Autopsy of Friendster, Garcia, Mavrodiev, Schweitzer
• An autopsy of a dead social network, The Physics arXiV Blog
• Researchers conduct ‘autopsy’ of dead social network Friendster, Solon

The number of major cyberlaw and information tech policy books being published annually continues to grow at an astonishing pace, so much so that I have lost the ability to read and review all of them. In past years, I put together end-of-year lists of important info-tech policy books (here are the lists for 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011) and I was fairly confident I had read just about everything of importance that was out there (at least that was available in the U.S.). But last year that became a real struggle for me and this year it became an impossibility. A decade ago, there was merely a trickle of Internet policy books coming out each year. Then the trickle turned into a steady stream. Now it has turned into a flood. Thus, I’ve had to become far more selective about what is on my reading list. (This is also because the volume of journal articles about info-tech policy matters has increased exponentially at the same time.)

So, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to discuss what I regard to be the five most important titles of 2012, briefly summarize a half dozen others that I’ve read, and then I’m just going to list the rest of the books out there. I’ve read most of them but I have placed an asterisk next to the ones I haven’t.  Please let me know what titles I have missed so that I can add them to the list. (Incidentally, here’s my compendium of all the major tech policy books from the 2000s and here’s the running list of all my book reviews.)

As I do each year, I need to repeat a few disclaimers.  First, what qualifies as an “important” info-tech policy book is highly subjective, but I would define it as a title that many people — especially scholars in the field — are currently discussing and that we will likely be referencing for many years to come.  But I “weight” books in the sense that narrowly-focused titles lose a few points. For example, books that deal mostly with privacy issues, copyright law, or antitrust policy are docked a few points relative to “big picture” info-tech policy books that offer a broader exploration of policy issues and which offer more wide-ranging recommendations.

Second, almost all of the books included have something profound to say about Internet policy (either directly or indirectly) and the more profound and clear the policy recommendations or implications, the higher the titles rank in terms of importance on my list.

Third, and most importantly: Just because a book appears on this list that does not necessarily mean I agree with everything in it.  In fact, as was the case in previous years, I found much with which to disagree in most of the books listed here. Simply put, the cyber-liberty I cherish is a real loser in both academic and public policy circles these days. It has very few defenders today. So, if this was simply a list of my personal favorite books, there would only be 2 or 3 titles on it. Instead, this is my effort to list important books in the field, regardless of whether I agree with the content and conclusions found in those titles.

OK, on to the list.

(1) Rebecca MacKinnon – Consent of the Network: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom

Rebecca MacKinnon’s book was the most important information technology policy book released in 2012 because it: (1) presented a splendid history of the ideas and forces shaping Internet policy debates globally; (2) offered policy insights that were extremely relevant to breaking developments in this field; and (3) set forth a call-to-arms to global Internet activists and gave them a new way of framing their issue advocacy.

MacKinnon is a former journalist and her outstanding reporting skills are on display throughout the text. Her coverage of China’s efforts to regulate the Net is outstanding. She also surveys some of the recent policy fights here and abroad over issues such as online privacy, Net neutrality regulation, free speech matters, and the copyright wars. The book demands attention for this historical work and analysis alone.

Even more importantly, however, MacKinnon makes a forceful argument for how to think about Internet freedom and democracy in new digital worlds. Her book is an attempt to take the Net freedom movement to the next level; to formalize it and to put in place a set of governance principles that will help us hold the “sovereigns of cyberspace” more accountable. Many of her proposals are quite sensible. But, as I noted in my much longer review of the book, I had a real problem with MacKinnon’s use of the term “digital sovereigns” or “sovereigns of cyberspace” and the loose definition of “sovereignty” that pervades her narrative. She too often blurs and equates private power and political power, and she sometimes leads us to believe that the problem of the dealing with the mythical nation-states of “Facebookistan” and “Googledom” is somehow on par with the problem of dealing with actual sovereign power — government power — over digital networks, online speech, and the world’s Netizenry.

Despite these nitpicks, MacKinnon has many other ideas about Net governance in the book that are less controversial and entirely sensible in my opinion. She wants to “expand the technical commons” by building and distributing more tools to help activists and make organizations more transparent and accountable. These would include circumvention and anonymization tools, software and programs that allow both greater data security and portability, and devices and network systems to expand the range of communication and participation, especially in more repressed countries. She would also like to see neitzens “devise more systematic and effective strategies for organizing, lobbying, and collective bargaining with the companies whose service we depend upon — to minimize the chances that terms of service, design choices, technical decisions, or market entry strategies could put people at risk or result in infringement of their rights.” This also makes sense as part of a broader push for improved corporate social responsibility.

Regarding the role of law, MacKinnon has a mixed view. She says: “There is a need for regulation and legislation based on solid data and research (as opposed to whatever gets handed to legislative staffers by lobbyists) as well as consultation with a genuinely broad cross-section of people and groups affected by the problem the legislation seeks to solve, along with those likely to be affected by the proposed solutions.” Of course, that’s a fairly ambiguous standard that could open the door to excessive political meddling with the Net if we’re not careful. Overall, though, she acknowledges how regulation so often lags far behind innovation. “A broader and more intractable problem with regulating technology companies is that legislation appears much too late in corporate innovation and business cycles,” she rightly notes.

MacKinnon’s book will be of great interest to Internet policy scholars and students, but it is also accessible to a broader audience interested in learning more about the debates and policies that will shape the future of the Internet and digital networks for many years to come. One other note: MacKinnon’s clearly-worded prose and cool-headed tone deserve praise and emulation. It serves as a model for how to write a thoughtful Internet policy book, even if you don’t agree with all her conclusions or recommendations.

My complete review of Consent of the Networked can be found here.

(2) Susan Crawford – Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age

Susan Crawford’s book was probably my least favorite title of 2012, but that doesn’t mean I can discount its significance within this field. Crawford has made herself a widely-recognized and highly-charged figure in the world of Internet policy through her work as an activist, an academic, and even a government official. In Captive Audience, she doesn’t even try to hide her self-described “radicalized” views on communications policy anymore and in the process she solidifies her role as the ringleader of the growing movement to impose centralized, top-down government control on America’s broadband infrastructure.

What is most astonishing about Captive Audience is the way Crawford so audaciously waxes nostalgic for the days of regulated monopoly. Simply put, Crawford doesn’t believe that capitalism or competition have any role to play in the provision of broadband networks and services. “No competitive pressure will force these companies to act [in the public interest],” she argues on the last page of the manifesto. “Americans,” she claims, “have allowed a naive belief in the power and beneficence of the free market to cloud their vision.” She suggests we should just give up our false hope that markets can deliver such an important service and get on with the task of converting broadband into a full-blown regulated public utility.

Her proposed solutions read like the typical Big Government grab-bag of policy proposals: more government spending, more government ownership, and more government regulation (forced access regulation and rate controls) for any private carriers that are allowed to remain in operation as de facto handmaidens of the state. Crawford’s perfect world scenario would seem to be some sort of amalgam of the U.S. Postal Service and the federal highway program. While both programs have sought to provide an important service to the masses, it goes without saying that both are also an absolute basket case in terms of service management and economic viability. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say that Crawford is right and that public ownership and comprehensive government management is the way to go. Where will all this money come from for all the new government activity Crawford desires? Apparently it grows on trees because she isn’t ever willing to admit that we find ourselves in the midst of major fiscal crisis that likely constrains the ability of governments to make these investments themselves. Luckily, private wireline and wireless broadband providers have been investing tens of billions in infrastructural upgrades in recent years (don’t take my word for it, read what the Progressive Policy Institute has to say), a fact that Crawford conveniently ignores.

More importantly, Crawford never fully confronts the fact that the era of regulated monopoly she cherishes was an unmitigated croynist disaster for consumers. That era had nothing to do with the “public interest” and everything to do with protecting the private interests of regulated entities — namely, Ma Bell on the communications side and broadcasters on the media side. She also doesn’t address the lackluster state of innovation during the 70 or so years during which time communications and media markets were under the tight grip of federal and state regulators, who controlled rates, restricted new entry, and discouraged innovation at virtually every juncture. If one is going to recommend a return to the regulatory past, they had better grapple with that uncomfortable, anti-consumer, anti-innovation history. Crawford utterly fails to in Captive Audience.

While the book is nominally about broadband regulation, the bulk of it is actually dedicated to taking on one company — Comcast — and specifically picking apart its recent merger with NBC Universal. For Crawford, the Comcast-NBC deal represented something akin to the Mayan apocalypse of media policy. She wants us to believe that the deal has forever solidified Comcast’s grasp on both programming and broadband markets. Comcast chief Brian Roberts is presented as the nefarious villain of the narrative; Crawford paints him as a cross between Gordon Gecko and Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons.” Usually such neurotic narratives are reserved for Rupert Murdoch and how he is supposedly plotting mass media domination to brainwash the minds of the masses. But Crawford suggests that Roberts is the new Bond villain du jour and chapter after chapter are devoted to demonizing him, his father, and other execs at Comcast. She argues that “Comcast now owns the Internet in America” and that the company is “squeezing independent online video” providers out of the market.

Despite all this hand-wringing, the situation in the video marketplace has never looked brighter. Crawford fails to put things in historical perspective and examine consumer choices in this market today relative to the past — a point I made in this debate with her last year. Of course, she probably didn’t want to seriously examine that evidence because by every metric available — and I published an entire report called Media Metrics a few years ago proving this — Americans have more and better viewing options at their disposal than ever before in history. We have more channels and more content available over more platforms (cable, satellite, telco, online, DVD, mail, etc) and more devices than ever before. Consumers have an unprecedented ability to access, record, time-shift, interact with, and even manipulate and redistribute video content. Of course, all this choice and quality comes at a cost, as Crawford continuously complains throughout the text. Apparently, in her view, all these great new programming options and technologies should just fall to us like manna from heaven with no price tag attached.

If you want to see what the opposite of Internet freedom and digital capitalism looks like, look no further than this book. It is the definitive articulation of the cyber-planner’s ethos. Of course, that’s also what makes Captive Audience one of the most important books of 2012. But if you really must read such one-sided propaganda — since this book will, no doubt, be assigned in many cyberlaw and media studies classes across America — then I encourage you to also read Christopher Yoo’s Dynamic Internet and Randy May’s edited collection of essays on Communications Law and Policy in the Digital Age, both of which are mentioned below. Both of those books offer a refreshingly level-headed examination of the true state of this marketplace. I’d also recommend you check out these recent essays by Bret Swanson and Richard Bennett for a hard look at the shoddy numbers and assumptions underlying many of the broadband policy critiques you hear out there today from Crawford and others.

(3) John Palfrey & Urs Gasser – Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems

What makes Palfrey & Gasser’s book so important is that the authors aim to develop “a normative theory identifying what we want out of all this interconnectivity” that the information age has brought us. They correctly note “there is no single, agreed-upon definition of interoperability” and that “there are even many views about what interop is and how it should be achieved.” Generally speaking, they argue increased interoperability — especially among information networks and systems — is a good thing because it “provides consumers greater choice and autonomy,” “is generally good for competition and innovation,” and “can lead to systemic efficiencies.”

But they wisely acknowledge that there are trade-offs, too, noting that “this growing level of interconnectedness comes at an increasingly high price.” Whether we are talking about privacy, security, consumer choice, the state of competition, or anything else, Palfrey and Gasser argue that “the problems of too much interconnectivity present enormous challenges both for organizations and for society at large.” Their chapter and privacy and security offers many examples, but one need only look around at their own digital existence to realize the truth of this paradox. The more interconnected our information systems become, and the more intertwined our social and economic lives become with those systems, the greater the possibility of spam, viruses, data breaches, and various types of privacy or reputational problems. Interoperability giveth and it taketh away.

Ultimately, however, the authors fail to develop a clear standard for when interoperability is good and when governments should take steps to facilitate or mandate it. They argue that “there is no single form or optimal amount of interoperability that will suit every circumstance” and that “most of the specifics of how to bring interop about [must] be determined on a case-by-case basis. Yet, Palfrey and Gasser also make it clear they want government(s) to play an active role in ensuring optimal interoperability. They say they favor “blended approaches that draw upon the comparative advantages of the private and public sector,” but they argue that government should feel free to tip or nudge interoperability determinations in superior directions to satisfy “the public interest.” “If deployed with skill,” they argue, “the law can play a central role in ensuring that we get as close as possible to optimal levels of interoperability in complex systems.”

The fundamental problem this “public interest” approach to interoperability regulation is that it is no better than the “I-know-it-when-I-see-it” standard we sometimes at work in the realm of speech regulation. It’s an empty vessel, and if it is the lodestar by which policymakers make determinations about the optimal level of interoperability, then it leaves markets, innovators, and consumers subject to the arbitrary whims of what a handful of politicians or regulators think constitutes “optimal interoperability,” “appropriate standards,” and “best available technology.”

In my absurdly long review of their book, I offered an alternative framework that suggests patience, humility, and openness to ongoing marketplace experimentation as the primary public policy virtues that lawmakers should instead embrace. Ongoing marketplace experimentation with technical standards, modes of information production and dissemination, and interoperable information systems, is almost always preferable to the artificial foreclosure of this dynamic process through state action. The former allows for better learning and coping mechanisms to develop while also incentivizing the spontaneous, natural evolution of the market and market responses. The latter (regulatory foreclosure of experimentation) limits that potential.

Defining “optimal interoperability,” is not just difficult as Palfrey and Gasser suggest, but I would argue that it is a pipe dream. Sometimes consumers demanded a certain amount interoperability and they usually get it. But it seems equally obvious that consumers don’t always demand perfect interoperability. Just look at your iPhone or Xbox for proof. Quite often, a lack of interoperability helps firms finance important new products and services while simultaneously ensuring users a tailored and potentially more secure and satisfying experience. Importantly, however, non-interoperability also spurs new forms of innovation from rivals looking to leap-frog the old front-runners. Progress flows from this never-ending cycle of technological change and industrial churn.

In sum, we cannot define or determine “optimal interoperability” in an a priori fashion; only ongoing experimentation can help us determine what truly lies in “the public interest.” Despite my different approach and conclusions, Palfrey and Gasser’s book perfectly frames what should be a very interesting ongoing debate over these issues and for that reason will be required reading on this subject for years to come.

Again, my longer review of Palfrey and Gasser’s book can be found here, and listen to John Palfrey’s podcast discussion with Jerry Brito here.]

(4) Christopher Yoo – The Dynamic Internet: How Technology, Users, and Businesses are Transforming the Network

Christopher Yoo’s book was my personal favorite of the year, but it won’t capture as much interest and recognition as some of the other titles on this list. The book offers a concise overview of how Internet architecture has evolved and a principled discussion of the public policies that should govern the Net going forward. Yoo makes two straight-forward arguments. First, the Internet is changing. In Part 1 of the book, Yoo offers a layman-friendly overview of the changing dynamics of Internet architecture and engineering. He documents the evolving nature of Internet standards, traffic management and congestion policies, spam and security control efforts, and peering and pricing policies. He also discusses the rise of peer-to-peer applications, the growth of mobile broadband, the emergence of the app store economy, and what the explosion of online video consumption means for ongoing bandwidth management efforts. Those are the supply-side issues. Yoo also outlines the implications of changes in the demand-side of the equation, such as changing user demographics and rapidly evolving demands from consumers. He notes that these new demand-side realities of Internet usage are resulting in changes to network management and engineering, further reinforcing changes already underway on the supply-side.

Yoo’s second point in the book flows logically from the first: as the Internet continues to evolve in such a highly dynamic fashion, public policy must as well. Yoo is particularly worried about calls to lock in standards, protocols, and policies from what he regards as a bygone era of Internet engineering, architecture, and policy. “The dramatic shift in Internet usage suggests that its founding architectural principles form the mid-1990s may no longer be appropriate today,” he argues. “[T]he optimal network architecture is unlikely to be static. Instead, it is likely to be dynamic over time, changing with the shifts in end-user demands,” he says. Thus, “the static, one-size-fits-all approach that dominates the current debate misses the mark.”

Yoo makes a particular powerful case for flexible network pricing policies. His outstanding chapter on “The Growing Complexity of Internet Pricing” offers an excellent overview of the changing dynamics of pricing in this arena and explains why experimentation with different pricing methods and business models must be allowed to continue. Getting pricing right is essential, Yoo notes, if we hope to ensure ongoing investment in new networks and services. He also notes how foolish it is to expect the government to come in and save the day thought massive infrastructure investment to cover the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to continue to build-out high-speed services.

Throughout the second half of his book, Yoo explains why it would be a disaster for consumers and high-tech innovation if policymakers limited pricing flexibility and experimentation with new business models and technological standards. He argues that public policy should generally seek to avoid ex ante forms of preemptive, prophylactic Internet regulation and instead rely on an ex post approach when and if things go wrong. Essentially, he wants policymakers to embrace “techno-agnosticism” toward ongoing debates over standards, protocols, business models, pricing methods, and so on. Lawmakers should not be preemptively tilting the balance in one direction or the other or, worse yet, restricting experimentation that can help us find superior solutions.

And even under that model of retrospective review, Yoo makes it clear throughout the book that there should be a very high bar established before any regulation is pursued. This is particularly true because of the First Amendment values at stake when the government attempts to regulate speech platforms. In Chapter 9 of the book, Yoo walks the reader through all the relevant case law on this front and makes it clear how “the Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that the editorial discretion exercised by intermediaries serves important free speech values.” Yoo also makes the case that a certain degree of intermediation helps serve consumer needs by helping them more easily find the content and services they desire. Law should not seek to constrain that and, under current Supreme Court First Amendment jurisprudence, it probably cannot.

To me, Yoo’s approach strikes the right balance for Net governance and public policy in the information age. It all comes down to flexibility and freedom. If the Internet and all modern digital technologies are to thrive, we must reject the central planner’s mindset that dominated the analog era and forever bury all the static thinking it entailed.

My complete review of Yoo’s Dynamic Internet is here.

(5) Brett Frischmann – Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources

Frischmann’s book offers a nice contrast with Yoo’s in that it suggests a far more ambitious role for the state in shaping the future of digital networks and online platforms. Although not strictly a book about information technology infrastructure, Frischmann spends a great deal of time making the case for a greater government action in the realm of communications policy and for open access and Net neutrality regulation in particular. (There’s also a chapter on intellectual property issues that tech policy wonks will find of interest). The book is a veritable paean to open access regulation; Frischmann aims to persuade the reader that “society is better off sharing infrastructure openly” and devotes considerable energy to hammering that point home in one context after another.

In my review of the book, which was part of 2-day symposium on the book over at the Concurring Opinions blog, I took Frischmann’s book to task for its almost complete absence of public choice insights and his general disregard for thorny “supply-side” questions.  Frischmann is so single-mindedly focused on making the “demand-side” case for better appreciating how open infrastructures “generate spillovers that benefit society as a whole” and facilitate various “downstream productive activities,” that he short-changes the supply-side considerations regarding how infrastructure gets funded and managed to begin with.

The book also ignored the omnipresent threat of regulatory capture and the fact that any major infrastructure regulatory system big enough and important to be captured by special interests and affected parties often will be. Frischmann acknowledges the problem of capture in just a single footnote in the book and admits that “there are many ways in which government failures can be substantial,” but he asks the reader to quickly dispense with any worries about government failure since he believes “the claims rest on ideological and perhaps cultural beliefs rather than proven theory or empirical fact.”  I found that assertion outrageous and argued that, to the contrary, decades of scholarship has empirically documented the reality of government failure and its costs to society, as well as the plain old-fashioned inefficiency often associated with large-scale government programs. For infrastructure projects in particular, the combination of these public choice factors usually adds up to massive inefficiencies and cost overruns.

For those reasons, I argued in my review that society would be better off adopting a “3-P” approach to infrastructure management: privatize, property-tize, and price. But Frischmann is dead set against such thinking and makes it clear that everything must be subservient to the goal of “openness” and commons-based management. Unsurprisingly, therefore, this leads him to suggest that we need “a dramatic shift — perhaps a paradigm shift — away from the conventional position favoring market provisioning and markets ‘free’ from government intervention.” But the problem with that reasoning, as I pointed out in my review, is that most of the infrastructure that Frischmann cites as failing us today is already managed in the fashion he favors! Nonetheless, he wants to pile on still more commons-based government control / ownership solutions even though they are the primary cause of our infrastructure problems today. In this sense, Frischmann’s approach parallels Susan Crawford’s in her book Captive Audience, discussed above. They both seek to gloss over the ugly realities of traditional public infrastructure (mis-)management and they imply that we just need to build a better breed of bureaucrats who will somehow be immune to all the problems of the past. Needless to say, I don’t place much faith in such efforts.

Despite these serious deficiencies, students and scholars studying infrastructure theory will benefit from Frischmann’s excellent treatment of public goods and social goods; spillovers and externalities; proprietary versus commons systems management; common carriage policies and open access regulation; congestion pricing strategies; and the debate over price discrimination for infrastructural resources. He at least does a nice job outlining these concepts and controversies, even if he ultimately fails to make the case for radically expanding government control of infrastructural resources.

Again, you can read my entire review of Frischmann’s book here.

— Other Major Releases in 2012 —

Julie E. Cohen – Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice

Cohen’s book represents an effort to move “beyond the bounds of traditional liberal political theory” by transcending what she labels the traditional “information-as-freedom” versus “information-as-control” paradigms. Her aim is to promote “cultural environmentalism” and “the structural conditions of human flourishing.” She argues that “a commitment to human flourishing demands a more critical stance toward the market-driven evolution of network architectures.” In other words, don’t trust markets.

I didn’t find her case very convincing and it didn’t help that the book is filled with impenetrable prose that sometimes leaves the reader’s head a bit numb. (Two representative samples: “With respect to space, surveillance employs a twofold dynamic of containerization and affective modulation in order to pursue large-scale behavioral modification.” … and… “Here the performative impulse introduces static into the circuits of the surveillant assemblage; it seeks to reclaim bodies and reappropriate spaces.” Say what? Write in plain English, professor!)

The closing chapter also includes a strange reinterpretation of Ludditism. Cohen argues: “the tale of the Luddites poses an important challenge for scholars and policy makers in the emerging networked information society. If technologies do not have natural trajectories, it is our obligation to seek pathways of development that promote the well-being of situated, embodied users and communities. When our preferred policy prescriptions persistently produce information architectures and institutions that undermine human flourishing in critical ways, it is time to question them and to experiment with ways of doing better.”  Hmmm… I’m not sure I want to know what that would mean in practice!

Regardless, Cohen’s book has a lot to say about modern privacy and copyright battles and will be of great interest to scholars in those specific fields of study.  You can find all the chapters online here.

Cole Stryker – Hacking the Future: Privacy, Identity, and Anonymity on the Web

Stryker’s Hacking the Future provides a concise overview of the battles over online anonymity that have raged since the Net’s early days and he outlines the many new threats to it. “What we are seeing is an all-out war on anonymity, and thus free speech, waged by a variety of armies with widely diverse motivations, often for compelling reasons,” he says. The book will be a great use to those covering ongoing policy debates over cybersecurity, the “nymwars” and online authentication / identification debates, post-Arab Spring political activism & “hactivism,” encryption issues, social networking privacy, troll culture and cyberbullying, and much more. Stryker makes a strong case for the continuing importance of online anonymity but isn’t scared to ask hard questions about the trade-offs society faces when some can mask their online identities. But he also explores the question of whether anonymity can survive given recent technological and policy-related developments, both of which aim to make individuals more identifiable online. I particularly enjoyed Chapter 10’s breakdown of the “Faces of Anonymity,” in which Stryker crafts a detailed taxonomy of anonymous character types online.

He also offers a run-down of the tools and steps that people can take advantage of if they want to ensure their anonymity / privacy online, including: cookie blocking, private browsing tools, disabling HTML in email and limiting or disabling broswer extensions, clearing browser histories, and using encryption tools, proxy servers, and VPN tunneling. “The question we have to ask ourselves,” Stryker notes, is “Does the accessibility of these anonymizing technologies make the world a safer, more equitable place, better place?” He answers: “It’s difficult to measure, but their abolition certainly wouldn’t.” He also draws this interesting parallel with efforts to regulate firearms: “The logic here is not unlike that used by those who oppose gun control: if guns are made illegal, then only criminals will have guns, leaving well-meaning folks defenseless. The reasoning is compelling within the identity space,” he argues, “regardless of what you might think about the merits of gun control.”

Two other notes: First, Wide Open Privacy: Strategies For The Digital Life by J.R. Smith & Siobhan MacDermott makes a nice compliment to Hacking the Future. It also offers a breakdown of privacy-enhancing technologies and outlines other strategies to safeguard your online anonymity. Second, if you are interested in digging even deeper in the Luzsec side of this story, you should check out Parmy Olson’s W e are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker Wor ld of Lulzsec, Anonymous and the Global Cyber Insurgency. It’s a splendid history but doesn’t have as much to say about the various policy issues that Stryker tackles in Hacking the Future. Or just listen to Olson’s podcast discussion with Jerry Brito. Speaking of that Brito character…

Jerry Brito (ed.) – Copyright Unbalanced: From Incentive to Excess

My Mercatus Center colleague Jerry Brito put together this important collection of essays by various conservatives and libertarian authors to highlight growing concerns about copyright policy. Contributors include Tom W. Bell, David G. Post, Reihan Salam, Patrick Ruffini, Tim Lee, Christina Mulligan, and Eli Dourado (also of Mercatus). Their essays suggest that the tide may be turning against copyright among free market analysts. Their chapters explore the increasingly complexity of copyright law and the rising costs associated with its enforcement and make a powerful case for reform of, or at least restraints on, the current copyright system. The consensus seemed to revolve around a few key reforms: significantly shortened copyright terms, the reintroduction of formalities (i.e., registration), and limits on criminal prosecution and civil asset forfeiture. The authors also make a strong case that public choice problems pervade today’s copyright system and that we should be concerned that cronyism is increasing creeping into the politics of copyright law and its seemingly endless expansion.

If you interested in a different take on IP issues to balance out Brito’s collection, I’d recommend picking up the forthcoming Laws of Creation: Property Rights in the World of Ideas by Ronald A. Cass and Keith N. Hylton. It’s a 2013 release but it is already in stock. I’m reading an advance copy from the publisher right now and will likely have more to say about it in a forthcoming post.

Randolph J. May (ed.) – Communications Law and Policy in the Digital Age: The Next Five Years

My former colleague Randy May put together this nice collection of essays by some of America’s leading communications and media policy scholars, including Bruce Owen, Christopher Yoo, James Speta, Daniel Lyons and others. The authors offer a generally skeptical take on the expansion of communications and broadband regulation and the growing power of the Federal Communications Commission over these markets. In particular, many of the contributors take the FCC to task for sketchy assertions of jurisdiction and the agency’s efforts to expand its imperial regulatory ambitions without always having the clear statutory authority to do so. The chapters by James Speta and Seth Cooper are particularly good in that regard. Admin law geeks will eat them up.

Those analysts following the ongoing Net neutrality wars will also find the book informative, even if they disagree with the generally skeptical take on the issue from contributors. Spectrum and universal service policy wonks will also appreciate the excellent chapters on those two issues from Michele P. Connolly and Daniel A. Lyons, respectively. And the closing chapter by Bruce Owen is, like everything Bruce does, a masterpiece. Owen is probably the most respected media economist on the planet and his decades of experience in this field shines through in his powerful essay on “Communications Policy Reform, Interest Groups, and Legislative Capture.” He crafts a political economy of the regulatory state and points out that the explosion of rent-seeking and legislative/regulatory capture in this sector is unlikely to dissipate. “Therefore,” Owen argues, “communications policy likely will continue to be subject to welfare-suppressing regulation because such regulation is consistent with the interests of legislators,” who are often beholden to special interests and their campaign dollars.

Joshua Gans – Information Wants to Be Shared

I really enjoyed this book. It’s an insightful exploration of modern media economics filled with interesting questions and scenarios about how information markets will evolve in the future. What will sustain movies, music, book, local reporting, and so on in the future? Gans does a terrific job making these issues easy to understand and doesn’t try to evangelize as much as the many others who have written on these issues. If you’ve read and enjoyed Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian’s classic text, Information Rules, then you will find Gans’ book to be the perfect compliment.

Gans doesn’t have a lot to say about public policy, however. This is really more of a business book suited for industry analysts and business school students. Nonetheless, some of its implications for policy are clear since many of these business model debates boil over into the policy arena.

P.S. I should mention that, even if you don’t pick up his new book, you should be following Gans’ “Digitopoly” blog. It is always worth reading.

Andrew Keen – Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us

If you’re into ‘the-whole-world-is-going-to-Hell-and-the-Internet-is-to-blame’ screeds, Andrew Keen will never disappoint. In Digital Vertigo as well as his earlier book, The Cult of the Amateur, Keen is grumpy about, well, just about everything under the sun. In the earlier book, it was the Web 2.0 world of blogging and “amateur” content creation — most notably Wikipedia and YouTube — that earned Keen’s wrath. In the new book, it is users themselves and the social sharing sites and technologies that they favor that Keen goes off on.

Specifically, Keen is worried that our increased reliance on new online and interactive technologies is spawning a “hypervisible age of great exhibitionism” that sacrifices privacy and individuality at the altar of sharing and social status-seeking. He also makes sweeping claims that we are now living in “a world in which many of us have forgotten what it means to be human,” or that “we are forgetting who we really are.” As I noted in my Forbes review of the book, it’s classic technopanic talk. Not only does Keen fail to substantiate such claims, but he also doesn’t bother to even offer the reader any sort of practical plan for how to achieve a more balanced digital life.

Bruce Schneier – Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive

Security expert Bruce Schneier’s latest book was a terrific read and easily one of my favorites of the year. It wasn’t a book about technology policy per se, but it certainly has important ramifications for it. Schneier explains four “societal pressures” combine to help create and preserve trust within society. Those pressures include: (1) Moral pressures; (2) Reputational pressures; (3) Institutional pressures; and (4) Security systems. By “dialing in” these societal pressures in varying degrees, trust is generated over time within groups. Of course, these societal pressures also fail on occasion, Schneier notes. He explores a host of scenarios — in organizations, corporations, and governments — when trust breaks down because defectors seek to evade the norms and rules the society lives by. These defectors are the “liars and outliers” in Schneier’s narrative and his book is an attempt to explain the complex array of incentives and trade-offs that are at work and which lead some humans to “game” systems or evade the norms and rules others follow.

Indeed, Schneier’s book serves as an excellent primer on game theory as he walks readers through complex scenarios such as prisoner’s dilemma, the hawk-dove game, the free-rider problem, the bad apple effect, principle-agent problems, the game of chicken, race to the bottom, capture theory, and more. These problems are all quite familiar to economists, psychologists, and political scientists, who have spent their lives attempting to work through these scenarios. Schneier has provided a great service here by making game theory more accessible to the masses and given it practical application to a host of real-world issues.

The most essential lesson Schneier teaches us is that perfect security is an illusion, and this is where the implications for tech policy come in. We can rely on those four societal pressures in varying mixes to mitigate problems like theft, terrorism, fraud, online harassment, and so on, but it would be foolish and dangerous to believe we can eradicate such problems completely. “There can be too much security,” Schneier explains, because, at some point, constantly expanding security systems and policies will result in rapidly diminishing returns. Trying to eradicate every social pathology would bankrupt us and, worse yet, “too much security system pressure lands you in a police state,” he correctly notes.

Despite these challenges, Schneier reminds us that there is cause for optimism. Humans adapt better to social change than they sometimes realize, usually by tweaking the four societal pressures Schneier identifies until a new balance emerges. While liars and outliers will always exist, society will march on.

See my longer review of Schneier’s excellent book over at Forbes. I highly recommend you pick up Liars & Outliers no matter what your field of study. It is outstanding.

… and still more titles from 2012 (* asterisk means I didn’t find time to finish them)…

• E. Gabriella Coleman – Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking *
• Sean A. Pager & Adam Candeub (eds.) – Transnational Culture in the Internet Age *
• John Naughton – From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know about the Internet
• Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee – Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy [listen to McAfee’s podcast discussion with Jerry Brito]
• Chris Reed – Making Laws for Cyberspace *
• J.R. Smith & Siobhan MacDermott – Wide Open Privacy: Strategies For The Digital Life
• Virginia Eubanks – Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age *
• Lori Andrews – I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy
• Hassan Masum and Mark Tovey (eds.) – The Reputation Society: How Online Opinions Are Reshaping the Offline World *
• Reed Hundt & Blair Levin – The Politics of Abundance: How Technology Can Fix the Budget, Revive the American Dream, and Establish Obama’s Legacy *
• Kal Raustiala & Christopher Sprigman – The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation sparks Innovation* [listen to Sprigman’s podcast discussion with Jerry Brito]
• Jason Mazzone, Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law * [listen to Mazzone’s podcast discussion with Jerry Brito]
• Clay A. Johnson – The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption
• Julian Assange – Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet
• Andy Greenberg – This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information

… and, again, here are the lists of important books from 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011.

In their paper, “Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy,” my Mercatus Center colleagues Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins warned of the dangers of “threat inflation” in cybersecurity policy debates. In early 2011, Mercatus also published a paper by Sean Lawson, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, entitled “Beyond Cyber Doom” that documented how fear-based tactics and cyber-doom scenarios and rhetoric increasingly were on display in cybersecurity policy debates.  Finally, in my recent Mercatus Center working paper, “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” I extended their threat inflation analysis and developed a comprehensive framework offering additional examples of, and explanations for, threat inflation in technology policy debates.

These papers make it clear that a sort of hysteria has developed around cyberwar and cybersecurity issues. Frequent allusions are made in cybersecurity debates to the potential for a “Digital Pearl Harbor,” a “cyber cold war,” a “cyber Katrina,” or even a “cyber 9/11.” These analogies are made even though these historical incidents resulted in death and destruction of a sort not comparable to attacks on digital networks. Others refer to “cyber bombs” even though no one can be “bombed” with binary code. And new examples of such inflationary rhetoric seem to emerge each day. For example, today’s NPR’s Morning Edition program featured a segment by Tom Gjelten entitled, “Cybersecurity Bill: Vital Need Or Just More Rules?” that included the comments of Michael McConnell, a former director of National Intelligence, Here’s what McConnell said about cyberwar at the 6:30 mark of the show:

“this threat is so intrusive, it’s so serious, it could literally suck the life’s blood out of this country, and if we don’t address it, it’s going to be a severe impact and so I think we have no choice but to address it and some of that process will be regulatory.”

Wow, who knew the blood could literally be drained from our bodies by cyberattacks! Have the Chinese or Iranians developed a cyber-superweapon that can reach through our screens and suck the life right out of us? (Like a cross between Videodrome and Halloween III: Season of the Witch!)

I’m being silly, of course. And some might dismiss such rhetorical flourishes or even defend them in the name of “doing whatever it takes” to raise awareness about an important concern. But these fear-based tactics are dangerous. As Brito and Watkins note, “when a threat is inflated, the marketplace of ideas on which a democracy relies to make sound judgments—in particular, the media and popular debate—can become overwhelmed by fallacious information.” In my paper, I argue that technopanics and threat inflation can have many troubling ramifications. They can:

1. Foster animosities and suspicions among the citizenry;
2. Create distrust of many institutions, especially the press;
3. Often divert attention from actual, far more serious risks; and,
4. Lead to calls for information control.

But we shouldn’t expect such rhetorically tactics to subside any time soon. After all, bombastic predictions of an impending cyber-apocalypse are nothing new, especially because they are such an effective way to grab attention, headlines, and funding.

Back in January 1996, the conservative Weekly Standard magazine ran a truly over-the-top cover story by Charles J. Dunlap entitled “How We Lost the High-Tech War of 2007.” (The actual cover appears above and the whole outlandish article is worth reading for its comedic value if noting else.) It included a dramatic Tom Clancy-esque cover illustration of the U.S. Capitol building smoldering in flames after an apparent cyber-attack of some sort.  Of course, there was no High-Tech War of 2007. But talk is cheap and there are few downsides to using such alarmist tactics. Pessimistic critics who use threat inflation to advance their causes are rarely held accountable when their panicky predictions fail to come to pass. As journalist Matt Ridley correctly observes, “Pessimism has always been big box office.”  Bad news sells, and there are always plenty of buyers.

It’s a shame rational debate is increasing impossible in this and other Internet policy arenas.

In my ongoing work on technopanics, I’ve frequently noted how special interests create phantom fears and use “threat inflation” in an attempt to win attention and public contracts. In my next book, I have an entire chapter devoted to explaining how “fear sells” and I note how often companies and organizations incite fear to advance their own ends. Cybersecurity and child safety debates are littered with examples.

In their recent paper, “Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy,” my Mercatus Center colleagues Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins argued that “a cyber-industrial complex is emerging, much like the military-industrial complex of the Cold War.” As Stefan Savage, a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, told The Economist magazine, the cybersecurity industry sometimes plays “fast and loose” with the numbers because it has an interest in “telling people that the sky is falling.” In a similar vein, many child safety advocacy organizations use technopanics to pressure policymakers to fund initiatives they create. [Sometimes I can get a bit snarky about this.]

That Economist story cites new research by scholars who are dispassionately evaluating the actual evidence and finding that data about cybercrime is often exaggerated and skewed in various ways, often by proponents of greater government regulation — as well as greater government funding for their companies or organizations. Again, we’ve seen this at work for many years in the child safety arena, too. In my book, I discuss the online “predator panic” that many child safety groups blew completely out of proportion in past years.

So, next time you hear such folks advocating increased government regs and funding, ask them what they personally have to gain from it.  Chances are, quite a lot.

Additional reading:

• Prophecies of Doom & the Politics of Fear in Cybersecurity Debates (8/8/11)

Those of you interested in transparency and “Government 2.0” issues will absolutely want to pick up Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice, a terrific collection of 34 essays edited by Daniel Lathrop and Laurel Ruma. Much like Access Controlled, the collection of essays on global Internet filtering and censorship that I praised here last month, Open Government is a resource like no other in its field. It offers an amazing diversity of viewpoints covering virtual every aspect of the debate over transparency and open government.

The collection was published by O’Reilly Media and Tim O’Reilly himself has one of the best chapters in the book on “Government as a Platform.” “The magic of open data is that the same openness that enables transparency also enables innovation, as developers build applications that reuse government data in unexpected ways.” (p. 25)  This explains why in their chapter on “Enabling Innovation for Civic Engagement,” David G. Robinson, Harlan Yu, and Edward W. Felten, of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, speak of “a new baseline assumption about the public response to government data: when government puts data online, someone, somewhere will do something valuable and innovative with it.” (p.84) “By publishing its data in a form that is free, open, and reusable,” they continue, “government will empower citizens to dream up and implement their own innovative ideas of how to best connect with their governments.” (p. 89)

Indeed, just think about some of the many exciting sites and projects (both public and private) that have been developed thanks to government data becoming more accessible in recent years. Here’s a short list of some of the best:

Regulation

• Regulations.gov (public)
• OpenRegs.com (private)

General Spending

• USASpending.gov (public)
• FedSpending.org (private)

Stimulus Spending

• Recovery.gov (public)
• StimulusWatch.org (private)

Legislation / Govt. Activity

• THOMAS (public)
• GovTrack.us (private)
• WashingtonWatch.com (private)
• RealTimeCongress.org (private)

Campaign Spending

• OpenSecrets.org (private)
• MapLight.org (private)
• TransparencyData.com (private)

Court Records

• PACER (public)
• RECAP (private to open-source PACER)

Corporate Financial Information

• EDGAR (now public; was private)

City Affairs

• EveryBlock.com (private)

And there are many additional examples featured throughout the essays in Open Government. As Beth Simone Noveck, the U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer for open government in the Obama Administration notes, “Countless civic groups already use new communication and information-sharing tools to promote political action, operate an opposition movement, or mobilize community activism.” (p. 53)

The book also features interesting essays by my TLF blogging colleagues Jerry Brito and Jim Harper. Jerry’s is creatively-entitled, “All Your Data Are Belong to Us: Liberating Government Data” and Jim’s (along with Jeff Jonas) is on “Open Government: The Privacy Imperative.” Both are worthy of your attention (and I’m not just saying that because they paid me to).

I certainly didn’t agree with everything I read in the book. In particular, the chapter on “Open Government and Open Society” by Archon Fung and David Weil troubled me greatly. Fung and Weil make two dangerous arguments that deserve refutation. First, they fear that “the progressive impulse for transparency… may well produce conservative or even reactionary effects of deligitimizing government activity quite broadly as public discourse feeds more and more stories of government waste, corruption, and failure.” (p. 107)  Sorry, but for those of us who question Leviathan and consider “waste, corruption, and failure” to be standard operating procedure for government, it’s hard to have much sympathy for this concern.

Regardless, they argue that “the solution to this problem is not to reduce government transparency, but rather to create a fuller accounting of it.”  They think that will help enlighten the masses and convince them of the many unappreciated benefits of Big Government.  More realistically, in my opinion, it will just lead to even more skepticism about the wisdom of expansive State power — and that’s just fine with me, of course.  But I wonder what Fung and Weil would recommend if increased transparency goes hand in hand with increased distrust in government? Would their passion for (so-called) “progressive” government trump further transparency it it undermined their desire for expansive State power and action?

Even more disturbing — but hardly surprising once they reveal their true colors — is the argument Fung and Weil make in favor of imposing the identical transparency requirements on private organizations that are imposed on government. They argue that:

a very substantial part of the energies of transparency advocates should be redirected toward making corporations and other organizations in society meet the same standards increasingly demanded of open government. This shift requires the transparency movement to reorient itself in several substantial ways. Government assumes a different role in the political imagination. Rather than a looming specter of threat that society must tame through transparency, government becomes an ally of society whose strength is required to make businesses transparent. In many cases, private and civic organizations will not disclose information voluntarily, and the force of law and policy — and the kind of authority that can only come from government — will make them do so. (p 109)

Not once in the essay — not once — do Fung and Weil stop to reflect upon the core difference between state power and corporate power: the scope of coercive powers and the possibility of escape. That is, the State has the power to tax, fine, punish, imprison, wage war, etc.  Corporations have none of these things.  And if you hate or fear a certain company, you almost always have another choice to turn to. Not so with the State.  Escape from its tentacles is not so easy.  They even have the audacity to claim that, “In American society, the threats to citizens individually and to society generally come as much — perhaps much more — from powerful private sector actors as from government.” Really? That’s certainly news to me.  Were companies locking up people in Gitmo, storming compounds in Waco, TX, or raiding people’s homes in outrageous drug busts?  Uh, no.

This is not to say that companies don’t make profound mistakes or that more transparency isn’t a beneficial thing even at the corporate level, but Fung and Weil are engaged in a dangerous game of moral equivalency here that we should not let them get away with.  Moreover, they completely ignore the many good reasons why companies shouldn’t be perfectly transparent. Business plans and methods, for example, need to be kept somewhat secret for obvious reasons.

Finally, when they make the argument that, “This shift requires the transparency movement to reorient itself in several substantial ways” and asking us to welcome government “as an ally,” they are essentially politicizing the transparency movement and fracturing what, at least so far, has been a very non-partisan affair. If they succeed in leading the movement down their preferred path, it will destroy that alliance. I certainly realize that the majority of people in the transparency and “Govt 2.0” movement do not share my radical pacifism when it comes to the dangers of State power, but I would hope they would want to keep at least some of my type in the movement and maintain a non-partisan approach to the issue. I think transparency and open government advocates should check their ideologies at the door, so to speak, when they approach these issues.

Regardless, don’t let my disdain for that particular chapter discourage you from picking up Open Government. (In fact, I think it’s great that the editors included one such extreme chapter in there to give a flavor for what some people at the fringe of the transparency movement are likely thinking.) Overall, this is a terrific set of essays and it deserves a place on your bookshelf if you care about transparency and Government 2.0 issues.

P.S. #1: This is probably a “no-duh” recommendation for those of you who already actively follow “Gov 2.0” developments, but for those who are not already aware of Alex Howard and his prodigious and impressive output on this front, start reading him now.  Alex is the Government 2.0 Correspondent for 
O’Reilly Media, and he’s a machine. I’m not sure how he manages to crank out so much material on these issues but he is an indispensable resource and not to be missed.

P.S. #2:  As always, you find all my book reviews here. Next up: Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus.

I’ve just finished reading Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion, by Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis, and it’s another title worth adding to your tech policy reading list. The authors survey a broad swath of tech policy territory — privacy, search, encryption, free speech, copyright, spectrum policy — and provide the reader with a wonderful history and technology primer on each topic.

I like the approach and tone they use throughout the book. It is certainly something more than “Internet Policy for Dummies.” It’s more like “Internet Policy for the Educated Layman”: a nice mix of background, policy, and advice. I think Ray Lodato’s Slashdot review gets it generally right in noting that, “Each chapter will alternatively interest you and leave you appalled (and perhaps a little frightened). You will be given the insight to protect yourself a little better, and it provides background for intelligent discussions about the legalities that impact our use of technology.”

Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis aren’t really seeking to be polemical in this book by advancing a single thesis or worldview. To the extent the book’s chapters are guided by any central theme, it comes in the form of the “two basic morals about technology” they outline in Chapter 1:

The first is that information technology is inherently neither good nor bad — it can be used for good or ill, to free us or to shackle us. Second, new technology brings social change, and change comes with both risks and opportunities. All of us, and all of our public agencies and private institutions, have a say in whether technology will be used for good or ill and whether we will fall prey to its risks or prosper from the opportunities it creates. (p. 14)

Mostly, what they aim to show is that digital technology is reshaping society and, whether we like or it not, we better get used to it — and quick!  “The digital explosion is changing the world as much as printing once did — and some of the changes are catching us unaware, blowing to bits our assumptions about the way the world works… The explosion, and the social disruption that it will create, have barely begun.” (p 3)

In that sense, most chapters discuss how technology and technological change can be both a blessing and a curse, but the authors are generally more optimistic than pessimistic about the impact of the Net and digital technology on our society. What follows is a quick summary of some of the major issues covered in Blown to Bits.

Privacy: In the chapter on privacy, the authors conclude that it is increasingly difficult to bottle up our personal information and protect it and ourselves entirely from the outside world. “Despite the very best efforts, and the most sophisticated technologies, we can not control the spread of our private information. And we often want information to be made public to serve our own, or society’s purposes.” (p. 70) They argue that there still may be some ways to deal with the misuse of information and that some new technologies might be able to help protect our privacy at the margins. Generally speaking, however, this is a losing battle, and, more importantly, there is an increasing tension between privacy and freedom of speech:

A continuing border war is likely to be waged, however, along an existing free speech front: the line separating my right to tell the truth about you from your right not to have that information used against you. In the realm of privacy, the digital explosion has left matters deeply unsettled. (p. 70)

These are issues I discussed in more detail in my recent review of Daniel Solove’s important new book, Understanding Privacy. Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis are right to point out that these tensions are only going to increase in coming years and their chapter outlines many of the new fault lines in the debate over online privacy.

Encryption: Having followed the “crypto wars” closely in the mid-1990s, I also found their chapter on cryptography intriguing. The authors note that encryption has gone mainstream. “Keys are cheap. Secret messages are everywhere on the Internet. We are all cryptographers now.” Despite that, the authors note that “very little email is encrypted today.” With the exception of some human rights groups and some particularly privacy-sensitive users, most of us are perfectly content to send our e-mails unencrypted. They argue that there are three reasons most people are unconcerned about their e-mail privacy:

First, there is still little awareness of how easily our e-mail can be captured as the packets flow through the Internet. […] Second, there is little concern because most ordinary citizens feel they have little to hide, so why would anyone bother looking? […] Finally, encrypted email is not built into the Internet infrastructure in the way encrypted web browsing is. (p. 191-92)

They continue and conclude:

Overall, the public seems unconcerned about privacy of communication today, and that privacy fervor that permeated the crypto wars a decade ago is nowhere to be seen. In a very real sense, the dystopian predictions of both sides of that debate are being realized: On the one hand, encryption technology is readily available around the world, and people can hide the contents of their messages, just as law-enforcement feared… At the same time, the spread of the Internet has been accompanied by an increase in surveillance, just as the opponents of encryption regulation feared. (p. 193)

Actually, I’m not sure there really was a “privacy fervor that permeated the crypto wars a decade ago.” Many of us who argued passionately for crypto-freedom back then knew it was unlikely that the masses were going to rush right out and start encrypting all their mail the minute the policy battle ended. In reality, most of us live pretty mundane lives and just don’t care enough to go through the hassle of encrypting the random chatter of e-mail. But it was the principle of the matter that counted — the government should never be given the keys to unlock all private communications. That is what we were fighting about in the crypto wars — not the necessity of everyone encyrpting every e-mail they sent.

Importantly, however, the authors correctly note how the truly beneficial result of the fight for crypto-freedom was an explosion of online commerce, facilitated by behind-the-scenes crypto protecting our transactions. Amazon, eBay, and many other e-commerce vendors, both big and small, have prospered because of strong crypto. That was the security blanket many of us needed before we were willing to take the plunge and begin doing most of our shopping and financial transactions online. This is a great public policy success story, and Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis do a wonderful job relaying it to the reader.

Online Free Speech / Age Verification: As a passionate First Amendment advocate, the chapter on free speech issues was also of great interest to me. The authors run through the early history of efforts to censor online speech, including the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) and the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 (COPA), and bring us right up to speed with congressional efforts such as the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), which would ban social networking sites and services in publicly funded schools and libraries. “DOPA, which has not passed into law, is the latest battle in a long war between conflicting values,” note the authors. “On the one hand, society has an interest in keeping unwanted information away from children. On the other hand, society as a whole has an interest in maximizing open communication.” (p. 231)

Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis go on to outline the dangers of online censorship and the importance of defending the First Amendment from new legislative and regulatory attacks, but they would have done well to cite the growing diversity of parental control tools and methods that are now on the market. I share their passion for defending free speech values, but it is equally important we work hard to show parents and policymakers how many effective self-help tools and strategies are out there on the market today to help them guide — or even control — their child’s media and Internet experiences. Not everyone is equally excited about what a world of media abundance offers us, or out children. If we hope to continue to fend off attacks on the First Amendment, we have to make sure parents are empowered to mentor their kids and limit access to content they find objectionable so they don’t expect Uncle Sam to play the role of national nanny.

I was glad to see the authors spend some time focusing on online age verification / identity authentication since that is probably the most important free speech debate raging today. [I’ve written quite a bit here about the battle over online age verification for social networking sites and other online sites.] The authors point out Congress already attempted to impose age verification on the Internet when they passed the Child Online Protection Act in 1998. “The big problem,” the authors note, “was that these methods either didn’t work or didn’t even exist.” (p. 248) Indeed, the effort in COPA to require “adult personal identification numbers” or a “digital certificate that verifies age” was in their words, “basically a plea from Congress for the industry to come up with some technical magic for determining age at a distance.” (p. 248)  And things really haven’t advanced much since then, they argue:

In the state-of-the-art, however, computers can’t reliably tell the if party on the other end of the communications link is a human or is another computer. For a computer to tell whether a human is over or under the age of 17, even imperfectly, would be very hard indeed. Mischievous 15-year-olds could get around any simple screening system that could be used in the home. The Internet just isn’t like a magazine store. (p. 249)

I hope policymakers are listening — especially the many stubborn state attorneys general who continue to push age verification as a silver-bullet solution to online child safety concerns.

Spectrum Policy: The authors point out how the death of media scarcity has profound implications for the future of speech regulation and spectrum policy alike. “As a society,” they argue, “we simply have to confront the reality that our mindset about radio and television is wrong. It has been shaped by decades of the scarcity argument.” (p. 292)  Regarding what it means for speech controls, they note:

If almost anyone can now send information that many people can receive, perhaps the government’s interest in restricting transmissions should be less than what it once was, not greater. In the absence of scarcity, perhaps the government should have no more authority over what gets said on radio and TV than it does over what gets printed in newspapers. (p. 261)

I couldn’t agree more, and I’ve written voluminously on the topic of creating a “consistent First Amendment standard for the Information Age.” Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis seem to agree with what I said there when they argue:

Other regulation of broadcast words and images should end. Its legal foundation survives no longer in the newly engineered world of information. There are too many ways for the information to reach us. We need to take responsibility for what we see, and what our children are allowed to see. And they must be educated to live in a world of information plenty. (p. 293)

The death of the scarcity doctrine should also have a profound impact on the future spectrum policy decisions, they say. Perhaps scarcity-based rationales for regulation made (some) sense in the past, but:

These were facts of the technology of the time. They were true, but they were contingent truths of engineering. They were never universal laws of physics, and are no longer limitations of technology. Because of engineering innovations over the past 20 years, there is no practically significant “natural limitation” on the number of broadcast stations. Arguments from inevitable scarcity can no longer justify U.S. government denials of the use of the airwaves. The vast regulatory infrastructure, built to rationalize use of the spectrum but much more limited radio technology, has adjusted slowly — as it almost inevitably must: Bureaucracies don’t move as quickly as technological innovators. The FCC tries to anticipate resource needs centrally and far in advance. But technology can cause abrupt changes in supply, and market forces can cause abrupt changes in demand. Central planning works no better for the FCC than it did for the Soviet Union. (p. 272)

I completely agree, although challenging questions remain about how to get us out of the current mess. Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis argue that “commons-based” approaches make the most sense. I am certainly open to the idea of treating certain swaths of spectrum as a commons, but it’s important to recognize that this does not necessarily get the regulators completely out of the picture. In fact, as my TLF colleague Jerry Brito has persuasively argued, there is the real potential that the FCC could become an aggressive device regulator if we switch to this approach. “A ‘commons’ model is not a third way between regulation and property, it is just another kind of regulation,” Brito concludes. That’s why I continue to believe that a property rights-based approach for most spectrum allocation makes the most sense and will get the spectrum deployed for its most highly-valued use. Commons-based approaches should supplement, not supplant, that model.

Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis also fail to sweat the details about how to handle the issue of incumbent spectrum users in the transition to their preferred commons-based model. That strikes me as a pretty big problem. They repeatedly mention how incumbents often seek to block beneficial spectrum reforms — which is no doubt true on some occasions — but that doesn’t mean incumbent spectrum holders don’t have legitimate rights in their existing allocations that should be honored. I would hope that, even if they wanted to go with a pure commons approach going forward, the authors would at least be willing to grandfather-in existing spectrum users. If the goal is to encourage them to vacate what they currently have, incentivize them with flexible use and resale rights. For example, for the right price, a lot of broadcast spectrum holders might be willing to give up their current allotment. Alternatively, if flexible use was allowed, they might deploy their spectrum for a different purpose. Unfortunately, both of these options are currently prohibited by the FCC’s command-and-control regulatory system.

Overall, however, I enjoyed the spectrum chapter and found the history and technology primer in this chapter to be the best in the book.

Copyright: The authors have a strongly-worded chapter on copyright that generally argues for relaxing copyright protections. Interestingly, however, (unless I am missing something) I notice they don’t offer their book for free download on their site.  I’m always intrigued by copyright critics who refuse to put their own content online. Apparently, it’s another case of ‘copying is good for me, but not for thee.’ Regardless, in their copyright chapter, they argue that:

The war over copyright and the Internet has been escalating for more than 15 years. It is a spiral of more and more technology that makes it ever easier for more and more people to share more and more information. This explosion is countered by a legislative response that brings more and more acts within the scope of copyright enforcement, subject to punishments that grow ever more severe. Regulation tries to keep pace by banning technology, sometimes even before the technology exists… If we cannot slow the arms race, tomorrow’s casualties may come to include the open Internet and dynamic of innovation that fuels the information revolution. (p. 199)

The authors make a fair point about the perils of banning technologies to protect copyright. That’s never the right answer. Regrettably, however, they pay less attention to what I regard as the legitimate concerns of copyright holders about how to protect their creative works and expressive endeavors going forward. And it’s not just about protecting large-scale industries, as they and other copyright critics are often prone to claim. It’s about whether or not we want a workable copyright system going forward. Of course, some critics wouldn’t mind seeing copyright law fade into the sunset altogether. But Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis don’t really make it clear how far they’d be willing to go. They do have a brief discussion about collective licensing approaches as a possible solution, which may be coming sooner than we think for the Net. Unfortunately, they don’t spend much time developing the details. I remain skeptical about the sensibility of that approach — especially since it will likely end up being compulsory in nature and fraught with fairness problems (i.e. Who pays in? How much? On the other end, who gets paid how much when their content appears online? etc.) Nonetheless, I think that’s where we’ll end up before the copyright wars are over, so it would have been nice to see the authors spend more time on collective licensing issues.

They also spend a lot of time discussing DRM. I was surprised by their comment that, “Developers of DRM and trusted platforms may be creating effective technologies to control the use of information, but no one has yet devised effective methods to circumscribe the limits of that control.” (p. 212) I must say, that does not seem to match up with the reality of the market we see around us today in which DRM systems are rapidly crumbling and being abandoned left and right.

Conclusion

I didn’t agree with everything in Blown to Bits, such as their unfortunate call for Net neutrality regulation. Overall, however, I enjoyed the book and recommend it. The narrative can be a little disjointed at times, almost sounding like a series of e-mail exchanges between friends (which may have been the case since the book had three authors). But the text is very accessible and contains a great deal of useful information to bring you up to speed on the hottest tech policy debates under the sun. If the authors are smart, they’ll throw the book online and update it periodically to keep it fresh. As I have found with my parental controls and Media Metrics reports, that’s the only way to keep up with the frantic pace of change in the tech policy arena — version your books like software and release periodic updates.

This book will definitely appear on my big, end-of-year “Most Important Tech Policy Books of 2008” list, which I should have wrapped up shortly. Also, I think this book makes a nice complement to Palfrey and Gasser’s Born Digital, which I reviewed here last month. And, if you are interested in another title that takes an approach similar to what Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis have taken here, you might want to check out Bruce Owen’s outstanding 1999 book “The Internet Challenge to Television.” It’s an oldy but a goodie, as I noted here.

Finally, given the title of the book and the countless times in the text that Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis talk about the “bits revolution,” how “bits are bits,” and how “bits behave strangely,” shockingly, they never seem to get around to crediting Nicholas Negroponte for his pioneering work on this front in Being Digital. Long before anybody else gave a damn about how the movement from a world of atoms to a world bits would change our entire existence, Nicholas Negroponte was preaching that gospel to the unconverted. And considering he was saying all that back in the dark (dial-up) ages of 1995, the man deserves some credit, as I have noted here before.