By Adam Thierer & Jennifer Huddleston Skees
“
He’s making a list and checking it twice. Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice
.”
With the Christmas season approaching, apparently it’s not just Santa who is making a list. The Trump Administration has just asked whether a long list of emerging technologies are naughty or nice — as in whether they should be heavily regulated or allowed to be developed and traded freely.
If they land on the naughty list, these technologies could be subjected to complex export control regulations, which would limit research and development efforts in many emerging tech fields and inadvertently undermine U.S. innovation and competitiveness. Worse yet, it isn’t even clear there would be any national security benefit associated with such restrictions.
From Light-Touch to a Long List
Generally speaking, the Trump Administration has adopted a “light-touch” approach to the regulation of emerging technology and relied on more flexible “soft law” approaches to high-tech policy matters. That’s what makes the move to impose restrictions on the trade and usage of these emerging technologies somewhat counter-intuitive. On November 19, the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security launched a “
Review of Controls for Certain Emerging Technologies
.” The notice seeks public comment on “criteria for identifying emerging technologies that are essential to U.S. national security, for example because they have potential conventional weapons, intelligence collection, weapons of mass destruction, or terrorist applications or could provide the United States with a qualitative military or intelligence advantage.” Continue reading →
[Note: I later adapted this essay into a short book, which you can download for free here.]
Let’s talk about “permissionless innovation.” We all believe in it, right? Or do we? What does it really mean? How far are we willing to take it? What are its consequences? What is its opposite? How should we balance them?
What got me thinking about these questions was a recent essay over at
The Umlaut by my Mercatus Center colleague Eli Dourado entitled, “‘Permissionless Innovation’ Offline as Well as On.” He opened by describing the notion of permissionless innovation as follows:
In Internet policy circles, one is frequently lectured about the wonders of “permissionless innovation,” that the Internet is a global platform on which college dropouts can try new, unorthodox methods without the need to secure authorization from anyone, and that this freedom to experiment has resulted in the flourishing of innovative online services that we have observed over the last decade.
Eli goes on to ask, “why it is that permissionless innovation should be restricted to the Internet. Can’t we have this kind of dynamism in the real world as well?”
That’s a great question, but let’s ponder an even more fundamental one: Does anyone really believe in the ideal of “permissionless innovation”? Is there anyone out there who makes a consistent case for permissionless innovation
across the technological landscape, or is it the case that a fair degree of selective morality is at work here? That is, people love the idea of “permissionless innovation” until they find reasons to hate it — namely, when it somehow conflicts with certain values they hold dear. Continue reading →
Hmmm… What am I missing? I cannot lay my finger on a single line in the Communications Act of 1934, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, or any statute in between that gives the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the authority to regulate cloud computing. And yet, like any good stickler for jurisdictional authority, my PFF colleague Barbara Esbin keeps bringing to my attention little FCC chirps here and there which suggest that the agency is slowly positioning itself to become the Federal Cloud Commission. For example, back in September, Barbara brought to my attention this passage in the Commission’s recent Wireless Innovation and Investment Notice of Inquiry, (paragraph 60, pg. 21):
As other approaches, such as cloud computing, evolve, will established standards or de facto standards become more important to the applications development process? For example, can a dominant cloud computing position raise the same competitive issues that are now being discussed in the context of network neutrality? Will it be necessary to modify the existing balance between regulatory and market forces to promote further innovation in the development and deployment of new applications and services?
In my earlier essay about this, I noted that these questions should serve as a wake-up call for Google and other cloud-based providers who think that “neutrality” mandates will end at the infrastructure layer of the Net. As Berin Szoka and I argued in our paper on “high-tech mutually assured destruction,” regulatory regimes grow but almost never contract. And I’m even less optimistic about the FCC limiting its regulatory aspirations after the latest thing Barbara Esbin brought to my attention.
Today, as part of the Commission’s ongoing effort to develop a National Broadband Plan, the FCC released a request for information “on data portability and its relationship to broadband.” (NBP Public Notice #21) “The Commission seeks tailored comment on broadband and portability of data and their relation to cloud computing, transparency, identity, and privacy,” the notice says. Here was the second item on the list of things the Commission said it was investigating: Continue reading →
In episode #44 of “Tech Policy Weekly,” Berin Szoka and Adam Thierer engage in a debate with Internet security expert Chris Soghoian, who is a student fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He is also a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University’s School of Informatics.
Chris is an up-and-coming star in the field of cyberlaw and technology policy as he has quickly made a name for himself in debates over privacy policy, data security, and government surveillance. He straddles the line between academic and activist, and the role he often plays in many tech policy debates is somewhat akin to what Ralph Nader has done in many other fields through the years. Except, in this case, instead of “Unsafe at Any Speed” it’s more like “Unsafe at Any Setting,” since Chris is often raising a stink about what he regards as unjust or unreasonable privacy or security settings that various online websites or service providers use.
On the show, Chris talks about two of his recent crusades to get certain online providers to change their default settings to improve user security or privacy: (1) His effort this week to get major email providers—and Google in particular—to change their default security settings on their email offerings; and (2) his earlier crusade to create permanent opt-out cookies to stop behavioral advertising by advertising networks.
There are several ways to listen to today’s TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. (And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!)
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.