Interoperability is a topic that has long been of interest to me. How networks, platforms, and devices work with each other–or sometimes fail to–is an important engineering, business, and policy issue. Back in 2012, I spilled out over 5,000 words on the topic when reviewing John Palfrey and Urs Gasser’s excellent book, Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems.
I’ve always struggled with the interoperability issues, however, and often avoided them became of the sheer complexity of it all. Some interesting recent essays by sci-fi author and digital activist Cory Doctorow remind me that I need to get back on top of the issue. His latest essay is a call-to-arms in favor of what he calls “adversarial interoperability.” “[T]hat’s when you create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them,” he says. “Think of third-party printer ink, alternative app stores, or independent repair shops that use compatible parts from rival manufacturers to fix your car or your phone or your tractor.”
Doctorow is a vociferous defender of expanded digital access rights of many flavors and his latest essays on interoperability expand upon his previous advocacy for open access and a general freedom to tinker. He does much of this work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which shares his commitment to expanded digital access and interoperability rights in various contexts.
I’m in league with Doctorow and EFF on some of these things, but also find myself thinking they go much too far in other ways. At root, their work and advocacy raise a profound question: should there be any general right to exclude on digital platforms? Although he doesn’t always come right out and say it, Doctorow’s work often seems like an outright rejection of any sort of property rights in networks or platforms. Generally speaking, he does not want the law to recognize any right for tech platforms to exclude using digital fences of any sort. Continue reading →
The big news out of Europe today is that the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has invalidated the 15-year old EU-US safe harbor agreement, which facilitated data transfers between the EU and US. American tech companies have relied on the safe harbor to do business in the European Union, which has more onerous data handling regulations than the US. [PDF summary of decision here.] Below I offer some quick thoughts about the decision and some of its potential unintended consequences.
#1) Another blow to new entry / competition in the EU: While some pundits are claiming this is a huge blow to big US tech firms, in reality, the irony of the ruling is that it will bolster the market power of the biggest US tech firms, because they are the only ones that will be able to afford the formidable compliance costs associated with the resulting regulatory regime. In fact, with each EU privacy decision, Google, Facebook, and other big US tech firms just get more dominant. Small firms just can’t comply with the EU’s expanding regulatory thicket. “It will involve lots of contracts between lots of parties and it’s going to be a bit of a nightmare administratively,” said Nicola Fulford, head of data protection at the UK law firm Kemp Little when commenting on the ruling to the BBC. “It’s not that we’re going to be negotiating them individually, as the legal terms are mostly fixed, but it does mean a lot more paperwork and they have legal implications.” And by driving up regulatory compliance costs and causing constant delays in how online business is conducted, the ruling will (again, on top of all the others) greatly limits entry and innovation by new, smaller players in the digital world. In essence, EU data regulations have already wiped out much of the digital competition in Europe and now this ruling finishes off any global new entrants who might have hoped of breaking in and offering competitive alternatives. These are the sorts of stories never told in antitrust circles: costly government rulings often solidify and extend the market dominance of existing companies. Dynamic effects matter. That is certainly going to be the case here. Continue reading →
If there are two general principles that unify my recent work on technology policy and innovation issues, they would be as follows. To the maximum extent possible:
- We should avoid preemptive and precautionary-based regulatory regimes for new innovation. Instead, our policy default should be innovation allowed (or “permissionless innovation”) and innovators should be considered “innocent until proven guilty” (unless, that is, a thorough benefit-cost analysis has been conducted that documents the clear need for immediate preemptive restraints).
- We should avoid rigid, “top-down” technology-specific or sector-specific regulatory regimes and/or regulatory agencies and instead opt for a broader array of more flexible, “bottom-up” solutions (education, empowerment, social norms, self-regulation, public pressure, etc.) as well as reliance on existing legal systems and standards (torts, product liability, contracts, property rights, etc.).
I was very interested, therefore, to come across two new essays that make opposing arguments and proposals. The first is this recent
Slate oped by John Frank Weaver, “We Need to Pass Legislation on Artificial Intelligence Early and Often.” The second is Ryan Calo’s new Brookings Institution white paper, “The Case for a Federal Robotics Commission.”
Weaver argues that new robot technology “is going to develop fast, almost certainly faster than we can legislate it. That’s why we need to get ahead of it now.” In order to preemptively address concerns about new technologies such as driverless cars or commercial drones, “we need to legislate early and often,” Weaver says. Stated differently, Weaver is proposing “precautionary principle”-based regulation of these technologies. The precautionary principle generally refers to the belief that new innovations should be curtailed or disallowed until their developers can prove that they will not cause any harms to individuals, groups, specific entities, cultural norms, or various existing laws, norms, or traditions.
Calo argues that we need “the establishment of a new federal agency to deal with the novel experiences and harms robotics enables” since there exists “distinct but related challenges that would benefit from being examined and treated together.” These issues, he says, “require special expertise to understand and may require investment and coordination to thrive.
I’ll address both Weaver and Calo’s proposals in turn. Continue reading →
I’ve spent a great deal of time here defending “techno-optimism” or “Internet optimism” against various attacks through the years, so I was interested to see Cory Doctorow, a novelist and Net activist, take on the issue in a new essay at Locus Online. I summarized my own views on this issue in two recent book chapters. Both chapters appear in The Next Digital Decade and are labeled “The Case for Internet Optimism.” Part 1 is sub-titled “Saving the Net From Its Detractors” and Part 2 is called “Saving the Net From Its Supporters.” More on my own thoughts in a moment. But let’s begin with Doctorow’s conception of the term.
Doctorow defines “techno-optimism” as follows:
In order to be an activist, you have to be… pessimistic enough to believe that things will get worse if left unchecked, optimistic enough to believe that if you take action, the worst can be prevented. […]
Techno-optimism is an ideology that embodies the pessimism and the optimism above: the concern that technology could be used to make the world worse, the hope that it can be steered to make the world better.
What this definition suggests is that Doctorow has a very clear vision of what constitutes “good” vs. “bad” technology or technological developments. He turns to that dichotomy next as he seeks to essentially marry “techno-optimism” to a devotion to the free/open software movement and a rejection of “proprietary technology”: Continue reading →
Cory Doctorow has called for a Wikipedia-style effort to build an open source, non-profit search engine. From his column in The Guardian:
What’s more, the way that search engines determine the ranking and relevance of any given website has become more critical than the editorial berth at the New York Times combined with the chief spots at the major TV networks. Good search engine placement is make-or-break advertising. It’s ideological mindshare. It’s relevance…
It’s a terrible idea to vest this much power with one company, even one as fun, user-centered and technologically excellent as Google. It’s too much power for a handful of companies to wield.
The question of what we can and can’t see when we go hunting for answers demands a transparent, participatory solution. There’s no dictator benevolent enough to entrust with the power to determine our political, commercial, social and ideological agenda. This is one for The People.
Put that way, it’s obvious: if search engines set the public agenda, they should be public.
He goes on to claim that “Google’s algorithms are editorial decisions.” For Doctorow, this is an outrage: “so much editorial power is better vested in big, transparent, public entities than a few giant private concerns.”
I wish Doctorow well in his effort to crowdsource a Google-killer, but I’m more than a little skeptical that anyone would actually want to use his search engine of The People. My guess is that, like most things produced in the name of “The People” (Soviet toilet paper comes to mind), it will probably won’t be much fun to use, and will likely chafe noticeably. (For the record, I love and regularly use Wikipedia; I just don’t think that model is unlikely to produce a particularly useful search engine. As Doctorow himself has noted of Google, “they make incredibly awesome search tools.”)
But I’m glad to see that Doctorow has conceded an important point of constitutional law:
The First Amendment protects the editorial discretion of search engines, like all private companies, to decide what to content to communicate. For a newspaper, that means deciding which articles or editorials to run. For a library or bookstore, it means which books to carry. For search engines, it means how to write their search algorithims. Continue reading →
None other than Sci-Fi author, civil libertarian, blogger, activist, and TLF commenter Cory Doctorow drops in at the Bureaucrash Podcrash (that’s a podcast for “crashers”) to discuss his new book Little Brother.
Austin Grossman’s review of the book for the New York Times remarks:
An entertaining thriller and a thoughtful polemic on Internet-era civil rights, “Little Brother” is also a practical handbook of digital self-defense. Marcus’s guided tour through RFID cloners, cryptography and Bayesian math is one of the book’s principal delights. He spreads his message through a secure network engineered out of Xbox gaming consoles, to a tech-savvy youth underground (we are now post-nerd, I learned — hipsters and social networking experts have replaced the unwashed coders of yore).
We at TLF may disagree with Mr. Doctorow on a number of policy issues, but I must admit that he’s a talented writer. I bought Cory’s
Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, a collection of short stories, at Capital Books here in DC and read it cover to cover by the end of that weekend. A great read available free in digital form at Cory’s Craphound.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.