Marc Hochstein, Executive Editor of American Banker, a leading media outlet covering the banking and financial services community, discusses bitcoin.
According to Hochstein, bitcoin has made its name as a digital currency, but the truly revolutionary aspect of the technology is its dual function as a payment system competing against companies like PayPal and Western Union. While bitcoin has been in the news for its soaring exchange rate lately, Hochstein says the actual price of bitcoin is really only relevant for speculators in the short-term; in the long-term, however, the anonymous, decentralized nature of bitcoin has far-reaching implications.
Hochstein goes on to talk about the new market in bitcoin futures and some of bitcoin’s weaknesses—including the volatility of the bitcoin market.
Download
Related Links
Scott Shackelford, assistant professor of business law and ethics at Indiana University, and author of the soon-to-be-published book Managing Cyber Attacks in International Law, Business, and Relations: In Search of Cyber Peace, explains how polycentric governance could be the answer to modern cybersecurity concerns.
Shackelford originally began researching collective action problems in physical commons, including Antarctica, the deep sea bed, and outer space, where he discovered the efficacy of polycentric governance in addressing these issues. Noting the similarities between these communally owned resources and the Internet, Shackelford was drawn to the idea of polycentric governance as a solution to the collective action problems he identified in the online realm, particularly when it came to cybersecurity.
Shackelford contrasts the bottom-up form of governance characterized by self-organization and networking regulations at multiple levels to the increasingly state-centric approach prevailing in forums like the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Analyzing the debate between Internet sovereignty and Internet freedom through the lens of polycentric regulation, Shackelford reconceptualizes both cybersecurity and the future of Internet governance.
Download
Related Links
The House Judiciary Committee’s Crime subcommittee yesterday held a hearing yesterday on the painful issues of cyberbullying (webcast). Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-CA) talked about her bill, the “Megan Meier Cyber Bullying Prevention Act” (H.R. 1966), which would create of a new federal felony to punish cyberharassment, including fines and jail time for violators. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) talked about her bill, the “Adolescent Web Awareness Requires Education Act (AWARE Act)” (H.R. 3630), which would instead allocate $125 million over five years in grants for education and awareness-building about these problems. Without endorsing any particular approach, Adam and I discussed the general advantages of education over criminalization in our “Cyberbullying Legislation: Why Education is Preferable to Regulation” paper published by PFF in June, which we updated and submitted as written testimony. But we really couldn’t have done a better job at making this point than Ranking Member Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who powerfully articulated his opposition to the run-away growth of federal criminal law. Chairman Scott (D-VA) also expressed a commendable reluctance to just pass another law and assume that fixes the problem.
Problems with Criminalization
Three lawyers on the panel generally agreed on the thorny speech and due process concerns raised by criminalization and agreed that the Sánchez bill would require serious revision to pass constitutional muster. UVA Law Prof. Robert O’Neil (testimony) suggested that of the exceptions to free speech protection recognized by the Supreme Court, the only one that could likely be used to do what advocates of cyberbullying criminalization want to accomplish is the intentional infliction of emotional distress. But O’Neill emphasized that this is generally a tort, not a criminal action—which seems like a pretty big distinction to me, especially when the criminal sanction might involve a felony conviction, as Sánchez has proposed. Felony convictions are the “Mark of Cain” in modern life, exceeded only in their lasting effect by being required to register on a sex offender registry. Cato Adjunct Fellow and civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate (testimony) highlighted the serious problems raised by vagueness and over-breadth in attempting to define harassment—as evidenced by speech codes at many universities. Harvard Law Prof. John Palfrey (testimony) generally echoed these concerns.
Criminalizing what is mostly child-on-child behavior simply will not solve the age-old problem of kids mistreating each other, a problem that has traditionally been dealt with through counseling and rehabilitation at the local level. For all the talk of how to craft a criminal law (especially its definitions) to minimize constitutional problems, I was very surprised that no one at the hearing raised the critical issue of just
who it is we’re trying to protect and from whom. Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.