I’m currently finishing up my next book. It addresses various strands of “Internet pessimism” and attempts to explain why all the gloom and doom theories we hear about the Internet’s impact on modern culture and economy are not generally warranted.  A key theme of my book is that most Internet pessimists overlook the importance of human adaptability in the face of technological change.  The amazing thing about humans is that we adapt so much better than other creatures. We learn how to use the new tools given to us and make them part of our lives and culture. The worst situations often bring out the most creative, innovative solutions. Media critic Jack Shafer has noted that “the techno-apocalypse never comes” because “cultures tend to assimilate and normalize new technology in ways the fretful never anticipate.”

In a cultural sense, humans have again and again adapted to technological change despite the radical disruptions to their lives, mores, manners, and methods of learning. As Aleks Krotoski recently points out in her new Guardian essay, “How the Internet Has Changed Our Concept of What Home Is”:

We are adaptable creatures and will work within the confines of our existing homes to integrate this new creature into our lives. We have already made the web part of our domestic ecologies and we continually imbue it with a sense of place. Perhaps its malleability is why it has been so successful and why we are willing to bring this interruptive technology into our most intimate worlds.

Human adaption also works magic in an economic sense. Entrepreneurs are constantly developing disruptive technologies that transform markets and expand opportunities. Innovators respond to incentives, including short-term spells of excessive “market power.” [More on that in my latest Forbes column, “No One Owns a Techno Crystal Ball.”]

Techno-pessimism and technopanics are born from irrational fears and a failure to appreciate that humans have, many times before, faced and conquered the technological unknown. Simply put, pessimists have very little faith in human ingenuity and resiliency.

In a post earlier this week, I discussed Randy Cohen’s “guideline” for anonymous blogging. Specifically, Cohen argued in a recent New York Times piece that, “The effects of anonymous posting have become so baleful that it should be forsworn unless there is a reasonable fear of retribution.  By posting openly, we support the conditions in which honest conversation can flourish.”  While sympathetic to that guideline, I noted I agreed with it as an ethical principle, not a legal matter.  In others words, what might make sense as a “best practice” for the Internet and its users would not make sense as a regulatory standard.  I prefer using social norms and public pressure to drive these standards, not regulation that could have an unintended chilling effect on beneficial forms of anonymous online speech.

Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media of the Harvard Berkman Center has a new column up at the UK Guardian in which he takes a slightly different cut at a new standard or social norm for dealing with some of the more caustic anonymous speech out there:

One of the norms we’d be wise to establish is this: People who don’t stand behind their words deserve, in almost every case, no respect for what they say. In many cases, anonymity is a hiding place that harbours cowardice, not honour. The more we can encourage people to use their real names, the better. But if we try to force this, we’ll create more trouble than we fix.  But we don’t want, in the end, to turn everything over to the lawyers. The rest of us — the audience, if you will — need to establish some new norms as well.

Specifically, Gillmor argues that, ” We need to readjust our internal BS meters in a media-saturated age,” because “We are far too prone to accepting what we see and hear.”  I think Gillmor has too little faith in most digital denizens; most of us take anonymous comments with a grain of salt and assume that the ugliest of those comments are often untrue.  And that’s generally the “principle” he recommends each of us adopt going forward:

When you read or hear an anonymous or pseudonymous attack on someone else, you should not just assume — barring persuasive evidence of the charge — that it’s false. Assume that the accuser is an outright, contemptible liar.

I am generally sympathetic to Gillmor’s principle, but I think he goes a bit overboard in asking us to assume that all anonymous or pseudonymous attacks are false. So, here’s a reformulation of it: We should discount, by at least some small measure, anonymous online speech that attacks others in a heated manner and which lacks supporting evidence for the assertions made or charges levied. However, the more heated or vicious the attack, the greater we should discount the veracity of the claims asserted.

Of course, this is simply a guideline for readers, not speakers or the sites that host online speech.  Each speaker will have to decide for themselves whether to post anonymously or reveal their identities. As I noted in my previous essay, however, I think it makes sense to generally encourage people to reveal their true identities when blogging or commenting.  I have always lived by that rule personally when blogging or posting comments on other sites, whether they are blogs, discussion boards, or even shopping sites.

For sites that host speech, things get trickier.  Luckily, we have Section 230 of the CDA to protect online operators from onerous forms of liability for the content they host on their sites, although some would like to change that. Also, as I’ve discussed here before, some critics of online anonymity would like to see “civility check” or “cooling off periods” instituted that would prevent instantaneous comments from being posted without some sort of human or automated review of the content.  But tweaking Sec. 230 liability norms or requiring “cooling off periods” for comments could have a profoundly chilling effect on many beneficial forms of online speech. As Gillmor wisely notes in his essay:

anonymity has crucially important value. We need it for whistleblowers, for political dissidents in dictatorships — for those who have important stories to tell but whose lives or livelihoods would be in jeopardy if their identities were exposed.

And one has to think through the mechanics of regulation before willy-nilly proposing to “ban anonymity” online.  As Gillmor points out, that could lead to some troubling outcomes:

People who’d ban anonymity don’t seem to realise that it’s technically impossible unless we’re willing to turn over all of our communications in every venue to a central authority — a system that would herald the end of liberty. They can’t really want such a regime, can they? Meanwhile, even that kind of structure could and would be hacked by motivated types, though with more difficulty.

That’s exactly right. Nonetheless, online speakers and websites shouldn’t just treat Sec. 230 as a “get-out-of-jail-free” card or let their anonymous speech rights go to their heads.  There’s nothing wrong with a little sensible site policing and self-regulation to deal with the baser elements of the blogosphere.

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.

Doctorow’s “We’ll build our own darn rocket ship in the backyard!” response  to his deep concerns about Google’s dominance of search does not, of course, impinge on Google’s editorial discretion—and for that, I commend him.  But others, most notably Frank Pasquale, have indeed proposed government action to address such concerns in ways that most surely would impinge on the First Amendment rights of all search engines.

Pasquale’s comlpaint about Google is essentially the same as Doctorow’s, but rather than proposing an innovative (if unrealistic) alternative (like Doctorow), he  has called (PDF) for the “creation of a Federal Search Commission to parallel the Federal Communications Commission” and declared that ” In order to reduce opportunities for clickfraud and unfair treatment of indexed entities, qualified transparency will be needed in order to open up the ‘black box’ of search engine operations to at least some third parties.”   He focuses on search algorithms because:

The heart of a search engine and the key to its success is its search algorithm. Effective algorithms are protected by a veil of secrecy and by various intellectual property rights. As a result, new entrants cannot easily appropriate existing algorithms. Moreover, many algorithms are trade secrets. Unlike patents, which the patent holder must disclose and which eventually expire, these trade secrets may never enter the public domain. Search algorithms may be analogous to the high-cost infrastructure required for entry into the utility or railroad markets.

He diagnoses the problem as follows:

given the emphasis on secrecy in the search engine business model, no one can verify that such rankings have not been manipulated or that subtler biases in favor of search engines’ partners are not being worked into the search algorithm… If search engines are to be accountable at all, if their interest is to be balanced against those of the various other claimants involved in search-related disputes, and if social values are to be given any weight, some governmental agent should be able to peer into the black box of search and determine whether or not illegitimate manipulation has occurred.

But what about editorial discretion?  Why should Google be forced to change its PageRank algorithms any more than The New York Times should be forced to change how it decides which stories to run?  Moreover, why should Google be forced to disclose how this process works?  Assigning a government monitor to sit in on meetings of the Times‘ editorial board “to detect bias” would clearly impinge on their editorial discretion.  Similarly, I don’t see why forcing a Yahoo!, Microsoft or any other search engine to disclose their equivalent processes for ranking search results should pass constitutional muster.

Editorial discretion means getting to make your own decisions, even if they might seem biased to those wise elites who “know better” because, well, it’s your decision and not the government’s!  Saying that speakers can make whatever decisions they want as long as they’re not biased means speakers don’t really have editorial discretion after all.

So, if recognizing that search algorithms are a form of editorial discretion is a problem (as Doctorow implies), it’s only insofar as this might frustrate the desires of those who would regulate search.