The New York Times today published my response to an oped by Senators Lindsey Graham & Elizabeth Warren calling for a new “Digital Consumer Protection Commission” to micromanage the high-tech information economy. “Their new technocratic digital regulator would do nothing but hobble America as we prepare for the next great global technological revolution,” I argue. Here’s my full response:

Senators Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren propose a new federal mega-regulator for the digital economy that threatens to undermine America’s global technology standing.

A new “licensing and policing” authority would stall the continued growth of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence in America, leaving China and others to claw back crucial geopolitical strategic ground.

America’s digital technology sector enjoyed remarkable success over the past quarter-century — and provided vast investment and job growth — because the U.S. rejected the heavy-handed regulatory model of the analog era, which stifled innovation and competition.

The tech companies that Senators Graham and Warren cite (along with countless others) came about over the past quarter-century because we opened markets and rejected the monopoly-preserving regulatory regimes that had been captured by old players.

The U.S. has plenty of federal bureaucracies, and many already oversee the issues that the senators want addressed. Their new technocratic digital regulator would do nothing but hobble America as we prepare for the next great global technological revolution.

This week, I appeared on the Tech Freedom Tech Policy Podcast to discuss “Who’s Afraid of Artificial Intelligence?” It’s an in-depth, wide-ranging conversation about all things AI related. Here’s a summary of what host what Corbin Barthold and I discussed:

1. The “little miracles happening every day” thanks to AI

2. Is AI a “born free” technology?

3. Potential anti-competitive effects of AI regulation

4. The flurry of joint letters

5. new AI regulatory agency political realities

6. the EU’s Precautionary Principle tech policy disaster

7. The looming “war on computation” & open source

8. The role of common law for AI

9. Is Sam Altman breaking the very laws he proposes?

10. Do we need an IAEA for AI or an “AI Island”

11. Nick Bostrom’s global control & surveillance model

12. Why “doom porn” dominates in academic circles

13. Will AI take all the jobs?

14. Smart regulation of algorithmic technology

15. How the “pacing problem” is sometimes the “pacing benefit”

The Wall Street Journal has run my response to troubling recent opeds by President Biden (“Republicans and Democrats, Unite Against Big Tech Abuses“) and former Trump Administration Attorney General William Barr (“Congress Must Halt Big Tech’s Power Grab“) in which they both called for European-style regulation of U.S. digital technology markets.

“The only thing Europe exports now on the digital-technology front is regulation,” I noted in my response, and that makes it all the more mind-boggling that Biden and Barr want to go down that same path. “[T]he EU’s big-government regulatory crusade against digital tech: Stagnant markets, limited innovation and a dearth of major players. Overregulation by EU bureaucrats led Europe’s best entrepreneurs and investors to flee to the U.S. or elsewhere in search of the freedom to innovate.”

Thus, the Biden and Barr plans for importing European-style tech mandates, “would be a stake through the heart of the ‘permissionless innovation’ that made America’s info-tech economy a global powerhouse.” In a longer response to the Biden oped that I published on the R Street blog, I note that:

“It is remarkable to think that after years of everyone complaining about the lack of bipartisanship in Washington, we might get the one type of bipartisanship America absolutely does not need: the single most destructive technological suicide in U.S. history, with mandates being substituted for markets, and permission slips for entrepreneurial freedom.”

What makes all this even more remarkable is that they calls for hyper-regulation come at a time when China is challenging America’s dominance in technology and AI. Thus, “new mandates could compromise America’s lead,” I conclude. “Shackling our tech sectors with regulatory chains will hobble our nation’s ability to meet global competition and undermine innovation and consumer choice domestically.”

Jump over to the WSJ to read my entire response (“EU-Style Regulation Begets EU-Style Stagnation“) and to the R Street blog for my longer essay (“President Biden Wants America to Become Europe on Tech Regulation“).

According to this article by Julian Hattem in The Hill (“Lawmakers warn in-flight calls could lead to fights“), 77 congressional lawmakers have sent a letter to the heads of four federal agencies warning them not to allow people to have in-flight cellphone conversations on the grounds that it “could lead to heated arguments among passengers that distract officials’ attention and make planes less safe.”  The lawmakers say “arguments in an aircraft cabin already start over mundane issues, like seat selection and overhead bin space, and the volume and pervasiveness of voice communications would only serve to exacerbate and escalate these disputes.” They’re also concerned that it may distract passengers from important in-flight announcements.

Well, I think I speak for a lot of other travelers when I say I find the idea of gabby passengers — whether on a phone or just among themselves — insanely annoying. For those of us who value peace and quiet and find airline travel to be among the most loathsome of experiences to begin with, it might be tempting to sympathize with this letter and just say, “Sure, go ahead and make this a federal problem and solve this for us with an outright ban.”

But isn’t there a case to be made here for differentiation and choice over yet another one-size-fits all mandate? Why must we have federal lawmakers or bureaucrats dictating that every flight be the same? I don’t get that. After all, enough of us would be opposed to in-flight calls that we would likely pressure airlines to not offer many of them. But perhaps a few flights or routes might be “business traveler”-oriented and offer this option to those who do. Or perhaps some airlines would restrict calling to certain areas of the cabin, or limit when the calls could occur.

I dealt with a similar issue back in 2007 when Democratic representative Heath Shuler of North Carolina, along with several cosponsors, introduced the “Family Friendly Flights Act,” which would have required that airlines create “child safe viewing areas”: no publicly viewable TV screens would air violent programming within ten rows of the designated zones. The act defined  “violent programming” as any movie originally rated PG-13 or above, or any television show rated PG-V or PG-14-V or above.

As I noted at the time, it was somewhat easy for me to sympathize with other parents of young children who didn’t want them seeing violent fare during flights. However, I noted that there were some alternatives to government censorship of in-flight films, including privacy film to cover the screens or “no-video” flight options. The law never passed and instead what we got was airlines toning down some of the more violent and racy stuff because of public pressure.

I think that same sort of “social pressure / social norms” response would deter some of the most egregious behavior by passengers who used cell phones to carry on conversations. After all, legislators are certainly correct when they assert that tensions already run high over lesser matters inside the cabin of planes (like bin space and reclining seats). But somehow we get by without new laws on that front.

So, instead of always looking first to one-size-fits all mandates to solve such problems, perhaps a little experimentation and differentiation among carriers could yield a better solution to such problems. Sure, I know that’s not easy because of the relatively standardized airplane cabin designs. But perhaps that could change, too. Is it really all that unthinkable that some carrier in the future might create segregated cabin areas for “connected class” vs. “quiet class,” for example? Why couldn’t some enterprising airline retrofit at least some of the planes to accommodate such travelers, either on the same plane or perhaps, if needed, on completely different flights catering to both types of travelers? And, again, let’s remember that a lot of airlines aren’t going to want to deal with any of this and, therefore, most of them will likely tightly self-regulate cell phone talking on their own.

The bottom line is that we should not foreclose experimentation and choice so hastily when competition might spur creative solutions to complex problems. Not everything needs to be a federal matter.

Rebecca MacKinnon has an important piece in the Wall Street Journal today about China’s “Green Dam Youth Escort” filtering mandate and the danger of this model catching on with other governments. “More and more governments — including democracies like Britain, Australia and Germany — are trying to control public behavior online, especially by exerting pressure on Internet service providers,” she notes. “Green Dam has only exposed the next frontier in these efforts: the personal computer.”

She’s right, and that’s cause for serious concern.  Moreover, there’s the question of how corporations doing business in China should respond to demands and threats related to installing such filters. She notes:

In a world that includes child pornographers and violent hate groups, it is probably not reasonable to oppose all censorship in all situations. But if technical censorship systems are to be put in place, they must be sufficiently transparent and accountable so that they do not become opaque extensions of incumbent power — or get hijacked by politically influential interest groups without the public knowing exactly what is going on. Which brings us back to companies: the ones that build and run Internet and telecoms networks, host and publish speech, and that now make devices via which citizens can go online and create more speech. Companies have a duty as global citizens to do all they can to protect users’ universally recognized right to free expression, and to avoid becoming opaque extensions of incumbent power — be it in China or Britain.

I generally agree with all that but this is a difficult issue and one that I have struggled with personally. (See this “Friendly Conversation about Corporate High-Tech Engagement with China” that Jim Harper and I had three years ago).  But I do hope that more companies take a hard line with the Chinese as well as there own governemnts when it comes to filtering mandates or even restricitve parental control defaults and settings [an issue I wrote more about in this paper: “The Perils of Mandatory Parental Controls and Restrictive Defaults.”]  On that note, kudos to the business groups that already signed on to a joint letter oppossing China’s new filtering mandate.