Boy, the symposium on “Competition in Online Search” that Daniel Sokol threw together this week over at the Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog could not have been better timed! As most of you know, the European Commission stepped up its attack on Google this week and all signs are that a lot more antitrust activity is on the way on this front.
Anyway, all the entries in the symposium are in and a few rebuttals have followed, including one by me. In my response, I took on Frank Pasquale and Eric Clemons, who were the most aggressive in their calls for search regulation. I thought I would just re-post it here to complement my early entry in the symposium on Monday.
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I enjoyed the entries in this symposium and learned something from each of them. I have a few things to say in response to both Frank Pasquale and Eric Clemons and their sweeping indictments of not just Google but seemingly the entire modern information economy.
Everywhere they look, it seems, Pasquale and Clemons see villainy. Someone completely alien to the modern online ecosystem would read Pasquale’s description of it — “digital feudalism,” “absolute sovereignty,” “opaque technologies,” “leaving users in the dark,”
etc., etc. — and likely conclude that a catastrophe had befallen modern man. Of course, Pasquale’s narrative is missing any reference to the unparalleled expansion in the stock of knowledge and human choices that has been made possible by Google and the others companies he castigates (Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon). Meanwhile, Clemons wants to group Google in with supposed Wall Street robber barons as well as characters from Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” It’s all a bit much. Continue reading →
by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer, Progress Snapshot 5.11 (PDF)
Ten years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman lamented the “Business Community’s Suicidal Impulse:” the persistent propensity to persecute one’s competitors through regulation or the threat thereof. Friedman asked: “Is it really in the self-interest of Silicon Valley to set the government on Microsoft?” After yesterday’s FCC vote’s to open a formal “Net Neutrality” rule-making, we must ask whether the high-tech industry—or consumers—will benefit from inviting government regulation of the Internet under the mantra of “neutrality.”
The hatred directed at Microsoft in the 1990s has more recently been focused on the industry that has brought broadband to Americans’ homes (Internet Service Providers) and the company that has done more than any other to make the web useful (Google). Both have been attacked for exercising supposed “gatekeeper” control over the Internet in one fashion or another. They are now turning their guns on each other—the first strikes in what threatens to become an all-out, thermonuclear war in the tech industry over increasingly broad neutrality mandates. Unless we find a way to achieve “Digital Détente,” the consequences of this increasing regulatory brinkmanship will be “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) for industry and consumers.
New Fronts in the Neutrality Wars
The FCC’s proposed rules would apply to all broadband providers, including wireless, but not to Google or many other players operating in other layers of the Net who favor such broadband-specific rules. With this rulemaking looming, AT&T came after Google with letters to the FCC in late September and then another last week accusing the company of violating neutrality principles in their business practices and arguing that any neutrality rules that apply to ISPs should apply equally to Google’s panoply of popular services. In particular, AT&T accused Google of “search engine bias,” suggesting that only government-enforced neutrality mandates could protect consumers from Google’s supposed “monopolist” control.
The promise made yesterday by the FCC—to only apply neutrality principles to the infrastructure layer of the Net—is hollow and will ultimately prove unenforceable. Continue reading →
Adam Thierer and I have warned that neutrality regulation, once imposed on broadband providers, will
extend to other Internet services wherever “gatekeepers” are alleged to control access to a platform used by others. In short, the slippery slope of creeping common carriage is real and we’re already heading down it, with cyber-collectivist “luminaries” like Jonathan Zittrain and Frank Pasquale demanding neutrality regulation for devices, application platforms like iTunes and Facebook, and search!
TLF Reader Jim Reardon made a particularly astute observation on my post asking whether Americans really want net neutrality regulation:
Regulation of any service, product or industry is preceded by definition. Once defined, it is subject to taxation.
[Net Neutrality regulation] is a prelude to taxation of Internet products and services. It will likely start with telephony services and proceed accordingly to financial services, and continue from there.
As such, the activity is essentially neutral insofar as technology innovation is concerned — so long as applicable taxes are paid the government will ensure that the service is not disfavored by the network operators.
Absolutely right! One of the greatest barriers to government regulation and taxation of the Internet today is the lack of clear definitions: The FCC rules will tell you precisely what “cable television” or “commercial radio” mean, but the concepts of “social networking,” “Internet video,” “blogging,” and even “search” are indeterminate and constantly evolving.
Ronald Reagan once quipped:
Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Fortunately, government’s
ability to implement this view depends—to paraphrase President Clinton—”on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ ‘it’ is”: Allowing “it” to remain beautifully amorphous may be the best way to keep government at bay.
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 →
Anyone interested in the long-running debate over how to balance online privacy with anonymity and free speech, whether Section 230‘s broad immunity for Internet intermediaries should be revised, and whether we need new privacy legislation must read the important and enthralling NYT Magazine piece “The Trolls Among Us” by Mattathias Schwartz about the very real problem of Internet “trolls“–a term dating to the 1980s and defined as “someone who intentionally disrupts online communities.”
While all trolls “do it for the lulz” (“for kicks” in Web-speak) they range from the merely puckish to the truly “malwebolent.” For some, trolling is essentially senseless web-harassment or “violence” (e.g., griefers), while for others it is intended to make a narrow point or even as part of a broader movement. These purposeful trolls might be thought of as the Yippies of the Internet, whose generally harmless anti-war counter-cutural antics in the late 1960s were the subject of the star-crossed Vice President Spiro T. Agnew‘s witticism:
And if the hippies and the yippies and the disrupters of the systems that Washington and Lincoln as presidents brought forth in this country will shut up and work within our free system of government, I will lower my voice.
But the more extreme of these “disrupters of systems” might also be compared to the plainly terroristic Weathermen or even the more familiar Al-Qaeda. While Schwartz himself does not explicitly draw such comparisons, the scenario he paints of human cruelty is truly nightmarish: After reading his article before heading to bed last night, I myself had Kafka-esque dreams about complete strangers invading my own privacy for no intelligible reason. So I can certainly appreciate how terrifying Schwartz’s story will be to many readers, especially those less familiar with the Internet or simply less comfortable with the increasing readiness of so many younger Internet users to broadcast their lives online.
But Schwartz leaves unanswered two important questions. The first question he does not ask:
Just how widespread is trolling? However real and tragic for its victims, without having some sense of the scale of the problem, it is difficult to answer the second question Schwartz raises but, wisely, does not presume to answer: What should be done about it? The policy implications of Schwartz’s article might be summed up as follows: Do we need new laws or should we focus on some combination of enforcing existing laws, user education and technological solutions? While Schwartz focuses on trolling, the same questions can be asked about other forms of malwebolence–best exemplified by the high-profile online defamation Autoadmit.com case, which demonstrates the effectiveness of existing legal tools to deal with such problems.
Continue reading →
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