principles – Technology Liberation Front https://techliberation.com Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology Thu, 03 Apr 2025 23:20:10 +0000 en-US hourly 1 6772528 Running List of My Research on AI, ML & Robotics Policy https://techliberation.com/2022/07/29/running-list-of-my-research-on-ai-ml-robotics-policy/ https://techliberation.com/2022/07/29/running-list-of-my-research-on-ai-ml-robotics-policy/#respond Fri, 29 Jul 2022 12:51:54 +0000 https://techliberation.com/?p=77020

[last updated 4/3/2025 – Check my Medium page for latest posts]

This a running list of all the essays and reports I’ve already rolled out on the governance of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotics. Why have I decided to spend so much time on this issue? Because this will become the most important technological revolution of our lifetimes. Every segment of the economy will be touched in some fashion by AI, ML, robotics, and the power of computational science. It should be equally clear that public policy will be radically transformed along the way.

Eventually, all policy will involve AI policy and computational considerations. As AI “eats the world,” it eats the world of public policy along with it. The stakes here are profound for individuals, economies, and nations. As a result, AI policy will be the most important technology policy fight of the next decade, and perhaps next quarter century. Those who are passionate about the freedom to innovate need to prepare to meet the challenge as proposals to regulate AI proliferate.

There are many socio-technical concerns surrounding algorithmic systems that deserve serious consideration and appropriate governance steps to ensure that these systems are beneficial to society. However, there is an equally compelling public interest in ensuring that AI innovations are developed and made widely available to help improve human well-being across many dimensions. And that’s the case that I’ll be dedicating my life to making in coming years.

Here’s the list of what I’ve done so far. I will continue to update this as new material is released:

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021 (and earlier)

]]> https://techliberation.com/2022/07/29/running-list-of-my-research-on-ai-ml-robotics-policy/feed/ 0 77020 6 Ways Trump’s Social Media Executive Order Betrays Conservative Principles https://techliberation.com/2020/06/05/6-ways-trumps-social-media-executive-order-betrays-conservative-principles/ https://techliberation.com/2020/06/05/6-ways-trumps-social-media-executive-order-betrays-conservative-principles/#comments Fri, 05 Jun 2020 14:52:38 +0000 https://techliberation.com/?p=76751

[Co-authored with Connor Haaland and originally published on The Bridge as, “Do Our Leaders Believe in Free Speech and Online Freedom Anymore?”]

The president is a counterpuncher': Trump on familiar ground in ...A major policy battle has developed regarding the wisdom of regulating social media platforms in the United States, with the internet’s most important law potentially in the crosshairs. Leaders in both major parties are calling for sweeping regulation.

Specifically, President Trump and his presumptive opponent in the coming presidential election, former Vice President Joe Biden, have both called for “Section 230” of the Communications Decency Act to be repealed. Last week, the president took a misguided step in this direction by signing an executive order that, if fully carried out, will result in significantly greater regulation of the internet and of speech.

A Growing Call to Regulate Internet Platforms

The ramifications of these threats and steps could not be more profound. Without Section 230—also known as “the 26 words that created the internet”—we would have a much less advanced internet ecosystem. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia would have never grown as quickly. Indeed, the repeal of Section 230 means many fewer jobs, less information distribution, and, frankly, less joy.

Shockingly, by backing Trump’s recent push for regulating these internet platforms, many conservatives are betraying their own principles—the ones that support freedom of expression and the ability to run private businesses without government interference.

Section 230 limits the liability online intermediaries face for the content and communications that travel over their networks. The immunities granted by Section 230 let online speech and commerce flow freely, without the constant threat of legal action or onerous liability looming overhead for digital platforms. To put it another way, without this provision, today’s vibrant internet ecosystem likely would not exist.

For completely different reasons, however, Biden and Trump want it axed. “Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one. For [Facebook CEO Mark] Zuckerberg and other platforms,” said Biden in a New York Times interview. Like many other Democrats, Biden wants social media platforms to do far more to block speech they find to be offensive in various ways. If they fail to do more, Biden and other Democrats want Sec. 230 revised or repealed.

In contrast, Trump and his allies want these same platforms to do far less to curate content. Although lacking any empirical evidence, they allege that massive anti-conservative bias exists across today’s most popular platforms. As a result, they want Sec. 230 gutted. “Repeal 230,” said Trump in a tweet. Tensions reached a boiling point last week following a public fight between the president and Twitter after the social networking platform on May 27 added a fact-check notice to one of the president’s tweets about the supposed dangers of mail-in voting.

Retaliating Against Social Media

On May 28, Trump struck back against Twitter by signing an executive order on “preventing online censorship.” The EO cited Twitter six times but also went after Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube by name. Paradoxically, it also noted that the “freedom to express and debate ideas is the foundation for all of our rights as a free people,” even though the order will result in arbitrary government rule over our free speech rights.

Indeed, Trump’s executive order runs afoul of traditional conservative principles in several ways:

  1. It expands the power of the government by delegating more authority to the administrative state and expanding arbitrary bureaucratic rule and regulatory abuse. It encourages the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission to take a more active interest in content policy decisions, which is of dubious legality. Section 3 of the EO also says the Department of Justice “shall review the viewpoint-based speech restrictions imposed by each online platform identified in the report … and assess whether any online platforms are problematic vehicles for government speech due to viewpoint discrimination, deception to consumers, or other bad practices.” (emphasis added)

    What do other bad practices entail, and who in the government gets to make the call? It is not prudent to delegate authority over something as sacred as our rights to free speech to unelected government bureaucrats. Such power will stifle civil discourse and increase the possibility for special interests to co-opt the government by using its power for their own desires.

  2. It undermines property rights of private companies by letting Big Government dictate how they use their business platforms. Carrying out the president’s executive order would amount to a taking of private property by the government, an action that conservatives have historically loathed. Our Founding Fathers considered property rights to be the cornerstone of a free and just society, yet Trump pays that fact little respect in this EO, running afoul of a centuries-old American tradition.

  3. It will encourage frivolous lawsuits. By gutting Sec. 230, a law that protects online platforms from punishing liability for third-party speech, Trump’s EO would empower trial lawyers. We are already too litigious a country, filing over 80 million cases in state courts every year, and we do not need another reason to be in the courtroom. Repealing 230 would open the floodgates to endless lawsuits about online speech and clog up our judicial system, using resources that could be directed to more important matters.

  4. It undermines free speech and would likely hurt conservative voices most. Trump’s executive order makes a mockery of the First Amendment by applying the Fairness Doctrine and net neutrality notions to social media, regulations that conservatives have vociferously opposed. A recent lawsuit filed by the Center for Democracy and Technology that seeks to challenge the EO alleges this exact point, saying it could chill free speech. In the past we have seen such concepts applied arbitrarily, harming free speech and media competition.

    For instance, our colleague Brent Skorup, has written on how the FCC exploited another arbitrary rule—the “public interest” standard. He points to the fact that a documentary portraying former Sen. John Kerry in a negative light was taken off the air thanks to the authority of the public interest standard as a paradigmatic example of how arbitrary regulatory power can harm free speech. The EO also undermines platforms that have greatly amplified conservative voices in recent years. On Facebook, for instance, 7 of the top 10 most cited news outlets were conservative. Meanwhile, Trump and other conservative leaders have tapped the power of Twitter to directly communicate with their base. The EO would therefore likely result in much conservative content being removed quickly to avoid legal hassles with regulators or the courts.

  5. The combined effect of all these other factors will undermine the global competitiveness of US-based firms, potentially benefiting Chinese internet companies the most. Willingly giving up a comparative advantage would be foolish, considering how America’s tech companies are the envy of the world. Not only does the EO affect existing social platforms, but it could stifle innovation throughout the digital economy moving forward. Who wants to try and innovate in a field that is subject to regulations that can change on a president’s whim?

  6. It could be used by future politicians against conservative platforms, like Fox News and other right-leaning outlets. This is clearly not the intent of Trump’s executive order, but that will eventually be the result nonetheless. Going forward, we will have different presidents with different political outlooks. When making laws, regulations, and executive orders, it is always important to consider how they could be applied by successive administrations with opposite political and ideological stripes.

Today’s social media platforms are not perfect, but it is impossible for them to please everyone. There is no Goldilocks formula whereby they can get speech policies just right and make everyone happy. Instead, the ideal policy for speech platforms is: Let a thousand flowers bloom. One-size-fits-all content management and community standards shouldn’t be the goal. We need diverse platforms and approaches for a diverse citizenry.

But when presidential candidates and their allies line up in support of repealing Sec. 230 and opening the door to speech controls, the end result will be homogenized conformity with the will of those in power. That’s a horrible result for a nation that values diversity of opinion and freedom of speech, and it will only end up hurting those who seek to change the conversation.

Also see: Brent Skorup, “The Section 230 Executive Order, Free Speech, and the FCC,” Technology Liberation Front, June 3, 2010.

]]> https://techliberation.com/2020/06/05/6-ways-trumps-social-media-executive-order-betrays-conservative-principles/feed/ 2 76751 Striking a Sensible Balance on the Internet of Things and Privacy https://techliberation.com/2015/01/16/striking-a-sensible-balance-on-the-internet-of-things-and-privacy/ https://techliberation.com/2015/01/16/striking-a-sensible-balance-on-the-internet-of-things-and-privacy/#comments Fri, 16 Jan 2015 21:08:39 +0000 http://techliberation.com/?p=75274

FPF logoThis week, the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) released a new white paper entitled, “A Practical Privacy Paradigm for Wearables,” which I believe can help us find policy consensus regarding the privacy and security concerns associated with the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable technologies. I’ve been monitoring IoT policy developments closely and I recently published a big working paper (“The Internet of Things and Wearable Technology: Addressing Privacy and Security Concerns without Derailing Innovation”) that will appear shortly in the Richmond Journal of Law & Technology. I have also penned several other essays on IoT issues. So, I will be relating the FPF report to some of my own work.

The new FPF report, which was penned by Christopher Wolf, Jules Polonetsky, and Kelsey Finch, aims to accomplish the same goal I had in my own recent paper: sketching out constructive and practical solutions to the privacy and security issues associated with the IoT and wearable tech so as not to discourage the amazing, life-enriching innovations that could flow from this space. Flexibility is the key, they argue. “Premature regulation at an early stage in wearable technological development may freeze or warp the technology before it achieves its potential, and may not be able to account for technologies still to come,” the authors note. “Given that some uses are inherently more sensitive than others, and that there may be many new uses still to come, flexibility will be critical going forward.” (p. 3)

That flexible approach is at the heart of how the FPF authors want to see Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs) applied in this space. The FIPPs generally include: (1) notice, (2) choice, (3) purpose specification, (4) use limitation, and (5) data minimization. The FPF authors correctly note that,

The FIPPs do not establish specific rules prescribing how organizations should provide privacy protections in all contexts, but rather provide high-level guidelines. Over time, as technologies and the global privacy context have changed, the FIPPs have been presented in different ways with different emphases. Accordingly, we urge policymakers to enable the adaptation of these fundamental principles in ways that reflect technological and market developments. (p. 4)

They continue on to explain how each of the FIPPS can provide a certain degree of general guidance for the IoT and wearable tech, but also caution that: “A rigid application of the FIPPs could inhibit these technologies from even functioning, and while privacy protections remain essential, a degree of flexibility will be key to ensuring the Internet of Things can develop in ways that best help consumer needs and desires.” (p. 4) And throughout the report, the FPF authors stress the need for the FIPPS to be “practically applied” and they nicely explain how the appropriate application of any particular one of the FIPPS “will depend on the circumstances.”  For those reasons, they conclude by saying, “we urge policymakers to adopt a forward-thinking, flexible application of the FIPPs.” (p. 11)

The approach that Wolf, Polonetsky, and Finch set forth in this new FPF report is very much consistent with the policy framework I sketched out in my forthcoming law review article. “The need for flexibility and adaptability will be paramount if innovation is to continue in this space,” I argued. In essence, best practices need to remain just that: best practices — not fixed, static, top-down regulatory edicts. As I noted:

Regardless of whether they will be enforced internally by firms or by ex post FTC enforcement actions, best practices must not become a heavy-handed, quasi-regulatory straitjacket. A focus on security and privacy by design does not mean those are the only values and design principles that developers should focus on when innovating. Cost, convenience, choice, and usability are all important values too. In fact, many consumers will prioritize those values over privacy and security — even as activists, academics, and policymakers simultaneously suggest that more should be done to address privacy and security concerns. Finally, best practices for privacy and security issues will need to evolve as social acceptance of various technologies and business practices evolve. For example, had “privacy by design” been interpreted strictly when wireless geolocation capabilities were first being developed, these technologies might have been shunned because of the privacy concerns they raised. With time, however, geolocation technologies have become a better understood and more widely accepted capability that consumers have come to expect will be embedded in many of their digital devices.  Those geolocation capabilities enable services that consumers now take for granted, such as instantaneous mapping services and real-time traffic updates. This is why flexibility is crucial when interpreting the privacy and security best practices.

The only thing I think that was missing from the FPF report was a broader discussion of other constructive privacy and security solutions that involve education, etiquette, and empowerment-based solutions. I would have also liked to have seen some discussion of how other existing legal mechanisms — privacy torts, contractual enforcement mechanisms, property rights, state “peeping Tom” law, and existing privacy statutes — might cover some of the hard cases that could develop on this front. I discuss those and other “bottom-up” solutions in Section IV of my law review article and note that they can contribute to the sort of “layered” approach we need to address privacy and security concerns for the IoT and wearable tech.

In any event, I encourage everyone to check out the new Future of Privacy Forum report as well as the many excellent best practice guidelines they have put together to help innovators adopt sensible privacy and security best practices. FPF has done some great work on this front.

Additional Reading

]]> https://techliberation.com/2015/01/16/striking-a-sensible-balance-on-the-internet-of-things-and-privacy/feed/ 3 75274 The Problem with the “Declaration of Internet Freedom” & the “Digital Bill of Rights” https://techliberation.com/2012/07/02/the-problem-with-the-declaration-of-internet-freedom-the-digital-bill-of-rights/ https://techliberation.com/2012/07/02/the-problem-with-the-declaration-of-internet-freedom-the-digital-bill-of-rights/#comments Mon, 02 Jul 2012 16:24:53 +0000 http://techliberation.com/?p=41536

We live in an entitlement era, when rights are seemingly invented out of whole-cloth. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that a bit of “rights inflation” is creeping into debates about Internet policy. Today, for example, a coalition of groups and individuals (many of which typically advocate greater government activism), have floated a “Declaration of Internet Freedom.”  My concern with their brief manifesto is that is seems to based on a confused interpretation of the word “freedom,” which many of the groups behind the effort take to mean freedom for the government to reorder the affairs of cyberspace to achieve values they hold dear.

The manifesto begins with the assertion that “We stand for a free and open Internet,” and then says “We support transparent and participatory processes for making Internet policy and the establishment of five basic principles:”

  1. Expression: Don’t censor the Internet.
  2. Access: Promote universal access to fast and affordable networks.
  3. Openness: Keep the Internet an open network where everyone is free to connect, communicate, write, read, watch, speak, listen, learn, create and innovate.
  4. Innovation: Protect the freedom to innovate and create without permission. Don’t block new technologies, and don’t punish innovators for their users actions.
  5. Privacy: Protect privacy and defend everyone’s ability to control how their data and devices are used.

This effort follows close on the heels of a proposal from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) to craft a “Digital Bill of Rights” that, not to be outdone, includes ten principles. They are:

  1. Freedom – digital citizens have a right to a free, uncensored internet.
  2. Openness – digital citizens have a right to an open, unobstructed internet.
  3. Equality – all digital citizens are created equal on the internet.
  4. Participation – digital citizens have a right to peaceably participate where and how they choose on the internet.
  5. Creativity – digital citizens have a right to create, grow and collaborate on the internet, and be held accountable for what they create.
  6. Sharing – digital citizens have a right to freely share their ideas, lawful discoveries and opinions on the internet.
  7. Accessibility – digital citizens have a right to access the internet equally, regardless of who they are or where they are.
  8. Association – digital citizens have a right to freely associate on the internet.
  9. Privacy – digital citizens have a right to privacy on the internet.
  10. Property – digital citizens have a right to benefit from what they create, and be secure in their intellectual property on the internet.

In a recent Forbes column (“We Don’t Need a Digital Bill of Rights“), I expressed some concerns about the Issa-Wyden effort and I have similar feelings about that new “Declaration of Internet Freedom” as well. As I noted in the Forbes column on those “rights”:

It would be hard to be against any of these things. Luckily, at least here in the United States, we already enjoy all these freedoms thanks to the protections provided by our actual Bill of Rights. We are at liberty to participate where and how we choose, to share and be as creative as we desire, and to associate with whomever we wish. The First Amendment alone secures those rights. Likewise, properly construed, the First Amendment ensures the “right to a free, uncensored Internet,” it’s just that lawmakers often  try to evade the Amendment’s unambiguous and comprehensive “Congress shall make no law” prohibition.

But it’s not just that these new efforts aren’t needed, it’s that conflating them with the actual Declaration of Independence or Bill of Rights really bastardizes the true intent of those founding documents. As Cato’s Jim Harper rightly notes:

I’m really hoping that nobody living today gets to define the basic principles by which the Internet is ruled. We’ve got that. It’s a neato collection of negative rights, preventing the government from interfering with society’s development, whether that development occurs online or off.

Of course, Jim and I believe that the original Declaration, the U.S. Constitution, and the original Bill of Rights helped establish a government of limited, enumerated powers that properly safeguarded the most important general right of all: The right of individuals to be at liberty to live a life of their own choosing. It was all beautifully summarized in that simple phrase: you have a right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

By contrast, if you subscribe to an alternative theory of rights that imagines there exists a litany of goodies to which we all possess an inalienable right, then you will likely be more sympathetic to efforts like the this new “Declaration of Internet Freedom” and “Digital Bill of Rights.” But that’s the problem I have with both documents.  The wonderful thing about the original Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights was that they didn’t create any expensive entitlements that required affirmative state action. Instead, they tightly bound government and curtailed its powers and left the people at liberty. By contrast, these new “Declaration of Internet Freedom” and “Digital Bill of Rights” contain all sorts of aspirational principles that could be construed as “positive rights” that require government to provide some sort of basic underlying service, or to affirmatively and aggressively regulate the information economy to protect some of these amorphous values.

I think that’s pretty clear with some of the principles listed in the documents. Consider “Access” (“Promote universal access to fast and affordable networks”); and “Openness” (“Keep the Internet an open network where everyone is free to connect, communicate, write, read, watch, speak, listen, learn, create and innovate”). I suppose you could claim that those values do not represent calls for government action, but I hope you can imagine how easy it would be to convert both into an affirmative mandate to subsidize or regulate.

Similarly, I like the sound of the “Innovation” bullet (“Protect the freedom to innovate and create without permission. Don’t block new technologies, and don’t punish innovators for their users actions”), but is that protecting the freedom to innovation and creation without permission from the government or does this entail something more? After all, as I document in this book chapter (“The Case for Internet Optimism, Part 2: Saving the Net from Its Supporters“), there exists a large number of academics and advocacy groups today who believe that “openness” and “innovation” are values (even rights) that are most at risk from private, not public action. I invite you to read the works of Tim Wu, Dawn Nunziato, or Frank Pasquale (among others) to see what I am talking about. These new “Declaration” and “Bill of Rights” proposals don’t offer a detailed answer to that question, but I can’t help but raise this concern when at least the former effort was led by the far-left radicals at the Free Press, which was founded by America’s leading media Marxist (yes, Marxist — read about it all here).

Until the advocates who came up with these statements are willing to unpack these principles a bit more and explain their theories of rights and government, we really don’t know what these manifestos would mean if they came to influence public policy. But I suspect that they would both just result in more legislative meddling and regulatory adventurism.

Finally, I know that a few of my friends here at the TLF have come up with their own “Declaration” to push back against this other one, and I agree with many of the principles that they have articulated in their counter-manifesto. (Hell, Wayne Crews and I once even came up with a sort of Declaration of our own back in 2001).  But I think we now need to impose a moratorium on all these new “Declarations” and “Bill of Rights” proposals until we get a hell of a lot more serious about honoring the originals.

JUST SAY NO to new “Declarations” and “Bill of Rights” proposals, and JUST SAY YES to the real deals!

P.S. For a light-hearted take on the excesses of our entitlement age, you might enjoy my old essay: “Broadband as a Human Right (and a short list of other things I am entitled to on your dime)“

]]> https://techliberation.com/2012/07/02/the-problem-with-the-declaration-of-internet-freedom-the-digital-bill-of-rights/feed/ 12 41536 Let’s Craft the Perfect Internet Policy… No, Wait, It’s Already Been Done! https://techliberation.com/2012/02/15/lets-craft-the-perfect-internet-policy-no-wait-its-already-been-done/ https://techliberation.com/2012/02/15/lets-craft-the-perfect-internet-policy-no-wait-its-already-been-done/#comments Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:49:08 +0000 http://techliberation.com/?p=40110

Friends of Internet freedom, I need your assistance. I think we need to develop a principled, pro-liberty blueprint for Internet policy going forward. Can you help me draw up five solid principles to guide that effort?

No, wait, don’t worry about it… it has has already been done!

As I noted in my latest weekly Forbes column, “Fifteen years ago, the Clinton Administration proposed a paradigm for how cyberspace should be governed that remains the most succinct articulation of a pro-liberty, market-oriented vision for cyberspace ever penned. It recommended that we rely on civil society, contractual negotiations, voluntary agreements, and ongoing marketplace experiments to solve information age problems. In essence, they were recommending a high-tech Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm (to the Internet).”

That was the vision articulated by President Clinton’s chief policy counsel Ira Magaziner, who was in charge of crafting the administration’s Framework for Global Electronic Commerce in July 1997.  I was blown away by the document then and continue to genuflect before it today. Let’s recall the five principles at the heart of this beautiful Framework:

1. The private sector should lead. The Internet should develop as a market driven arena not a regulated industry. Even where collective action is necessary, governments should encourage industry self-regulation and private sector leadership where possible.

2. Governments should avoid undue restrictions on electronic commerce

. In general, parties should be able to enter into legitimate agreements to buy and sell products and services across the Internet with minimal government involvement or intervention. Governments should refrain from imposing new and unnecessary regulations, bureaucratic procedures or new taxes and tariffs on commercial activities that take place via the Internet.

3. Where governmental involvement is needed, its aim should be to support and enforce a predictable, minimalist, consistent and simple legal environment for commerce

. Where government intervention is necessary, its role should be to ensure competition, protect intellectual property and privacy, prevent fraud, foster transparency, and facilitate dispute resolution, not to regulate.

4. Governments should recognize the unique qualities of the Internet

. The genius and explosive success of the Internet can be attributed in part to its decentralized nature and to its tradition of bottom-up governance. Accordingly, the regulatory frameworks established over the past 60 years for telecommunication, radio and television may not fit the Internet. Existing laws and regulations that may hinder electronic commerce should be reviewed and revised or eliminated to reflect the needs of the new electronic age.

5. Electronic commerce on the Internet should be facilitated on a global basis

. The Internet is a global marketplace. The legal framework supporting commercial transactions should be consistent and predictable regardless of the jurisdiction in which a particular buyer and seller reside.

It doesn’t get much better than that. Sure, some will nitpick about some of the Clinton Administration’s views on a few issues like encryption and copyright, but the fact remains that we would be hard-pressed today to come with a better set of general principles to guide Internet policymaking than those five. And these principles can be embraced in a non-partisan fashion. Liberal and conservatives alike should learn to abandon their pet regulatory issues and instead embrace this more principled approach to keeping government’s paws off the Net before cyberspace gets smothered by red tape both here and abroad.

Finally, I encourage you to also check out this remarkable speech that Ira Magaziner delivered two years after issuing the Framework in which he argued that “even if it were desirable to centrally control the Internet in some way, it is impossible, and life is too short to spend too much time doing things that are impossible. By the same token, we need to respect the nature of the medium in the sense that technology moves very quickly, and any policy that is tied to a given technology is going to be outmoded before it is enacted.”

He concluded that speech by noting that we should rely “first and foremost on the marketplace and on self-regulation, of limited and highly targeted government involvement based on consensus, of non-partisan debate and international cooperation. Most importantly of all,” he said, we should “retain a sense of humility and…acknowledge that none of us can, on these issues at least, claim to have all the answers.”

Yes, yes, YES!  Such humility is sorely lacking in our policymakers today.

So, who will join me in renewing the fight for the Clinton-Magaziner vision for the Internet policy?

]]> https://techliberation.com/2012/02/15/lets-craft-the-perfect-internet-policy-no-wait-its-already-been-done/feed/ 4 40110 New Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising https://techliberation.com/2009/07/02/new-self-regulatory-principles-for-online-behavioral-advertising/ https://techliberation.com/2009/07/02/new-self-regulatory-principles-for-online-behavioral-advertising/#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:29:00 +0000 http://techliberation.com/?p=19122

The leading trade associations in the online advertising industry have just released their new self-regulatory principles—the first comprehensive self-regulatory principles industry has produced, which track closely with the suggested guidelines released by the FTC in February.

I commend the industry for setting a new standard in transparency, consumer control and data security. These Principles do much to empower Americans to make their own decisions about privacy, but I fear that many critics of so-called “targeted advertising” will never be satisfied, no matter how high industry raises the bar.

These critics have insisted that ordinary users can’t be trusted to make the “right decisions” about privacy and have insisted on imposing restrictive default “opt-in” rules for the online data collection that makes online advertising valuable to websites that rely on ad revenue.  Such pre-emptive privacy regulation would stunt the growth of revenue for the “Free” online content and services we’ve all come to take for granted.  During a time of economic recession, and as traditional media like newspapers struggle to make the transition from print to the Internet, it’s more important than ever that policymakers allow self-regulation to evolve.  Only by doing so can we expect continued innovation and creativity online. We must all remember:  There is no free lunch!

I’ll lead a panel discussion on July 10 on Capitol Hill about “Regulating Online Advertising: What Will it Mean for Consumers, Culture & Journalism?”  Please RSVP here.

]]> https://techliberation.com/2009/07/02/new-self-regulatory-principles-for-online-behavioral-advertising/feed/ 5 19122