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Running List of My Research on AI, ML & Robotics Policy

by on July 29, 2022 · 0 comments

[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: Continue reading →

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The Classical Liberal Approach to Digital Media Free Speech Issues

by on December 8, 2021 · 2 comments

On December 13th, I will be participating in an Atlas Network panel on, “Big Tech, Free Speech, and Censorship: The Classical Liberal Approach.” In anticipation of that event, I have also just published a new op-ed for The Hill entitled, “Left and right take aim at Big Tech — and the First Amendment.” In this essay, I expand upon that op-ed and discuss the growing calls from both the Left and the Right for a variety of new content regulations. I then outline the classical liberal approach to concerns about free speech platforms more generally, which ultimately comes down to the proposition that innovation and competition are always superior to government regulation when it comes to content policy.

In the current debates, I am particularly concerned with calls by many conservatives for more comprehensive governmental controls on speech policies enforced by various private platforms, so I will zero in on those efforts in this essay. First, here’s what both the Left and the Right share in common in these debates: Many on both sides of the aisle desire more government control over the editorial decisions made by private platforms. They both advocate more political meddling with the way private firms make decisions about what types of content and communications are allowed on their platforms. In today’s hyper-partisan world,” I argue in my Hill column, “tech platforms have become just another plaything to be dominated by politics and regulation. When the ends justify the means, principles that transcend the battles of the day — like property rights, free speech and editorial independence — become disposable. These are things we take for granted until they’ve been chipped away at and lost.”

Despite a shared objective for greater politicization of media markets, the Left and the Right part ways quickly when it comes to the underlying objectives of expanded government control. As I noted in my Hill op-ed:

there is considerable confusion in the complaints both parties make about “Big Tech.” Democrats want tech companies doing more to limit content they claim is hate speech, misinformation, or that incites violence. Republicans want online operators to do less, because many conservatives believe tech platforms already take down too much of their content.

This makes life very lonely for free speech defenders and classical liberals. Usually in the past, we could count on the Left to be with us in some free speech battles (such as putting an end to “indecency” regulations for broadcast radio and television), while the Right would be with us on others (such as opposition to the “Fairness Doctrine,” or similar mandates). Today, however, it is more common for classical liberals to be fighting with both sides about free speech issues.

My focus is primarily on the Right because, with the rise of Donald Trump and “national conservatism,” there seems to be a lot of soul-searching going on among conservatives about their stance toward private media platforms, and the editorial rights of digital platforms in particular. Continue reading →

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The FCC’s new Office of Economics and Analytics and the public interest

by on February 9, 2018 · 0 comments

Last week the FCC commissioners voted to restructure the agency and create an Office of Economics and Analytics. Hopefully the new Office will give some rigor to the “public interest standard” that guides most FCC decisions. It’s important the FCC formally inject economics in to public interest determinations, perhaps much like the Australian telecom regulator’s “total welfare standard,” which is basically a social welfare calculation plus consideration of “broader social impacts.”

In contrast, the existing “standard” has several components and subcomponents (some of them contradictory) depending on the circumstances; that is, it’s no standard at all. As the first general counsel of the Federal Radio Commission, Louis Caldwell, said of the public interest standard, it means

as little as any phrase that the drafters of the Act could have used and still comply with the constitutional requirement that there be some standard to guide the administrative wisdom of the licensing authority.

Unfortunately, this means public interest determinations are largely shielded from serious court scrutiny. As Judge Posner said of the standard in Schurz Communications v. FCC,

So nebulous a mandate invests the Commission with an enormous discretion and correspondingly limits the practical scope of responsible judicial review.

Posner colorfully characterized FCC public interest analysis in that case:

The Commission’s majority opinion … is long, but much of it consists of boilerplate, the recitation of the multitudinous parties’ multifarious contentions, and self-congratulatory rhetoric about how careful and thoughtful and measured and balanced the majority has been in evaluating those contentions and carrying out its responsibilities. Stripped of verbiage, the opinion, like a Persian cat with its fur shaved, is alarmingly pale and thin.

Every party who does significant work before the FCC has agreed with Judge Posner’s sentiments at one time or another.

Which brings us to the Office of Economics and Analytics. Cost-benefit analysis has its limits, but economic rigor is increasingly important as the FCC turns its attention away from media regulation and towards spectrum assignment and broadband subsidies.

The worst excesses of FCC regulation are in the past where, for instance, one broadcaster’s staff in 1989 “was required to review 14,000 pages of records to compile information for one [FCC] interrogatory alone out of 299.” Or when, say, FCC staff had to sift through and consider 60,000 TV and radio “fairness” complaints in 1970. These regulatory excesses were corrected by economists (namely, Ronald Coase’s recommendation that spectrum licenses be auctioned, rather than given away for free by the FCC after a broadcast “beauty contest” hearing), but history shows that FCC proceedings spiral out of control without the agency intending it.

Since Congress gave such a nebulous standard, the FCC is always at risk of regressing. Look no further than the FCC’s meaningless “Internet conduct standard” from its 2015 Open Internet Order. This “net neutrality” regulation is a throwback to the bad old days, an unpredictable conduct standard that–like the Fairness Doctrine–would constantly draw the FCC into social policy activism and distract companies with interminable FCC investigations and unknowable compliance requirements.

In the OIO’s mercifully short life, we saw glimpses of the disputes that would’ve distracted the agency and regulated companies. For instance, prominent net neutrality supporters had wildly different views about whether a common practice, “zero rating” of IP content, by T-Mobile violated the Internet conduct standard. Chairman Tom Wheeler initially called it “highly innovative and highly competitive” while Harvard professor Susan Crawford said it was “dangerous” and “malignant” and should be outlawed “immediately.” The nearly year-long FCC investigations into zero rating and the equivocal report sent a clear, chilling message to ISPs and app companies: 20 years of permissionless innovation for the Internet was long enough. Submit your new technologies and business plans to us or face the consequences.

Fortunately, by rescinding the 2015 Order and creating the new economics Office, Chairman Pai and his Republican colleagues are improving the outlook for the development of the Internet. Hopefully the Office will make social welfare calculations a critical part of the public interest standard.

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New Filing & Working Paper on the Regulation of the Sharing Economy

by on May 26, 2015 · 1 comment

Along with colleagues at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, I am releasing two major new reports today dealing with the regulation of the sharing economy. The first report is a 20-page filing to the Federal Trade Commission that we are submitting to the agency for its upcoming June 9th workshop on “The “Sharing” Economy: Issues Facing Platforms, Participants, and Regulators.” We have been invited to participate in that event and I will be speaking on the fourth panel of the workshop. The filing I am submitting today for that workshop was co-authored with my Mercatus colleagues Christopher Koopman and Matt Mitchell.

The second report we are releasing today is a new 47-page working paper entitled, “How the Internet, the Sharing Economy, and Reputational Feedback Mechanisms Solve the ‘Lemons Problem.'” This study was co-authored with my Mercatus colleagues Christopher Koopman, Anne Hobson, and Chris Kuiper.

I will summarize each report briefly here. Continue reading →

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What is “Optimal Interoperability”? A Review of Palfrey & Gasser’s “Interop”

by on June 11, 2012 · 4 comments

I’m pretty rough on all the Internet and info-tech policy books that I review. There are two reasons for that. First, the vast majority of tech policy books being written today should never have been books in the first place. Most of them would have worked just fine as long-form (magazine-length) essays. Too many authors stretch a promising thesis into a long-winded, highly repetitive narrative just to say they’ve written an entire book about a subject. Second, many info-tech policy books are poorly written or poorly argued. I’m not going to name names, but I am frequently unimpressed by the quality of many books being published today about digital technology and online policy issues.

The books of Harvard University cyberlaw scholars John Palfrey and Urs Gasser offer a welcome break from this mold. Their recent books, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, and Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems, are engaging and extremely well-written books that deserve to be books. There’s no wasted space or mindless filler. It’s all substantive and it’s all interesting. I encourage aspiring tech policy authors to examine their works for a model of how a book should be done.

In a 2008 review, I heaped praise on Born Digital and declared that this “fine early history of this generation serves as a starting point for any conversation about how to mentor the children of the Web.” I still recommend highly to others today. I’m going to be a bit more critical of their new book, Interop, but I assure you that it is a text you absolutely must have on your shelf if you follow digital policy debates. It’s a supremely balanced treatment of a complicated and sometimes quite contentious set of information policy issues.

In the end, however, I am concerned about the open-ended nature of the standard that Palfrey and Gasser develop to determine when government should intervene to manage or mandate interoperability between or among information systems. I’ll push back against their amorphous theory of “optimal interoperability” and offer an alternative framework that suggests patience, humility, and openness to ongoing marketplace experimentation as the primary public policy virtues that lawmakers should instead embrace. Continue reading →

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Remembering What Regulatory Capture Looked Like: The Airline Experience

by on April 11, 2011 · 0 comments

This week, my colleague Jerry Brito asked me to guest lecture to his George Mason University law school class on regulatory process. He asked me to talk about one of my favorite topics: the sad, sordid history of regulatory capture. Regular readers will recall the compendium I posted here a few months ago [and that I continue to update] of selected passages from books and papers penned by various economists and political scientists who have studied this issue.

Again, it doesn’t make for pretty reading, but the lesson that history teaches is vital: No matter how noble the “public interest” goals of regulatory advocates or their specific proposals, the only thing that really counts is what regulation means in practice.  Regrettably, all too often, regulation is “captured” by various interests and used to their advantage, or at least to the disadvantage of potential competitors, new entrants, and innovation.

While I was gathering some materials for the case study portion of my lecture — which incorporates the history of telecommunications monopolization, broadcast industry regulatory shenanigans, and transportation / airlines fiascos — I figured I had to post a passage from one of my favorite books on regulation of all-time: Thomas K. McCraw’s brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning 1984 book, Prophets of Regulation. In his chapter on the late great Alfred Kahn, the father of airline deregulation, McCraw recounts the history of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) from its creation in the 1940s up until the time of Kahn’s ascendency to CAB chairman in the Carter Administration (and then the CAB’s eventual deregulation and abolition). Here’s the key passage from that history: Continue reading →

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Regulatory Capture: What the Experts Have Found

by on December 19, 2010 · 661 comments

[Note: This post is updated regularly as I discover relevant old or new material.]

“Regulatory capture” occurs when special interests co-opt policymakers or political bodies — regulatory agencies, in particular — to further their own ends.  Capture theory is closely related to the “rent-seeking” and “political failure” theories developed by the public choice school of economics.  Another term for regulatory capture is “client politics,” which according to James Q. Wilson, “occurs when most or all of the benefits of a program go to some single, reasonably small interest (and industry, profession, or locality) but most or all of the costs will be borne by a large number of people (for example, all taxpayers).”  (James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy, 1989, at 76).

While capture theory cannot explain all regulatory policies or developments, it does provide an explanation for the actions of political actors with dismaying regularity.  Because regulatory capture theory conflicts mightily with romanticized notions of “independent” regulatory agencies or “scientific” bureaucracy, it often evokes a visceral reaction and a fair bit of denialism.  (See, for example, the reaction of New Republic’s Jonathan Chait to Will Wilkinson’s recent Economist column about the prevalence of corporatism in our modern political system.)  Yet, countless studies have shown that regulatory capture has been at work in various arenas: transportation and telecommunications; energy and environmental policy; farming and financial services; and many others.

I thought it might be useful to build a compendium of quotes from various economists and political scientists who have studied the regulatory process throughout history and identified regulatory capture or client politics as a major problem.  I would greatly appreciate having others suggest additional quotes and studies to add to this list since I plan to update it frequently and eventually work all of this into a future paper or book. [ Note: I have updated this compendium over a dozen times since the original post, so please check back for updates.]

The following list is chronological and begins, surprisingly, with the thoughts of progressive hero Woodrow Wilson…

Continue reading →

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Thoughts on Wu, Part 5: What Ultimately Separates the Cyber-Libertarian & Cyber-Collectivist

by on October 29, 2010 · 15 comments

I want to thank Tim Wu for continuing to engage in a discussion here about his book, The Master Switch, with his various comments to my ongoing rants.  After pouring out about 15,000 words over the past 4 days, I suspect I’m beginning to sound a bit like his cyber-stalker!  I feel a bit bad about this because I really do like Tim a lot and find him to be one of the all-around coolest and most laid-back guys in the Net policy business.  But, as I’ve noted in my ongoing series [see parts 1, 2, 3, & 4], we have profoundly different worldviews when it comes to information history and policy. And some of the recent comments he made to my 3rd post deserve a serious response.

In one of those comments he asks, “The question, then, is how you get, essentially, limited, controlled government in regulatory affairs; how you duplicate, in some sense, the limits imposed on other dangerous gov’t functions like the army. I don’t think this is having things both ways; I think this is trying to learn from what has gone wrong in the past.”  In the other, he says: “The question I’m asking in the end of the book is whether we can do better; try to have rules against the worse forms abuse without a creeping regulation that turns into capture. I suspect you think that’s impossible, but I don’t.”

So, here’s my response (and I’m making it a new, dedicated post here instead of just a comment in an old thread because I feel we are getting to the heart of the difference between cyber-libertarians (like myself) and cyber-collectivists (or whatever Tim would call himself). Continue reading →

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The Wrong Way to Reinvent Media, Part 2: Broadcast Spectrum Fees for Public Media

by on March 29, 2010 · 1 comment

As mentioned last week, in a new series of essays, PFF scholars will be examining proposals that would have the government play a greater role in sustaining struggling media enterprises, “saving journalism,” or promoting more “public interest” content. With many traditional media operators struggling, and questions being raised about how journalism in particular will be supported in the future, Washington policymakers are currently considering what role government can and should play in helping media providers reinvent themselves in the face of tumultuous technological change wrought by the Digital Revolution. We will be releasing 6 or 7 essays on this topic leading up to our big filing in the FCC’s “Future of Media” proceeding (deadline is May 7th).  And here’s a podcast Berin Szoka and I did providing an overview of the series.

In the first installment of the series, Berin and I critiqued an old idea that’s suddenly gained new currency: taxing media devices or distribution systems to fund media content. In the second installment, “The Wrong Way to Reinvent Media, Part 2: Broadcast Spectrum Taxes to Subsidize Public Media,” I discuss proposals to impose a tax on broadcast spectrum licenses to funnel money to public media projects or other “public interest” content or objectives. Such a tax would be fundamentally unfair to broadcasters, who are struggling for their very survival in the midst of unprecedented marketplace turmoil.  Moreover, such a tax is unnecessary in light of the many other sources of “public interest” programming available today. Finally, even if the government creates or subsidizes wonderful, civic- and culturally-enriching content, there’s no way to force people to consume it.  Nor should government force such media choices upon the public. There’s no good reason for government to be socially-engineering media choices through taxes.

I’ve attached the entire essay down below.

Continue reading →

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C-SPAN Makes Quarter Century of Video Archives Available Online, Free

by on March 16, 2010 · 5 comments

Brian Stelter of The New York Times reports today that “C-Span has uploaded virtually every minute of its video archives to the Internet”:

The archives, at C-SpanVideo.org, cover 23 years of history and five presidential administrations and are sure to provide new fodder for pundits and politicians alike. The network will formally announce the completion of the C-Span Video Library on Wednesday.

That’s just incredible. But, as I recently noted in my essay on, “C-SPAN, Civic-Minded Programming & Public Interest Regulation,” what’s more incredible it that this amazing, unprecedented civic resource has been provided to Americans at zero expense for the American taxpayer.  Many people fail to realize that C-SPAN is a private, non-profit company that is provided as a public service by cable industry contributions. It receives no government or taxpayer contributions whatsoever. From 1979-2009, total license fees paid by cable & satellite companies to support C-SPAN totaled $922 million.

So, next time you hear someone whining about how the private sector fails to provide “public interest programming,” ask them why the government didn’t think of C-SPAN first.  And don’t let them forget how, when C-SPAN first got off the ground, many in Congress fought the idea of public access to the inner workings of government. Thank God some folks in the private sector kept the heat on for access, while also keeping the monetary support flowing for the massive investment necessary to keep this unprecedented public resource alive and growing.

Visit C-SPAN’s amazing — and easily searchable — video archive today: www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary

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