Google’s public policy shop today officially joined the blogosphere, joining Cisco (February 4, 2005), Global Crossing (November 7, 2005), and Verizon Communications (October 2, 2006), each of which already have corporate policy blogs. The maiden post, by Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s director of public policy and government affairs, promises “public policy advocacy in a Googley way.” It’s one in which users will “be part of the effort” to help “refine and improve” the company’s policy positions. The blog already has 12 posts, done during the company’s internal test. The most recent – which I suspect provided the occasion to officially launch the blog – is a short summary of the official Google position on network neutrality.
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Betcha.com recently began offering a U.S.-based, P2P, honor-based betting service. Its FAQ claims that Betcha.com avoids the reach of domestic state and federal anti-gambling laws because, “Unlike any other betting venue on the planet, Betcha bettors always retain the right to withdraw their bets . . . . Therefore, they are not ‘risking’ anything. No ‘risk;’ means no ‘gamble.'” Will Betcha’com’s hack of anti-internet gaming laws work?
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Tom Lee suggests that I’m over-stating my case with regard to the innovativeness of free software:
But I don’t think this lack of originality is due to any inherent flaw in open-source contributors or the organizational model they employ. I think it’s simply a question of capital — open source projects typically haven’t got any. The vast majority of applications benefit from network effects that arise when their userbase becomes large enough: suddenly it’s easier to find someone to play against online, or the documentation is better, or you can exchange files in the same format that your friend uses. It’s relatively easy for open-source projects to achieve the necessary level of market interest when dealing with highly technical users and applications, as Tim’s examples demonstrate — there are accepted techniques (e.g. the RFC process, making frequent commits to the project) and media outlets (e.g. listservs, usenet) that can confer legitimacy and generate interest without an investment.
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Here’s the other specific criticism of peer production you’ll find in Carr’s critique of peer production:
But for all its breadth and popularity, Wikipedia is a deeply flawed product. Individual articles are often poorly written and badly organized, and the encyclopedia as a whole is unbalanced, skewed toward popular culture and fads. It’s hardly elitist to point out that something’s wrong with an encyclopedia when its entry on the Flintstones is twice as long as its entry on Homer.
Carr doesn’t even have the basic facts right here. To start with, the Flintstones entry, at some 5672 words, is actually only about 50 percent longer than the Homer entry, with around 3822 words. But more to the point, the entry on homer includes links to entries on the Homeric Question (1577 words), Ancient accounts of Homer (1183 words), Homeric scholarship (4799 words), Homeric Greek (582 words), and The Historicity of the Illiad (1720 words). If my math is right, that’s 13,683 words, more than double the number of words in the Flintstone’s article. (The Flintstone’s article doesn’t appear to be divided up into sub-sections as the Homer article is, although there are entries on Flintstones-related topics, such as the characters in the show and the actors who played them. But on the other hand, there are also lengthy entries on The Iliad, The Odyssey, The geography of the Odyssey, and The Trojan War.
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Nick Carr has a lengthy article on the pros and cons of peer production. To some extent, it’s hard to quibble with his basic point that peer production is useful but not a panacea. Clearly, peer production doesn’t work for every project, and it will always rely on a core group of dedicated individuals who do a lot of the work.
But what I found striking about the article is that it spends a lot of time asserting that peer-produced products have problems, but Carr provides hardly any examples. Below the fold, I’ll look at one of the few specific criticisms of free software, which I find to be seriously misguided.
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A reader sent me a link to the controversy last week over the blocking of Listpic by Craig’s List. Listpic was a service that allowed users to view Craig’s List ads as image thumbnails rather than as text ads:
In an e-mail to Wired News, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster explains the company’s position: “The 0.1% of our users who were accessing Craigslist images via Listpic were creating a grossly disproportionate drain on our server resources, degrading performance significantly for the 99.9% of our users accessing Craigslist in the normal fashion. Besides frequently hitting our site to harvest Craigslist user content for re-display on their site, each Listpic page load was causing our systems to serve up approx 100 full size images.”
In a forum post on Craigslist, company founder Craig Newmark (look for his yellow name tag) echoed Buckmaster’s comments. And of course there’s the inconvenient little fact that ListPic was serving Craigslist data on an external website while selling advertising — a big no-no.
The reader who emailed it to me suggested that this was an illustration of Craig Newmark’s hypocrisy for advocating network neutrality for telcos while discriminating against websites using Craig’s List content in ways they don’t approve of. I don’t think that’s quite right. I certainly think Craig’s support of Internet regulations is misguided, but I don’t think this really illustrates it. In the first place, network neutrality is a principle for ISPs to follow. No one has ever seriously suggested that it be applied to websites, and indeed, it’s not even clear what a neutrality policy for websites would even mean. Second, Listpic was not a Craig’s List customer, and so there’s no reason Craig’s List has any obligations at all to Listpic. Third, Craig appears to be claiming that Listpic wasn’t even serving up the images itself, but was hot-linking the images from Craig’s List’s servers—hot linking on such a large scale is universally regarded as a no-no.
There are good arguments against government regulation of the Internet, but spurious accusations of hypocrisy against Craig’s List, Google, or anybody else is not among them.
Julian pinpoints exactly what’s wrong with the ludicrous claim that copyright infringement is a bigger problem than ordinary property crime:
There’s a big difference between a the cost of theft to an industry or firm and the cost to the country. If I steal your bike, I’ve cost you one bike, not America. America still has the same number of bikes in it. The cost to the country of the theft of physical resources is not the cost of the resources themselves, typically, but rather the efficiency loss of shifting those resources to less valued uses, the cost of resources expended preventing or prosecuting it, the opportunity cost of the effort expended on a zero-sum transfer, and so on. By contrast, piracy is actually positive sum in static terms: Nobody has any fewer programs, songs, or movies, while the pirate has (at least) one more. Nothing has been redirected to a lower-valued use. So the only actual loss in this case is the value of new IP that doesn’t get created because piracy prevents prospective creators from fully internalizing its value. (There may be further losses if we think piracy induces companies to raise the prices of their products, and there are consumers who are priced out of the legal market by this, but don’t avail themselves of pirate copies.) I don’t know how significant that number is—or even how you’d measure it accurately—but “hundreds of billions” just doesn’t pass the straight face test.
A software industry study released a few years back tried to translate piracy losses into job losses in the tech sector. And again, even if we take that number at face value, just looking at one specific sector is worse than useless. By that mode of reckoning, Bastiat’s satirical “Petition from the Manufacturers of Candles” should be read as a serious guide to policy.
Quite so. As I’ve argued before, attempts to inflate the costs of movie piracy fall equally flat. Even if we equate the lost revenue of the movie industry with the lost wealth to the country (which is almost certainly an overstatement), the losses to the movie industry are measured in the billions (about $6.1 billion, to be precise) not tens or hundreds of billions. And the software industry’s inflated figure is only $34 billion. “Hundreds of billions” isn’t even remotely plausible.
PFF has just released the transcript of an event I hosted on May 18th on “The Complexities of Regulating TV Violence.” [The print transcript can be found here and the audio here.]
The event featured Henry Geller, Former General Counsel, Federal Communications Commission, Robin Bronk, Executive Director, The Creative Coalition, Robert Corn-Revere, a partner at the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine, and Jonathan L. Freedman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and the author of Media Violence and its Effect on Aggression. It was an interesting discussion and I encourage you to check it out if you are following this issue. Also, I published a report last month on this issue entitled, “The Right Way to Regulate Violent TV,” which focused on the tools and methods parents can use to deal with this issue on their own.
This month, I have been posting a series of essays about how parents can deal with potentially objectionable online content or contacts to coincide with “National Internet Safety Month.” (Here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7). In this series, I have been talking about how parents need to adopt a “layered” approach to online child protection that involves many tools and strategies. And such an approach is certainly needed to address social networking activities.
Social networking websites have become wildly popular with teenagers in recent years. Sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Xanga, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Tagged, Imbee, LiveJournal, Yahoo! 360, and Windows Live Spaces attract millions of users and represent just a few of the hundreds of social networking sites online today. These sites offer their users the space and tools to build the equivalent of an online journal and then to network with others more easily. New sites are seemingly surfacing every week, and they are growing more personalized in an attempt to appeal to specific niches.
But concerns about how youngsters use these services quickly prompted lawmakers to introduce legislation to ban access to such sites in schools and libraries. Others, including several state attorneys general, want such sites to age-verify all users to exclude those over or under a certain age. (I have discussed my reservations with proposals to impose age verification schemes on social networking websites in my PFF white paper, “Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions.”)
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.