Proponents of neutrality regulation have been touting a new study by three economists at the University of Florida on the effects of net neutrality. 
The study looks at two questions: who would be the winners and losers if broadband service providers offered premium service for content delivery for a fee?, and 2) would the use of such fees increase the incentive of broadband service providers to expand capacity?
The authors conclude first that broadband service providers would benefit, and content providers would be worse off, and second, that there would be no increased incentive for expanding networks. Regulation advocates have grasped this report as confirmation of their case for mandated net neutrality. “The Internet with Net Neutrality is unequivocally better for consumers,” exclaimed SaveTheInternet.com in a post on the report.
The problem is that the study says no such thing.
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As more and more of our consumption comes in the form of bits, how to keep all that data safe becomes a big problem. Obviously, data security is a big issue. But the bigger one, I think, is keeping good backups.
It used to be that only geeks and businesses could keep good backups. To copy everything, you had to buy a second hard drive or a stack of CDs or DVDs (or floppies or cartridges) and spend too much time setting things up and flipping disks. The really hardcore bought tape drives, and those with deep pockets signed up for network-based solutions like Retrospect.
But all at once, the market for the rest of us is heating up. The home user now has some excellent options.
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Don’t forget that tonight we’ll be holding the third installment of our wildly successful Alcohol Liberation Front events. We’ll be meeting from 5:30-7 PM at Science Club. We’ll also be recording our contributors pontificating for our new podcast, Tech Policy Weekly. So drop on by and have a drink with your favorite TLF bloggers.
Washington University School of Law professor Neil Richards and George Washington University Law School professor Daniel Solove have an important new law review article out. Privacy’s Other Path: Recovering the Law of Confidentiality is a useful reminder of a dimension of privacy apart from the privacy torts so famously inspired by Warren and Brandeis in their 1890 Harvard Law Review article.
Confidentiality is the idea that you can share information subject to restrictions on further disclosure and use. There are often implicit understandings about how shared or mutually created information should be treated. It’s an important point that’s been conveniently forgotten in government arguments for “data retention,” for example. Confidentiality in the financial services sphere has been eviscerated by the Bank Secrecy Act and the Supreme Court cases that followed it, as well as Smith v. Maryland in the telecommunications context.
Richards and Solove’s work has its awkward turns – they characterize continental Europe’s focus on dignity and America’s focus on liberty as highly individualistic, while suggesting that confidentiality is “based on the protection of relationships.” If these characterizations are relevant at all, confidentiality can be seen just as much as a protection of individuals, the difference being that confidentiality is rooted more deeply in contract. Small matter, though.
Overall a good work, and an important reminder.
(HT: Schneier)
In anticipation of the Capitol Hill event I am hosting this Friday (“Age Verification for Social Networking Sites: Is It Possible? And Desirable?”), PFF has just released my new 35-page report on this issue: “Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions.”
In my paper, I note that many state attorneys general (AGs) are threatening legal action against social networking sites unless those sites verify the age of all their users. Already, age verification proposals have been introduced in Connecticut, Georgia and North Carolina. More proposals are likely on the way. AGs and other policy makers argue that age verification is necessary to protect kids from cyber-predators and other online dangers.
This week I will be discussing various aspects of my report in a series of blog entries. Today I will just highlight the major conclusions of my study. Tomorrow I will discuss some of the major myths surrounding social networking and online child abuse. And later this week I will outline some of my reservations about leading age verification schemes.
The general conclusions of my paper are as follows:
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This Thursday, March 22, The Heritage Foundation will be hosting Dr. Irwin Jacobs, the founder of QUALCOMM at its DC digs for a discussion entitled “Not Patently Obvious: An Innovator’s Perspective on Patent Reform. I’ve alway found Jacobs life story to be a fascinating one — starting out as an assistant professor of electrical engineering with some ideas on wireless signals, he ended up developing some of the key technologies behind the cell phone revolution, and founding one of America’s most sucessful firms. He is worried about the direction of patent reform in the Congress, however — fearing that proposed reforms will undercut the incentives for innovators in the future.
Please join us for what should be a fascinating discussion at 10 am Thursday. RSVP here.
Very good piece today by Peter Suderman, managing editor at National Review Online, on Timothy Wu and regulation of wireless. His conclusion:
Over the last two decades, wireless phones have morphed from awkward, brick-sized contraptions with laughably poor reception into slim, sleek fashion accessories with impressive feature sets. Meanwhile, wireless service has gone from novelty to convenience to necessity. Society may not always love the cell-phone industry, but consumers have integrated its products into daily life to a remarkable degree. If these trends are any indication, the wireless industry will continue to adapt to the demands of consumers all on its own — somewhat fitfully and frustratingly for sure — but without any need for government meddling, no matter how well intentioned.
Exactly.
Over the past few days there’s been some lively blogosphere speculation going on regarding Google’s position on net neutrality. A few weeks ago, I noted that Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s top policy guy, had argued against an FCC role in net neutrality, saying that neutrality should be thought of as “an attorney general or FTC problem.” Earlier this week, TLF’s Drew Clark, writing on GigaOm.com, made the case that an even more extensive re-think is going on in Mountain View. Clark pointed out that McLaughlin, in addition to distancing Google from the FCC, also opened the door a crack to charges for quality-of-service guarantees, saying “[t]here is a pragmatic view that it is OK as long as it is done in a non-discriminatory way.”
None of this means Google is about to join the free-market camp (though we’d love to have them). It does put a lot of distance, however, between them and their allies. According to Clark, this has caused “a fair bit of angst” within Google and among those allies.
Clark’s piece spurred an almost immediate rebuttal from Tim Karr of Free Press, one of the leading non-profit groups in the pro-regulation camp. Writing in the Huffington Post, Karr denied that Google was going wobbly. His evidence? Well, he asked them, and they denied it. “Google’s position on Net Neutrality has not changed one bit,” he quotes a Google spokesman as saying.
Well, that certainly settles the matter, doesn’t it? I mean, if Google was shifting its position, it would say so, wouldn’t it? One can just see the statement: “We regret any inconvenience but we now realize what we were saying last year was just plain wrong. Lord knows what we were thinking. Never mind.”
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Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Jerry Brito, Tim Lee, Adam Thierer, and Jim Harper. Topics include,
- Viacom sues YouTube alleging contributory copyright infringement
- Google changes its privacy policy to make search records “more anonymous”
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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I traveled to Florida with a large dose of optimism and returned a jaded man – all in one day. Public policy work can do this to you – particularly when a bill you testify against gets passed unanimously by the committee that heard your testimony.
The occasion: testifying in Tallahassee on a bill that would regulate online dating websites. (HB 531 – The Internet Predator Awareness Act). It would require websites to disclose whether they perform criminal background checks on their members. It would also require disclosures about how to practice safe online dating and not to put too much faith in the results of criminal background checks.
That’s a lot of disclosures and disclaimers, stuff that most consumers will not read and could care less about – especially because a clear criminal background check is no excuse to let down your guard on common sense precautions (in my testimony I warned that this bill could give consumers a false sense of security).
But there’s a larger theme going on here – the nanny state of government is creeping into e-commerce.
What are the benefits of this bill that the market isn’t providing? If security-conscious consumers want to use a service that provides background checks, they can do so already, and can even perform criminal checks on their own.
We don’t need government regulation to mandate which services a website must provide. Governments should protect us from decisions we can’t make, not from decisions we can make.
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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.
