Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Via Julian, diarist at Daily Kos has repeated the complaint that libertarians have been AWOL on FISA. This is beyond silly. Let me offer a quick timeline:
That’s nowhere close to an exhaustive list, and that was all in February. I’ve been writing about this subject since 2006, and so has Julian. Maybe our friends at Daily Kos could do a little bit of research before making sweeping statements about what libertarians have or haven’t been doing?
Ben Worthen has a post looking at restrictions on the use of consumer technologies in businesses. Apparently, a lot of corporate IT departments have found it necessary to ban a lot of consumer applications like Skype, webmail, and the iPhone from their networks because they’re required to monitor and record all of their employees’ communications, and it’s hard to do that with applications that aren’t specifically designed with employer monitoring in mind. This strikes me as profoundly stupid. If the goal is to prevent employees from leaking confidential information, this kind of ad hoc monitoring isn’t going to get the job done. Employees will always be able to find some application that lets them transfer files (the IT manager Worthen interviewed admits that there are some additional sites she’d like to block but hasn’t yet). And even if the computers are totally locked down, they can still write down confidential information with a pen and paper and carry it out of the office. The bottom line is that an employee determined to violate his employer’s trust will find a way to do so no matter what the IT department does.
Apparently, though, this is what securities law requires. So you can’t really blame the IT departments for complying with the law. But it’s worth noting that this is more a quirk of a few regulated industries (health care is another where information-disclosure is tightly controlled) rather than a general property of American business. If your company isn’t in one of these industries, it probably doesn’t make sense to impose these kinds of draconian restrictions. And Congress might want to re-think regulations that require companies to behave this way.
Via the always carefully inoffensive ValleyWag, Psychology Today has a post about a study of the motivations of open source programmers and other participants in collaborative online projects. The study finds that “software contributors placed a greater emphasis on reputation-gaining and self-development motivations, compared with content contributors, who placed a greater emphasis on altruistic motives.”
We’ve discussed here before how open source projects often represent a more efficient way of producing information goods than firms. Some are eager to class open source as “non-market” (read altruistic) behavior, but I think it’s better considered as market behavior that happens to trade in human capital, reputation, self-satisfaction, etc. rather than money.
The debate over online child safety is just as heated abroad as it is here in the States. Over in the UK yesterday, according to this London Times article, Conservative Shadow Home Secretary David Davis…
attacked the Government for not doing enough to raise awareness among children of the dangers posed by cyber-crime, at a time when the threat was growing and criminals were using increasingly sophisticated methods to target their victims. “From e-mail to file-sharing, social networking to shopping, the internet is part of our lives. But we’re not the only ones to have migrated to this new communication platform,” Mr Davis told delegates at an e-crime conference in London. “The internet is a shopping mall for criminals, and for many of us it’s in the home that cyber-crime strikes. These days our real valuables are the personal details that are measured in megabites, rather than our belongings.”
Apparently, Mr. Davis and fellow conservatives have also argued that children as young as 5 years of age should be taught about the dangers of putting their personal details on the internet.
A few thoughts on this… First, I’m all for online safety education and media literacy, but shouldn’t we be teaching our kids basic literacy first? My six year old doesn’t even know how to spell “Internet” yet!
The rural broadband debate has been in the news a lot lately. Yesterday, DSL Reports ran a story sharply criticizing a report released by the US Internet Industry Association (an ISP lobbyist firm). But as Ars pointed out, the report actually offers some facts revealing that broadband availability in the U.S. isn’t nearly as bad some have suggested.
79 % of homes with a phone line can now get DSL, and 96 % of homes with cable can get broadband. Considering just about every home has a phone line, and most people have cable, these numbers suggest the main reason for the lack of rural broadband users isn’t the lack of availability, but the lack of adoption. Of course, rural areas have slower speeds and higher prices than urban areas. This makes sense, because building out a network in low-density areas costs more per subscriber versus urban areas, where a single apartment complex can house hundreds of users.
Still, groups argue that massive government subsidies are needed to promote broadband deployment in rural areas. ConnectedNation (a Washington-based non-profit) released a report a couple weeks ago, “The Economic Impact of Stimulating Broadband Nationally”, which concluded that accelerating broadband could pump $134 billion into the U.S. economy.
Google’s recent announcement that it is creating a home for personal health records online is a natural outgrowth of Silicon Valley’s Web 2.0 consumer Internet focus. The question this raises is whether a market-driven system is better for keeping health records than one run by the government. Here is my column discussing it.
I’m a big fan of Chris Anderson and his magazine Wired. So I eagerly read his new cover story and preview of his forthcoming book, both entitled “Free!”
Anderson begins with the story of King Gillette, famous for his give-away-the-razor-and-sell-the-blades business model. Anderson classifies this form of “free” as a cross-subsidy.
Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It’s as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?)
You know this freaky land of free as the Web.
But why are digital and information technologies fundamentally different than massy goods? And why do they make “free” business models far more widespread, or even dominant?
To explain, Anderson goes to the source — of both the technology, literally, and of the imaginative economic concept that propelled the technology far beyond its initial potential. You see, Carver Mead not only did the research behind Gordon Moore’s Law, and named it, but he also (1) created the VLSI manufacturing and design methodology to make very large scale integrated circuits possible and (2) envisioned that Moore’s Law could mean entirely new products, new industries, and even a new quantum digital economy.
Since I’m new here and since this is the Technology Liberation Front, I’m earnestly reposting some recent thoughts about how technology is driving political evolution in China.
_____________________
In a long and thoughtful article in the Jan/Feb 08 issue of Foreign Affairs, John Thornton, a former head of Goldman Sachs and now professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, details the evolution of democracy in China. Along the way, Thornton describes two striking examples of the way “technologies of freedom” (in my colleague Adam Thierer’s phrase) are making a big difference.
In the past several years, the Internet and cell phones have started to challenge traditional media by becoming channels for the expression of citizen outrage, at times forcing the government to take action. One celebrated instance was the “nail house” incident in the sprawling metropolis of Chongqing, in central China. For three years, a middle-class couple stubbornly refused to sell their house to property developers who, with the municipal government’s permission, planned to raze the entire area and turn it into a commercial district. The neighbors had long ago moved away. The developer tried to intimidate the couple by digging a three-story canyon around their lone house, but the tactic backfired spectacularly. Photos of their home’s precarious situation were posted on the Internet, sparking outrage among Chinese across the country. Within weeks, tens of thousands of messages had been posted lambasting the Chongqing government for letting such a thing happen. Reporters camped out at the site; even official newspapers took up the couple’s cause. In the end, the couple settled for a new house and over $110,000 in compensation. The widely read daily Beijing News ran a commentary that would have been inconceivable in a Chinese newspaper a decade ago: “This is an inspiration for the Chinese public in the emerging age of civil rights. . . . Media coverage of this event has been rational and constructive. This is encouraging for the future of citizens defending their rights according to the law.”
I’ve started to force myself to use Twitter to see if I can discover why people find it so compelling. Well, yesterday, after UPS delivered Clay Shirky’s new book, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” I decided to subscribe to Shirky’s tweets. Lo and behold, a few hours later I get this tweet from Shirky: “Getting ready for a talk tomorrow at New America Foundation in DC.” I had no idea he would be in town. Twitter is actually useful.
So, I attended the talk at the New America Foundation. It was based on his book, which looks at the how new online tools of conversation and collaboration (like Twitter) are affecting society. I took notes and thought I’d share them here. Be warned they’re more or less chicken scratch, but they should give you a flavor for his ideas. They’re after the jump.
Tom is absolutely right that the manipulative use of graphical filters has a long (if not exactly proud) pedigree in politics. What he’s forgetting, however, is that hysterical over-reaction to political advertising also has a long pedigree. Does no one remember RATS? Or Michael J. Fox’s exaggerated Parkinsons symptoms? Making mountains over molehills is the whole point of a political campaign. This campaign has had its stupid moments, but they’re no stupider than past contests.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
