Now, there are examples of trickle down and mass rebellion. Tim does a nice job in “The Durable Net” of exploring these and does the most to bring me closer to faith in lay users. He cites the Digg rebellion against censorship and the fight for open IM protocols. But in my observation, very few non-technical folks use Adium or the other IM unifiers. In fact, iChat and AIM are dominant defaults. As for the Digg example, the users of Digg tend to be technically inclined and the cost of posting a hex code and pushing “Digg” are so minimal that, yes, even my mother could do it (though I doubt she would).
It is possible that the select few will be motivated enough to free their own iPhone or create tools to detect violations of the end-to-end principle, but I worry that the critical mass will not be reached. Although 40% of Saudis are disturbed by Internet censorship, I’d be willing to bet that 40% do not nor can they make use of Tor or Psiphon or the other anti-censorship technologies. These are the people who would suffer from a non-generative, non-neutral future if the technical few do not successfully defend their interests.
I’m mostly thinking out loud, so I’d love to hear your thoughts: are users capable of protecting their interests?
In my paper, I go into a lot of detail with specific examples in which open technologies persevered in the face of organized resistance. But let me step back and make a more general point about the underlying argument of that section of the paper: In a nutshell, we should be optimistic about the future of open platforms for the same reason we’re in favor of open platforms in the first place. Put simply, they work better. Open platforms harness the distributed knowledge of millions of people and produce ecosystems that is greater than the sum of their parts. Closed platforms are hampered by the limitations of central planning, and as a result they tend to be sterile, inflexible, and incapable of keeping up with developments on more open platforms. Continue reading →
The basic business outlook is very focused on the key role of the executive. Good, profitable, growing firms are run by brilliant executives. And the ability of the firm to grow and be profitable is evidence of its executives’ brilliance. And profit ultimately stems from executive brilliance. This is part of the reason that CEO salaries need to keep escalating — recruiting the best is integral to success. The leaders of large firms become revered figures. Not only important because, in practice their decisions are significant. But they become celebrities and dispensers of advice and wisdom. Their success stems from overall brilliance, and thus they must have enlightening things to say on a variety of subjects.
The thing about this is that if this were generally true — if the CEOs of the Fortune 500 were brilliant economic seers — then it would really make a lot of sense to implement socialism. Real socialism. Not progressive taxation to finance a mildly redistributive welfare state. But “let’s let Vikram Pandit and Jeff Immelt centrally plan the economy — after all, they’re really brilliant!”
But in the real world, the point of markets isn’t that executives are clever and bureaucrats are dimwitted. The point is that nobody is all that brilliant. Nobody really has a reliable method of surveying the scene and accurately gauging What Is To Be Done. But in a market economy, we don’t need anyone to have such a method. Instead, a bunch of people get to do some inquiries into the issue and then give it their best shot. And the ones who are wrong will fail. And the ones who are right will succeed.
This is spot-on, and it’s a theme that I’ve bloggedabout in the past. One of the reasons I think that Matt’s point isn’t more obvious is that most industries are relatively homogenous, and so it’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison of different forms of industrial organization.
One of the things that makes the software industry industry interesting is that you have genuine institutional experimentation. You have 2-person startups toppling multi-billion-dollar firms. You have free software projects embarrassing proprietary software companies with budgets three orders of magnitude larger. You have venture capital firms investing tens of millions of dollars and angel investors investing tens of thousands. And so we get some real data on how efficient different forms of economic organization are. And it turns out that the centralized, bureacratics ones tend to be massively wasteful, relative to other ways of organizing software development.
Of course, software is special in part because their primary output is made of infinitely reproducible bits. You need a certain minimum of capital to start a car company or a bank. But still, it’s worth keeping in mind that the inefficiency of central planning isn’t limited to the government—the government just happens to be the largest bureaucracy with the least competition. But other organizations exhibit the same problems in proportion to their size and lack of competition. The larger an organization is, the more dysfunctional it’s likely to be and the harder it will be to reform. Which is one of the many reasons I hope Congress let’s GM collapse under its own weight.
In her latest column, Media Post media market guru Diane Mermigas wonders how long it will be before we see a traditional over-the-air (OTA) broadcast TV network (like ABC, NBC, CBS, or Fox) dump their old broadcast business altogether and just move all their properties to cable and satellite TV. And, in response to Mermigas, Cory Bergman of Lost Remote argues, as I did last week, “the real future of TV is not linear cable, but non-linear video delivered seamlessly via IP to multiple devices, including your TV set. But mass adoption of this approach is still several years away.”
Bergman is right. It would be foolish to think any traditional network is going to rely exclusively on IP-based distribution any time soon; they see it as more of a compliment (or another product window). But Mermigas may be on to something in predicting that broadcast networks may soon be looking to get out of the OTA television business altogether and essentially become “a glorified general entertainment cable network.”
The strain on their dysfunctional paradigm is emanating from a devastating recession and the ongoing digital revolution. Both are permanently altering the rules of play for the networks. A case can be made for at least one of the Big 4 broadcast networks emerging as a glorified general entertainment cable network within the next several years. The economic advantages: more steady ad revenues and consistent subscriber fees as content is distributed cross-platform.
It would be a bold move that a free-spirited company such as News Corp. might already be contemplating for its Fox Broadcast TV Network, or NBC Universal for its peacock network. Industry analysts increasingly wonder how an independent CBS can prattle on under the crumbling old rules. In a world of exploding access and choices, the prime-time ratings (even with Live plus 3 configurations) spell diminishing returns. For Disney, ABC’s general entertainment status is on par with ESPN in sports; the new multi-platform model is in place except for formally moving the ABC TV Network to the cable side of the ledger.
“The doggone law. The consarned law. The lousy, frickin’, nit-pickin’, noveau-Prussian, freedom-crushin’ . . . .” Nice to Be Wanted twangs the sad tale:
Like Sensible Khakis and Take Up the Flame,Nice to Be Wanted comes with a license allowing pretty free non-commercial use. Also like those songs, this one requires commercial licensees to tithe 10% to a good cause—here, the Institute for Justice.
We all owe IJ thanks for its Good Works. I owe IJ a special “thank you,” for inspiring the lines in Nice to Be Wanted about the plight of the “charmin’ lady down New Orleans’ way.” Alas, her tale rings all too true. May she—and may we all—win greater freedom to pursue our livelihoods. Go get ’em IJ! (The bit about “pumped his own gas” also draws from a real-world inspiration: just scroll down to Oregon Revised Statute § 480.330.)
I plan at least a few more of these videos, by the way. Subscribe to my channel to catch them all. My efforts remain pretty raw for now, granted; Nice to Be Wanted comes from only the second take of my first visit to a recording studio. Please share your suggestions about how I might improve. (You can skip, “Suck less,” though. I’m already working on that, thanks.)
At Stanford Law School, I am a member of the Stanford Law and Technology Association and the Center for Internet and Society. I write for CIS’s publication, Packets. I just published a piece summarizing the recent Third Circuit case once again holding the Child Online Protection Act unconstitutional. When the decision was released back in July, Adam Thierer wrote a wonderful post here on it. Adam’s and my pieces are complementary. Though Adam gave a nice assessment of COPA’s future, my summary goes into a bit greater detail on the court’s legal reasoning. If you’re interested in the law or in the constitutional principles involved, you may want to check out this interview with my brother, who was a counsel on the case.
When people ask me why I do what I do for a living — and, more specifically, why I focus all my attention on digital media and technology policy — I often respond by showing them the new gadgets or software I am playing with at any given time. I just love digital technology. I am swimming in a sea of digital gadgets, consumer electronics, online applications, computing software, video games, and all sorts of cyber-stuff.
Anyway, even though this is a technology policy blog, I sometimes highlight new digital toys or applications that have changed my life for the better. As the year winds down, therefore, I thought I would share with you five technologies that improved my life and productivity in 2008. I’d also love to hear from all of you about the technologies that you fell in love with this year in case I might have missed them. Here’s my list:
Thanks to Nate Anderson’s outstanding review over at Ars Technica, I finally made the plunge and bought Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 earlier this month. Wow, what a life-changer. I had played around with an earlier version of this market-leading speech recognition technology and found it somewhat clunky and unreliable. But Ver. 10, has ironed out almost all the old problems and become an incredibly sophisticated piece of software in the process. I love the way I can use simple voice commands to navigate menus in Microsoft Word and in Firefox. Perhaps best of all, I can dictate random rants into a pocket recording device and then upload them to Naturally Speaking (via a USB connection) and have them instantly transcribed. I’m even composing blog entries like this using it! Only problem is inserting HTML code; that’s still a hassle. Also, I find that switching from one input device to another definitely affects the quality of the transcription. Once you “train” Naturally Speaking using one device, it makes sense to stick with it. It’s not just the quality of the microphone; it’s also the proximity to your mouth that makes a difference. Regardless, this is one great product and, best of all, it’s should help save my rapidly-aging hands from becoming prematurely arthritic! All those years of video games and keyboards have taken their toll. Continue reading →
So, while the rest of you are still watching your Saturday morning cartoons this weekend, I’ll be working hard to defend the First Amendment at the Federal Society’s 2008 “National Lawyers Convention.” I am speaking on a panel there on Saturday morning entitled “The FCC and the First Amendment” and will be going up against Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin and Gregory Garre, the Solicitor General of the United States. The primary focus of our discussion will be the FCC v. Fox case that was recently heard by the Supreme Court. It should be an interesting conversation.
It looks like registration for the event is now closed, but I’ll try to blog about it afterwords. Not sure if they are taping it or not, but if I find a video or transcript I’ll post it later.
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“The FCC and the First Amendment”
Saturday, November 22nd / 10:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. / East Room
Mr. Miguel A. Estrada, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, and Former Assistant to the United States Solicitior General
Hon. Gregory G. Garre, United States Solicitor General
Hon. Kevin J. Martin, Federal Communications Commission
Mr. Adam D. Thierer, The Progress and Freedom Foundation
Moderator: Hon. Brett M. Kavanaugh, United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia
Is there any other issue under the tech policy sun today that creates stranger intellectual bedfellows than collective licensing of online music? After all, as I noted here before, on the pro-collective licensing side we find mortal enemies EFF and RIAA (at least Warner) in league. And on the anti-collective licensing side, we have Mike Masnick and Andrew Orlowski. If you locked those two guys in a room and tossed out any other copyright topic, they’d probably end up killing each other with their bare hands. But somehow they agree on this one (albeit for somewhat different reasons).
Anyway, I continue to have mixed, but generally skeptical, feelings about online collective licensing. There are countless thorny fairness issues on both the artist and consumer side of things. What’s the pay-in rate? How is it set? Who all pays in? Who gets paid out, how much, and by what formula? And God only knows how you deal with those parties (whether they be ISPs, consumers, or even artists) who don’t want to be a part of the scheme.
For these reasons, I’ve always felt a voluntary collective licensing scheme for the Internet is challenging, if not impossible. It would have to be compulsory to be a truly blanket license that covered all music, all users, and all platforms. I’m not too fond of that approach, but I think that’s where we are likely heading in the copyright wars. After all, that’s how it has been resolved in many other contexts historically. But that doesn’t give me any comfort since those other systems have been a mess in practice. This 2004 Cato study by Robert Merges provides some details and makes the case against apply the compulsory licensing approach to the online music marketplace.
I need not remind anyone here about FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s ongoing “war on cable.” Even if you hate the cable industry or capitalism in general, there’s just no way I can see how anyone who believes in the rule of law and good government can support Martin’s incessant abuse of power in his Moby Dick-like crusade against the cable industry. A crusade, incidentally, which happens to be motivated by Chairman Ahab’s desire to control speech on cable television, as I’ll note below.
Anyway, the latest chapter in this miserable saga of government-gone-mad is Martin’s recent effort to begin a far-ranging data gathering effort concerning cable prices and analog-to-digital channel movements under the guise of individual complaint enforcement. In a new paper entitled “Der Undue Prozess at the FCC: Part Deux,” my PFF colleague Barbara Esbin shows, once again, how the FCC’s regular processes and procedures are being perverted by Martin to achieve ends not within the agency’s delegated authority. And the results, in this case, will be profoundly anti-consumer.
Esbin documents the four flaws in the FCC’s investigation as follows:
I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years trying to debunk various myths about online child safety or at least put those risks into perspective. Too often, press reports and public policy initiatives are being driven by myths, irrational fears, or unjustified “moral panics.” Luckily, the New York Timesreports that there’s another study out this week that helps us see things in a more level-headed light. This new MacArthur Foundation report is entitled Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project. This white paper is a summary of three years of research on kids’ informal learning with digital media. The survey incorporates the insights from 800 youth and young adults and over 5000 hours of online observations. The information will eventually be contained in a book from MIT Press (“Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media.”)
“It might surprise parents to learn that it is not a waste of time for their teens to hang out online,” said Mizuko Ito, University of California, Irvine researcher and the report’s lead author. “There are myths about kids spending time online – that it is dangerous or making them lazy. But we found that spending time online is essential for young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be competent citizens in the digital age.”
Importantly, regarding the concerns many parents and policymakers have about online predation, Ms. Ito told the New York Times that, “Those concerns about predators and stranger danger have been overblown.” “There’s been some confusion about what kids are actually doing online. Mostly, they’re socializing with their friends, people they’ve met at school or camp or sports.”
In the report, according to the summary, the researchers “identified two distinctive categories of teen engagement with digital media: friendship-driven and interest-driven. While friendship-driven participation centered on “hanging out” with existing friends, interest-driven participation involved accessing online information and communities that may not be present in the local peer group.” The specific findings of the study are as follows:
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.