Via Jeff Jonas, who oh-so-carefully assessed the treatment he received in Stephen Baker’s book The Numerati, I came across this NPR interview with Baker.
In the latter part of the interview, Baker discusses pretty accurately Jonas’ dissent from the passion for predictive data mining in the national security world. That dissent was given expression in the paper Jeff and I wrote, “Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining.”
The data intelligentsia are an interesting subject for a book, of course – it looks The Numerati may have a lot of similarities to Robert O’Harrow’s No Place to Hide – and the NPR interview is interesting. But what makes it notable is Baker’s economic literacy. Or, more accurately, his lack of economic literacy.
Now, I’m not an economist either, so I’ll stand for correction in the comments (actual economists preferred, not just people with strong opinions, please).
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It’s sad that it even needs to be said, but Mike Masnick reminds us that if you’re writing about “Digital Socialism and the Tyranny of the Consumer” then you’re deeply, deeply confused. The “tyranny of the consumer” is the distinctive feature of free-market economies. And if we were going to label someone in the copyright debate “socialist,” it would be those who advocate government-granted monopolies in the reproduction of creative works, not those who want to repeal them. The author of this piece seems not to grasp the distinction between collectively-owned resources and unowned resources. Here’s a handy cheat sheet:
| Collectively Owned |
Unowned |
The US Post Office
The British National Health Service
American public schools
AIG
Amtrak
The Cuban economy
| Air
Sunlight
The Bible
Tom Sawyer
War and Peace
The TCP/IP protocols |
If you’re a supporter of the kinds of institutions we find in the first column, it might be reasonable to call you a “socialist.” If you support those in the second column, not so much.
Over on the Cato@Liberty blog, I’ve done a fairly lengthy write-up of the Google Flu Trends privacy issue. It’s an important problem that I think deserves a little more than dismissal.
My conclusion: “The heart of the problem lies not with the current leader in search, or any other Internet innovator. The problem lies with our unconstrained government.”
If you’re inclined to dismiss this conclusion as libertarian boilerplate, please read the post.
Remember being in grade school when a classmate’s rabble rousing would ruin it for everybody, and the teacher would hold back the class from going to recess? The other students would moan and groan and justifiably feel that punishing the entire class for one person’s misdeeds was unfair. This is what I fear for the tech industry, due to the trouble-making of the financial crisis.
If politicians turn their gaze from the financial sector to tech in 2009, they will likely focus on the issue of personally identifiable information (PII) and privacy. And here’s why.
Now is a tenuous time for all markets. Our politicians are looking to reassure Americans by regulating areas of the economy where there’s minimal regulation and a perceived lack of transparency. Rightly or wrongly, there’s a perceived lack of transparency in the collection and use of a user’s online data. And the following overarching trends and recent events could combine to further a pro-regulatory privacy agenda in 2009:
- Criminal Abuse: The Federal Trade Commission estimates that as many as 9 million Americans have their identities stolen each year. Increasingly, identity thieves use online phishing scams to deceive consumers. Phishers and other online criminals exist because more and more of us are in the pond—we store and access our personal and sensitive data online.
- Private Abuse: The lack of transparency surrounding the failed experiment with NebuAd’s deep packet inspection behavioral tracking by some ISPs.
- Private Use: The collection of user information is at the center of the web-delivered content and social media that helps define the Web2.0 economy. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Internet advertising revenues for the first six months of 2008 were $11.5 billion, a 15.2 percent increase over the first half of 2007. Search histories and stored cookie profiles help create a user dossier that ad companies use to display specific ads, and to help generate the more than $120 billion in online retail sales expected this year.
- Market Power: The DOJ investigation of the Google and Yahoo deal based on the market power of Google creates a big brother stigma on all online data collection practices.
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[Hat tip to Richard Bennett for the recommendation here..] I haven’t had a chance to read through the entire thing yet, but this new study by Nemertes Research seems worthy of attention: “Internet Interrupted: Why Architectural Limitations Will Fracture the ‘Net.” From the exec sum:
In 2007, Nemertes Research conducted the first-ever study to independently model Internet and IP infrastructure (which we call “capacity”) and current and projected traffic (which we call “demand”) with the goal of evaluating how each changes over time. In that study, we concluded that if current trends were to continue, demand would outstrip capacity before 2012. Specifically, access bandwidth limitations will throttle back innovation, as users become increasingly frustrated with their ability to run sophisticated applications over primitive access infrastructure. This year, we revisit our original study, update the data and our model, and extend the study to look beyond physical bandwidth issues to assess the impact of potential logical constraints. Our conclusion? The situation is worse than originally thought!
We continue to project that capacity in the core, and connectivity and fiber layers will outpace all conceivable demand for the near future. However, demand will exceed access line capacity within the next two to four years. Even factoring in the potential impact of a global economic recession on both demand (users purchasing fewer Internet-attached devices and services) and capacity (providers slowing their investment in infrastructure) changes the impact by as little as a year (either delaying or accelerating, depending on which is assumed to have the greater effect).
This is a subject that my colleague Bret Swanson has written a great deal about, so I’m sure he’ll be commenting on this study at some point. Even if you don’t agree with the conclusion Nemertes reaches, as Richard Bennett notes, the report is well worth reading just the background information on public and private peering, content delivery networks, and overlay networks.
Over the past year, I have been monitoring a very interesting trend with important ramifications for the future of Internet policy. State Attorneys General (AGs) — often in league with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) — have been striking a variety of “voluntary” agreements with various Internet companies that deal with child safety concerns or other online issues. These agreements require the companies involved to take various steps to alter site architecture and functionality, commit to stop certain practices, or take steps to block certain users (ex: predators; escort services) or types of content (ex: child porn; online “discrimination”) altogether.
To begin, let me be very clear about one thing: Some of these activities or types of content warrant a law enforcement response. That is certainly the case with child pornography or predation, for example. However, as I will note down below, there is a legitimate question about whether state officials and a non-profit private organization should be crafting legal or regulatory policies to address such concerns for a global medium like the Internet. Regardless, these agreements are creating a new layer of Internet regulation (almost extra-legal in character) that is worthy of exploration.
First, let me itemize some of these recent “voluntary” agreements between Internet companies and the AGs and/or NCMEC:
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The 111th Congress and the new Obama administration should scrap “E-Verify.” The federal government’s inchoate immigration background check system is the culmination of 20 years’ failure to create a tolerable “internal enforcement” program for U.S. immigration law. Rather than building on past failure, the new Congress and president should pull the plug on E-Verify and reform immigration law so that it aligns with the nation’s economic need for labor.
More here.
How about nothing.
My Cato colleague Gene Healy has a book out that is essential reading for people who think that all things turn on the presidency. The folks at the Family Online Safety Institute should read The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power.
Because the subject line of the email they sent me promoting their “Safe at Any Speed” conference about online safety is: “What Will the Obama Administration Do . . . ?”
Please: Nothing, nothing, nothing. It is, and shall forever be, the responsibility of parents to raise their children, including by guiding kids’ access to and use of the online world. Adam pointed you last week to a report that appears to do a good job of keeping things in perspective.
It’s nice to see that FOSI is involving people like Adam and First Amendment lawyer nonpareil Bob Corn-Revere in their conference. The next thing they should do is move it out of Washington to where the parents are. And don’t ask what presidents will do about online safety.
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