Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Richard Bennett brought to my attention the release of the latest CTIA Semi-Annual Wireless Industry Survey. Lots of interesting facts worth examining. I took two of the charts that appeared in the report and mashed them up to created this chart for the Mercatus Center depicting what has been happening with prices and investment in this sector. Down below, I note why this is important.
At today’s FCC “Generation Mobile” forum — chock-full of online safety experts, company reps, Jane Lynch of the TV show Glee, and even Chairman Genachowski himself — it was the kids that made the show about mobile technology worthwhile. On a panel about generation mobile, here are a few of the statements we heard from high school kids:
- “Don’t just take the phone away.”
- “When parents snoop too much, it’s a privacy invasion.”
- “We’ll listen more if you present us with concrete evidence for behavioral restrictions.”
These are the kinds of arguments tech policy advocates make, only we would have said them in our unique brand of policy speak:
- Don’t regulate the technology, regulate bad behavior.
- Privacy is important and governments/companies must respect the privacy interests of their citizens/customers.
- Policymakers should collect sufficient data and analysis before introducing new legislation
Policy geek speak aside, here are some interesting facts we heard about teen use of mobile technology: Continue reading →
On the podcast this week, Adam Thierer, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in the Technology Policy Program, reviews the past year in technology policy and looks ahead to next year. Thierer first weighs in on net neutrality and upcoming FCC deliberations could that hatch a new regulatory regime for the internet. He then talks Google and antitrust, the proposed Comcast-NBC merger, and disputes between broadcasters and content providers. He also suggests that two issues — privacy and cyber security — will be at the forefront of tech policy debates in the coming year, pointing to support for do-not-track rules and to recent WikiLeaks and state secrets drama as momentum behind the respective issues.
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Over a year ago Adam Thierer and Berin Szoka penned [an essay](http://techliberation.com/2009/08/12/cyber-libertarianism-the-case-for-real-internet-freedom/) seeking to define the contours of cyber-libertarianism, and they drew a contrast with the digital commons movement, part of what they called “cyber-collectivism.” They were criticized, however, for not drawing a similar contrast to “cyber-conservatism.” The reason they didn’t do this, Adam [explained](http://techliberation.com/2009/08/12/cyber-libertarianism-the-case-for-real-internet-freedom/#comment-14730877), was because they didn’t “think there really is a coherent ‘cyber-conservative’ movement out there the same way we see a rising ‘Digital Commons’ movement.” I think the reaction to Cablegate might be allowing us to see the outlines of cyber-conservatism a bit better.
The most vocal and strident reaction against Wikileaks has come from folks we can identify as neocons. Aside from demanding that the U.S. hunt down Julian Assange, Charles Krauthammer [wrote](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/02/AR2010120204561.html), “Putting U.S. secrets on the Internet, a medium of universal dissemination new in human history, requires a reconceptualization of sabotage and espionage — and the laws to punish and prevent them.” Meanwhile Marc Thiessen, ignoring the distributed nature of WikiLeaks, [called](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/06/AR2010120603074.html) for the U.S. to “rally a coalition of the willing to defeat WikiLeaks by shutting down its servers and cutting off its finances.” And William Kristol, for his part, [asked rhetorically](http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/whack-wikileaks_520462.html), “Why can’t we disrupt and destroy WikiLeaks in both cyberspace and physical space, to the extent possible? Why can’t we warn others of repercussions from assisting this criminal enterprise hostile to the United States?”
I won’t say there’s a fully developed theory of internet policy in these statements, but you can definitely see a rejection of an unregulated internet, not to mention of internet exceptionalism. Information control in the name of security, they seem to argue, is more than justified. And despite his technical [cluelessness](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101208/10133512187/how-political-pundits-get-confused-when-they-dont-understand-that-wikileaks-is-distributed.shtml), Marc Thiessen does grasp that pressuring internet intermediaries, like Amazon and PayPal, is an important way to control information.
Continue reading →
Deep in this Washington Post story on dynamic pricing—prices that change based on what online retailers know or guess about individual customers—come these lines:
[A]s much as retailers try to foil bargain shoppers, consumers do hold the upper hand online. Dynamic pricing is easy to counteract. Search multiple sites – including ones that collect prices from across the Internet as well as the sites themselves. Run searches on more than one browser, including one which you have erased cookies. Leave items in a shopping cart for a few days to gin up discount offers.
That makes the rest of the story, and wafting consumer protection concerns with dynamic pricing, a little humdrum. Indeed, it belies the headline: “How Online Retailers Stay a Step Ahead of Comparison Shoppers.”
Even better advice—certainly the simplest—is: Don’t buy what you can’t afford. That is serious consumer protection.
Wow, what a year for cyberlaw and information technology policy books! Both in terms of number of titles and the gravity of the books released, 2010 was one of the biggest years of the past decade (perhaps matched only by 2006 or 2008 in terms of significance). So, here’s my annual list of the Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2010.
First, however, as is the case each year [see my 2008 & 2009 lists], I need to repeat a few disclaimers. First, what qualifies as an “important” info-tech policy book is highly subjective, but I would define it as a title that many people — especially scholars in the field — are currently discussing and that we will likely be referencing for many years to come. But I “weight” books in the sense that narrowly-focused titles lose a few points. For example, books that deal mostly with privacy issues, copyright law, or antitrust policy do not exactly qualify as the same sort of “info-tech policy book” as other titles that offer a broader exploration of policy issues / concerns. For that reason, “big picture” info-tech policy books tend to rank higher on my lists.
The second caveat: Merely because a book appears on my list it does not necessarily mean I agree with everything in it. In fact, as was the case in previous years, I found much with which to disagree in my picks for the most important books of 2010 and I find that the cyber-libertarianism I subscribe to has very few fans out there.
With those caveats in mind, here are my choices for the Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2010. Continue reading →
While I harbor plenty of doubts about the wisdom or practicability of Do Not Track legislation, I have to cop to sharing one element of Nick Carr’s unease with the type of argument we often see Adam and Berin make with respect to behavioral tracking here. As a practical matter, someone who is reasonably informed about the scope of online monitoring and moderately technically savvy already has an array of tools available to “opt out” of tracking. I keep my browsers updated, reject third party cookies and empty the jar between sessions, block Flash by default, and only allow Javascript from explicitly whitelisted sites. This isn’t a perfect solution, to be sure, but it’s a decent barrier against most of the common tracking mechanisms that interferes minimally with the browsing experience. (Even I am not quite zealous enough to keep Tor on for routine browsing.) Many of us point to these tools as evidence that consumers have the ability to protect their privacy, and argue that education and promotion of PETs is a better way of dealing with online privacy threats. Sometimes this is coupled with the claim that failure to adopt these tools more widely just goes to show that, whatever they might tell pollsters about an abstract desire for privacy, in practice most people don’t actually care enough about it to undergo even mild inconvenience.
That sort of argument seems to me to be very strongly in tension with the claim that some kind of streamlined or legally enforceable “Do Not Track” option will spell doom for free online content as users begin to opt-out en masse. (Presumably, of course, The New York Times can just have a landing page that says “subscribe or enable tracking to view the full article.”) If you think an effective opt-out mechanism, included by default in the major browsers, would prompt such massive defection that behavioral advertising would be significantly undermined as a revenue model, logically you have to believe that there are very large numbers of people who would opt out if it were reasonably simple to do so, but aren’t quite geeky enough to go hunting down browser plug-ins and navigating cookie settings. And this, as I say, makes me a bit uneasy. Because the hidden premise here, it seems, must be that behavioral advertising is so important to supplying this public good of free content that we had better be really glad that the average, casual Web user doesn’t understand how pervasive tracking is or how to enable more private browsing, because if they could do this easily, so many people would make that choice that it would kill the revenue model. So while, of course, Adam never says anything like “invisible tradeoffs are better than visible ones,” I don’t understand how the argument is supposed to go through without the tacit assumption that if individuals have a sufficiently frictionless mechanism for making the tradeoff themselves, too many people will get it “wrong,” making the relative “invisibility” of tracking (and the complexity of blocking it in all its forms) a kind of lucky feature.
There are, of course, plenty of other reasons for favoring self-help technological solutions to regulatory ones. But as between these two types of arguments, I think you probably do have to pick one or the other.
Every once and awhile it’s worth taking a step back and looking at the long view of how Internet policy developments have unfolded and consider where they might be heading next. We’ve reached such a moment as it pertains to efforts to police the Internet for copyright piracy, objectionable online content, privacy violations, and cybersecurity. We’re at an interesting crossroads in this regard since the prospects for successful cracking down on copyright piracy and pornography appear grim. Seemingly every effort that has been tried has failed. The Net is awash in online porn and pirated content. I am not expressing a normative position on this, rather, I’m just stating what now seems to be commonly accepted fact.
In the meantime, the United States is in the process of creating new information control regimes and this time its access to personal information and cybersecurity that are the focus of regulatory efforts. The goal of the privacy-related regulatory efforts is to help Netizens better protect their privacy in online environments and stop the “arms race” of escalating technological capabilities. The goal of cybersecurity efforts is to make digital networks and systems more secure or, more profoundly as we see in the Wikileaks case, it is to bottle up state secrets.
These efforts are also likely to fail. Simply stated, it’s a nightmare to bottle-up information once it’s out there. Continue reading →
This morning, a database of FY 2011 earmark requests was released by Taxpayers Against Earmarks, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and my own WashingtonWatch.com. With House Republicans generally eschewing earmarks this year, members of Congress and senators still sought over 39,000 earmarks, valued at over $130 billion dollars. Learn more on the relevant pages at Taxpayers for Common Sense, Taxpayers Against Earmarks, and WashingtonWatch.com.
This is transparency. The production of organized, machine-readable data has allowed these differing groups—an advocacy organization, a spending analysis group, and a “Web 2.0” transparency site—to expand the discussion about earmarks. The data is available to any group, to the press, and to political scientists and researchers.
Earmarking is a questionable practice, and, anticipating public scrutiny, House and Senate Republicans have determined to eschew earmarks for the time being. But the earmark requests in this database are still very much “live.” They could be approved in whatever spending legislation Congress passes for the 2011 fiscal year. They also tell us how our representatives acted before they got careful about earmarks.
Earmarks are a small corner of the federal policy process, of course, but when all legislation, budgeting, spending, and regulation has become more transparent—truly transparent, Senator Durbin—the public’s oversight of Congress will be much, much better. As I noted at the December 2008 Cato Institute conference, “Just Give Us the Data,” progressives believe that it would validate government programs and root out corruption. (That’s fine—corruption and ongoing failure in federal programs are not preferable.) I believe that demand for government will drop. The average American family pays about $100 per day for the operation of the federal government currently. That’s a lot.
Again, you can see how this data is in use, and you can use it yourself, by visiting Taxpayers for Common Sense, Taxpayers Against Earmarks, and WashingtonWatch.com. On the latter site, you can see a map of earmarks in your state and lists of earmarks by member of Congress and representative, then vote and comment on individual earmarks.
At considerable expense and effort, these sites have done what President Obama asked Congress to do in January. If earmarking is to continue, Congress could produce earmark data as a matter of course itself: The appropriations committees could take earmark requests online and immediately publish them, rather than using the opaque exchange of letters, phone calls, and—who knows—homing pigeons.
Congress should modernize and make itself more transparent. We’re showing the way.
Amazon made headlines last week when it abruptly cut off service to Wikileaks, allegedly on the grounds that the site had violated Amazon’s terms of acceptable use. However, Amazon’s supposedly “voluntary” decision came less than 24 hours after Amazon received a phone call from Senate Homeland Security Committee staff (at the behest of Sen. Joe Lieberman) inquiring about the firm’s relationship with Wikileaks. According to a report in The Guardian, Amazon’s decision to terminate service to Wikileaks was a “reaction to heavy political pressure.”
That’s not all. Glenn Greenwald reported last week on Salon.com that another Internet company, Tableau Software, also decided to disable service to Wikileaks because of pressure from Joe Lieberman. Unlike Amazon, Tableau admitted that its decision was directly prompted by pressure from Lieberman. From Tableau’s statement:
Our decision to remove the data from our servers came in response to a public request by Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, when he called for organizations hosting WikiLeaks to terminate their relationship with the website.
It’s difficult to see Joe Lieberman’s “public request” as anything but a thinly-veiled threat. Case in point: In addition to his staffers’ phone calls, Lieberman went on MSNBC last week, stating bluntly, “we’ve got to put pressure on any companies … which provide access to the Internet to Wikileaks.”
As Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Lieberman is in a uniquely powerful position to push for legislation that might harm private firms like Amazon. He can also hold Congressional hearings, which frequently turn into public spectacles and garner massive media coverage. A company’s CEO enduring a congressional grilling on Capitol Hill can significantly impact that firm’s public image — and, in some cases, its stock price as well. While no individual Senator has the power to enact laws, promulgate rules, or enforce regulations, a single crusading politician can arguably cause cognizable harm to any U.S. company that pushes back against “requests” to suppress unfavorable content.
How does this implicate the First Amendment? As EFF’s Rainey Reitman and Marcia Hofmann pointed out on the DeepLinks blog, “The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of expression against government encroachment — but that doesn’t help if the censorship doesn’t come from the government.”
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
