Transparency and Its Discontents

by on October 3, 2011 · 1 comment

Remember when you had to wait until the end of the month to see your bank statement?

Last week, on the cusp of failing to pass any annual appropriations bills ahead of the October 1 start of the new fiscal year, congressional leaders came up with a short-term government funding bill (or “continuing resolution”) that would fund the government until November 18th. For whatever reason, that deal (H.R. 2608) wasn’t ready to go before the end of the week, so Congress passed an even shorter-term continuing resolution (H.R. 2017) that funds the government until tomorrow, October 4th.

Every weekend, I hunch over my computer and update key records in the database of WashingtonWatch.com, a government transparency website I run as a non-partisan, non-ideological resource. Then I put a summary of what’s going on into an email like this one (subscribe!) that goes out to 7,000 or so of my closest friends.

Last weekend, the Library of Congress’ THOMAS website, which is one of my resources, was down a good chunk of the time for maintenance. Even after it came up again, some materials such as bill text and committee reports weren’t available. (They had come up by the wee hours this morning.) Maintenance is necessary sometimes, though when the service provider I use for the WashingtonWatch.com email does maintenance, it’s usually for an hour or so in the middle of a weekend night.

But when I went to update the database to reflect last week’s passage of H.R. 2017, Continue reading →

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More on Jarvis, “Publicness” & Privacy Rights

by on October 3, 2011 · 9 comments

In his latest weekly Wall Street Journal column, Gordon Crovitz has penned a review of the new Jeff Jarvis book, Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live. Gordon’s review closely tracks my own thoughts on the book, which I laid out last week in my Forbes essay, “Is Privacy Overrated?”  Gordon’s essay is entitled “Are We Too Hung Up on Privacy” and he finds, like I do, that Jarvis makes compelling case for understanding the benefits of publicness as the flip-side of privacy. Instead of repeating all the arguments we make in our reviews here, I’ll just ask people go check out both of our essays if they are interested.

I did, however, want to elaborate on one thing I didn’t have time to discuss in my review of the Jarvis book. While I like the approach he used in the book, I thought Jarvis could have spent a bit more time exploring some the thorny legal issues in play when advocates of privacy regulation look to enshrine into law quite expansive views of privacy “rights.”

One of the things that both Crovitz and I appreciated about the Jarvis book was the way he tries to get us to think about privacy in the context of ethics instead of law. “Privacy is an ethic governing the choices made by the recipient of someone else’s information,” Jarvis argues, while “publicness is an ethic governing the choices made by the creator of one’s own information,” he says. In my review, I explained why this was so important: Continue reading →

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Would Top-Down Global Planning Have Created the Net?

by on October 3, 2011 · 0 comments

Here’s a sharp editorial from The Economist about Internet governance entitled,  “In Praise of Chaos: Governments’ Attempts to Control the Internet Should be Resisted.” In the wake of the recent Internet Governance Forum meeting, many folks are once again debating the question of who rules the Net? Along with Wayne Crews, I edited a huge collection of essays on that topic back in 2003 and it’s a subject that continues to interest me greatly. As I noted here last week, many of those who desire greater centralization of control over Net governance decisions are using the fear that “fragmentation” will occur without some sort of greater plan for the Net’s future. I believe these fears are greatly overstated and are being used to justify expanded government meddling with online culture and economics.

The new Economist piece nicely brings into focus the key question about who or what we should trust to guide the future of the Internet. It rightly notes that the current state of Net governance is, well, messy. But that’s not such a bad thing when compared to the alternative: Continue reading →

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Sonia Arrison on technology and longevity

by on September 27, 2011

On the podcast this week, Sonia Arrison, writer, futurist, and senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, discusses her new book entitled 100+: How the Coming of Age of Longevity Will Change Everything from Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith. The process of aging, according to Arrison, is not set in stone, and the way humans experience age can be changed as technology evolves. She discusses the different types of technology, including tissue engineering and gene therapy, which are poised to change numerous aspects of human life by improving health and increasing lifespan to 150 years and beyond. She also talks about how increased lifespans will affect institutions in society and addresses concerns, such as overpopulation and depletion of resources, raised by critics of this technology.

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Online ‘Fragmentation’ Fears & the Downside of a ‘Globally Coherent Approach’ to Internet Governance

by on September 27, 2011 · 3 comments

In a speech today before the Internet Governance Forum entitled “Taking Care of the Internet,” Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission, responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe, argued for “a globally coherent approach” to preserve “the global character of the Internet, and keep it from fragmenting.” That sounds good in theory but, as always, the devil is in the details. No one wants to see a highly balkanized Internet with each country and continent becoming a digital island cut off from the rest of Internet. On the other hand, if “a globally coherent approach” means layers of international red tape and bureaucracy, then fragmentation doesn’t sound so bad by comparison. That’s particularly true for those of us who live in countries to cherish principles of freedom of speech and free enterprise, as we do in the United States.

For example, to most of the rest of the planet, America’s First Amendment is viewed as a pesky local ordinance that simply interferes with the ability of government to establish rules for acceptable speech and expression throughout society. What, then, does “a globally coherent approach” to Internet governance mean when America’s values conflict with other countries and continents? Does it mean that the U.S. should conform to a global norm as established by a “consensus body”? Who would that be? The OECD? The United Nations? The International Telecommunications Union? If so, it is clear that protections for freedom of speech and expression would be sacrificed on the altar of “consensus” or a “coherent global approach” to Net governance. Continue reading →

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ABA Roundtable Discussion Tomorrow on the AT&T/T-Mobile Merger

by on September 26, 2011 · 0 comments

[Cross posted at Truthonthemarket]

As I have posted before, I was disappointed that the DOJ filed against AT&T in its bid to acquire T-Mobile.  The efficacious provision of mobile broadband service is a complicated business, but it has become even more so by government’s meddling.  Responses like this merger are both inevitable and essential.  And Sprint and Cellular South piling on doesn’t help — and, as Josh has pointed out, further suggests that the merger is actually pro-competitive.

Tomorrow, along with a great group of antitrust attorneys, I am going to pick up where I left off in that post during a roundtable discussion hosted by the American Bar Association.  If you are in the DC area you should attend in person, or you can call in to listen to the discussion–but either way, you will need to register here.  There should be a couple of people live tweeting the event, so keep up with the conversation by following #ABASAL.

Panelists:
Richard Brunell, Director of Legal Advocacy, American Antitrust Institute, Boston
Allen Grunes, Partner, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, Washington
Glenn Manishin, Partner, Duane Morris LLP, Washington
Geoffrey Manne, Lecturer in Law, Lewis & Clark Law School, Portland
Patrick Pascarella, Partner, Tucker Ellis & West, Cleveland

Location: 
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, P.C. 1700 K St. N.W. Fifth Floor Washington, D.C. 20006

For more information, check out the flyer here.

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Net neutrality: Doing the Numbers

by on September 26, 2011 · 7 comments

For Forbes this morning, I reflect on the publication late last week of the FCC’s “Open Internet” or net neutrality rules and their impact on spectrum auctions past and future.  Hint:  not good.

An important study last year by Prof. Faulhaber and Prof. Farber, former chief economist and chief technologist, respectively, for the FCC, found that the last-minute imposition of net neutrality limits on the 700 MHz “C” block in the FCC’s 2008 auction reduced the winning bid by 60%–a few billion dollars for the Treasury.

Yet the FCC maintained in the December Report and Order approving similar rules for all broadband providers that the cost impact of these “prophylactic” rules would be minimal, because, after all, they simply endorse practices most providers already follow.  (And the need for the new rules, then, came from where?)

Continue reading →

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Publication Practices for Transparent Government: Rating the Congress

by on September 23, 2011 · 0 comments

The Cato Institute is doing a live-streamed Capitol Hill briefing this morning—start-time 9:00 a.m. Eastern—on congressional transparency.

You can see and download all the materials being released to Hill staff on a Cato@Liberty blog post summarizing where congressional transparency stands: “needs improvement.”

You can watch the event live (or later on tape) and join the conversation at the Twitter hashtag #RateCongress.

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Three Provocations about Parental Controls, Online Safety & Kids’ Privacy

by on September 22, 2011 · 3 comments

On Wednesday afternoon, it was my great pleasure to make some introductory remarks at a Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) event that was held at the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, CA. FOSI CEO Stephen Balkam asked me to offer some thoughts on a topic I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about in recent years: Who needs parental controls? More specifically, what role do parental control tools and methods play in the upbringing of our children? How should we define or classify parental control tools and methods? Which are most important / effective? Finally, what should the role of public policy be toward parental control technologies on both the online safety and privacy fronts?

In past years, I spent much time writing and updating a booklet on these issues called Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods. It was an enormous undertaking, however, and I have abandoned updating it after I hit version 4.0. But that doesn’t mean I’m not still putting a lot of thought into these issues. My focus has shifted over the past year more toward the privacy-related concerns and away from the online safety issues. Of course, all these issues intersect and many people now (rightly) considered them to largely be the same debate.

Anyway, to kick off the FOSI event, I offered three provocations about parental control technologies and the state of the current debate over them. I buttressed some of my assertions with findings from a recent FOSI survey of parental attitudes about parental controls and online safety. Continue reading →

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Top 10 Antitrust Fallacies to Watch for at Today’s Google Antitrust Hearing

by on September 21, 2011 · 8 comments

by Berin Szoka & Geoffrey Manne

In advance of today’s Senate Judiciary hearing, “The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?,” we’ve assembled a list of fallacies you’re likely to hear, either explicitly or implicitly:

  1. Competitors, not Competition.  Antitrust protects consumer welfare: competition, not competitors.  Competitors complain because a practice hurts them, but antitrust asks only whether a practice actually hurts consumers. The two are rarely the same.
  2. Big Is Bad. Being big (“success”) isn’t illegal.  Market share doesn’t necessarily create market power.  And even where market power does exist, antitrust punishes only its abuse.
  3. Burden-Shifting. Google, like any defendant, is presumed innocent until proven guilty.  So Google’s critics bear the burden of proving both that Google has market power and that it has abused that power to the detriment of consumers.  Yet, ironically, it’s Google at the table defending itself rather than the antitrust agencies explaining their concerns.
  4. Ignoring Error Costs. The faster technology moves, the greater the risk of a “false positive” and the more likely “false negatives” are to be mooted by disruptive innovation that unseats incumbents.  Thus, error costs counsel caution.
  5. Waving the Magic Wand.  Google’s critics often blithely assume that Google is “smart enough to figure it out” when it comes to implementing, or coping with, a wide range of proposed remedies.  But antitrust remedies, like all regulation, must be grounded in technological reality, and we must be realistic about real-world trade-offs.

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