Yesterday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign released a tech and innovation agenda. The document covers many tech subjects, including cybersecurity, copyright, and and tech workforce investments, but I’ll narrow my comments to the areas I have the most expertise in: broadband infrastructure and Internet regulation. These roughly match up, respectively, to the second and fourth sections of the five-section document.
On the whole, the broadband infrastructure and Internet regulation sections list good, useful priorities. The biggest exception is Hillary’s strong endorsement of the Title II rules for the Internet, which, as I explained in the National Review last week, is a heavy-handed regulatory regime that is ripe for abuse and will be enforced by a politicized agency.
Her tech agenda doesn’t mention a Communications Act rewrite but I’d argue it’s implied in her proposed reforms. Further, her statements last year at an event suggest she supports significant telecom reforms. In early 2015, Clinton spoke to tech journalist Kara Swisher (HT Doug Brake) and it was pretty clear Clinton viewed Title II as an imperfect and likely temporary effort to enforce neutrality norms. In fact, Clinton said she prefers “a modern, 21st-century telecom technology act” to replace Title II and the rest of the 1934 Communications Act. Continue reading →
I’m pleased to announce the publication of my latest law review article, “Guns, Limbs, and Toys: What Future for 3D Printing?” The article, which appears in Vol. 17 of the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology, was co-authored with Adam Marcus. Here’s the abstract:
We stand on the cusp of the next great industrial revolution thanks to technological innovations and developments that could significantly enhance the welfare of people across the world. This article will focus on how one of those modern inventions–3D printing–could offer the public significant benefits, but not without some serious economic, social, and legal disruptions along the way. We begin by explaining what 3D printing is and how it works. We also discuss specific applications of this technology and its potential benefits. We then turn to the policy frameworks that could govern 3D printing technologies and itemize a few of the major public policy issues that are either already being discussed, or which could become pertinent in the future. We offer some general guidance for policymakers who might be pondering the governance of 3D printing technologies going forward. Contra to the many other articles and position papers that have already been penned about 3D printing policy, which only selectively defend permissionless innovation in narrow circumstances, we endorse it as the default rule across all categories of 3D printing applications.
More specifically, we do a deep dive into 3 primary public policy “fault lines” for 3D printing: firearms, medical devices, and intellectual property concerns. Read the whole thing for more details.
The folks over at RegBlog are running a series of essays on “Rooting Out Regulatory Capture,” a problem that I’ve spent a fair amount of time discussing here and elsewhere in the past. (See, most notably, my compendium on, “Regulatory Capture: What the Experts Have Found.”) The first major contribution in the RegBlog series is from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and it is entitled, “Corporate Capture of the Rulemaking Process.”
Sen. Warren makes many interesting points about the dangers of regulatory capture, but the heart of her argument about how to deal with the problem can basically be summarized as ‘Let’s Build a Better Breed of Bureaucrat and Give Them More Money.’ In her own words, she says we should “limit opportunities for ‘cultural’ capture'” of government officials and also “give agencies the money that they need to do their jobs.”
It may sound good in theory, but I’m always a bit perplexed by that argument because the implicit claims here are that:
(a) the regulatory officials of the past were somehow less noble-minded and more open to corruption than some hypothetical better breed of bureaucrat that is out there waiting to be found and put into office; and
(b) that the regulatory agencies of the past were somehow starved for resources and lacked “the money that they need to do their jobs.”
Neither of these assumptions is true and yet those arguments seem to animate most of the reform proposals set forth by progressive politicians and scholars for how to deal with the problem of capture. Continue reading →
The FCC’s transaction reviews have received substantial scholarly criticism lately. The FCC has increasingly used its license transaction reviews as an opportunity to engage in ad hoc merger reviews that substitute for formal rulemaking. FCC transaction conditions since 2000 have ranged from requiring AOL-Time Warner to make future instant messaging services interoperable, to price controls for broadband for low-income families, to mandating merging parties to donate $1 million to public safety initiatives.
In the last few months alone,
- Randy May and Seth Cooper of the Free State Foundation wrote a piece that the transaction reviews contravene rule of law norms.
- T. Randolph Beard et al. at the Phoenix Center published a research paper about how the FCC’s informal bargaining during mergers has become much more active and politically motivated in recent years.
- Derek Bambauer, law professor at the University of Arizona, published a law review article that criticized the use of informal agency actions to pressure companies to act in certain ways. These secretive pressures “cloak what is in reality state action in the guise of private choice.”
This week, in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, my colleague Christopher Koopman and I added to this recent scholarship on the FCC’s controversial transaction reviews. Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.