Technopanics, Progress Studies, AI, spectrum, and privacy were hot topics at the Technology Liberation Front in the past year. Below are the most popular posts from 2019.
Glancing at our site metrics over the past 10 years, the biggest topics in the 2010s were technopanics, Bitcoin, net neutrality, the sharing economy, and broadband policy. Looking forward at the 2020s, I’ll hazard some predictions about what will be significant debates at the TLF: technopanics and antitrust, AVs, drones, and the future of work. I suspect that technology and federalism will be long-running issues in the next decade, particularly for drones, privacy, AVs, antitrust, and healthcare tech.
Enjoy 2019’s top 10, and Happy New Year.
10. 50 Years of Video Games & Moral Panics by Adam Thierer
I have a confession: I’m 50 years old and still completely in love with video games.
As a child of the 1970s, I straddled the divide between the old and new worlds of gaming. I was (and remain) obsessed with board and card games, which my family played avidly. But then Atari’s home version of “Pong” landed in 1976. The console had rudimentary graphics and controls, and just one game to play, but it was a revelation. After my uncle bought Pong for my cousins, our families and neighbors would gather round his tiny 20-inch television to watch two electronic paddles and a little dot move around the screen.
9. The Limits of AI in Predicting Human Action by Anne Hobson and Walter Stover
Let’s assume for a second that AIs could possess not only all relevant information about an individual, but also that individual’s knowledge. Even if companies somehow could gather this knowledge, it would only be a snapshot at a moment in time. Infinite converging factors can affect one’s next decision to not purchase a soda, even if your past purchase history suggests you will. Maybe you went to the store that day with a stomach ache. Maybe your doctor just warned you about the perils of high fructose corn syrup so you forgo your purchase. Maybe an AI-driven price raise causes you to react by finding an alternative seller.
In other words, when you interact with the market—for instance, going to the store to buy groceries—you are participating in a discovery process about your own preferences or willingness to pay.
8. Free-market spectrum policy and the C Band by Brent Skorup
A few years ago I would have definitely favored speed and the secondary market plan. I still lean towards that approach but I’m a little more on the fence after reading Richard Epstein’s work and others’ about the “public trust doctrine.” This is a traditional governance principle that requires public actors to receive fair value when disposing of public property. It prevents public institutions from giving discounted public property to friends and cronies. Clearly, cronyism isn’t the case here and FCC can’t undo what FCCs did generations ago in giving away spectrum. I think the need for speedy deployment trumps the windfall issue here, but it’s a closer call for me than in the past.
One proposal that hasn’t been contemplated with the C Band but might have merit is an overlay auction with a deadline. With such an auction, the FCC gives incumbent users a deadline to vacate a band (say, 5 years). The FCC then auctions flexible-use licenses in the band. The FCC receives the auction revenues and the winning bidders are allowed to deploy services immediately in the “white spaces” unoccupied by the incumbents. The winning bidders are allowed to pay the incumbents to move out before the deadline.
7. STELAR Expiration Warranted by Hance Haney
The retransmission fees were purposely set low to help the emerging satellite carriers get established in the marketplace when innovation in satellite technology still had a long way to go. Today the carriers are thriving business enterprises, and there is no need for them to continue receiving subsidies. Broadcasters, on the other hand, face unprecedented competition for advertising revenue that historically covered the entire cost of content production.
Today a broadcaster receives 28 cents per subscriber per month when a satellite carrier retransmits their local television signal. But the fair market value of that signal is actually $2.50, according to one estimate.
6. What is Progress Studies? by Adam Thierer
How do we shift cultural and political attitudes about innovation and progress in a more positive direction? Collison and Cowen explicitly state that the goal of Progress Studies transcends “mere comprehension” in that it should also look to “identify effective progress-increasing interventions and the extent to which they are adopted by universities, funding agencies, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and other institutions.”
But fostering social and political attitudes conducive to innovation is really more art than science. Specifically, it is the art of persuasion. Science can help us amass the facts proving the importance of innovation and progress to human improvement. Communicating those facts and ensuring that they infuse culture, institutions, and public policy is more challenging.
5. How Do You Value Data? A Reply To Jaron Lanier’s Op-Ed In The NYT by Will Rinehart
All of this is to say that there is no one single way to estimate the value of data.
As for the Lanier piece, here are some other things to consider:
A market for data already exists. It just doesn’t include a set of participants that Jaron wants to include, which are platform users.
Will users want to be data entrepreneurs, looking for the best value for their data? Probably not. At best, they will hire an intermediary to do this, which is basically the job of the platforms already.
An underlying assumption is that the value of data is greater than the value advertisers are willing to pay for a slice of your attention. I’m not sure I agree with that.
Finally, how exactly do you write these kinds of laws?
4. Explaining the California Privacy Rights and Enforcement Act of 2020 by Ian Adams
As released, the initiative is equal parts privacy extremism and cynical-politics. Substantively, some will find elements to applaud in the CPREA, between prohibitions on the use of behavioral advertising and reputational risk assessment (all of which are deserving of their own critiques), but the operational structure of the CPREA is nothing short of disastrous. Here are some of the worst bits:
3. Best Practices for Public Policy Analysts by Adam Thierer
So, for whatever it’s worth, here are a few ideas about how to improve your content and your own brand as a public policy analyst. The first list is just some general tips I’ve learned from others after 25 years in the world of public policy. Following that, I have also included a separate set of notes I use for presentations focused specifically on how to prepare effective editorials and legislative testimony. There are many common recommendations on both lists, but I thought I would just post them both here together.
2. An Epic Moral Panic Over Social Media by Adam Thierer
Strangely, many elites, politicians, and parents forget that they, too, were once kids and that their generation was probably also considered hopelessly lost in the “vast wasteland” of whatever the popular technology or content of the day was. The Pessimists Archive podcast has documented dozens of examples of this reoccurring phenomenon. Each generation makes it through the panic du jour, only to turn around and start lambasting newer media or technologies that they worry might be rotting their kids to the core. While these panics come and go, the real danger is that they sometimes result in concrete policy actions that censor content or eliminate choices that the public enjoys. Such regulatory actions can also discourage the emergence of new choices.
1. How Conservatives Came to Favor the Fairness Doctrine & Net Neutrality by Adam Thierer
If I divided my time in Tech Policy Land into two big chunks of time, I’d say the biggest tech-related policy issue for conservatives during the first 15 years I was in the business (roughly 1990 – 2005) was preventing the resurrection of the so-called Fairness Doctrine. And the biggest issue during the second 15-year period (roughly 2005 – present) was stopping the imposition of “Net neutrality” mandates on the Internet. In both cases, conservatives vociferously blasted the notion that unelected government bureaucrats should sit in judgment of what constituted “fairness” in media or “neutrality” online.
Many conservatives are suddenly changing their tune, however.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.