Articles by Adam Thierer 
Senior Fellow in Technology & Innovation at the R Street Institute in Washington, DC. Formerly a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, President of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, Director of Telecommunications Studies at the Cato Institute, and a Fellow in Economic Policy at the Heritage Foundation.
In their paper, “Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy,” my Mercatus Center colleagues Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins warned of the dangers of “threat inflation” in cybersecurity policy debates. In early 2011, Mercatus also published a paper by Sean Lawson, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, entitled “Beyond Cyber Doom” that documented how fear-based tactics and cyber-doom scenarios and rhetoric increasingly were on display in cybersecurity policy debates. Finally, in my recent Mercatus Center working paper, “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” I extended their threat inflation analysis and developed a comprehensive framework offering additional examples of, and explanations for, threat inflation in technology policy debates.
These papers make it clear that a sort of hysteria has developed around cyberwar and cybersecurity issues. Frequent allusions are made in cybersecurity debates to the potential for a “Digital Pearl Harbor,” a “cyber cold war,” a “cyber Katrina,” or even a “cyber 9/11.” These analogies are made even though these historical incidents resulted in death and destruction of a sort not comparable to attacks on digital networks. Others refer to “cyber bombs” even though no one can be “bombed” with binary code. And new examples of such inflationary rhetoric seem to emerge each day. Continue reading →
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has just released my new white paper, “The Perils of Classifying Social Media Platforms as Public Utilities.” [PDF] I first presented a draft of this paper last November at a Michigan State University conference on “The Governance of Social Media.” [Video of my panel here.]
In this paper, I note that to the extent public utility-style regulation has been debated within the Internet policy arena over the past decade, the focus has been almost entirely on the physical layer of the Internet. The question has been whether Internet service providers should be considered “essential facilities” or “natural monopolies” and regulated as public utilities. The debate over “net neutrality” regulation has been animated by such concerns.
While that debate still rages, the rhetoric of public utilities and essential facilities is increasingly creeping into policy discussions about other layers of the Internet, such as the search layer. More recently, there have been rumblings within academic and public policy circles regarding whether social media platforms, especially social networking sites, might also possess public utility characteristics. Presumably, such a classification would entail greater regulation of those sites’ structures and business practices.
Proponents of treating social media platforms as public utilities offer a variety of justifications for regulation. Amorphous “fairness” concerns animate many of these calls, but privacy and reputational concerns are also frequently mentioned as rationales for regulation. Proponents of regulation also sometimes invoke “social utility” or “social commons” arguments in defense of increased government oversight, even though these notions lack clear definition.
Social media platforms do not resemble traditional public utilities, however, and there are good reasons why policymakers should avoid a rush to regulate them as such. Continue reading →
Time Warner Cable (TWC) has announced it will once again attempt an experiment with usage-based pricing (UBP) for its broadband services. (News coverage here, here, and here.) The company gave UBP a shot a few years ago and some consumers, regulatory advocates, and lawmakers howled in protest. The radical activist group Free Press called for immediate policy action and former Rep. Eric Massa’s (D-NY) was happy to oblige with his proposed “Broadband Internet Fairness Act,” which would have let the FCC decide whether such pricing plans were permissible.
For their latest UBP experiment, TWC goes out of its way to avoid controversy, primarily by making it clear the plan is entirely optional. Here’s what their consumers are offered as part of what is being labelled it’s “Value Edition” plan:
- Up to 5GB/month of data transmission for a $5/month discount from one’s current monthly bill. All Standard, Basic and Lite broadband customers will be eligible. Turbo, Extreme and Wideband customers will continue as always, with access to unlimited broadband and no optional tiered plan or discounts.
- The ability to opt-in and opt-out of a tiered package at any time.
- A “meter” that tracks usage on a daily, monthly, weekly or even hourly basis, enabling customers to accurately gauge usage. Below is an example of the hourly meter:
- A 60 day/2 billing-cycle grace period to allow customers to adjust usage patterns. During this time we will notify customers of overages but won’t charge for them.
- Overages will cost $1 per GB, not to exceed a maximum of $25/month.
It’s hard to see how anyone could be against this and I was pleased to see that Harold Feld of Public Knowledge didn’t automatically dismiss it and, in fact, had some rather favorable things to say about it. Continue reading →
[UPDATE: 2/14/2013: As noted here, this paper was published by the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology in their Winter 2013 edition. Please refer to that post for more details and cite this final version of the paper going forward.]
I’m pleased to report that the Mercatus Center at George Mason University has just released my huge new white paper, “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle.” I’ve been working on this paper for a long time and look forward to finding it a home in a law journal some time soon. Here’s the summary of this 80-page paper:
Fear is an extremely powerful motivating force, especially in public policy debates where it is used in an attempt to sway opinion or bolster the case for action. Often, this action involves preemptive regulation based on false assumptions and evidence. Such fears are frequently on display in the Internet policy arena and take the form of full-blown “technopanic,” or real-world manifestations of this illogical fear. While it’s true that cyberspace has its fair share of troublemakers, there is no evidence that the Internet is leading to greater problems for society.
This paper considers the structure of fear appeal arguments in technology policy debates and then outlines how those arguments can be deconstructed and refuted in both cultural and economic contexts. Several examples of fear appeal arguments are offered with a particular focus on online child safety, digital privacy, and cybersecurity. The various factors contributing to “fear cycles” in these policy areas are documented.
To the extent that these concerns are valid, they are best addressed by ongoing societal learning, experimentation, resiliency, and coping strategies rather than by regulation. If steps must be taken to address these concerns, education and empowerment-based solutions represent superior approaches to dealing with them compared to a precautionary principle approach, which would limit beneficial learning opportunities and retard technological progress.
The complete paper can be found on the Mercatus site here, on SSRN, or on Scribd. I’ve also embedded it below in a Scribd reader. Continue reading →
Over at Forbes I have posted some thoughts on the new privacy framework (Consumer Data Privacy in a Networked World) that the Obama Administration released today. In my essay, “The Problem with Obama’s “Let’s Be More Like Europe” Privacy Plan,” I hammer home the same point I’ve made here before many times: Regulation is not a costless exercise. No matter how well-intentioned regulatory proposals may be, they can often have unforeseen, unintended consequences. This is equally true for privacy controls. I discuss how a new privacy regulatory regime could drive up prices for services that currently are free or inexpensive, limit new digital services and innovations, create barriers to entry for new entrants and entrepreneurs, negatively impact the competitiveness of existing U.S. Internet operators, and, more generally, increase the horizons of government power over the Internet.
For a more detailed analysis of these issues, I encourage you to check out my big Mercatus Center filing to the FTC last year on privacy and Do Not Track regulation. Also, here are few TLF essays that summarize my skepticism about expanded privacy controls:
Today the Federal Trade Commission released a new report entitled, “Mobile Apps for Kids: Current Privacy Disclosures Are Disappointing,” which concludes that “confusing and hard-to-find disclosures do not give parents the control that they need in this area. The FTC argues that “parents need consistent, easily accessible, and recognizable disclosures regarding in-app purchase capabilities so that they can make informed decisions about whether to allow their children to use apps with such capabilities.”
It’s hard to be against the FTC’s “the more disclosure, the better” policy recommendation and I’m not about to come out against it here. But the question is: how much disclosure is enough? Reading through the report and seeing how hard the FTC hammers this point home makes me think the agency wants our app store checkout process to be littered with the pages of fine print disclosure policies that now accompany our credit card statements and home mortgage payments! Seriously, would that make us better off?
As a parent of two kids who both download countless apps on my Android phone, my wife’s iPhone, and our family’s Android tablet, I appreciate a certain amount of disclosure about what sort of information apps are collecting and how they are using it. I think Google’s Android marketplace strikes a nice balance here, providing us with the most crucial facts about what the application will access or share. Apple could do more on disclosure but the company also prides itself (to the dismay of some!) on its rigorous pre-screening process to make sure the apps in the App Store are safe and don’t violate certain privacy and security policies. Yet, as the FTC correctly points out, “the details of this screening process are not clear.” Of course, most Apple users simply don’t give a damn. They’re all too happy to let Apple just take care of it for them even if they’re not really sure what’s happening to their data behind the scenes. The more privacy-sensitive crowd wants greater disclosure and control, of course, and I’m sympathetic to that plea. But again, how much disclosure is enough? Are you going to wade through pages of disclosure policies and privacy opt-ins before downloading that latest iteration of “Angry Birds” or “Cut the Rope”? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on that. The more interested findings in the survey relate to price and market dynamics and I am hoping people don’t ignore them. Continue reading →
Friends of Internet freedom, I need your assistance. I think we need to develop a principled, pro-liberty blueprint for Internet policy going forward. Can you help me draw up five solid principles to guide that effort?
No, wait, don’t worry about it… it has has already been done!
As I noted in my latest weekly Forbes column, “Fifteen years ago, the Clinton Administration proposed a paradigm for how cyberspace should be governed that remains the most succinct articulation of a pro-liberty, market-oriented vision for cyberspace ever penned. It recommended that we rely on civil society, contractual negotiations, voluntary agreements, and ongoing marketplace experiments to solve information age problems. In essence, they were recommending a high-tech Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm (to the Internet).”
That was the vision articulated by President Clinton’s chief policy counsel Ira Magaziner, who was in charge of crafting the administration’s Framework for Global Electronic Commerce in July 1997. I was blown away by the document then and continue to genuflect before it today. Let’s recall the five principles at the heart of this beautiful Framework: Continue reading →
On numerous occasions here at the TLF over the past eight years, I’ve noted the profound influence that the late Ithiel de Sola Pool had on my thinking about the interaction of technology, information, and public policy. In fact, when I needed to pick a thematic title for my weekly Forbes column, it only took me a second to think of the perfect one: “Technologies of Freedom.” I borrowed that from the title of Pool’s 1983 masterpiece, Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age. As I noted in my short Amazon.com review, Pool’s technological tour de force is simply breathtaking in its polemical power and predictive capabilities. Reading this book three decades after it was published, one comes to believe that Pool must have possessed a crystal ball or had a Nostradamus-like ability to foresee the future.
I felt that same was this week when I was re-reading some chapters from his posthumous book, Technologies without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global Age–a collection of his remaining essays nicely edited and tied together by Eli Noam after Pool’s death in 1984. Re-reading it again reminded me of Pool’s remarkable predictive powers. In particular, the closing chapter on “Technology and Culture” includes some of Pool’s thoughts on the future of copyright. As you read through that passage below, please try to remember he wrote these words back in the early 1980s, long before most people had even heard of the Internet and when home personal computing was only just beginning to take off. Yet, from what he already knew about networked computers and digital methods of transmitting information, Pool was able to paint a prescient portrait of the future copyright wars that we now find ourselves in the midst of. Here’s what he had to say almost 30 years ago about how things would play out: Continue reading →
Rebecca MacKinnon’s new book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, is well-researched exploration of the forces driving Internet developments and policy across the globe today. She serves up an outstanding history of recent global protest movements and social revolutions and explores the role that Internet technologies and digital networks played in those efforts. She also surveys some of the recent policy fights here and abroad over issues such as online privacy, Net neutrality regulation, free speech matters, and the copyright wars. The Consent of the Networked is certainly worth reading and will go down as one of the most important Internet policy books of 2012.
A Call to Action
Of course, it’s not just a history lesson. MacKinnon has also issued a call-to-arms here. As a well-known web activist, MacKinnon has emerged as a leading force in the broad-based, if loosely-defined, “Net freedom” movement. The term “Net freedom,” she notes, means very different things to different people. It’s “like a Rorschach inkblot test: different people look at the same ink splotch and see very different things.” (p. 188) Nonetheless, on the global stage, the Internet freedom movement is fundamentally tied up with efforts to hold both governments and corporate actors more accountable for their actions toward the Netizens, digital networks, and online speech and expression. Continue reading →
My latest Forbes column is entitled “Why Doesn’t Society Just Fall Apart?” and it’s a short review of Bruce Schneier’s latest book, Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive. It’s an interesting exploration of the societal pressures that combine to ensure that (most!) societies don’t go off the rails and end in anarchic violence. In particular, he identifies and discusses four “societal pressures” combine to help create and preserve trust within society. Those pressures include: (1) Moral pressures; (2) Reputational pressures; (3) Institutional pressures; and (4) Security systems. By “dialing in” these societal pressures in varying degrees, trust is generated over time within groups.
Of course, these societal pressures also fail on occasion, Schneier notes. He explores a host of scenarios — in organizations, corporations, and governments — when trust breaks down because defectors seek to evade the norms and rules the society lives by. These defectors are the “liars and outliers” in Schneier’s narrative and his book is an attempt to explain the complex array of incentives and trade-offs that are at work and which lead some humans to “game” systems or evade the norms and rules others follow. 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.