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 the wake of last week’s big SOPA showdown, a lot of people are talking about the expanded presence and power of the Internet, online operators, and digital Netizens in Washington policy debates. I certainly don’t mean to diminish the importance of this particular episode. It certainly is historic, regardless of how you feel about the specifics of SOPA. What does concern me, however, is the way this episode is prompting questions about how much more “engagement” Internet companies need to consider inside the Beltway. For example, today’s Wall Street Journal features an article on “The Web’s Growing Muscle” and notes:
The Internet industry has found a rare sweet spot in Washington. With Google in the lead, the companies have begun building a strong traditional lobbying force in Washington. And, to complement that inside game, websites’ millions of users have become a powerful outside weight on Congress. What’s more, in a rare Washington double play, the concerns of Internet companies have found a sympathetic ear both in the Democratic White House and among Republican presidential candidates who otherwise can’t agree with Barack Obama on anything.
The piece concludes with a quote from an anonymous media executive saying “People are looking at what Google spent on lobbying and wondering, ‘Can we match that?’ It has to be a big spend.”
I cannot possibly think of anything more demoralizing than that. Continue reading →
According to the BBC, the European Commission is apparently set to adopt formal rules guaranteeing a so-called “right to be forgotten” online. As part of the Commission’s overhaul of the 1995 Data Protection Directive, this new regulation will mandate that, “people will be able to ask for data about them to be deleted and firms will have to comply unless there are ‘legitimate’ grounds to retain it,” the BBC reports.
I thought Todd Zywicki, a senior scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, did a nice job on Judge Napolitano’s “Freedom Watch” show addressing the contentious question of whether government should be regulating food advertising in order to somehow make American kids healthier. Todd pointed out how the advertising guidelines currently being developed are anything but “voluntary” and noted that there are many causes of childhood obesity. Watch the clip here:
As if my earlier essay on why “We Need More Attack Ads in Political Campaigns” wasn’t incendiary enough, allow me to heap praise on this outstanding new oped by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen “In Defense of Big Money in Politics.” Few things get me more steamed than when Democrats and Republicans decry “big money” in politics and claim we need to aggressively clamp down on it. What’s even more insulting is when they say this is a smart way to encourage 3rd party political candidates and movements.
What’s really going on here is simple protectionism. The reason that today’s politicians want to regulate cash in campaigns is because the two parties already own the system. Believe me, as someone who has NEVER voted for a politician from either of the two leading parties, I would love for it to be the case that clamping down on campaign spending actually helped 3rd party candidates. Richard Cohen’s column explains why that certainly wasn’t the case with Eugene McCarthy’s historic 1968 challenge to Lyndon Johnson, which was fueled by “big money” contributions from a handful of major donors. Here’s how Cohen begins his piece: Continue reading →
My latest weekly Forbes column asks, “Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short?” and it explores the dynamics that lead many parents and policymakers to perpetually write off younger generations. As the late journalism professor Margaret A. Blanchard once observed: “[P]arents and grandparents who lead the efforts to cleanse today’s society seem to forget that they survived alleged attacks on their morals by different media when they were children. Each generation’s adults either lose faith in the ability of their young people to do the same or they become convinced that the dangers facing the new generation are much more substantial than the ones they faced as children.”
What explains this phenomenon? In my essay, I argue that it comes down to a combination of “juvenoia” and hyper-nostalgia. University of New Hampshire sociologist David Finkelhor defines juvenoia as “exaggerated anxiety about the influence of social change on children and youth.” Once you combine such panicky juvenoia about new media and youth culture with a nostalgic view of the past that says the “good ‘ol days” are behind us, you get the common generational claim that the current good-for-nothing generation and their new-fangled gadgets and culture are steering us straight into the moral abyss.
Instead of panic and hyper-pessimism, I believe that the more sensible approach approach is patient parental engagement and mentoring. I argue that “quite often, the best approach to learning more about our children’s culture is to immerse ourselves in it. Should we worry about the content found in some games, music, or videos? Perhaps we should. Sitting down and consuming that content with our kids and talking to them about it might be the best way to better understand their culture and then mentor them accordingly.”
I enjoyed this new piece by Matt Welch over at Reason about the uses and abuses of the “if we can put a man on the moon” metaphor. “There’s no escaping the moonshot in contemporary political discourse,” Welch notes. Indeed, in the field of technology policy, we hear the old “if we can put a man on the moon, then we can [fill in the blank]… ” line with increasing regularity.
For example, just a few years ago, in the midst of the social networking “predator panic,” several state Attorneys General, led by Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, pushed aggressively for a mandatory online age verification scheme. At several points during the debate, Blumenthal, now a U.S. Senator, argued that “The technology is available. The solution is financially feasible, practically doable. If we can put a man on the moon, we can check ages of people on these Web sites,” he claimed. Of course, just saying so doesn’t make it true. As I noted in a big paper on the issue, online age verification is extremely complicated, likely even impossible, and history has shown that no technological control is foolproof. Moreover, attempts to impose authentication and identification schemes would have numerous trade-offs and unintended consequences, especially for online anonymity, privacy, and free speech. A subsequent report by the Harvard-based blue ribbon Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF) showed why that was the case. Continue reading →
Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein had a terrific column yesterday (Human Knowledge, Brought to You By…) on one of my favorite subjects: how advertising is the great subsidizer of the press, media, content, and online services. Klein correctly notes that “our informational commons, or what we think of as our informational commons, is, for the most part, built atop a latticework of advertising platforms. In that way,” he continues, “it’s possible that no single industry — not newspapers nor search engines nor anything else — has done as much to advance the storehouse of accessible human knowledge in the 20th century as advertisers. They didn’t do it because they are philanthropists, and they didn’t do it because they love information. But they did it nevertheless.”
Quite right. As I noted in my recent Charleston Law Review article on “Advertising, Commercial Speech & First Amendment Parity,” media economists have found that advertising has traditionally provided about 70% to 80% of support for newspapers and magazines, and advertising / underwriting has entirely paid for broadcast TV and radio media. And it goes without saying that advertising has been an essential growth engine for online sites and services. How is it that we’re not required to pay per search, or pay for most online news services, or shell out $19.95 a month for LinkedIn, Facebook, or other social media services? The answer, of course, is advertising. Thus, Klein notes, while “we see [] advertising as a distraction… without the advertising, the information wouldn’t exist. So the history of information, in the United States at least, is the history of platforms that could support advertising.”
And the sustaining power of advertising for new media continues to grow. As I noted in my law review article: Continue reading →
I’ve never understood why so many people whine about “negative attack ads” during political campaign season. To me, attack ads are just about the only interesting thing that comes out of the early campaign / caucus period. Attack ads are usually chock-full of useful information about candidates and their positions and they typically provoke or even demand a response from the politician being attacked. They also attract increased media scrutiny and broader societal deliberation about a candidate and his or her views.
More importantly, these attack ads and the responses they provoke are far, far more substantive than the typical campaign ad puffery we see and hear. Most campaign ads are packed with absurd banalities ensuring us that the candidate running the ad loves their spouse, children, country, and God. Well, of course they do! Enough of that silly crap. It’s meaningless drivel. Give us more attack ads, I say! They are a healthy part of deliberative democracy and our free speech tradition.
In an provocative oped in today’s New York Times, Vint Cerf, one of the pioneers of the Net who now holds the position “chief Internet evangelist” at Google, makes the argument for why “Internet Access Is Not a Human Right.” He argues:
technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it.
The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of access to information — and those are not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular time. Indeed, even the United Nations report, which was widely hailed as declaring Internet access a human right, acknowledged that the Internet was valuable as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.
You won’t be surprised to hear that I generally agree. But there are two other issues Cerf fails to address. First, who or what pays the bill for classifying the Internet or broadband as a birthright entitlement? Second, what are the potential downsides for competition and innovation from such a move? Continue reading →
As 2011 winds down, I thought I’d list a few year-end analytics for The Technology Liberation Front blog. In 2011, we had just under 400,000 visits from 332,000 unique visitors. That’s up from 312,000 visits and 247,000 unique visitors in 2010.If you prefer a pageviews metric then we had 514,000 pageviews and 444,000 unique pageviews in 2011, up from 420,000 and 361,000 respectively in 2010.
As far as the top posts of the year go, anything Bitcoin related proved to be link-bait magic with 4 of the top 10 posts (all by Jerry Brito) being about Bitcoin. But it was Ryan Radia’s post on how to protect your privacy on Facebook and the Net more generally that commanded the most hits in 2011 with almost 35,000 views. Congrats Ryan! Anyway, the year’s Top 10 list follows below and many thanks to all those who took the time to visit the TLF over the past year.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.