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.
This morning, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released its eagerly-awaited Preliminary FTC Staff Report on Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: A Proposed Framework for Businesses and Policymakers. As expected, the agency has generally endorsed an expanded regulatory regime to govern online data collection and advertising efforts in the name of protecting consumer privacy. More specifically, the agency endorsed a so-called “Do Not Track” mechanism that would supposedly help consumers block unwanted data collection or advertising. Here’s how the agency describes it:
Such a universal mechanism could be accomplished by legislation or potentially through robust, enforceable self-regulation. The most practical method of providing uniform choice for online behavioral advertising would likely involve placing a setting similar to a persistent cookie on a consumer’s browser and conveying that setting to sites that the browser visits, to signal whether or not the consumer wants to be tracked or receive targeted advertisements. To be effective, there must be an enforceable requirement that sites honor those choices. (p. 66)
I’m sure we’ll have plenty more to say here about the issue in coming weeks and months (comments on the FTC report are due by Jan. 31), but we’ve already commented on this proposal here before. See 1, 2, 3. To briefly summarize a few of those concerns: Continue reading →
Milton Mueller, a professor at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, is a familiar figure to anyone who follows Internet governance issues. He has established himself as a leading Net governance guru thanks to his extensive academic record in this field with books like Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace (2002) and his work with The Internet Governance Project and the Global Internet Governance Academic Network. Mueller’s latest book, Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance, continues his exploration of the forces shaping Internet policy across the globe.
The de Tocqueville of Cyberspace
What Mueller is doing – better than anyone else, in my opinion – is becoming the early chronicler of the unfolding Internet governance scene. He meticulously reports on, and then deconstructs, ongoing governance developments along the cyber-frontier. He is, in effect, a sort of de Tocqueville for cyberspace; an outsider looking in and asking questions about what makes this new world tick. Fifty years from now, when historians look back on the opening era of Internet governance squabbles, Milton Mueller’s work will be among the first things they consult.
Mueller’s goal in Networks and States is two-fold and has both an empirical and normative element. First, he aims to extend his exploration of the actors and forces affecting Internet governance debates and then develop a framework and taxonomy to better map and understand these forces and actors. He does a wonderful job on that front, even though many Net governance issues (especially those related to domain name system issues and ICANN) can be incredibly boring. Mueller finds a way to make them far more interesting, especially by helping to familiarize the reader with the personalities and organizations that increasingly dominate these debates and the issues and principles that drive their actions or activism.
Mueller’s second goal in Networks and States is to breathe new life into the old cyber-libertarian philosophy that was more prevalent during the Net’s founding era but has lost favor today. I plan to discuss this second goal in more detail here because Mueller has done something quite important in Networks and States: He has issued a call to arms to those who care about classical liberalism telling us, in effect, to get off our duffs and get serious about the fight for Internet freedom. Continue reading →
Proponents of Net neutrality regulation continue their full-court press to get the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and its chairman, Julius Genachowski, to unilaterally push through a new industrial policy regime for the Internet. The latest word, according to Politico, is that the agency is pushing back its scheduled December open meeting from Dec. 15 to Dec. 21 to give the agency more time to plot its next move. There’s no word yet what the agency’s regulatory blueprint will look like, so it’s impossible to critique the agency’s plan at this point. I’ve made the case against Net neutrality regulation here before, however, and I’m sure those same concerns and critiques will apply to whatever the agency ends up adopting.
What’s most concerning about the way this process is playing out currently is just how anti-democratic it is. I understand the zeal of the pro-regulatory forces on this issue, but there is simply no good excuse for advocating that 3 unelected officials at an independent regulatory agency rush through a vote to regulate a such a massive and important sector of the American economy.
It used to be the case that a broad and non-partisan coalition of academics and organizations supported the non-delegation principle, which, generally speaking, refers to the notion that only democratically elected officials should be in a position to pass laws and make the really important decisions about the future course of our polity and its economy. Of course, when it comes to the economy, I’d prefer most of those decisions be left to marketplace experimentation. However, to the extent regulation is deemed necessary and that regulation governs such a massively important portion of the American economy, that determination should definitely be made by elected leaders in Congress and not delegated to bureaucrats who would ram through regulations with 3 votes and sketchy plan for reordering that sector. Continue reading →
When it comes to technology policy, I’m usually a fairly optimistic guy. But when it comes to technology politics, well, I have my grumpier moments. I had at particularly grumpy moment earlier this summer when I was sitting at a hearing listening to a bunch of high-tech companies bash each other’s brains in and basically calling for lawmakers to throw everyone else under the regulatory bus except for them. Instead of heeding Ben Franklin’s sound old advice that “We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately,” it’s increasingly clear that high-tech America seems determined to just try to hang each other. It’d be one thing if that heated competition was all taking place in the marketplace, but, increasingly, more and more of it is taking place inside the Beltway with regulation instead of innovation being the weapon of choice.
That episode made me think back to the outstanding 2000 manifesto penned by T. J. Rodgers, president and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, “Why Silicon Valley Should Not Normalize Relations with Washington, D.C.” I went back and re-read it upon the 10th anniversary of its publication by the Cato Institute and, sadly, came to realize that just about everything Rodgers had feared and predicted had come true. Rodgers had attempted to preemptively discourage high-tech companies from an excessive “normalization” of relations with the parasitic culture that dominates Washington by reminding them what Washington giveth it can also taketh away. “The political scene in Washington is antithetical to the core values that drive our success in the international marketplace and risks converting entrepreneurs into statist businessmen,” he warned a decade ago. “The collectivist notion that drives policymaking in Washington is the irrevocable enemy of high-technology capitalism and the wealth creation process.” And he reminded his fellow capitalists “that free minds and free markets are the moral foundation that has made our success possible. We must never allow those freedoms to be diminished for any reason.”
Alas, as I point out in my new Cato Policy Report essay “The Sad State of Cyber-Politics,” no one listened to Rodgers. Indeed, Rodgers’s dystopian vision of a highly politicized digital future has taken just a decade to become reality. The high-tech policy scene within the Beltway has become a cesspool of backstabbing politics, hypocritical policy positions, shameful PR tactics, and bloated lobbying budgets. I go on in the article to itemize a litany of examples of how high-tech America appears determined to fall prey to what Milton Friedman once called “The Business Community’s Suicidal Impulse“: the persistent propensity to persecute one’s competitors using regulation or the threat thereof.
It’s a sad tale that doesn’t make for enjoyable reading, but I do try to end the essay on an upbeat (if somewhat naive) note. If you are interested, you can find the plain text version on the Cato website here and I’ve embedded the PDF of the publication down below in a Scribd Reader. Continue reading →
Jeff Winkler of The Daily Caller was kind enough to call me for comment after seeing some tweets of mine about a new proposal floated by U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to potentially mandate cell phone jamming technology be embedded in every car to minimize the risk of distracted driving. While I am sympathetic to the concerns he and others have raised about the serious dangers associated with distracted driving, LaHood has been continuously upping the ante in terms of proposed regulatory responses to the problem.
Back in October, La Hood suggested that a ban on all cell phone communications in cars might be needed. He argued that even hands-free phone conversations are a “cognitive distraction” and should be prohibited and has also suggested that such a ban should extend to in-vehicle information and entertainment systems such as Ford Motor Co.’s Sync and General Motors Co.’s OnStar system. This means almost every conceivable in-vehicle technology could be regulated under LaHood’s “cognitive distraction” paradigm, including your car stereo and GPS system. This week LaHood went further and suggested that it may be necessary to also mandate some sort of scrambling technology be embedded in all vehicles to completely block any potential wireless communications or connectivity.
My comments on that proposal appear in Winkler’s piece today, although Winkler notes that LaHood appears now to be backing off the idea. However, just in case this idea (or the idea of banning all communications devices from cars more generally) pops up again, here’s what I find wrong with LaHood’s approach: Continue reading →
I’m very pleased to announce that I am today joining the Mercatus Center at George Mason University as a Senior Research Fellow. I will be working in the Mercatus Center’s Technology Policy Program and covering many of the same issues I have been active on for many years now, including: free speech and child safety issues; privacy and advertising policy; communications and media law; Internet governance; online taxation and e-commerce regulation; and much more.
I’m particularly excited about joining Mercatus since it reunites me with my old Cato colleague Jerry Brito, who also blogs with me here at the TLF, of course. Jerry is also a senior research fellow at Mercatus and he has done a stellar job developing the Technology Policy Program at the Center. I very much look forward to working closely with him, my old friend Jerry Ellig, and the many other skilled intellectuals working in various programs throughout Mercatus. It’s an amazing group of scholars Mercatus has assembled and I know I have much to learn from all of them.
For those not familiar with the Mercatus Center, it was founded in 1985 and has become the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas. As its website notes, Mercatus is a university-based research center that aims to bridge the gap between academic ideas and real world problems: Continue reading →
Tim Wu appears hell-bent of redefining the English language. After reading his new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires [See my 6-part review: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and his new editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal, “In the Grip of the New Monopolists,” it’s clear to me that he has made it his mission in life to redefine some rather basic, widely-accepted economic terms to suit his own political purposes. Among them: “market power,” “monopoly,” and “laissez-faire.” I addressed his misuse of the term “market power” here and misunderstanding of the term “laissez-faire” here.
In today’s Journal editorial, it’s “monopoly” that Wu seeks to redefine. He begins his essay by asking: “How hard would it be to go a week without Google? Or, to up the ante, without Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, eBay and Google?” He continues on to suggest that these “new monopolists” have an iron lock on their respective markets and that there appears little hope of escaping them.
But the problem with his argument that “we are living in an age of large information monopolies” begins with the fact that he speaks of “monopolies” in a plural sense and apparently misses the irony of that entirely. If so many “information monopolies” exist, then Wu’s thesis is undermined by the very fact that no one company dominates the Internet landscape. What Wu is really suggesting is that the Digital Economy landscape is littered with dominant firms in industry sectors that he has defined extremely narrowly. Continue reading →
This week, we’ve seen reports in both The New York Times (“Stage Set for Showdown on Online Privacy“) and The Wall Street Journal (“Watchdog Planned for Online Privacy“) that the Obama Administration is inching closer toward adopting a new Internet regulatory regime in the name of protecting privacy online. In this essay, I want to talk about information control regimes, not from a normative perspective, but from a practical one. In doing so, I will compare the relative complexities associated with controlling various types of information flows to protect against four theoretical information harms: objectionable content, defamation, copyright, and privacy.
From a normative perspective, there are many arguments for and against various forms of information control. Here, for example, are the reasons typically given for why society might want to impose regulations on the Internet (or other communications channels) to address each of the four issues identified above:
- Content control / Censorship: We must control information flows to protect children from objectionable content or all citizens against some other form of supposedly harmful speech (hate speech, terrorist recruitment, etc).
- Defamation control: We must control information flows to protect people’s reputations.
- Copyright control: We must control information flows to protect the property rights of creators against unauthorized use / distribution.
- Privacy control: We must control information flows to protect against information flows that include information about individuals.
Again, there are plenty of good normative arguments in the opposite direction, many of which are based on free speech considerations since, by definition, information control regimes limit the flow of forms of speech. For privacy, I discussed such speech-related considerations in my essay on “Two Paradoxes of Privacy Regulation.” But what about the administrative or enforcement burdens associated with each form of information control? I increasingly find that question as interesting as the normative considerations.
Continue reading →
It’s appropriate that Kevin Kelly’s new book, What Technology Wants, was published in the same year as Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget. Although Kelly and Lanier are on opposite sides of the Internet optimist vs. pessimist divide, they come at the issue of technology’s impact on society in thoughtful, but at times quite controversial, ways. I found both books to be remarkably interesting, but also, at times, deeply troubling.
For example, Lanier’s book, which I reviewed here in January, contained an excellent critique of the extreme varieties of quixotic techno-utopianism, which he labels “cybernetic totalism.” Lanier was taking on the belief by some extreme digital age optimists that a “hive mind” or “Noosphere” is coming about. He made a strong case for appreciating individuality and stressed caution when it comes to embracing technology in an over-zealous or quasi-religious fashion. But Lanier’s critique was too sweeping and his worldview too morose. He unfairly indicts the entire digital generation and wrongly claims most modern culture is moribund and little more than “a petty mashup of preweb culture.”
Kelly’s What Technology Wants is basically You Are Not a Gadget in reverse. Kelly does a nice job placing modern technological advances in a more reasonable context, but he is also guilty of some of that kooky “noosphere” thinking Lanier nicely critiqued in his book. Continue reading →
A report in the U.K. Telegraph notes that the European Union is seeking to create a so-called “right to be forgotten” online, and has “drafted potential legislation that would include new, unprecedented privacy rights for citizens sharing personal data.” Details are sparse at this point, but according to this new 20-page European Commission document, “A Comprehensive Approach on Personal Data Protection in the European Union,” the EU will be:
clarifying the so-called ‘right to be forgotten’, i.e. the right of individuals to have their data no longer processed and deleted when they are no longer needed for legitimate purposes. This is the case, for example, when processing is based on the person’s consent and when he or she withdraws consent or when the storage period has expired. (p.8)
Two brief comments on this. First, it should be apparent that any “right to be forgotten” conflicts mightily with free speech rights and press freedom. As I discussed at greater length in this review of Solove’s Understanding Privacy as well as my essay on “Two Paradoxes of Privacy Regulation,” the problem with enshrining expansive privacy “rights” into law is that it means there will need to be stricter limits placed on speech and press freedoms. As Eugene Volokh noted in his 2000 law review article entitled, “Freedom of Speech, Information Privacy, and the Troubling Implications of a Right to Stop People from Speaking About You“: Continue reading →
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