Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
A couple weeks ago at State of the Net, I was on a panel on Bitcoin moderated by Coin Center’s Jerry Brito. The premise of the panel was that the state of Bitcoin is like the early Internet. Somehow we got policy right in the mid-1990s to allow the Internet to become the global force it is today. How can we reprise this success with Bitcoin today?
In my remarks, I recall making two basic points. Continue reading →
Ten or fifteen years ago, when I sat around and thought about what I would do with my life, I never considered directing the technology policy program at Mercatus. It’s not exactly a career track you can get on — not like being a lawyer, a doctor, a professor.
One of the things I loved about Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One is that it is self-consciously anti-track. The book is a distillation of Thiel’s 2012 Stanford course on startups. In the preface, he writes,
“My primary goal in teaching the class was to help my students see beyond the tracks laid down by academic specialties to the broader future that is theirs to create.”
I think he is right. The modern economy provides unprecedented opportunity for people with talent and grit and passion to do unique and interesting things with their lives, not just follow an expected path. Continue reading →
This month, the FCC is set to issue an order that will reclassify broadband under Title II of the Communications Act. As a result of this reclassification, broadband will suddenly become subject to numerous federal and local taxes and fees.
How much will these new taxes reduce broadband subscribership? Nobody knows for sure, but using the existing economic literature we can come up with a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
According to a policy brief by Brookings’s Bob Litan and the Progressive Policy Institute’s Hal Singer, reclassification under Title II will increase fixed broadband costs on average by $67 per year due to both federal and local taxes. With pre-Title II costs of broadband at $537 per year, this represents a 12.4 percent increase.
[I have updated these estimates at the end of this post.]
My employer, the Mercatus Center, provides ridiculously generous funding (up to $40,000/year) for graduate students. There are several opportunities depending on your goals, but I encourage people interested in technology policy to particularly consider the MA Fellowship, as that can come with an opportunity to work with the tech policy team here at Mercatus. Mind the deadlines!
The PhD Fellowship is a three-year, competitive, full-time fellowship program for students who are pursuing a doctoral degree in economics at George Mason University. Our PhD Fellows take courses in market process economics, public choice, and institutional analysis and work on projects that use these lenses to understand global prosperity and the dynamics of social change. Successful PhD Fellows have secured tenure track positions at colleges and universities throughout the US and Europe.
It includes full tuition support, a stipend, and experience as a research assistant working closely with Mercatus-affiliated Mason faculty. It is a total award of up to $120,000 over three years. Acceptance into the fellowship program is dependent on acceptance into the PhD program in economics at George Mason University. The deadline for applications is February 1, 2015.
Last month, my Mercatus Center colleague Brent Skorup published a major scoop: police departments around the country are scanning social media to assign people individualized “threat ratings” — green, yellow, or red. This week, police are complaining that the public is using social media to track them back.
LAPD Chief Charlie Beck has expressed concerns that Waze, the social traffic app owned by Google, could be used to target police officers. The National Sherriff’s Association has also complained about the app.
To be clear, Waze does not allow anybody to track individual officers. Users of the app can drop a pin on a map letting drivers know that there is police activity (or traffic jams, accidents, or traffic enforment cameras) in the area.
That’s it.
Last week, two very interesting events happened in the world of copyright and content piracy. First, the Pirate Bay, the infamous torrent hosting site, was raided by police and removed from the Internet. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde (who was no longer involved with the project) expressed his indifference to the raid; there was no soul left in the site, he said, and in any case, he is “pretty sure the next thing will pan out.”
Second, a leaked trove of emails from the Sony hack showed that the MPAA continues to pursue their dream of blocking websites that contribute to copyright infringement. With the failure of SOPA in 2012, the lobbying organization has pivoted to trying to accomplish the same ends through other means, including paying for state attorneys-general to attack Google for including some of these sites in their index. Over at TechDirt, Mike Masnick argues that some of this activity may have been illegal.
I’ll leave the illegality of the MPAA’s lobbying strategy for federal prosecutors to sort out, but like some others, I am astonished by the MPAA’s lack of touch with reality. They seem to believe that opposition to SOPA was a fluke, whipped up by Google, who they will be able to neutralize through their “Project Goliath.” And according to a meeting agenda reported on by TorrentFreak, they want to bring “on board ‘respected’ people in the technology sector to agree on technical facts and establish policy support for site blocking.”
The reality is that opposition to SOPA-style controls continues to remain strong in the tech policy community. The only people in Washington who support censoring the Internet to protect copyright are paid by Hollywood. If, through their generous war chest, the MPAA were able to pay a “respected” tech-sector advocate to build policy support for site blocking, that very fact would cause that person to lose respect.
Moreover, on a technical level, the MPAA is fighting a battle it is sure to lose. As Rick Falkvinge notes, the content industry had a unique opportunity in 1999 to embrace and extend Napster. Instead, it got Napster shut down, which eventually led to decentralized piracy over bittorrent. Now, it wants to shut down sites that index torrents, but torrent indexes are tiny amounts of data. The whole Pirate Bay index was only 90MB in 2012, and a magnet link for an individual torrent is only a few bytes. Between Bitmessage and projects like Bitmarkets, it seems extremely unlikely that the content industry will ever be able to shut down distribution of torrent data.
Instead of fighting this inevitable trend, the MPAA and RIAA should be trying to position themselves well in a world in which content piracy will always be possible. They should make it convenient for customers to access their paid content through bundling deals with companies like Netflix and Spotify. They should accept some background level of content piracy and embrace at least its buzz-generating benefits. They should focus on soft enforcement through systems like six strikes, which more gently nudge consumers to pay for content. And they should explicitly disavow any effort to censor the web—without such a disavowal, they are making enemies not just of tech companies, but of the entire community of tech enthusiasts and policy wonks.
Last week marked the conclusion of the ITU’s Plenipotentiary Conference, the quadrennial gathering during which ITU member states get together to revise the treaty that establishes the Union and conduct other high-level business. I had the privilege of serving as a member of the US delegation, as I did for the WCIT, and to see the negotiations first hand. This year’s Plenipot was far less contentious than the WCIT was two years ago. For other summaries of the conference, let me recommend to you Samantha Dickinson, Danielle Kehl, and Amb. Danny Sepulveda. Rather than recap their posts or the entire conference, I just wanted to add a couple of additional observations.
We mostly won on transparent access to documents
Through my involvement with WCITLeaks, I have closely followed the issue of access to ITU documents, both before and during the Plenipot. My assessment is that we mostly won.
Going forward, most inputs and outputs to ITU conferences and assemblies will be available to the public from the ITU website. This excludes a) working documents, b) documents related to other meetings such as Council Working Groups and Study Groups, and c) non-meeting documents that should be available to the public.
However, in February, an ITU Council Working Group will be meeting to develop what is likely to be a more extensive document access policy. In May, the whole Council will meet to provisionally approve an access policy. And in 2018, the next Plenipot will permanently decide what to do about this provisional access policy.
There are no guarantees, and we will need to closely monitor the outcomes in February and May to see what policy is adopted—but if it is a good one, I would be prepared to shut down WCITLeaks as it would become redundant. If the policy is inadequate, however, WCITLeaks will continue to operate until the policy improves.
I was gratified that WCITLeaks continued to play a constructive role in the discussion. For example, in the Arab States’ proposal on ITU document access, they cited us, considering “that there are some websites on the Internet which are publishing illegally to the public ITU documents that are restricted only to Member States.” In addition, I am told that at the CEPT coordination meeting, WCITLeaks was thanked for giving the issue of transparency at the ITU a shot in the arm.
A number of governments were strong proponents of transparency at the ITU, but I think special thanks are due to Sweden, who championed the issue on behalf of Europe. I was very grateful for their leadership.
The collapse of the WCIT was an input into a harmonious Plenipot
We got through the Plenipot without a single vote (other than officer elections)! That’s great news—it’s always better when the ITU can come to agreement without forcing some member states to go along.
I think it’s important to recognize the considerable extent to which this consensus agreement was driven by events at the WCIT in 2012. At the WCIT, when the US (and others) objected and said that we could not agree to certain provisions, other countries thought we were bluffing. They decided to call our bluff by engineering a vote, and we wisely decided not to sign the treaty, along with 54 other countries.
In Busan this month, when we said that we could not agree to certain outcomes, nobody thought we were bluffing. Our willingness to walk away at the WCIT gave us added credibility in negotiations at the Plenipot. While I also believe that good diplomacy helped secure a good outcome at the Plenipot, the occasional willingness to walk the ITU off a cliff comes in handy. We should keep this in mind for future negotiations—making credible promises and sticking to them pays dividends down the road.
The big question of the conference is in what form will the India proposal re-emerge
At the Plenipot, India offered a sweeping proposal to fundamentally change the routing architecture of the Internet so that a) IP addresses would be allocated by country, like telephone numbers, with a country prefix and b) domestic Internet traffic would never be routed out of the country.
This proposal was obviously very impractical. It is unlikely, in any case, that the ITU has the expertise or the budget to undertake such a vast reengineering of the Internet. But the idea would also be very damaging from the perspective of individual liberty—it would make nation-states, even more than the are now, mediators of human communication.
I was very proud that the United States not only made the practical case against the Indian proposal, it made a principled one. Amb. Sepulveda made a very strong statement indicating that the United States does not share India’s goals as expressed in this proposal, and that we would not be a part of it. This statement, along with those of other countries and subsequent negotiations, effectively killed the Indian proposal at the Plenipot.
The big question is in what form this proposal will re-emerge. The idea of remaking the Internet along national lines is unlikely to go away, and we will need to continue monitoring ITU study groups to ensure that this extremely damaging proposal does not raise its head.
Good news! As the ITU’s Plenipotentiary Conference gets underway in Busan, Korea, the heads of delegation have met and decided to open up access to some of the documents associated with the meeting. At this time, it is only the documents that are classified as “contributions“—other documents such as meeting agendas, background information, and terms of reference remain password protected. It’s not clear yet whether that is an oversight or an intentional distinction. While I would prefer all documents to be publicly available, this is a very welcome development. It is gratifying to see the ITU membership taking transparency seriously.
Special thanks are due to ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré. When Jerry Brito and I launched WCITLeaks in 2012, at first, the ITU took a very defensive posture. But after the WCIT, the Secretary-General demonstrated tremendous leadership by becoming a real advocate for transparency and reform. I am told that he was instrumental in convincing the heads of delegation to open up access to Plenipot documents. For that, Dr. Touré has my sincere thanks—I would be happy to buy him a congratulatory drink when I arrive in Busan, although I doubt his schedule would permit it.
It’s worth noting that this decision only applies to the Plenipotentiary conference. The US has a proposal that will be considered at the conference to make something like this arrangement permanent, to instruct the incoming SG to develop a policy of open access to all ITU meeting documents. That is a development that I will continue to watch closely.
Although SOPA was ignominiously defeated in 2012, the content industry never really gave up on the basic idea of breaking the Internet in order to combat content piracy. The industry now claims that a major cause of piracy is search engines returning results that direct users to pirated content. To combat this, they would like to regulate search engine results to prevent them from linking to sites that contain pirated music and movies.
This idea is problematic on many levels. First, there is very little evidence that content piracy is a serious concern in objective economic terms. Most content pirates would not, but for the availability of pirated content, empty their wallets to incentivize the creation of more movies and music. As Ian Robinson and I explain in our recent paper, industry estimates of the jobs created by intellectual property are absurd. Second, there are serious free speech implications associated with regulating search engine results. Search engines perform an information distribution role similar to that of newspapers, and they have an editorial voice. They deserve protection from censorship as long as they are not hosting the pirated material themselves. Third, as anyone who knows anything about the Internet knows, nobody uses the major search engines to look for pirated content. The serious pirates go straight to sites that specialize in piracy. Fourth, this is all part of a desperate attempt by the content industry to avoid modernizing and offering more of their content online through convenient packages such as Netflix.
As if these were not sufficient reason to reject the idea of “SOPA for Search Engines,” Google has now announced that they will be directing users to legitimate digital content if it is available on Netflix, Amazon, Google Play, Spotify, or other online services. The content industry now has no excuse—if they make their music and movies available in convenient form, users will see links to legitimate content even if they search for pirated versions.
Google also says they will be using DMCA takedown notices as an input into search rankings and autocomplete suggestions, demoting sites and terms that are associated with piracy. This is above and beyond what Google needs to do, and in fact raises some concerns about fraudulent DMCA takedown notices that could chill free expression—such as when CBS issued a takedown of John McCain’s campaign ad on YouTube even though it was likely legal under fair use. Google will have to carefully monitor the DMCA takedown process for abuse. But in any case, these moves by Google should once and for all put the nail in the coffin of the idea that we should compromise the integrity of search results through government regulation for the sake of fighting a piracy problem that is not that serious in the first place.
The ITU is holding its quadrennial Plenipotentiary Conference in Busan, South Korea from October 20 to November 7, 2014. The Plenipot, as it is called, is the ITU’s “supreme organ” (a funny term that I did not make up). It represents the highest level of decision making at the ITU. As it has for the last several ITU conferences, WCITLeaks will host leaked documents related to the Plenipot.
For those interested in transparency at the ITU, two interesting developments are worth reporting. On the first day of the conference, the heads of delegation will meet to decide whether documents related to the conference should be available to the public directly through the TIES system without a password. All of the documents associated with the Plenipot are already available in English on WCITLeaks, but direct public access would have the virtue of including those in the world who do not speak English but do speak one of the other official UN languages. Considering this additional benefit of inclusion, I hope that the heads of delegation will seriously consider the advantages of adopting a more open model for document access during this Plenipot. If you would like to contact the head of delegation for your country, you can find their names in this document. A polite email asking them to support open access to ITU documents might not hurt.
In addition, at the meeting, the ITU membership will consider a proposal from the United States to, as a rule, provide open access to all meeting documents.
This is what WCITLeaks has always supported—putting ourselves out of business. As the US proposal notes, the ITU Secretariat has conducted a study finding that other UN agencies are much more forthcoming in terms of public access to their documents. A more transparent ITU is in everyone’s interest—including the ITU’s. This Plenipot has the potential to remedy a serious deficiency with the institution; I’m cheering for them and hoping they get it right.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
