Articles by Jerry Brito

Jerry is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and director of its Technology Policy Program. He also serves as adjunct professor of law at GMU. His web site is jerrybrito.com.


Matt Hindman on politics and the internet

by on November 13, 2012 · 0 comments

In the wake of the election, Matt Hindman, author of The Myth of Digital Democracy, analyzes the effect of the internet on electoral politics. 

According to Hindman, the internet had a large—but indirect—effect on the 2012 elections. Particularly important was microtargeting to identify supporters and get out the vote, says Hindman. Data and measurements—two things that the GOP was once ahead in, but which they have ceded to the Democrats in the past 8 years—played a key role in determining the winner of the presidential election, according to Hindman. 

Hindman also takes a critical look at the blogosphere, comparing it to the traditional media that some argue it is superseding, and he delineates the respective roles played by Facebook and Twitter within the electoral framework.

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Chris Anderson on 3D Printing and the Maker Movement

by on November 6, 2012 · 0 comments

Chris Anderson, former Wired magazine editor-in-chief and author of Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, describes what he calls the maker movement.

According to Anderson, modern technologies, such as 3D printing and open source design, are democratizing manufacturing. The same disruption that digital technologies brought to information goods like music, movies and publishing will soon make its way to the world of physical goods, he says.

Anderson tells the story of his grandfather, who designed the first automatic sprinkler system in the 60s, and how different such an invention story would be today. He also discusses his own firm, 3D Robotics, and policy challenges to emerging manufacturing technology.

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Event: Will the UN Take Over the Internet? Previewing the World Conference on International Telecommunication

by on October 31, 2012 · 2 comments

As you know, Eli Dourado and I have been keeping close tabs on the World Conference on Information Technology (WCIT), which will take place this December in Dubai. We started WCITLeaks.org in June to help bring transparency to the treaty negotiations because U.S. officials and others had warned that some member states, including Russia and China, had put forth proposals to regulate the Internet, and those proposals where not available to the public. Since then, Eli has joined the State Department’s International Telecommunication Advisory Committee and he will be part of the U.S. delegation to the Conference.

Now we’d like to invite you for a final briefing about the conference, looking at what’s at stake and what to expect, on Wednesday, November 14, at 2 p.m. at the W Hotel in Downtown D.C. We will have a keynote address by Ambassador Terry Kramer, head of the U.S. delegation to the conference, as well as a panel discussion including Gary Fowlie from the United Nations, Paul Brigner from the Internet Society, and internet governance expert Milton Mueller.

We hope you will join us for what will no doubt be a lively discussion! Below is the full event information. Please RSVP today.

Please join the Mercatus Center for a panel discussion on the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT). Once in a generation, governments from around the world gather to revise the International Telecommunication Regulations, a UN-sponsored treaty that governs international telecom practices. This year’s meeting is especially important because it is the first one since widespread adoption of technologies such as the Internet and mobile phones.

In the U.S. there has been widespread concern that the UN may want to exert greater control over the Internet, and the House recently voted unanimously for a resolution opposing any such move. Additionally, there are concerns that the new regulations could require U.S. web companies to pay to deliver content over the Internet.

The panel will preview these and other issues that are likely to arise at the WCIT meeting that begins in Dubai on December 3. The event will also feature a keynote address by Ambassador Terry D. Kramer, the head of the U.S. delegation to the WCIT.

Panel Discussion:

Eli Dourado, Research Fellow, Mercatus Center at George Mason University & co-creator, WCITLeaks.org

Paul Brigner, Regional Director of the North American Bureau, Internet Society

Milton Mueller, Professor, Syracuse University School of Information Studies & co-founder, Internet Governance Project

Gary Fowlie, Head of the Liaison office of the International Telecommunication Union to the United Nations

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Joseph Hall on e-voting

by on October 30, 2012 · 0 comments

Elections are coming up, but though we’re well into the 21st century, we still can’t vote online. This archived episode discusses the future of voting.

Joseph Hall, Senior Staff Technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology and a former postdoctoral researcher at the UC Berkeley School of Information, discusses e-voting. Hall explains the often muddled differences between electronic and internet voting, and talks about security concerns of each. He also talks about benefits and costs of different voting systems, limits to having meaningful recounts with digital voting systems, and why internet voting can be a bad idea.

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Perry Keller on the relationship between the state and the media

by on October 23, 2012 · 0 comments

Perry Keller, Senior Lecturer at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London, and author of the recently released paper “Sovereignty and Liberty in the Internet Era,” discusses how the internet affects the relationship between the state and the media. According to Keller, media has played a formative role in the development of the modern state and, as it evolves, the way in which the state governs must change as well. However, that does not mean that there is a one-size-fits-all solution. In fact, as Keller demonstrates using real-world examples in the U.S., U.K., E.U., and China, the ways in which new media is governed can differ radically based upon the local legal and cultural environment.

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Stan Liebowitz on copyright and incentives

by on October 16, 2012 · 0 comments

Stan Liebowitz on copyright and incentivesStan Liebowitz, Ashbel Smith Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Dallas, discusses his paper, “Is Efficient Copyright a Reasonable Goal?” According to Leibowitz, economists could hypothetically calculate the exact copyright terms necessary to incentivize creators to make new works without allowing them to capture “rents,” or profits above the bare minimum necessary. However, he argues, efficiency might not be the best goal for copyright.

Liebowitz argues from a fairness or justice perspective that society should not favor an economically efficient copyright law, but one that treats creators of copyrighted works the same as workers in other types of industries. In other industries, he argues, workers are allowed to capture and keep rents.

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Event: FCC v. Fox: Broadcast Indecency Law as the New Paradigm for Regulatory Failure

by on October 15, 2012 · 0 comments

This Wednesday the Information Economy Project at George Mason University wil present the latest installment of its Tullock Lecture series, featuring Thomas G. Krattenmaker, former director of research at the FCC. Here is the notice:

Thomas G. Krattenmaker
Former Director of Research, FCC
Former Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Former Dean and Professor, William and Mary Law School

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

The Information Economy Project at George Mason University
proudly presents The Tullock Lecture on Big Ideas About Information

4:00 – 5:30 pm @ Hazel Hall Room 215
GMU School of Law, 3301 Fairfax Drive, Arlington, Va.
(Orange Line: Virginia Square-GMU Metro)
Reception to Follow in the Levy Atrium, 5:30-6:30 pm

In its June 21, 2012 opinion in FCC v. Fox, the Supreme Court vacated reasoned judgments of the Second Circuit, without one sentence questioning the validity or wisdom of those judgments. Although the Court absolved Fox on a technicality, its opinion appears to reflect a post-modern approach to First Amendment jurisprudence concerning broadcast speech, whereby neither precedent nor principle control outcomes. This indulgent approach to a government censorship bureau appears to acquiesce in an unconfined, unprincipled, and unwarranted seizure of regulatory power by the FCC. The Fox opinion thus compounds and enables a grave regulatory failure; whether any sound broadcast indecency policy or legal regime is feasible is perhaps debatable, but the Federal Communications Commission is wholly incapable of administering such a regime. The lecture will be preceded by a short introduction by Fernando Laguarda.

Register here.

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Leon Panetta: Beware of cyber-derailed trains full of lethal chemicals

by on October 12, 2012 · 1 comment

On the front page of today’s New York Times, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta again sounds the alarm about a "cyber Pearl Harbor.

“An aggressor nation or extremist group could use these kinds of cyber tools to gain control of critical switches,” Mr. Panetta said. “They could derail passenger trains, or even more dangerous, derail passenger trains loaded with lethal chemicals. They could contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country.”

Defense officials insisted that Mr. Panetta’s words were not hyperbole, and that he was responding to a recent wave of cyberattacks on large American financial institutions. He also cited an attack in August on the state oil company Saudi Aramco, which infected and made useless more than 30,000 computers.

Not hyperbole, hmm? It’s the usual cyber fear two-step. First lay out a doomsday scenario involving hackers remotely derailing trains full of lethal chemicals. Second, cite recent attacks as evidence that the threat is real. Except let’s look at the cited evidence.

Here’s how the New York Times itself described the recent attacks on banks:

The banks suffered denial of service attacks, in which hackers barrage a Web site with traffic until it is overwhelmed and shuts down. Such attacks, while a nuisance, are not technically sophisticated and do not affect a company’s computer network — or, in this case, funds or customer bank accounts. But they are enough to upset customers.

Explosive stuff. And what about that attack on Saudi Aramco? Serious, to be sure, even if no control systems were breached, but as Reuters recently reported,

One or more insiders with high-level access are suspected of assisting the hackers who damaged some 30,000 computers at Saudi Arabia’s national oil company last month, sources familiar with the company’s investigation say. …

The hackers’ apparent access to a mole, willing to take personal risk to help, is an extraordinary development in a country where open dissent is banned.

“It was someone who had inside knowledge and inside privileges within the company,” said a source familiar with the ongoing forensic examination.

What this shows is that one of the greatest threats to networks is not master hackers tunneling their way in, but good old fashioned spies. The cybersecurity legislation that Panetta and the administration are pushing cannot prevent a determined insider with access and permissions from carrying out an attack. It can, however, distort the incentives of businesses and hamper innovation.

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Pandora vs. FM: A case of picking winners and losers

by on October 11, 2012 · 5 comments

A few weeks I wrote an [intentionally provocative post](http://jerrybrito.com/2012/07/25/how-copyright-is-like-solyndra/) comparing copyright to Solyndra. My argument was that just as Congress has a knowledge problem and a public choice problem picking the right technologies to subsidize, so does it have these problems when it comes to picking winners and losers when it comes to setting out the contours of copyright.

I’m grateful for all the [wonderful feedback](https://plus.google.com/u/0/117169003326996777677/posts/TjzX6ZHLTK6) I got on that post, and I agree with those who pointed out that a problem with my analogy was that unlike subsidies to Solyndra, copyright doesn’t pick particular politically connected individuals or companies to privilege. I think it’s much more accurate to say that Congress can use copyright to privilege certain classes of well-organized industries or companies.

A case in point that shows how Congress picks winners and losers is being [debated right now](http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/24/3381396/pandora-internet-radio-royalty-bill): the framework that governs digital music broadcasting royalties for satellite radio and internet radio stations like Pandora. Today you pay a different royalty rate for playing a sound recording (like the lasted LMFAO opus) depending on what kind of radio station you are. Satellite radio stations pay 6 to 8 percent of their gross revenues each year in royalties. Pandora, however, pays around 50 percent, and it will likely be more next year. Meanwhile, traditional AM and FM radio stations pay nothing, zip, zero, zilch.

I won’t get into the public choice problems that may have led to this situation, but the fact is that one legacy industry is not just being subsidized with free access to an essential input (sound recordings), but it is also protected. That protection comes at the expense of a new and innovative industry–internet radio–that is being charged punishing rates for the same essential input.

My colleague Matt Mitchell recently published an excellent paper entitled [The Pathology of Privilege: The Economic Consequences of Government Favoritism](http://mercatus.org/publication/pathology-privilege-economic-consequences-government-favoritism) that catalogs the different ways government has favored particular industries. He also shows how this behavior “misdirects resources, impedes genuine economic progress, breeds corruption, and undermines the legitimacy of both the government and the private sector.” The uneven playing field in the digital music space fits right in with the type of privilege he discussed.

Conservatives and libertarians who are wary of such government extensions of privilege should keep their eye on copyright as the source of many such imbalances.

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Announcing TechWire, a new tech policy news and views aggregator

by on October 10, 2012 · 1 comment

For some time now I’ve been trying to teach myself how to program. I’m proficient in HTML and CSS, and and I could always tinker around the edges of PHP, but I really couldn’t code something from scratch to save my life. Well, there’s no better way to learn than by doing, at least when it comes to programming, so I gave myself a project to complete and, by golly, I did it. It’s called TechWire. It’s a tech policy news aggregator and I’m making it available on the web because I think it might be useful to other tech policy nerds.

Quite simply it’s a semi-curated reverse-chronological list of the most recent tech policy news with links to the original sources. And it’s not just news stories. You’ll also see opinion columns, posts from the various policy shops around town, new scholarly papers, and new books on tech policy. And you can also drill down into just one of these categories to see just the latest news, or just the latest opinions, or just the latest papers. Leave the page open in a tab and the site auto-refreshes as new items come in. Alternatively there is a Twitter feed at @TechWireFTW to get the latest.

Other features include the ability to look up the news for a particular day in the past, as well as clicking on a story to see what other stories are related. That’s especially useful if you want to see how different outlets are covering the same issue or if you want to see how an issue has developed over time. Just click on the linked timestamp at the end of a story to see related posts.

I hope TechWire (at http://techwireftw.com/) is as useful to you as it was fun for me to code. I’d like to thank some folks who really helped me along the way: Pete Snyder and Eli Dourado for putting up with my dumb questions, Cord Blomquist for great hosting and serene patience, Adam Thierer for being the best QA department I could wish for, and my wife Kathleen for putting up with me staring at the computer for hours.

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