Articles by Solveig Singleton 
Solveig Singleton is a lawyer and writer, with ventures into ceramic sculpture, photography, painting, and animal welfare work. Past venues for her policy work include the Cato Institute (mostly free speech, telecom, and privacy), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (mostly privacy and ecommerce), the Progress and Freedom Foundation (mostly IP). She is presently an adjunct fellow with the Institute for Policy Innovation and is working on a new nonprofit venture, the Convergence Law Institute. She holds degrees from Cornell Law School and Reed College. Favorite Movie: Persuasion. Favorite Books: Dhalgren; Villette; Freedom and the Law. Favorite Art: Kinetic sculpture--especially involving Roombas. Most obsolete current technology deployed: a 30 yr. old Canon AE-1. Music: these days, mostly old blues, classical guitar, Poe, Cowboy Junkies, Ministry. Phobia: Clowns.
Jim Harper of Cato has an interesting exchange with Adam Thierer of PFF on U.S. companies doing business in China. Would a “code of conduct” for U.S. firms doing business there help the cause of human rights?
Suppose a firm refused to do business in China, or got booted out for “pushing back” in response to queries from Chinese officials for information on dissidents? It seems to me that there would be other firms ready to step into that market–China being a truly massive market–either Asian firms or U.S.-based firms, or those of some other nation. There might be some gains from the publicity this stance would generate, but like Tianamen Square, the gains might be short-lived.
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I started work at the Cato Institute at the beginning of 1997, and here it is 2006. As I write, I know that very few of the reforms that I and other free-marketers advocate have ever been enacted. Some bad legislation has been prevented (opt-in!); some unconstitutional legislation has been voided; the FCC has continued to move towards something more like real property rights in spectrum at an absurdly incremental pace. But universal service has not been abolished or even replaced with targeted subsidies or auctions. Indecency rules continue to be used to harass broadcasters. A few predicted that the Net would make censorship impossible, or that cyberspace would become its own sovereign nation. Yet China censors the Net with mixed success; Yahoo and other companies must cooperate or get out.
In spite of this, I am full of hope for the future…
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The Volokh Conspiracy has posted this gem.
Those readers who know me could tell you I’m a calm, gentle sort. I’m fond of gardening, meditation, and fish tanks. But this one has got me mad. I speak of the German court ruling that professional ebay sellers must allow returns. Pile taxes on my phone bills or regulate television programming or some other old-school tech if you absolutely cannot help yourselves, but don’t mess with my bargain hunting! Ebay is the triumphant, splendid return of caveat emptor and for all the occasional disappointment (fabric interfacing that smelled!) has saved me hundreds of dollars (my most recent triumph being waterproof Teva hiking shoes). When I’m having a bad day, I sometimes just go and read my feedback to cheer up.
The FCC’s universal service fund finds itself, not unsurprisingly, increasingly embroiled in accounting troubles, from fraud to difficulty complying with accounting rules requiring it to have monies in hand before paying them out. Not to mention consumers irate about the growth of the line items on their bills.
This pit is potentially bottomless. In a nutshell, “Everyone wants to take out of the pool, especially if they pay into it, and anyone who doesn’t stake a claim will lose out to more aggressive competitors.” I quote IPI‘s recent telecom guide for state legislators, which I helped author.
Years ago, I saw the economic justification for universal service set out in the form of an equation. In English, it went something like this: The network is more valuable to everyone if absolutely everyone is on it. So we impose a tax to avoid the cost of some being excluded from the network. It all sounds very precise, put that way. But consider that no one knows the amount of the cost we are supposedly avoiding by this tax & spend scheme! And the amount we are coughing up to avoid it is apparently limitless! At the same time that technologies from the Internet to wireless are finally bringing transmission costs down. It is sad, that we cannot give the market a chance to work in rural areas as it has worked elsewhere.
-Solveig
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.