Matthew Yglesias notes Michael O’Hare’s prediction that consolidation of the newspaper business will be bad news for an informed electorate:
The traditional business model of a paper newspaper, in which readers’ attention is sold to advertisers by placing the ads next to news on a physical page, is broken. One fracture is a very broad withdrawal of public attention from anything that takes very long or much effort to engage with, from music to books and news; another is the IT-driven transformation of text from a product that can be denied to anyone who doesn’t pay for a physical object to a practically non-excludible public good. Still another is a phenomenon not fully understood, which is the much greater difficulty advertisements have drawing attention on a computer screen than on a paper page, evidenced by the flashing ads that now pop up screaming for attention over content on newspaper web pages. And we may also be seeing an example of “Baumol’s cost disease”, the steady increase of the relative cost of products like expert, competent, writing (music performance, in his example) that can’t take advantage of productivity improvements through technology.
When O’Hare says it’s difficulty for online ads to attract attention, he seems not to have heard of a little company called Google. It’s on track to earn $10 billion in revenues this year almost entirely by selling ads on computer screens. Google’s hundreds of thousands of advertisers don’t seem to be having any trouble getting users’ attention.
Given that most people still get most of their news and entertainment via non-Internet sources, there’s every reason to believe that the total size of the Internet advertising market will be an order of magnitude larger than that in a couple of decades. In a $100 billion market for Internet eyeballs, there should be plenty of room to pay people to do high-quality news-gathering.
Continue reading →
Tower Records is going out of business. It turns out that in the 21st century, shipping little plastic disks to brick-and-mortar retail stores is not a very lucrative way to distribute music. I expect we’ll be seeing more announcements like this one in the years to come, as the Internet cannibalizes 20th century music distribution and promotional models.
Dating a girl who reads Glamour has many advantages. One is that she always looks cute at parties. More importantly, though, she helps me keep abreast of the latest developments in the copyright debate. For example, she pointed out to me that the September issue has a pro-and-con feature on creating a new copyright for clothing design. The pro-copyright lady complains that “after a runway show, your designs are out immediately on the Internet and can be copied overnight. That means far more manufacturers can make a knockoff of your piece before your original has even gotten into the stores!”
The anti-copyright guy points out that once a fashion copyright was on the books, it would be almost impossible to determine which dresses are copying which other dresses. He points out that retro fashion has become quite common. Today’s hot styles are often imitations of styles from decades earlier. It would radically change the fashion industry if one company held the copyright to a particular style and was able to exclude others from imitating it.
Continue reading →
Jim is apparently too modest to whore his posts out to multiple blogs, but his comments on terrorist watch lists are very good, so I’m going to do it for him:
In the U.S., people who have done something wrong are supposed to be arrested, taken to court and charged, then permitted to contest the accusation. If they are found guilty, they pay money or serve time in jail.
Watch-listing follows no similarly familiar pattern. Law enforcement or national security personnel place a person on a list and then, wherever that list is used, treat the person (and other people with the same name) differently, stopping them, interrogating them, searching them, or whatever the case may be. This unilateral process is alien to our legal system.
Rather than watch-listing, people who are genuinely suspected of being criminals or terrorists should be sought, captured, charged, tried, and, if convicted, sentenced. Watch-listing allows law enforcement to be very active and intrusive without actually doing what it takes to protect against crime and terrorist acts. In Identity Crisis, I wrote that “watch listing and identification checking [are] like posting a most-wanted list at a post office and then waiting for criminals to come to the post office.”
At the national border, watch-listing must be used–deftly–because we cannot reach wrongdoers worldwide. Those watch-lists allow us to be vigilant against bad people who may arrive on our shores. Domestically, though–in our free country–the practice should end.
Quite so.
Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes has obtained a copy of the no-fly list the TSA uses to decide who among the flying public should be subject to extra scrutiny or denied the right to fly altogether. It is, not surprisingly, shockingly inadequate. It includes the “names of people not likely to cause terror, including the president of Bolivia, people who are dead and names so common, they are shared by thousands of innocent fliers.”
We’ve been told since the beginning of the program that we couldn’t release the list because it might tip off the terrorists. This has never made much sense–future terrorists can find out if they’re on the list by doing a test flight and seeing if they get extra scrutiny. The more plausible explanation for the TSA’s reluctance to release the list was due to their fears that it would be subject to harsh criticism. Luckily, the press has done its job here, and the list is now being subject to the scrutiny it deserves. Hopefully that will lead to improvements in our security procedures.
This point can be generalized: systems are made more, not less, secure when they’re open to scrutiny. This is the majority view among computer security experts, who tend to trust open, time-tested encryption algorithms over new-fangled proprietary ones, because it’s less likely that someone will discover a serious flaw in the system. We’ve seen the same phenomenon with computerized voting machines, where closed, proprietary machines have consistently been found to have serious security flaws. And the same is almost certainly true of physical security: opening up our airport security system to greater scrutiny will give security experts and the general public the opportunity to spot problems and pressure the authorities to remedy them. Security through obscurity doesn’t work in the high-tech world, and it’s not likely to work in airport security either.
Hat Tip: Jim Lippard
I’m at the State Policy Network’s education reform summit learning about school choice, probably the most important civil rights issue of our generation. I’ve learned a lot, but as a consequence, I haven’t had much time to blog. Luckily for me, this week’s software patent is so incredibly obvious that I don’t think I’ll have to write very much about it. The patent is held by a Pittsburgh bond-trading firm that won a ruling against a rival that had the audacity to offer competing bond-trading software. The patent in question is Patent #6,161,099, “Process and apparatus for conducting auctions over electronic networks.” Here’s the executive summary:
An apparatus and process for conducting auctions, specifically municipal bond auctions, over electronic networks, particularly the Internet, is disclosed. The auctioneer maintains a web site from which information about bonds to be auctioned can be obtained. A user participates in the auction by accessing the web site via a conventional Internet browser and is led through a sequence of screens that perform the functions of verifying the user’s identity, assisting the user in preparing a bid, verifying that the bid conforms to the rules of the auction, displaying to the user during the course of the auction selected bid information regarding bids received and informing the bidder how much time remains in the auction. The user may be given the option of confirming the accuracy of his bid before submitting the bid. The auctioneer is able to review bidding history, determine the winner and notify the winner over the network, and display selected auction results to bidders and observers over the network.
So it’s eBay for bonds. For those keeping score at home, eBay was founded in 1995, three years before the 1998 filing of this patent. So even if the idea of an online auction were a patent-worthy invention, it seems like the existence of eBay (and other auction sites that sprung up around the same time) would serve as prior art. But I guess the patent office felt differently.
Really, there’s not that much else to say. You would think that getting a patent would require something more innovative than simply offering online auctions for a particular products, but you’d be wrong. This is simply a patent on the idea of selling bonds via the Internet. How granting such a patent promotes “the progress of science of the useful arts” in the software or financial services industries is a mystery to me.
Wow.
The e-poll books are supposed to be operated by tapping a small plastic stylus against the computer screens. The terminals are linked together and are used to register, among other things, whether a voter has shown up at the polls.
But during last month’s primary election, on occasion, one machine in a precinct would show voters as having cast ballots, while another would say they had not come to the polls.
To fix the problem, Diebold officials said yesterday the units could be operated with computer mouses and that they could provide the state with 5,500 of them in time for the general election. Or they could install new software and allow election judges to touch the screens.
During yesterday’s test inside the Marriott’s banquet hall, the mouses were in use. But one poll worker did not heed the warning to operate the equipment using only the mouse, causing the machine to lose contact with the five others it was linked to. It took less than 30 seconds to reboot the machine.
The inexplicable thing about this is that the
Sun describes this as “a relatively smooth test.” But my question is: smooth compared with what? Paper ballots don’t have to be rebooted if someone touches them the wrong way. It’s not possible to vote twice with the same paper ballot. It may be the case that compared with previous Diebold tests, this one was relatively smooth, but compared with more traditional voting systems, Diebold’s machines are still an disaster waiting to happen.
Hat Tip: Techdirt
Nick Carr has a puzzling post about the fact that a Google search for “Martin Luther King, Jr.” returns, as its first result, a white supremacist website. The first sentence of the post is “It’s funny how a set of instructions – an algorithm – written by people can come to be granted, by those same people, a superhuman authority.”
One might expect the post to go on to identify someone granting Google’s algorithm a superhuman authority. One would be wrong. Carr writes that AOL, which has licensed Google’s search engine for its own site, “finds itself in the uncomfortable position of promoting the white supremacist site to its customers.” And Google says its results are generated automatically, and so it “can’t tweak the results because of that automation and the need to maintain the integrity of the results.” Carr concludes scornfully that Google believes that “human judgment is an unfit substitute for the mindless, automated calculations of an algorithm.”
This is silly. It’s not hard to understand why Google would be reluctant to second guess the results of its algorithm. The issue isn’t that human judgment is inferior to algorithmic results. The problem is that human judgment is incredibly expensive compared with computing power. Because obviously, this wouldn’t be the only example of manipulated search results. I’m sure the White House would immediately write to Google about this result. Tens of thousands of other individuals and groups who believe some search result or another had slighted them would come out of the woodworks to complain. Google would have to hire some new staffers to come up with some rules governing when search results get suppressed, and then they’d have to hire a bunch more staffers to apply these rules to thousands and thousands of individual complaints.
Continue reading →
I’m reading Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. I’m only a few pages in, but I thought this quote, on page 16, was interesting:
My approach heavily emphasizes individual action in nonmarket relations. Much of the discussion revolves around the choice between markets and nonmarket social behavior. In much of it, the state plays no role, or is perceived as playing a primarily negative role, in a way that is alien to the progressive branches of liberal political thought. In this, it seems more of a libertarian or an anarchistic thesis than a liberal one. I do not completely discount the state, as I will explain. But I do suggest that what is special about our moment is the rising efficacy of individuals and loose, nonmarket affiliations as agents of political economy. Just like the market, the state will have to adjust to this new emerging modality of human action. Liberal political theory must first recognize and understand it before it can begin to renegotiate its agenda for the liberal state, progressive or otherwise.
Now, from Benkler’s language, here and elsewhere in the book, it seems quite clear that his basic sympathies are with the “progressive branches of liberal political thought.” Yet Benkler is smart enough to recognize that the story he’s trying to tell doesn’t fit naturally within the progressive narrative. The emerging economy of peer production isn’t being created by democratic deliberation under the wise guidance of state regulation. No government programs are required or especially helpful to the process. Liberals can be excited about it to the extent that it’s an alternative to having the big, evil corporations do stuff, but it doesn’t leave much room for their political program.
In contrast, Benkler’s thesis dovetails nicely with the standard libertarian narrative–at least if libertarianism is understood as an ideology that defends individualism and voluntary cooperation in all its forms, rather than an ideology narrowly focused on promoting markets as the only legitimate form of economic organization. It’s a little bit unfortunate that left-wingers like Benkler and Larry Lessig are the most visible evangelists for the economics of peer production, because this is really a libertarian story: public goods being produced by the voluntary cooperation of individuals without a government program in sight.
Good news from California: Governor Schwarzenegger has signed legislation liberalizing cable franchise rules:
television providers of all kinds will be able to offer services throughout the state without having to negotiate individual franchise agreements with each and every municipality where they desire to provide service.
The new law represents a big victory for AT&T, which plans to spend $1 billion on a new fiber deployment by the end of 2008, and Verizon, which is already rolling out its FiOS service in the state. Both telecommunications companies plan to use the fiber networks to offer a triple play of voice, video, and broadband, putting them on equal footing with the incumbent cable companies.
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.