Yesterday was National Lemonade Day. Over at the Mercatus Bridge blog, Jennifer Skees and I used the opportunity to highlight the increasing regulatory crackdown on kids operating ventures without first seeking the proper permits from local authorities. We ask, “wouldn’t it be better to teach them the value of hard work and entrepreneurial effort instead of threatening them with penalties for not getting costly permits to do basic jobs?” Here’s our answer:
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Today is National Lemonade Day. For many Americans a lemonade stand was their first experience in entrepreneurship. But unfortunately, this time honored tradition that teaches the value of hard work, entrepreneurship, and innovation may be under threat from overzealous grown-ups.
Should we really force kids to get licenses to start lemonade stands, sell bottles of water outside a ballpark, or mow lawns for a little extra money? And wouldn’t it be better to teach them the value of hard work and entrepreneurial effort instead of threatening them with penalties for not getting costly permits to do basic jobs?
Recent news stories have highlighted examples of kids being confronted with local regulations that essential tell them not to be entrepreneurial until they’ve gotten someone’s blessing–or else face fines or other penalties for those efforts.
Out in San Francisco, for example, a neighbor threatened to call the police on an eight-year-old girl selling water to raise money for a trip to Disneyland after her mother had lost her job. The neighbor berated the little girl for “illegally selling water without a permit.” Luckily, national outrage seems to have fallen in favor of this rogue entrepreneur instead of “Permit Patty.” But this is far from an isolated case.
Another story went viral earlier this year involving kids and lemonade stands. Country Time lemonade pledged to pay the fines received or the permit cost for children’s lemonade stands. Who thought we’d reach the day when we need a Lemonade Legal Defense Fund? But just prior to the launch, Stapleton, Colorado police were called to shut down the lemonade stand of four and six year-old brothersfor failing to have a business license. Kids who probably can’t read or fill out the necessary forms are expected to obtain a formal license for a tradition that dates back about 120 years. Continue reading →
I recently posted an essay over at The Bridge about “The Pacing Problem and the Future of Technology Regulation.” In it, I explain why the pacing problem—the notion that technological innovation is increasingly outpacing the ability of laws and regulations to keep up—“is becoming the great equalizer in debates over technological governance because it forces governments to rethink their approach to the regulation of many sectors and technologies.”
In this follow-up article, I wanted to expand upon some of the themes developed in that essay and discuss how they relate to two other important concepts: the “Collingridge Dilemma” and technological determinism. In doing so, I will build on material that is included in a forthcoming law review article I have co-authored with Jennifer Skees, Ryan Hagemann (“Soft Law for Hard Problems: The Governance of Emerging Technologies in an Uncertain Future”) as well as a book I am finishing up on the growth of “evasive entrepreneurialism” and “technological civil disobedience.”
Recapping the Nature of the Pacing Problem
First, let us quickly recap that nature of “the pacing problem.” I believe Larry Downes did the best job explaining the “problem” in his 2009 book on The Laws of Disruption. Downes argued that “technology changes exponentially, but social, economic, and legal systems change incrementally” and that this “law” was becoming “a simple but unavoidable principle of modern life.” Continue reading →
The ongoing ride-sharing wars in New York City are interesting to watch because they signal the potential move by state and local officials to use infrastructure management as an indirect form of innovation control or competition suppression. It is getting harder for state and local officials to defend barriers to entry and innovation using traditional regulatory rationales and methods, which are usually little more than a front for cronyist protectionism schemes. Now that the public has increasingly enjoyed new choices and better services in this and other fields thanks to technological innovation, it is very hard to convince citizens they would be better off without more of the same.
If, however, policymakers claim that they are limiting entry or innovation based on concerns about how disruptive actors supposedly negatively affect local infrastructure (in the form of traffic or sidewalk congestion, aesthetic nuisance, deteriorating infrastructure, etc.), that narrative can perhaps make it easier to sell the resulting regulations to the public or, more importantly, the courts. Going forward, I suspect that this will become a commonly-used playbook for many state and local officials looking to limit the reach of new technologies, including ride-sharing companies, electric scooters, driverless cars, drones, and many others.
To be clear, infrastructure control is both (a) a legitimate state and local prerogative; and (b) something that has been used in the past to control innovation and entry in other sectors. But I suspect that this approach is about to become far more prevalent because a full-frontal defense of barriers to innovation is far more likely to face serious public and legal challenges. Continue reading →
By Andrea O’Sullivan and Adam Thierer (First published at The Bridgeon August 1, 2018.)
Technology is changing the ways that entrepreneurs interact with, and increasingly get away from, existing government regulations. The ongoing legal battles surrounding 3D-printed weapons provide yet another timely example.
For years, a consortium of techies called Defense Distributed has sought to secure more protections for gun owners by making the code allowing someone to print their own guns available online. Rather than taking their fight to Capitol Hill and spending billions of dollars lobbying in potentially fruitless pursuits of marginal legislative victories, Defense Distributed ties their fortunes to the mast of technological determinism and blurs the lines between regulated physical reality and the open world of cyberspace.
The federal government moved fast, with gun control advocates like Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and former Representative Steve Israel (D-NY) proposing legislation to criminalize Defense Distributed’s activities. They failed.
Plan B in the efforts to quash these acts of 3D-printing disobedience was to classify the Computer-aided design (CAD) files that Defense Distributed posted online as a kind of internationally-controlled munition. The US State Department engaged in a years-long legal brawl over whether or not Defense Distributed violated established International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). The group pulled down the files while the issue was examined in court, but the code had long since been uploaded to sharing sites like The Pirate Bay. The files have also been available on the Internet Archive for many years. The CAD, if you will excuse the pun, is out of the bag.
In a surprising move, the Department of Justice suddenly moved to drop the suit and settle with Defense Distributed last month. It agreed to cover the group’s legal fees and cease its attempt to regulate code already easily accessible online. While no legal precedent was set, since this was merely a settlement, it is likely that the government realized that its case would be unwinnable.
Gun control advocates did not react well to this legal retreat. Continue reading →
Dan Wang has a new post titled “How Technology Grows (a restatement of definite optimism)” and it is characteristically good. For tech policy wonks and policymakers, put it in your queue. The essay clocks in at 7500 words, but there’s a lot to glean from the piece. Indeed, he puts into words a number of ideas I’ve been wanting to write about. To set the stage, he begins first by defining what we mean by technology:
Technology should be understood in three distinct forms: as processes embedded into tools (like pots, pans, and stoves); explicit instructions (like recipes); and as process knowledge, or what we can also refer to as tacit knowledge, know-how, and technical experience. Process knowledge is the kind of knowledge that’s hard to write down as an instruction. You can give someone a well-equipped kitchen and an extraordinarily detailed recipe, but unless he already has some cooking experience, we shouldn’t expect him to prepare a great dish.
As he rightly points out, the United States has, for various reasons, set aside the focus on process knowledge. Where this is especially evident comes in our manufacturing base:
When firms and factories go away, the accumulated process knowledge disappears as well. Industrial experience, scaling expertise, and all the things that come with learning-by-doing will decay. I visited Germany earlier this year to talk to people in industry. One point Germans kept bringing up was that the US has de-industrialized itself and scattered its production networks. While Germany responded to globalization by moving up the value chain, the US manufacturing base mostly responded by abandoning production.
The White House has announced a new effort to help prepare workers for the challenges they will face in the future. While it’s a well-intentioned effort, and one that I hope succeeds, I’m skeptical about it for a simple reason: It’s just really hard to plan for the workforce needs of the future and train people for jobs that we cannot possibly envision today.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal today, Ivanka Trump, senior adviser to the president, outlines the elements of new Executive Order that President Trump is issuing “to prioritize and expand workforce development so that we can create and fill American jobs with American workers.” Toward that end, the Administration plans on:
establishing a National Council for the American Worker, “composed of senior administration officials, who will develop a national strategy for training and retraining workers for high-demand industries.” This is meant to bring more efficiency and effectiveness to the “more than 40 workforce-training programs in more than a dozen agencies, and too many have produced meager results.”
“facilitat[ing] the use of data to connect American businesses, workers and educational institutions.” This is meant to help workers find “what jobs are available, where they are, what skills are required to fill them, and where the best training is available.”
launching a nationwide campaign “to highlight the growing vocational crisis and promote careers in the skilled trades, technology and manufacturing.”
The Administration also plans on creating a new advisory board of experts to address these issues, and the administration is also “asking companies and trade groups throughout the country to sign our new Pledge to America’s Workers—a commitment to invest in the current and future workforce.” They hope to encourage companies to take additional steps “to educate, train and reskill American students and workers.”
Perhaps some of these steps make sense, and perhaps a few will even help workers deal with the challenges of our more complex, fast-evolving, global economy. But I doubt it.
I’ve been working on a new book that explores the rise of evasive entrepreneurialism and technological civil disobedience in our modern world. Following the publication of my last book, Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom, people started bringing examples of evasive entrepreneurialism and technological civil disobedience to my attention and asked how they were related to the concept of permissionless innovation. As I started exploring and cataloging these cases studies, I realized I could probably write an entire book about these developments and their consequences.
Hopefully that book will be wrapped up shortly. In the meantime, I am going to start rolling out some short essays based on content from the book. To begin, I will state the general purpose of the book and define the key concepts discussed therein. In coming weeks and months, I’ll build on these themes, explain why they are on the rise, explore the effect they are having on society and technological governance efforts, and more fully develop some relevant case studies. Continue reading →
There was horrible news from Tempe, Arizona this week as a pedestrian was struck and killed by a driverless car owned by Uber. This is the first fatality of its type and is drawing widespread media attention as a result. According to both police statements and Uber itself, the investigation into the accident is ongoing and Uber is assisting in the investigation. While this certainly is a tragic event, we cannot let it cost us the life-saving potential of autonomous vehicles.
While any fatal traffic accident involving a driverless car is certainly sad, we can’t ignore the fact that each and every day in the United States letting human beings drive on public roads is proving far more dangerous. This single event has led some critics to wonder why we were allowing driverless cars to be tested on public roads at all before they have been proven to be 100% safe. Driverless cars can help reverse a public health disaster decades in the making, but only if policymakers allow real-world experimentation to continue.
Let’s be more concrete about this: Each day, Americans take 1.1 billion trips driving 11 billion miles in vehicles that weigh on average between 1.5 and 2 tons. Sadly, about 100 people die and over 6,000 are injured each day in car accidents. 94% of these accidents have been shown to be attributable to human error and this deadly trend has been increasing as we become more distracted while driving. Moreover, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, almost 6000 pedestrians were killed in traffic accidents in 2016, which means there was roughly one crash-related pedestrian death every 1.6 hours. In Arizona, the issue is even more pronounced with the state ranked 6th worst for pedestrians and the Phoenix area ranked the 16th worst metro for such accidents nationally. Continue reading →
We hear a lot these days about “technological moonshots.” It’s an interesting phrase because the meaning of both words in it are often left undefined. I won’t belabor the point about how people define–or, rather, fail to define–“technology” when they use it. I’ve already spent a lot of time writing about that problem. See, for example, this constantly updated essay here about “Defining ‘Technology.'” It’s a compendium I began curating years ago that collects what dozens of others have had to say on the matter. I’m always struck by how many different definitions are out there that I keep unearthing.
The term “moonshots” has a similar problem. The first meaning is the literal one that hearkens back to President Kennedy’s famous 1962 “we choose to go to the moon” speech. That use of the terms implies large government programs and agencies, centralized control, and top-down planning with a very specific political objective in mind. Increasingly, however, the term “moonshot” is used more generally, as I note in this new Mercatus essay about “Making the World Safe for More Moonshots.” My Mercatus Center colleague Donald Boudreaux has referred to moonshots as, “radical but feasible solutions to important problems,” and Mike Cushing of Enterprise Innovation defines a moonshot as an “innovation that achieves the previously unthinkable.” I like that more generic use of the term and think it could be used appropriately when discussing the big innovations many of us hope to see in fields as diverse as quantum computing, genetic editing, AI and autonomous systems, supersonic transport, and much more. I still have some reservations about the term, but I think it’s definitely a better term than “disruptive innovation,” which is also used differently by various scholars and pundits.
Over at Plain Text, I have posted a new essay entitled, “Converting Permissionless Innovation into Public Policy: 3 Reforms.” It’s a preliminary sketch of some reform ideas that I have been working on as part of my next book project. The goal is to find some creative ways to move the ball forward on the innovation policy front, regardless of what level of government we are talking about.
To maximize the potential for ongoing, positive change and create a policy environment conducive to permissionless innovation, I argue that policymakers should pursue policy reforms based on these three ideas:
The Innovator’s Presumption: Any person or party (including a regulatory authority) who opposes a new technology or service shall have the burden to demonstrate that such proposal is inconsistent with the public interest.
The Sunsetting Imperative: Any existing or newly imposed technology regulation should include a provision sunsetting the law or regulation within two years.
The Parity Provision: Any operator offering a similarly situated product or service should be regulated no more stringently than its least regulated competitor.
These provisions are crafted in a somewhat generic fashion in the hope that these reform proposals could be modified and adopted by various legislative or regulatory bodies. If you are interested in reading more details about each proposal, jump over to Plain Text to read the entire essay.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.