Following up on Eli’s earlier post (“Does CDT believe in Internet freedom?”), I thought I’d just point out that we’ve spent a great deal of time here through the years defending real Internet freedom, which is properly defined as “freedom from state action; not freedom for the State to reorder our affairs to supposedly make certain people or groups better off or to improve some amorphous ‘public interest.'” All too often these days, “Internet freedom,” like the term “freedom” more generally, is defined as a set of positive rights/entitlements complete with corresponding obligations on government to delivery the goods and tax/regulate comprehensively to accomplish it. Using “freedom” in that way represents a grotesque corruption of language and one that defenders of human liberty must resist with all our energy.
I’ll be writing more about this in upcoming columns, but here’s a short list of past posts on Internet freedom, properly defined:
- The Problem with the “Declaration of Internet Freedom” & the “Digital Bill of Rights” – by Adam Thierer (July 2, 2012)
- A Note to Congress: The United Nations Isn’t a Serious Threat to Internet Freedom—but You Are – by Jerry Brito & Adam Thierer (The Atlantic, June 19, 2012)
- Does the Internet Need a Global Regulator? – by Adam Thierer (Forbes, May 6, 2012)
- More Confusion about Internet “Freedom” – by Adam Thierer (Mar. 1, 2011)
- Internet Freedom–Real vs Imagined – by Adam Thierer (Dec. 12, 2007)
- A Response to Andrew McLaughlin on Net Neutrality & “Freedom” – by Adam Thierer (July 9, 2011)
- Web 2.0, Section 230, and Nozick’s “Utopia of Utopias” – by Adam Thierer (Jan. 13, 2009)
- Cyber-Libertarianism: The Case for Real Internet Freedom – by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka (Aug. 12, 2009)
- Broadband as a Human Right (and a short list of other things I am entitled to on your dime) – by Adam Thierer (Oct. 14, 2009)
- “Internet Freedom”: How Statists Corrupt Our Language – by Berin Szoka (Oct. 27, 2009)
Joshua Gans, professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and author of the new book Information Wants to be Shared, discusses modern media economics, including how books, movies, music, and news will be supported in the future.
Gans argues that sharing enhances most information’s value. He also explains that the business models of traditional media companies, gatekeepers who have relied on scarcity and control, have collapsed in the face of new technologies. Equally important, he argues that sharing can revive moribund, threatened industries even as he examines platforms that have, almost accidentally, thrived in this new environment.
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We learned today that Robert M. McDowell, who has served as a Commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission for almost seven years, will be leaving the agency shortly. I’m sad to hear it. Commissioner McDowell has been a great champion of freedom across the board, from traditional communications and media reform to cutting-edge Internet policy issues. On one issue after another, fans of liberty could count on Rob McDowell to perfectly articulate and defend the pro-freedom position on high-tech policy matters whenever and wherever he wrote or spoke.
I can’t even begin to list all the things we’ve written here over the years at the TLF about McDowell and his excellent body of work while he served at the FCC, but a quick custom search of this blog yields dozens of columns all gushing with praise for the seemingly endless string of outstanding speeches and statements that he made since joining the agency in 2006. But I just want to highlight two of McDowell’s most eloquent speeches and strongly encourage you to go read or re-read them because they will inspire you to keep up the good fight to expand the sphere of liberty in this field:
Here a few choice passages from these amazing speeches: Continue reading →
There is renewed interest in unlicensed spectrum as the FCC approaches the TV white space issue (again). Tim B. Lee reports on some of the unlicensed supporters,
Activists at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, TX, built a free wireless network to help publicize the power of unlicensed “white spaces” technology. The project is part of a broader campaign to persuade the FCC not to auction off this spectrum for the exclusive use of wireless carriers.
Unlicensed spectrum for high-powered devices has been called Super Wifi (“wifi” in this context is used loosely; Super Wifi is a PR term and has nothing to do with the wifi technical standard). Frankly, there are many reasons to be cautious about assigning more unlicensed spectrum, especially given the confusing information out there about the technology. (For instance, despite a popular rumor, Super Wifi would not provide free Internet access to everyone with a device, as Matt Yglesias and Jon Brodkin point out.) Continue reading →
Susan W. Brenner, associate dean and professor of law at the University of Dayton School of Law, discusses her new paper published in the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology entitled “Cyber-threats and the Limits of Bureaucratic Control.”
Brenner argues that the approach the United States, like other countries, uses to control threats in real-space is ill-suited for controlling cyberthreats. She explains that because this approach evolved to deal with threat activity in a physical environment, it is predicated on a bureaucratic organizations. This is not an effective way of approaching cyber-threat control, she argues.
Brenner also explains why congressional efforts at cybersecurity legislation are flawed and why U.S. authorities persist in pursuing antiquated strategies that cannot provide an effective cyberthreats defense system. She outlines an alternative approach to the task of protecting the country from cyberthreats, and approach that is predicated on older, more fluid threat control strategies.
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Joe Karaganis, vice president at The American Assembly at Columbia University, discusses the relationship between digital convergence and cultural production in the realm of online piracy.
Karaganis’s work at American Assembly arose from a frustration with the one-sided way in which industry research was framing the discourse around global copyright policy. He shares the results of Copy Culture in the US & Germany, a recent survey he helped conduct that distinguishes between attitudes towards piracy in the two countries. It found that nearly half of adults in the U.S. and Germany participate in a broad, informal “copy culture,” characterized by the copying, sharing, and downloading of music, movies, TV shows, and other digital media. And while citizens support laws against piracy, they don’t support outsized penalties.
Karaganis also discuses the new “six-strike” Copyright Alert System in the U.S., of which he is skeptical. He also talks about the politics of copyright reform and notes that there is a window of opportunity for the Republican Party to take up the issue before demography gives the advantage to the much younger Democratic Party.
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Ronald A. Cass, Dean Emeritus of Boston University School of Law, discusses his new book, Laws of Creation: Property Rights in the World of Ideas, which he co-authored with Boston University colleague Keith Hylton. Written as a primer for understanding intellectual property law and a defense of intellectual property, Laws of Creation explains the basis of IP and its justification.
According to Cass, not all would-be reformers share a similar guiding philosophy, distinguishing between those who support property rights but nevertheless have specific critiques of the intellectual property system as it currently stands, and reformers who do not see a place for property.
Cass explains that the current intellectual property system is neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but is a matter of weighing tradeoffs. On the whole, he argues, intellectual property benefits society. Cass also argues that intellectual property law in the U.S. is still more functional than that in other countries, such as Italy, and that, while it would benefit from some reform, it is fundamentally a workable system.
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Christopher S. Yoo, the John H. Chestnut Professor of Law, Communication, and Computer & Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the new book, The Dynamic Internet: How Technology, Users, and Businesses are Transforming the Network, explains that the Internet that we knew in its early days—one with a client-server approach, with a small number of expert users, and a limited set of applications and business cases—has radically changed, and so it may be that the architecture underlying the internet may as well.
According to Yoo, the internet we use today barely resembles the original Defense Department and academic network from which it emerged. The applications that dominated the early Internet—e-mail and web browsing—have been joined by new applications such as video and cloud computing, which place much greater demands on the network. Wireless broadband and fiber optics have emerged as important alternatives to transmission services provided via legacy telephone and cable television systems, and mobile devices are replacing personal computers as the dominant means for accessing the Internet. At the same time, the networks comprising the Internet are interconnecting through a wider variety of locations and economic terms than ever before.
These changes are placing pressure on the Internet’s architecture to evolve in response, Yoo says. The Internet is becoming less standardized, more subject to formal governance, and more reliant on intelligence located in the core of the network. At the same time, Internet pricing is becoming more complex, intermediaries are playing increasingly important roles, and the maturation of the industry is causing the nature of competition to change. Moreover, the total convergence of all forms of communications into a single network predicted by many observers may turn out to be something of a myth. Policymakers, Yoo says, should allow room for this natural evolution of the network to take place.
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A couple of folks have asked me why I’ve gone silent over the past few months and posted so little here on the TLF. Simply put, I over-committed myself to one law review after another. I had submitted a few working papers to law reviews late last year and then was simultaneously approached by a few others who were soliciting specific pieces. And I said ‘yes’ to everybody! That’s meant zero time for casual blogging of any sort. I hope to get back on the beat soon, but I still am putting the wraps on two of these, so it may be awhile before I get back to blogging regularly. Anyway, to the extent anyone is interested in what I am working on, here are my next seven law review articles, plus a book chapter:
- “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” 14 Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology, 309-386, (Winter 2013).
- “The Perils of Classifying Social Media Platforms as Public Utilities,” forthcoming, The CommLaw Conspectus: Journal of Communications Law and Policy, (Spring 2013).
- “Uncreative Destruction: The Misguided War on Vertical Integration in the Information Economy,” with Brent Skorup, 65 Federal Communications Law Journal, 157-201, (April 2013).
- “The Pursuit of Privacy in a World Where Information Control Is Failing,” 35 Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, 409-455, (2013).
- “A Framework for Benefit-Cost Analysis in Digital Privacy Debates,” 20 George Mason University Law Review, 1055-1105 (2013).
- “A History of Cronyism & Capture in the Information Technology Sector,” with Brent Skorup, [Mercatus Working Paper, July 2013. Looking for a home for this one, possibly in a poly sci or history journal instead of a law review.]
- “Internet Policy Paradigms: The First Half Century of Internet Governance Visions” [Looking for a home for this one, too, but still far from done with it.]
- [Book chapter] “A Framework for Responding to Online Safety Risks,” [forthcoming book chapter in: Youth And The Internet – Regulating Online Opportunities And Risks (Springer Press, 2013)]
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.