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With Microsoft-Yahoo! going by the wayside, replaced by rumor and talk of a major transaction between Google and Yahoo!, it’s a good time to review some of the best industry analysis I’ve ever come across.

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Twice in two days now, I’ve come across news articles using the term “Big Brother” to refer to private sector information practices that affect privacy. Big Brother is not an appropriate shorthand here. In his book 1984, George Orwell gave the name “Big Brother” to the oppressive government that observed and controlled the lives of the book’s protagonists. The unique oppressive powers of this governmental entity were a central motif of the book.

Yesterday’s Washington Post had an article headlined “FTC Wants to Know What Big Brother Knows About You.” Is the Federal Trade Commision examining warrantless wiretapping, one hopes? Alas, no – they’re looking at “behavioral targeting” on the Web. This is when advertisers collect information about Web surfers with cookies, using it to direct more relevant ads their way.

Consumers who care to can “opt out” of nearly all “behavioral targeting” by setting their browsers not to receive third-party cookies. In both Internet Explorer and Firefox, the “Tools” pull down has a selection called “Options.” Clicking the “Privacy” tab allows users to set blanket bans on cookies or site-specific preferences.

Behavioral targeting is in no way an exercise of the legal monopoly on coercion, much less an oppressive exercise of that power.

Ars Technica, an otherwise excellent tech publication, mangled the same literary reference in this headline: “Big Brother is Watching: Companies Snoop E-mail to Combat Leaks.” Employers monitoring communications on their systems are neither exercising government power nor oppressing their employees.
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No policy angle. This is just cool. Via TechCrunch.

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Bruce Schneier is a smart and interesting guy. His sound thinking on computer security has influenced me a great deal, and it extrapolates well into related fields like national security. So I’m always interested to find writings of his with which I disagree. A recent essay in Wired, entitled “Our Data, Ourselves” is one. It calls for “a comprehensive data privacy law.”

This law should protect all information about us, and not be limited merely to financial or health information. It should limit others’ ability to buy and sell our information without our knowledge and consent. It should allow us to see information about us held by others, and correct any inaccuracies we find. It should prevent the government from going after our information without judicial oversight. It should enforce data deletion, and limit data collection, where necessary. And we need more than token penalties for deliberate violations.

If he really believes that these rules should govern the collection and use of data – “all information about us”! – what an administrative nightmare that would be to implement. The benefits of doing so would be quite small in comparison.

Some of these things are agreeable, such as judicial oversight of government data collection (the Fourth Amendment is that law) but even a solid libertarian like myself wouldn’t endorse judicial oversight of government officials looking up information about me on public Web sites, for example.

And should I have a right to review any email in which people discuss this blog post and its author? Incredible.

The flaw in this article (beyond its carelessness) is Bruce’s treatment of these information practices as all-new, and needing an all-new regulatory regime, just because decision-making is now undertaken using “data.”

“Whoever controls our data can decide whether we can get a bank loan, on an airplane or into a country. Or what sort of discount we get from a merchant, or even how we’re treated by customer support.”

But it’s always been true that decisions like these are made using “data” – perhaps not in digital form, but data/information all the same. When has a decision ever been made not using “data”? We don’t need to throw out old rules about privacy, fairness, and so on just because information is digitized.

Many of Schneier’s premises are correct. The change from analog to digital data systems does cause a lot more tracks to form behind people as they traverse the economy and society. This creates lots of efficiency, convenience, wealth, and problems – threats to privacy, fair treatment, personal security, seclusion, and liberty. Let’s deal with them – each one – on their merits rather than trying to write a single law to overhaul the use of information in society.

Reversing the course of a river would be a tiny problem compared to what Schneier proposes.

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Here’s a video highlighting the Peer-to-Patent project originated by Beth Noveck and New York Law School’s “Do Tank.”

Whether because of inappropriately low standards for granting patents or recent decades’ outburst of inventiveness in technological fields, the Patent and Trademark Office is swamped. Patent examiners lack the breadth of knowledge in relevant fields to do the job they should be doing on each patent application. Drawing on the knowledge of interested and knowledgeable people can only improve the process, and this project aims to do just that.

I’ve written favorably about Peer-to-Patent a couple of times, but here’s a cautionary note: A successful Peer-to-Patent would result in a dispersion of power from patent examiners and the USPTO to the participants in the project. Surface support from the USPTO notwithstanding, the application of public choice theory to bureaucracies tells us that the agency won’t give up this power without a fight.

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Yglesias points to “Money Ruins Everything”, a paper by John Quiggin and Dan Hunter about the rise of peer production and its implications for public policy. It covers much the same ground as (and cites) Greg Lastowka and Dan Hunter’s excellent Cato Policy Analysis “Amateur-to-Amateur.” The basic point is that non-pecuniary motives have become more important in recent years, as illustrated by the success of projects like Wikipedia and Linux.

I’ll have more to say about the paper at Techdirt, but I wanted to note a couple of minor quibbles:

Criticism the first: On p. 235 the authors draw a distinction between free software (which has a sharp distinction between producers and consumers) and the blogosphere (in which producers and consumers are often one and the same). I don’t think this dichotomy works on either side of the ledger. On the one hand, free software has made the most progress in precisely those areas where software producers and consumers are the same people. A lot of Apache contributors, for example, work as commercial web developers and submit patches they’ve developed for their own use or the use of their clients. While certainly, there are a lot more users than developers for almost any software project, it’s quite common for the developers of a project to be drawn from the same pool as the users.
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I’m looking for examples of effective tech lobbyists. We’ve seen a lot of people moving from the Valley to the Hill lately. Microsoft has gone from “Jack and His Jeep ” to a giant lobbying shop. Google learned from Microsoft’s mistakes and now has a couple floors down on New York Ave. These guys are making an impact in Washington, but what are the best Baptist and Bootleggers scenarios?

Bruce Yandle was the first to put this name to the common two-man play in Washington. It involves a moral authority and an underwriter with deep pockets to fund a lobbying effort. He used Baptists and bootleggers as the most clear example of this. Baptists called for temperance and prohibition because they genuinely believed that alcohol was a great evil. This provided moral authority. The bootleggers didn’t care much about morals, but they knew they’d get rich if legitimate breweries and distilleries were made illegal.

The same thing seems to be going on now. “Lobbying 2.0” features moral crusaders fighting for net neutrality, the unlocking of cell phones, the unbundling of any service that dare be bundled and other such tech-morality causes. Meanwhile, the real beneficiaries of any regulation to come out of this are big tech companies trying to gain an advantage on one another through regulation rather than through competition and innovation.

So, by “best” stories I mean classic examples of businesses lobbying in favor of regulation as opposed to defending themselves against regulation. Who’s most guilty of being a bootlegger? What individual crusader or group is playing the role of the Baptists?

Your comments are appreciated. Also, be sure to check out this Onion discussion on lobbyists.

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Ezra Klein links to Kevin Drum, who thinks that “40 years ago there were a small number of what you might call mega-intellectuals — people like Buckley and Chomsky and Galbraith and Friedman — who had a bigger influence on public discourse than any single public intellectual does today. Nobody on Dan’s list really seems to compete on quite the same plane as some of those 50s and 60s superstars.”

Ezra agrees with him. I don’t. Or, at least I don’t think this is obviously true. Here’s the thing: we consider Milton Friedman a giant because everyone in the libertarian political quandrant grew up reading him, while everyone in other quandrants grew up seeing him refuted. Contrariwise, Chomsky is considered a giant because everyone on the left idolized him in college and lots of non-lefties criticized him.

But of course, people in the 1950s didn’t have those attitudes because back then Friedman and Chomsky were brilliant young professors just beginning to make names for themselves. If you’d made a short list of important public intellectuals in 1970, Friedman and Chomsky would have been on it, but the list probably would have included a lot of other people that few remember today. Likewise, if we tried to make a list of the 100 most important public intellectuals today, that list would no doubt include some people that will one day be regarded as “giants,” but we don’t have any particular way to predict who they’ll be. What will determine that is whose ideas continue to be discussed as the next generation of intellectuals is growing up, and we won’t know who those are until we’ve actually had the discussions.

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