Peter Suderman at AFF was kind enough to ask me to be the inaugural subject of their new “bloggers on blogging” feature. You can read our conversation here. Lots of discussion of blogging: its utility for journalists, its particular utility for aspiring young journalists, how corporations can do it well, and its future. Check it out.
For those not familiar with AFF, it’s an important DC-centered organization that helps aspiring right-of-center policy wonks network and pick up skills that will be important to their careers. I was in charge of their Science and Technology section for a couple of years, and if you scroll down you can find my old columns. Writing an (unpaid) regular column was great practice, as well as a great way to showcase their writing skills. Any libertarians or conservatives who either (1) live in DC or (2) want to become writers should get involved with AFF and/or get involved with writing for them.
JD Lasica is speaking about the evolution of media. He did a video with Ed Felten that I assume is interesting, although I haven’t actually listened to it because I’m busy listening to his speech, which is also interesting.
I’m headed to Princeton’s Future of News workshop. It looks like there will be some fabulous speakers. If you’re in the New York/Philly area, I hope to see you there.
Inspired by the promotional brochure I recently came across, I’ve taken a look at L-1 Identity Solutions in a Cato TechKnowledge paper. Though it has better options, L-1 and its new acquisition, Digimarc ID Systems, seem likely to continue lobbying for the REAL ID Act. My concluding line may be a little obvious: “A corporate lobbying operation can do as much harm to liberty as any government agency or official.”
Yesterday – Sunday, May 11, 2008 – was the statutory deadline for state compliance with the REAL ID Act. Not a single state has begun issuing nationally standardized IDs as called for by the law. Nor are they putting driver information into nationally accessible databases.
Matthew Blake of the Washington Independent has a solid recap of the situation.
Luis points to an interesting paper on the fragility of intrinsic motivation in volunteer efforts. Luis explains:
The paper also has some more detailed observations that come out of the experimental work; among them that voluntary cooperation is fragile; group composition matters (i.e., groups with more conditional cooperators will be healthier); and that ‘belief management’ maters- i.e., if people think that they are in a group with more conditional cooperators, that group will be more robust. None of these will come as a huge surprise to anyone who has been involved with volunteer communities, but still interesting to see it experimentally confirmed.
I’ve always suspected that something like this is the case, and that it explains in part why the GPL is so successful, since it uses copyright to force cooperation and penalize defection, and (importantly) makes a clear public statement that that is the case, which serves a signaling function (everyone in the community knows these are the ground rules) and a filtering function (people who aren’t interested in collaborating don’t join as much as they join other groups.)
I think this is the key explanation for the outrage over the MS-Novell deal a couple of years back. By signing on to the GPL, Novell had signaled that it intended to honor the free software community’s principle of reciprocity. Then, it signed an agreement with Microsoft that looked like an attempt to skirt the GPL in a way that gave Novell an unfair advantage over other members of the Linux ecosystem. People who weren’t steeped in the ethos of the free software community saw it as a simple business deal, and objections to it as some kind of knee-jerk reaction to profit-making. They didn’t realize the extent to which the community is made up of “conditional cooperators” whose participation is contingent on everyone else in the community following the rules. When Novell “defected” from the community’s expectations, the rest of the community felt a need to ostracize it to ensure that no one else would be tempted to similarly defect.
Luis also linked to this old post of his which has more interesting citations on intrinsic motivations.
For those of you who monitor the ongoing drama over TV sports contracts, you’ll definitely want to read this new paper by my PFF colleague Barbara Esbin, “State Mandates for Program Carriage Dispute Resolution: Welcome to the Wide World of Regulation.” The key dispute du jour involves efforts by the NFL Network to require cable companies to enter into arbitration if the parties fail to strike program carriage deals. The NFL is pushing states to pass legislation mandating this. But, as Barbara notes, the mandatory arbitration procedures are quite silly:
Although characterized as “arbitration bills,” the legislative proposals go well beyond the question of private dispute resolution. Rather, they effectively require vertically integrated cable operators to carry every sports, news and entertainment programming service at a price set by an arbitrator on the terms and conditions of carriage proposed by the programmer. In contrast to the federal requirement that the programmer demonstrate discrimination and competitive harm, this legislation would permit a programmer to demand arbitration merely if it “believes” it is being treated unfairly.
In other words, what the NFL Network is looking for here is a free ride at the expense of video distributors and their subscribers. The NFL thinks they possess a “must have” network and that every operator must carry it even if the cable operators and their customers don’t want it or at least don’t think it’s worth the price the NFL wants them to pay for it. Barbara addresses what’s so wrong-headed about this thinking: Continue reading →
Malcolm Gladwell has an engaging write-up of Intellectual Ventures, a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the patent system:
In August of 2003, I.V. held its first invention session, and it was a revelation. “Afterward, Nathan kept saying, ‘There are so many inventions,’ ” Wood recalled. “He thought if we came up with a half-dozen good ideas it would be great, and we came up with somewhere between fifty and a hundred. I said to him, ‘But you had eight people in that room who are seasoned inventors. Weren’t you expecting a multiplier effect?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but it was more than multiplicity.’ Not even Nathan had any idea of what it was going to be like.”
The original expectation was that I.V. would file a hundred patents a year. Currently, it’s filing five hundred a year. It has a backlog of three thousand ideas. Wood said that he once attended a two-day invention session presided over by Jung, and after the first day the group went out to dinner. “So Edward took his people out, plus me,” Wood said. “And the eight of us sat down at a table and the attorney said, ‘Do you mind if I record the evening?’ And we all said no, of course not. We sat there. It was a long dinner. I thought we were lightly chewing the rag. But the next day the attorney comes up with eight single-spaced pages flagging thirty-six different inventions from dinner. Dinner.”
As Mike points out, the blindingly obvious conclusion from this is that patents are way, way too easy to get. If a room full of smart people—even absolutely brilliant people—can come up with 36 “inventions” in one evening, the logical conclusion is that “inventions” are not rare or hard to produce, and that therefore there’s no good public policy reason to offer monopolies to people who invent them. After all, the classic theory of patent law says just the opposite: that inventions are so difficult and expensive to produce that we wouldn’t get them at all without patent protection. That’s clearly not true of the “inventions” IV is developing, which means that if IV does get patents on them, the patent system is seriously flawed. Continue reading →
As I have argued many times before (see 1, 2, 3, 4), some sort of usage-based bandwidth metering or consumption cap makes a lot of sense as a way to deal with broadband network traffic management. So, if this is the direction that Comcast is heading–and this recent Broadband Reports piece suggests that it is–that is fine with me. The article says it might work as follows:
A Comcast insider tells me the company is considering implementing very clear monthly caps, and may begin charging overage fees for customers who cross them. While still in the early stages of development, the plan — as it stands now — would work like this: all users get a 250GB per month cap. Users would get one free “slip up” in a twelve month period, after which users would pay a $15 charge for each 10 GB over the cap they travel. According to the source, the plan has “a lot of momentum behind it,” and initial testing is slated to begin in a month or two.
“The intent appears to be to go after the people who consistently download far more than the typical user without hurting those who may have a really big month infrequently,” says an insider familiar with the project, who prefers to remain anonymous. “As far as I am aware, uploads are not affected, at least not initially.” According to this source, the new system should only impact some 14,000 customers out of Comcast’s 14.1 million users (i.e. the top 0.1%).
It’s always been my hope that we could potentially head-off burdensome Net neutrality regulations by encouraging carriers to deal with the problem of excessive bandwidth consumption by using time-tested price discrimination solutions instead of the sort of packet management techniques that are the subject of such heated debate today. Of course, on one of our old podcasts on Net neutrality issues, Richard Bennett pointed out to me that this still might not alleviate the need for other types of traffic management techniques to be used. And he also pointed out that the very small subset of true bandwidth hogs are almost entirely heavy BitTorrent users, so perhaps the way Comcast was dealing with them was just another way of skinning the same cat.
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.