“If we can put a man on the moon…”

by on January 9, 2012 · 0 comments

I enjoyed this new piece by Matt Welch over at Reason about the uses and abuses of the “if we can put a man on the moon” metaphor. “There’s no escaping the moonshot in contemporary political discourse,” Welch notes. Indeed, in the field of technology policy, we hear the old “if we can put a man on the moon, then we can [fill in the blank]… ” line with increasing regularity.

For example, just a few years ago, in the midst of the social networking “predator panic,” several state Attorneys General, led by Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, pushed aggressively for a mandatory online age verification scheme.  At several points during the debate, Blumenthal, now a U.S. Senator, argued that “The technology is available. The solution is financially feasible, practically doable. If we can put a man on the moon, we can check ages of people on these Web sites,” he claimed. Of course, just saying so doesn’t make it true. As I noted in a big paper on the issue, online age verification is extremely complicated, likely even impossible, and history has shown that no technological control is foolproof. Moreover, attempts to impose authentication and identification schemes would have numerous trade-offs and unintended consequences, especially for online anonymity, privacy, and free speech. A subsequent report by the Harvard-based blue ribbon Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF) showed why that was the case. Continue reading →

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Ezra Klein on the Importance of Advertising to Media

by on January 8, 2012 · 566 comments

Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein had a terrific column yesterday (Human Knowledge, Brought to You By…) on one of my favorite subjects: how advertising is the great subsidizer of the press, media, content, and online services.  Klein correctly notes that “our informational commons, or what we think of as our informational commons, is, for the most part, built atop a latticework of advertising platforms. In that way,” he continues, “it’s possible that no single industry — not newspapers nor search engines nor anything else — has done as much to advance the storehouse of accessible human knowledge in the 20th century as advertisers. They didn’t do it because they are philanthropists, and they didn’t do it because they love information. But they did it nevertheless.”

Quite right. As I noted in my recent Charleston Law Review article on “Advertising, Commercial Speech & First Amendment Parity,” media economists have found that advertising has traditionally provided about 70% to 80% of support for newspapers and magazines, and advertising / underwriting has entirely paid for broadcast TV and radio media. And it goes without saying that advertising has been an essential growth engine for online sites and services. How is it that we’re not required to pay per search, or pay for most online news services, or shell out $19.95 a month for LinkedIn, Facebook, or other social media services? The answer, of course, is advertising.  Thus, Klein notes, while “we see [] advertising as a distraction… without the advertising, the information wouldn’t exist. So the history of information, in the United States at least, is the history of platforms that could support advertising.”

And the sustaining power of advertising for new media continues to grow. As I noted in my law review article: Continue reading →

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Will the Web Make NC-17 Safe For Marketing?

by on January 5, 2012 · 1 comment

[Cross-posted at Reason.org]

One of the more critically praised films this year has been Shame, which has been in limited release around the country since December.  Although it’s an independent production, the film is being distributed by 20th Century Fox, a major studio, and stars Michael Fassbender, an actor who appears to be in the middle of his breakout moment.

The film is also rated NC-17.

Until recently, the Motion Picture Association of America’s NC-17 rating, which restricts admission to theatergoers 18 and older, was the box office kiss of death. Not only did NC-17 carry the notoriety of its predecessor, the X rating, it seriously hampered a film’s marketing. Boys Don’t Cry, The Cooler and Clerks are among the well-known examples of acclaimed films that were cut to win the more commercially acceptable R rating, in spite of protest from their filmmakers and actors that the cuts diminished the power and the point of the scenes in question.

But most newspapers and local TV stations won’t carry ads for NC-17 movies. Some theater chains, such as Cinemark, won’t exhibit them. Major retailers like Wal-Mart nor video rental chains like Blockbuster won’t stock NC-17-rated DVDs.

In Hollywood, art and commerce have always been in tense balance. That balance may shifting as the Web becomes a larger factor in advertising. For example, a newspaper’s policy against advertising NC-17 movies is meaningless if a theater chain no longer uses newspaper advertising at all. AMC, the second biggest chain in the country, has been cutting back on print advertising since 2009. Last June, the company documented its shift from print to Web in a quarterly filing with the SEC. Regal Entertainment Group, another chain, reportedly is following suit.

Continue reading →

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We Need More Attack Ads in Political Campaigns

by on January 5, 2012 · 1 comment

A Politician Reacting to an Attack Ad

I’ve never understood why so many people whine about “negative attack ads” during political campaign season. To me, attack ads are just about the only interesting thing that comes out of the early campaign / caucus period. Attack ads are usually chock-full of useful information about candidates and their positions and they typically provoke or even demand a response from the politician being attacked. They also attract increased media scrutiny and broader societal deliberation about a candidate and his or her views.

More importantly, these attack ads and the responses they provoke are far, far more substantive than the typical campaign ad puffery we see and hear. Most campaign ads are packed with absurd banalities ensuring us that the candidate running the ad loves their spouse, children, country, and God.  Well, of course they do!  Enough of that silly crap. It’s meaningless drivel. Give us more attack ads, I say! They are a healthy part of deliberative democracy and our free speech tradition.

Anyway, political scientist John G. Geer has made a far more eloquent case for attack ads and documented their use and importance throughout American history in his book, In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns. Here’s the link to a Cato event featuring him and an excerpt from the event is embedded below. Continue reading →

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Vint Cerf on Why Internet Access Is Not a Human Right (+ A Few More Reasons)

by on January 5, 2012 · 22 comments

In an provocative oped in today’s New York Times, Vint Cerf, one of the pioneers of the Net who now holds the position “chief Internet evangelist” at Google, makes the argument for why “Internet Access Is Not a Human Right.” He argues:

technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it. The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of access to information — and those are not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular time. Indeed, even the United Nations report, which was widely hailed as declaring Internet access a human right, acknowledged that the Internet was valuable as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.

You won’t be surprised to hear that I generally agree. But there are two other issues Cerf fails to address. First, who or what pays the bill for classifying the Internet or broadband as a birthright entitlement?  Second, what are the potential downsides for competition and innovation from such a move? Continue reading →

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#FacebookFail: Diversify Your Networking

by on January 3, 2012 · 3 comments

Here’s the notice I’ve been getting the last few days when, logged into Facebook from a computer, I try to post a comment or update my status.

Clever observers will note that the recommendation to log in from a computer is misplaced, as I get it when I’m logged in from a computer. Facebook gives me no instructions when I log in (or when I log out and log in again), though it did once ask me to change my password, which I did.

Most likely, Facebook’s algorithms believe I’ve violated some part of the Terms of Service, such as by repetitive posting or other spammy behavior. My exclusion from the site began contemporaneous with my attempt to post a single comment that failed for reasons I couldn’t discern in several tries.

Undoubtedly, my friends at Facebook will leap to my aid and clear this up for me in short order, feeling slightly stung that I “went public” with the problem rather than going to them. But I wanted to experience this as an ordinary consumer, not as a member of the digerati with insider access to people at important companies. In the past, I’ve used insider access with services like PayPal and (the now defunct) Bitcoin7 to get help that an ordinary user couldn’t have gotten. Bully for me that I can do that, but my experience is atypical and no basis for observing how the world works.

Some observations: Continue reading →

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A Mantra for Tech Policy in the New Year

by on January 3, 2012 · 0 comments

[Cross posted at TechFreedom.org]

It’s hard to believe TechFreedom launched just last January. As we begin 2012, let me share with you the mantra that continues to guide our work: “Technology expands the capacity to choose; and it denies the potential of this revolution if we assume the Government is best positioned to make these choices for us.”

That’s how Justice Kennedy explained the Supreme Court’s 2000 decision to strike down cable television censorship: better that parents choose for themselves what media are appropriate for their children. In short, as technology empowers, regulation should recede.

But except where courts impose this standard, the presumption in most tech policy debates is just the opposite: only government can protect us. In 1999, Larry Lessig predicted that “Cyberspace, left to itself, will not fulfill the promise of freedom. It will become a perfect tool of control.”  That pessimism shapes how most advocates, commentators, regulators, lawmakers, and even judges think about tech policy.

It’s a seductive idea: If only the right policy “levers” can be pulled, in the right way, at the right time, perhaps cyberspace can come closer to fulfilling that “promise of freedom.” Give me a lever large enough, some regulators seem to think, and I’ll free the world!

We’re skeptical—not of their motives, but of their ability to plan a free and thriving Internet.  Just as Hayek said about the “curious task” of economics, we aim “to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Will those policy levers really do what those pulling them think?  What else will they do? Will cyberspace really turn out better than if it had been left to itself?

This isn’t an merely an argument for self-regulation, but for the broader, more complex process by which market forces check corporate power.   Continue reading →

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Top TLF Posts of 2011 & Year-End Analytics

by on December 29, 2011 · 2 comments

As 2011 winds down, I thought I’d list a few year-end analytics for The Technology Liberation Front blog.  In 2011, we had just under 400,000 visits from 332,000 unique visitors. That’s up from 312,000 visits and 247,000 unique visitors in 2010.If you prefer a pageviews metric then we had 514,000 pageviews and 444,000 unique pageviews in 2011, up from 420,000 and 361,000 respectively in 2010.

As far as the top posts of the year go, anything Bitcoin related proved to be link-bait magic with 4 of the top 10 posts (all by Jerry Brito) being about Bitcoin. But it was Ryan Radia’s post on how to protect your privacy on Facebook and the Net more generally that commanded the most hits in 2011 with almost 35,000 views. Congrats Ryan! Anyway, the year’s Top 10 list follows below and many thanks to all those who took the time to visit the TLF over the past year.

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ICANN must not back down

by on December 29, 2011 · 5 comments

ICANN’s plan to open up the domain name space to new top level domains is scheduled to begin January 12, 2012. This long overdue implementation is the result of an open process that began in 2006. It would, in fact, be more realistic to say that the decision has been in the works 15 years; i.e., since early 1997. That is when demand for new top-level domain names, and the need for other policy decisions regarding the coordination of the domain name system, made it clear that a new institutional framework had to be created. ICANN was the progressive and innovative U.S. response to that need. It was created to become a nongovernmental, independent, truly global and representative policy development authority.

The result has been far from perfect, but human institutions never are. Over the past 15 years, every stakeholder with a serious interest in the issue of top level domains has had multiple opportunities to make their voice heard and to shape the policy. The resulting new gTLD policy reflects that diversity and complexity. From our point of view, it is too regulatory, too costly, and makes too many concessions to content regulators and trademark holders. But it will only get worse with delay. The existing compromise output that came out of the process paves the way for movement forward after a long period of artificial scarcity, opening up new business opportunities.

Now there is a cynical, illegitimate last-second push by a few corporate interests in the United States to derail that process. Continue reading →

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On Nostalgia

by on December 28, 2011 · 6 comments

Just last week I was discussing the terrifically interesting work of Michael Sacasas who pens The Frailest Thing, a poetic blog about technology and culture. [see: “Information Revolutions & Cultural / Economic Tradeoffs“] I highly recommend you follow his blog even if you struggle to keep up with his brilliance, as I often do.  He posted another great essay today entitled, “Nostalgia: The Third Wave,” in which he discusses the work of the late social critic Christopher Lasch and his work on memory and nostalgia. Go read the entire thing since I cannot possible do it justice here. Anyway, I posted a short comment over there that I thought I would just republish here in case others are interested. I find the issue of nostalgia to be quite interesting.

_______

Michael… I’m currently finishing up a paper looking at the causes of various “techno-panics” over time. I try to group together a variety of theories and possible explanations, one of which is labeled “Hyper-Nostalgia, Pessimistic Bias & Soft Ludditism.” I don’t go into anywhere near the detail you do here, but I did unearth a number of interesting things while conducting research. [Update: That paper on “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” was published by the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology in early 2013.]

Have you ever come across the book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, by the poet Susan Stewart? She notes that what is ironic about nostalgia is that it is rooted in something typically unknown by the proponent.  Consequently, she argues that nostalgia represents “a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience. Rather, it remains behind and before that experience.”  Too often, Stewart observes, “nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face” and thus becomes a “social disease.”

That’s probably a bit extreme, but it does help explain why some intellectuals, social critics, and policymakers occasionally demonize new mediums, technologies, or forms of culture. If one if suffering from a rather extreme version of what Michael Shermer refers to this as “rosy retrospection bias,” (The Believing Brain, 2011) or “the tendency to remember past events as being more positive than they actually were,” then it would hardly be surprising that they would adopt attitudes and policies that disfavor the new and different. Continue reading →

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