TLF friends, I have an announcement: Today the Mercatus Center at George Mason University is launching a new Technology Policy Program, which I will be directing. Perhaps more exciting for TLF readers, though, is that we’re also launching a new blog and podcast.
The new site is called Surprisingly Free, and it will focus on the intersection of technology, policy, and economics. We’ll feature commentary from Mercatus and GMU scholars, guest bloggers, and aggregated posts from other academics around the country.
The podcast is imaginatively called Surprisingly Free Conversations and it’s modeled after Russ Robert’s excellent Econtalk. The format is a weekly in-depth one-on-one conversation with a thinker or entrepreneur in the tech field. The first episode is up and features TLF veteran Tim Lee on bottom-up processes, innovation, and the future of news. Check it out, and please subscribe in iTunes.
We’re looking forward to engaging the tech policy discussion online from a law and econ academic perspective, and we hope you’ll join us for the ride. I look forward to your feedback!
The Post, hardly a bastion of radical cyber-libertarianism, has come out strongly against FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s plans to have the FCC issue “Net Neutrality” regulations. The editorial asks the critical threshold question we crazy cyber-libertarians always insist on:
Is this intervention necessary?
Mr. Genachowski claims to have seen “breaks and cracks” in the Internet that threaten to change the “fundamental architecture of openness.” He and other proponents of federal involvement cite a handful of cases they say prove that, left to their own devices, ISPs… will choke the free flow of information and technology. One example alluded to by the chairman: Comcast’s blocking an application by BitTorrent that would allow peer-to-peer video sharing. Yet that conflict was ultimately resolved by the two companies — without FCC intervention — after Comcast’s alleged bad behavior was exposed by a blogger.
Thus, the FCC oppposes pre-emptive regulation that would “prohibit ISPs from ‘discriminating against’ different applications,” noting that this would mean that “ISPs, which have poured billions of dollars into building infrastructure, would have little control — if any — over the kinds of information and technology flowing through their pipes.”
Three cheers for the
Post for recognizing both the property rights of ISPs in their networks and the fact that, even with Genachowski’s “slight concession” to allow “managed services in limited circumstances… unneeded regulation could still interfere with [ISPs] ability to manage bandwidth-hogging applications that can hamper service, especially during peak times.” Instead, the Post called for simple transparency, supporting a requirement that “ISPs be candid with the agency and the public about network management practices. The last paragraph hits the ball out of the park:
Mr. Genachowski claims that the FCC “will do as much as we need to do, and no more, to ensure that the Internet remains an unfettered platform for competition, creativity and entrepreneurial activity.” He will advance this goal by insisting on transparency; he will jeopardize it — and stifle further investments by ISPs — with attempts to micromanage what has been a vibrant and well-functioning marketplace.
Amen! The Post is about as “mainstream” as it gets in American journalism, so their strong opposition really underscores that preemptive “net neutrality” regulation isn’t the popular cause some in Washington think it is. It is simply infrastructure socialism.
In a week in which neutrality regulation is making a lot of news, I hope that Robert Hahn and Hal Singer’s terrific new study, “Why the iPhone Won’t Last Forever and What the Government Should Do to Promote its Successor” gets some attention. It provides a wonderful overview of how dynamically competitive the mobile marketplace has been over the past two decades and why critics are wrong to get worked up about the short-term “dominance” of Apple’s iPhone. Here’s the abstract of their paper:
Because of the overwhelming, positive response to the iPhone as compared to other smart phones, exclusive agreements between handset makers and wireless carriers have come under increasing scrutiny by regulators and lawmakers. In this paper, we document the myriad revolutions that have occurred in the mobile handset market over the past twenty years. Although casual observers have often claimed that a particular innovation was here to stay, they commonly are proven wrong by unforeseen developments in this fast-changing marketplace. We argue that exclusive agreements can play an important role in helping to ensure that another must-have device will soon come along that will supplant the iPhone, and generate large benefits for consumers. These agreements, which encourage risk taking, increase choice, and frequently lower prices, should be applauded by the government. In contrast, government regulation that would require forced sharing of a successful break-through technology is likely to stifle innovation and hurt consumer welfare.
“New technologies often seemingly emerge from nowhere, but also frequently lose their luster quickly,” Hahn and Singer go on to argue. As evidence they cite the recent examples of Second Life and MySpace, which were hyped as potentially become dominant providers in their respective areas just a few years ago, but now are subjected to intense competition. “[T]he the mobile handset market is subject to these same disruptive forces,” they argue: Continue reading →
Yesterday up on Capitol Hill, I hosted a very interesting discussion about “Next-Generation Parental Controls & Child Safety Efforts.” I thought I’d provide a quick recap here for those who couldn’t attend. [Note: audio of the event will be up shortly at the link above and transcript is in the works.] The event featured Steve Crown, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of Microsoft Corporation’s Entertainment & Devices Division; Dane Snowden, Vice President of External & State Affairs of CTIA – The Wireless Association; and Stephen Balkam, Chief Executive Officer of Family Online Safety Institute.
Steve Crown of Microsoft kicked the show off with a terrific overview of some the current and next-generation parental control tools and awareness efforts that Microsoft is deploying to help empower parents and keep kids safer both online and in gaming environments. Crown outlined Microsoft’s 5-prong strategy regarding how they have approached these issues on the gaming front, and I think it represents an excellent model of how sensible industry self-regulation and “best practices” can go a long way toward addressing concerns that many parents and policymakers have. The five strategies Crown outlined were: (1) Respect both the freedom of game creators and freedom of choice for game consumers; (2) empower parents with ratings, tools, and information; (3) use independent ratings (like the ESRB) to label content; (4) require all games be rated before they can be used on a platform so that parents can implement blocking controls; and (5) respect regional laws and rating systems in different parts of the globe.
In my book on
Parental Controls & Online Child Safety: A Survey of Tools & Methods, I’ve documented many of the empowerment tools that Microsoft has deployed in recent years to make this empowerment vision a reality. One of the most important things MS does on its XBox 360 console is to provide an immediate “out-of-the-box” prompt for parents to set up parental controls and establish other limitations on online chat, spending, or Internet access. Microsoft announced another cool new feature in November 2007, the “Family Timer.” It lets parents limit how and when children play games on the console. This is similar to the time management tools Microsoft offers in its Vista operating system for PCs. Incidentally, my wife has asked me to start using the Family Timer on our XBox — not for our kids, but for me! This particular 40-year-old man is still a big kid at heart.
Continue reading →
Adam Thierer and I have warned that neutrality regulation, once imposed on broadband providers, will
extend to other Internet services wherever “gatekeepers” are alleged to control access to a platform used by others. In short, the slippery slope of creeping common carriage is real and we’re already heading down it, with cyber-collectivist “luminaries” like Jonathan Zittrain and Frank Pasquale demanding neutrality regulation for devices, application platforms like iTunes and Facebook, and search!
TLF Reader Jim Reardon made a particularly astute observation on my post asking whether Americans really want net neutrality regulation:
Regulation of any service, product or industry is preceded by definition. Once defined, it is subject to taxation.
[Net Neutrality regulation] is a prelude to taxation of Internet products and services. It will likely start with telephony services and proceed accordingly to financial services, and continue from there.
As such, the activity is essentially neutral insofar as technology innovation is concerned — so long as applicable taxes are paid the government will ensure that the service is not disfavored by the network operators.
Absolutely right! One of the greatest barriers to government regulation and taxation of the Internet today is the lack of clear definitions: The FCC rules will tell you precisely what “cable television” or “commercial radio” mean, but the concepts of “social networking,” “Internet video,” “blogging,” and even “search” are indeterminate and constantly evolving.
Ronald Reagan once quipped:
Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Fortunately, government’s
ability to implement this view depends—to paraphrase President Clinton—”on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ ‘it’ is”: Allowing “it” to remain beautifully amorphous may be the best way to keep government at bay.
Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles;
[The Lord] hath put down the mighty from their seats [of power] and raised up the lowly.
– “Magnificat”
The Internet continues to humble the mighty in journalism. We hear a lot about the humbling of news outlets like the New York Times, but little about the humbling of news-makers. While the media
reformistas would have us believe that dark, shadowy forces control what we hear, see and read, the reality is that it’s becoming increasingly impossible for even the world’s largest companies to “manage” stories because we live in an age of true media abundance. There’s no better sign of this than the fact that Michael Arrington has declared, with good reason, the “news embargo” dead. In the days of media scarcity (which the reformistas like Andrew Keen want to re-create), press releases often declared a story to be “embargoed” until a specific day and time, allowing companies to shape the story by planting releases with the “right” journalists ahead of time. Such embargoes have been breaking down for some time, but now, with the explosion of media abundance, even Google no longer has “the clout to force press to stick to embargoes.”
It’s not my favorite recording but this clip of Bach’s “Magnificat” (BWV 243) should sear into your brain the irrepressibility of the Internet as the greatest leveling force since the invention of the printing press. The two are not unrelated: Bach’s Lutheranism was made possible only by the ready availability of the printed word.
Whatever you think about this messy dispute between AT&T and Google about how to classify web-based telephony apps for regulatory purposes — in this case, Google Voice — the key issue not to lose site of here is that we are inching ever closer to FCC regulation of web-based apps! Again, this is the point we have stressed here again and again and again and again when opposing Net neutrality mandates: If you open the door to regulation of one layer of the Net, you open up the door to the eventual regulation of all layers of the Net.
You might not buy that story initially but if you doubt it then I invite you to read just about any history of American broadcast media regulation over the course of the past seven decades. (You might want to start with Krattenmaker & Powe’s Regulating Broadcast Programming or Jonathan Emord’s
Freedom, Technology, and the First Amendment). In such histories you will find a common theme: Once regulation of media and communications platforms gets underway, the natural progression of things is uni-directional — Up! That is, when new questions arise about how to “deal with” a new service, network, platform, or technology, the general tendency is the “regulate up” instead of “deregulating down.” When regulators are given a greater say about the contours of markets as technologies evolve and/or converge, we shouldn’t be surprised that their first instinct is to “bring them into the fold.”
And, sadly, that is exactly what is likely to occur eventually with Google Voice. The only really interesting question is what else regulators start mucking with in the search and applications layer once they get their hands on it. And if you still insist that I am being overly paranoid about “regulatory creep” and the prospect of the FCC gradually transforming into the Federal Information Commission, then consider what the agency had to say about cloud computing in paragraph 60 (pg. 21) of the FCC’s recent Wireless Innovation and Investment Notice of Inquiry, which was launched on August 27th: Continue reading →
FOXNews.com has just published an editorial that I penned about Monday’s net neutrality announcement from the FCC.
by Ryan Radia
The federal government may gain broad new powers to regulate Internet
providers next month if Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski gets his way. In a milestone speech on Monday, Genachowski proposed sweeping new regulations that would give the FCC the formal authority to dictate application and network management practices to companies that offer Internet access, including wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon Wireless.
Genachowski’s proposed rules would make good on a pledge that President Obama made in his campaign to enshrine net neutrality as law. The announcement was met with cheers by a small but vocal crowd of activists and academics who have been pushing hard for net neutrality for years. But if bureaucrats and politicians truly care about neutrality, they would be wise to resist calls to expand the government’s power over private networks. Instead, policymakers should recognize that it is far more important for government to remain neutral to competing business models — open, closed, or any combination thereof.
Continue reading →
Washington, D.C. The Space Frontier Foundation today congratulated the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and NASA on their joint discovery of water across the Lunar surface.
“This discovery marks a turning point for humanity’s future in space,” remarked Foundation Director Berin Szoka. “Just as lumber, coal, and oil found in the New World powered America’s development, the precious resource of Lunar water will enable a truly open frontier in space.”
Scientists had previously assumed the Moon was bone-dry except for small concentrations of ice at the poles, but the Indian probe Chandrayaan-1 has confirmed the presence of water throughout the Lunar surface frozen in Lunar soil where it could easily be harvested.
“If we have water we have the core elements needed to support life,” said SFF Founder Rick Tumlinson. “H2O is a magic formula: We can drink it, raise crops with it, or even break it down for oxygen to breathe. We can even recombine the hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket propellant. Confirming the widespread existence of Moonwater means we have a nearby oasis in space around which we can build true human communities beyond the Earth. There
will be flowers on the Moon in our lifetimes.”
Since its creation in 1988, the Foundation has advocated using the resources we find in space to enable human exploration and settlement of the frontier-rather than carrying those resources from the Earth’s surface. These include both asteroid/comet materials and Lunar deposits such as those confirmed in today’s announcement.
“Lunar water will be the ‘mother’s milk’ of permanent human settlement not just of the Moon but of the rest of the Solar System,” concluded Szoka. “Finding water on the Moon is the key to opening the Space Frontier: Once you can refuel in space, you can ‘live off the land’ just like the early settlers who opened frontiers on Earth.”
Over at his always-informative Spectrum Blog, wireless guru Michael Marcus brings to my attention a new report that will definitely be of interest to everyone here about “The Economic Value Generated by Current and Future Allocations of Unlicensed Spectrum.” It was written by Rich Thanki of Perspective Associates, a UK consulting firm. I haven’t had time to finish the whole thing yet, but it basically lays out the argument for opening up more spectrum, especially “white spaces,” to unlicensed use.
Anyway, Mike Marcus has an much better write-up of the report than I could ever do, so head over there to check out his discussion. One important thing that Mike stresses is the importance of technical flexibility:
But the key issue here is not the presence or absence of a license, the key issue is deregulation. A major reason why unlicensed networks have been so innovative is that the descendants of the FCC Docket 81-413 rulemaking, e.g. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee have been in spectrum bands with great technical flexibility… If you overregulate unlicensed systems, they can stagnate just as much as licensed one often do.
I think that is an important insight and essential lesson that we should always keep in mind when it comes to spectrum policy, regardless of whether we talking about licensed or unlicensed spectrum. Although I’ve always been a bit torn about how much spectrum should be allocated on an unlicensed (or “commons”) basis versus auctioned (property rights model), as Marcus suggests, flexibility is crucial in either case. In all the heated catfights over licensed and unlicensed spectrum, that point sometimes gets overlooked.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.