One of the recurring themes in libertarian discussions of patent and copyright law is the question of whether these institutions are better thought of as a form of property rights or as government monopolies. Personally I think that the property metaphor misleads more than it illuminates, and so I tend to avoid discussing the subject in those terms.
Reason recently had a debate about global warming, which you can watch here. And interestingly, it ended up raising almost precisely the same issues. Fred Smith dismisses cap-and-trade schemes for limiting the emission of greenhouse gases as “rationing.” Around 3:45 in the fourth video, Bailey points out: “With regard to this notion that somehow this is ‘energy rationing,’ well, Fred, when we a forest, is that lumber rationing? When we privatize the fisheries, is that fish rationing?”
It’s a good question. The idea of property rights is central to libertarian thought, and as a result, labeling a given regulatory scheme a system of “property rights,” rather than “monopoly” or “rationing” automatically gives it a leg up in libertarian policy debates. But this also opens the door for mischief, as people pushing fundamentally un-libertarian policy proposals attempt to win the debate by re-framing their preferred position using the rhetoric of property rights.
Ultimately, you have to go beyond the terms to examine the underlying institutions to determine to what extent the underlying institutions actually fit the property model. I’ll just say that I think the analogy with property rights is somewhat problematic in both cases, but cannot be lightly dismissed in either case.
Here’s the FISA portion of the SOTU:
One of the most important tools we can give them is the ability to monitor terrorist communications. To protect America, we need to know who the terrorists are talking to, what they are saying, and what they are planning. Last year, the Congress passed legislation to help us do that. Unfortunately, the Congress set the legislation to expire on February 1. This means that if you do not act by Friday, our ability to track terrorist threats would be weakened and our citizens will be in greater danger. The Congress must ensure the flow of vital intelligence is not disrupted. The Congress must pass liability protection for companies believed to have assisted in the efforts to defend America. We have had ample time for debate. The time to act is now.
I love the Clintonian phrasing: “liability protection for companies believed to have assisted in the efforts to defend America.” Because if he admits they actually
have “assisted in the efforts,” they would most likely have been breaking the law.
Good for them. Democrats in the Senate have rejected a Republican-backed cloture vote that would have forced an up-or-down vote on a Senate wiretapping bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecom companies. Encouragingly, only 48 senators voted for cloture, suggesting that the vote on the final bill might be close.
It remains to be seen if the Democrats have the spine to go on the defensive. If I’m reading things right, the president has threatened to veto any effort to temporarily expand the powers of the Protect America Act. In the president’s own parlance, he appears to be putting politics before the safety of Americans. So will the Democratic leadership fight fire with fire and tell the American public that the president is endangering American lives for the benefit of big telecom companies? I sure hope so, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
Good piece in FT.com today by Tom Hazlett of George Mason University. In the essay, Tom takes stock of what the Microsoft antitrust case did and did not accomplish over the past decade. After pointing out that the case fell short of the mark in terms of injecting Java-based competition into the marketplace as some had hoped, Tom notes:
But the decade has hardly been a bust for competition. It flourishes on margins unimagined by those who were professing to protect its path. Rivalry has come not from Java, but from a resurgent Apple and the open-source Linux. One is a vertically integrated firm with proprietary innovation; the other a geekdom of code-sharers seeking karma and human capital. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is coughing up market share to Mozilla, Netscape and Opera, browsers that ride comfortably on Windows.
But operating systems and browsers turned out to be a side show. The profits of the decade have been stolen by entrepreneurs who saw what was unfolding over a distant horizon. And then traversed that distance in a flash.While the DoJ was filing against Microsoft, two youngsters at Stanford were crawling the web. With a search engine that could catalogue and rank the world’s web sites, matching key words while filtering out mish mash, their start-up quickly entered the language as a verb — a really popular verb. You can Google it.
Meanwhile, Apple has been making its own fortune under the shadow of the beast. It is crushing Microsoft in media players, finding its salvation in the holy i-trinity of Pod, Tunes and Phone. Domination of this digital consumer space was right there for the dreaming.
Continue reading →
I missed them when I was writing my previous post about IPv6, but Ars has done quite a bit of coverage of the IPv6 transition over the last year. Here is an overview of IPv6 done in the usual exhaustive Ars style. And here is a recent story on the federal government’s rush to make IPv6 available on its networks by July… but not actually start using it.
I think the takeaway lesson here is that all manner of large institutions are preparing for the IPv6 transition, but so far nobody seems to be actually pulling the trigger. It’s fairly easy for Microsoft to add an IPv6 stack to Windows XP. It’s much harder for an ISP to
stop using IPv4 and start using IPv6. And until a significant number of people have already done so, there will be very few compelling advantages to doing so, because most network traffic will still get routed through a 6to4 tunnel to the old-fashioned IPv4 network. I would love to be proven wrong, because IPv6 has some nifty features (you can read all about them in the article above) but there’s precious little evidence of actual movement in that direction.
Continue reading →
Last week on the Google Public Policy Blog, Peter Greenberger of Google’s Elections and Issue Advocacy Team posted Google’s new guidelines for political advertising on the site. Most of the guidelines seem fairly straightforward and sensible to me since they relate to general principles of fairness and transparency. But sandwiched in between those principles is the following guideline:
No attacks on an individual’s personal life. Stating disagreement with or campaigning against a candidate for public office, a political party, or public administration is generally permissible. However, political ads must not include accusations or attacks relating to an individual’s personal life, nor can they advocate against a protected group. So, “Crime rates are up under Police Commissioner Gordon” is okay, but “Police Commissioner Gordon had an affair” is not.
I understand what Google is trying to do here in terms of making the Net a more civil place to engage in deliberative democracy without all the mud-slinging and name-calling. In one sense, I applaud them for that. On the other hand, the world is
not a perfect place and candidates are not perfect people. And, candidates for office are not just like any other citizen in our society. They are people who will be given power over other people. Power over our lives, our liberties and fate of the nation.
Continue reading →
Roy Mark, a reporter with eWeek, was kind enough to call me last week to get some comments for a story he was putting together about the upcoming State of the Union Address and where technology policy fits in.. or rather, doesn’t. “When President Bush delivers his final State of the Union speech Jan. 28, don’t expect to hear much, if any, discussion of technology,” Roy argues in his piece. “In his previous seven addresses to the nation–adding up to almost 34,000 words–the president has never uttered the words “Internet,” “broadband” or “digital.” Wireless? Not a word. Spectrum? Not a single mention. Network neutrality? Forget it.”
Here’s a few sections from Roy’s article that include my comments agreeing with his thesis:
None of this is surprising to Adam Thierer, director of the Center for Digital Media Freedom and a senior fellow at Washington’s Progress & Freedom Foundation. When it comes to tech issues, “This has been an administration that has been largely missing in action,” Thierer told eWEEK. “It obsesses more about analog-era issues, steel over silicon, even as the service and technology sectors are the driving factors in the new economy.”
[…]
Continue reading →
Like Mike, I find this distinction illuminating:
I like to call this the “purpose-driven voluntary sector,” as distinct from (a) the profit-driven voluntary sector, i.e. the private sector, and (b) the purpose-driven coercive sector, i.e., the public sector. Its role is reminiscent of the religious orders in the Middle Ages, groups like the Franciscans and the Dominicans, or the Templars and Hospitallers who fought in the Holy Land. It includes universities, NGOs, churches, the blogosphere, Wikipedia, and so on. Its aims and its loyalties transcend both the self-interest of individuals and the interests of national states. It is a major driver of innovation and progress. It is growing in influence and power.
As Mike notes, there’s also a profit-driven coercive sector centered on K Street.
Libertarianism, properly understood, is concerned with the “voluntary” part, not the “profit” part. When Bill Gates and John Mackey encourage businesses to broaden their focus to encompass motivators other than profit, they’re properly understood not as free-market apostates but as thinkers who are helping to broaden the focus of a free-market movement that is sometimes too myopically focused on the profit-driven segment of the voluntary sector. For-profit companies are crucial to a free society, of course, but so are those parts of civil society that aren’t focused on turning a profit, and the “profit-driven” versus “purpose-driven” distinction is a nice way of highlighting this basic symmetry.
H.R. 5104 is a bill to extend the Protect America Act of 2007 by 30 days. It’s on the Suspension Calendar in the House, scheduled for consideration on Monday (1/28/08).
The Protect America Act, which broadened the government’s powers to eavesdrop on private conversations without court approval, expires Friday. Congress and the President are at loggerheads about how telecommunications surveillance should be administered, and whether telecommunications companies should be immunized from liability for alleged past violations of surveillance law.
Bills considered under “Suspension of the Rules” get limited debate and are not subject to amendment, but a two-thirds vote is required for passage.
So, what should Congress do? And why?
http://washingtonwatch.com/info/widget.php?id=200509532
Your vote is probably “Yes” if you think Congress should continue to negotiate with the President while existing surveillance continues.
Your vote is probably “No” if you think Congress should pass a longer-term extension or give the President greater powers. It’s also “No” if you think Congress should refuse further negotiations, either because these surveillance power are not so important, because they’re unconstitutional, or because political blame for collapsed negotiations can be pinned to the President.
But there are other ways to think about this bill. Vote your piece, and let’s hear your reasoning in the comments!
I missed a good opinion piece on REAL ID in the L.A. Times last week. The subhead of “The False Promise of REAL ID” gets its assessment of the recently issued regulations about right: “Homeland Security’s compromises make an ineffective law somewhat less damaging.”
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.