Yesterday was “pretend to be a time traveler” day. I particularly like this suggestion, from the distopian future section:
Take some trinket with you (it can be anything really), hand it to some stranger, along with a phone number and say “In thirty years dial this number. You’ll know what to do after that.” Then slip away.
Time travel hypotheticals, along with teleportation, mindreading, and other such exploits are great for thought experiments involving rights theory in a classical liberal tradition. Two treatments of thought: In one, new abilities that create potential new types of conflicts or that upset existing institutions or rule arrangements are best left alone, dealt with by contract; if the old rules don’t cover ’em, it’s inconsistent with freedom to impose any new ones. In another, one takes a step back, more or less leaves things alone, but if conflicts arising in a certain area seem to be creating systemic problems with long-run consequences, try some new rules and institutional arrangements and see how it goes. Or eventually let settled and customary expectations evolve into the default rules. Rather like IP today. Or infanticide in past centuries. Fun to be had by all.
Here’s a very appealing Web video that has enough doom ‘n’ gloom to make your head explode.
It’s interesting to see the anti-everything (-trade, -globalization, -consumerism, etc.) worldview summarized so neatly. I would be very unhappy if that was my ideology. The video’s host obviously has not read (or has dismissed) Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource – to say nothing of Austrian economics.
There are legitimate concerns expresed in the video – with negative externalities in third world countries, for example. But, um, hiring workers in the third world is not a negative externality. And there’s no acknowledgement of how the rule of law and property rights in those countries would empower and enrich people there.
Still, this is good stuff to consider. I could do without giving or getting all that junque at Christmastime.
Visitors to the United States are now being required to share 10 fingerprints on entering the country. Here’s the text of a release the DHS is sending around. (I’ll link to it when I find it online.)
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is now collecting additional fingerprints from international visitors arriving at Washington Dulles International Airport (Dulles). The change is part of the department’s upgrade from two- to 10-fingerprint collection in order to enhance security and fingerprint matching accuracy.
“Anyone who’s watched the news or seen crimes solved on television shows can appreciate the power of biometrics,” said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. “They help the legitimate traveler proceed more quickly while protecting their identity and enable our frontline personnel to focus even greater attention on potential security risks. Biometrics tell the story that the unknown terrorist tries to conceal, and it causes them to question whether they’ve ever left a print behind.”
I wonder how visitors from other countries feel being asked to submit fingerprints and go through biometric background checks just to come here and visit. I’m not sure we’re the beacon of liberty we used to be.
I blogged about Greenpeace’s quarterly report on Green-Tech last week, noting that the way they display their data is manipulative, but turns out the data itself is deeply flawed.
John Timmer writes at ArsTechnica on just how poorly this quarterly report is researched:
The research in general appears lazy. Nintendo’s failing grade appears to be based entirely on this entry in the corporate FAQ, which briefly summarizes some of the steps the company has taken to protect the environment. Anything that’s not covered there is simply rated “No Information.” Similarly, all of the information on Microsoft originates from press materials and corporate statements on the company’s web site. Clearly, Greenpeace did not perform an exhaustive evaluation of chemical use through the manufacturing pipeline.
So, even if you think the shifting numbers on the graph aren’t misleading, it turns out that the whole study is pretty worthless. If an eco-friendly rating is based on cursory searches of the manufacturer’s own reports, then the best PR department wins, not the best practices. Greenpeace, along with many other environmental groups, refer to the all-PR approach to going green as”green washing.” Ironic that Greenpeace itself is now doing a bit of the scrubbing.
Kevin Werbach’s “Only Connect” got quite a bit of attention in the blogosphere when it was unveiled, including a post here on TLF. The attention was well deserved. The paper does an excellent job of explaining what’s at stake in the network neutrality debate and elucidating the positions staked out by each side. His discussions of the complexities of discrimination, access tiering, quality-of-service, etc in sections III(B) and III(C) are especially well done. He seems more keenly attuned than most scholars to the challenges that a regulator tasked with enforcing a non-discrimination rule would face.
With that said, I think the paper suffered from a fundamental conceptual weakness that left me unpersuaded by his ultimate thesis: I wasn’t ultimately convinced that interconnection and non-discrimination are separate and distinct regulatory issues. To the contrary, I think the two are often intimately connected. An effective interconnection mandate almost always depends on ensuring that the terms of interconnection are non-discriminatory. If network owner A is forced to interconnect with network owner B against its will, there are a variety of ways A can retaliate by charging B unreasonable prices, dropping B’s packets, dragging its feet on installing B’s equipment, etc. In practice, a practical interconnection mandate will invariably require some network-neutrality-like regulations to make it effective. The converse is equally true: a legal rule mandating non-discriminatory routing policies is likely to require some regulation of interconnection terms in order to ensure that the regulated carrier doesn’t discriminate through the back door by only offering low-quality links to those carriers against whom it wishes to discriminate.
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I’m in the midst of a big writing project on network neutrality, and so I’m going to do a series of posts on papers I’ve been reading. Some of the material in these posts may find its way into the forthcoming paper. I’m going to start with “A Coasian Alternative to Pigovian Regulation of Network Interconnection,” a paper by two FCC economists, that purports to offer an alternative to the FCC’s current inter-carrier compensation regime whereby long-distance firms pay local exchange carriers to terminate calls to the LEC’s subscribers. I’m not specifically interested in telephone regulation, but Atkinson and Barnekov suggest their arguments apply to other networks as well, and they’re cited by others (including Kevin Werbach, whom I’ll discuss in a future post) in the network neutrality debate, so I thought it was worth reading.
It seems to have become trendy to label one’s policy prescriptions “Coasian,” and that’s how Atkinson and Barnekov frame their analysis. They argue that the FCC’s current compensation regime is “Pigouvian” because a government bureaucrat dictates the prices that network owners must pay each other for the privilege of interconnection. Under Atkinson and Barnekov’s alternative, the FCC would… dictate the prices that network owners must pay each other for the privilege of interconnection. But they think they have a formula that is less arbitrary than the formula currently being used, and would therefore better approach the Coasean ideal of clearly-defined property rights.
In a nutshell, when one network owner wished to connect with another network owner, Atkinson and Barnekov would have them calculate the total cost of interconnection and then split it down the middle. This total cost would not just include the costs of interconnection at the edge of the network (say, stringing fiber between their facilities) but also the increased cost imposed
inside each network, such as the additional capacity one network would need to carry the other’s traffic. This total cost would be computed, it would be divided by two, and then one party would pay the other so that each bore half the total cost.
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Why would copyright holders choose to abandon their statutory rights and rely solely on their common law ones? A few “blockheaded” authors might do so non-monetary reasons, of course. Thanks to the combined effect of copyright misuse and § 505 of the Copyright Act, however, even crassly profit-maximizing copyright holders might find abandonment financially attractive.
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Nate Anderson has an Arsticle on the major new copyright bill introduced yesterday.
H.R. 4279 is the bill, named the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2007 by its sponsors. “PRO-IP,” get it?
As I write this, voting, commenting, and wiki edits on WashingtonWatch.com have barely begun. The current vote can be seen below, and your opinion can be registered by clicking the appropriate place:
http://washingtonwatch.com/info/widget.php?id=200508535
Benefits of computer games for kids evidently include learning how to deal with an attacking moose. Do follow the link and read the comments, too… I especially like “maybe his nub sister body pulled” and the comment to follow.
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