Slate recently published an astonishing piece of revisionist history under the title, “Bring Back the Golden Age of Broadcast Regulation,” which suggested that the old media regulatory model of the past would be appropriate for modern digital media providers and platforms. In the essay, April Glaser suggests that policymakers should resurrect the Fairness Doctrine and a host of old Analog Era content controls to let regulatory bureaucrats address Digital Age content moderation concerns.
In a tweetstorm, I highlighted a few examples of why the so-called Golden Era wasn’t so golden in practice. I began by noting that the piece ignores the troubling history of FCC speech controls and unintended consequences of regulation. That regime gave us limited, bland choices–and a whole host of First Amendment violations. We moved away from that regulatory model for very good reasons.
For those glorifying the Fairness Doctrine, I encourage them to read the great Nat Hentoff’s excellent essay, “The History & Possible Revival of the Fairness Doctrine,” about the real-world experience of life under the FCC’s threatening eye. Hentoff notes: Continue reading →
[This essay originally appeared on the AIER blog on May 28, 2019. The USA TODAY also ran a shorter version of this essay as a letter to the editor on June 2, 2019.]
In a hotly-worded USA Today op-ed last week, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) railed against social media sites Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. He argued that, “social media wastes our time and resources,” and is “a field of little productive value” that have only “given us an addiction economy.” Sen. Hawley refers to these sites as “parasites” and blames them for a litany of social problems (including an unproven link to increased suicide), leading him to declare that, “we’d be better off if Facebook disappeared.”
As far as moral panics go, Sen. Hawley’s will go down as one for the ages. Politicians have always castigated new technologies, media platforms, and content for supposedly corrupting the youth of their generation. But Sen. Hawley’s inflammatory rhetoric and proposals are something we haven’t seen in quite some time.
He sounds like those fire-breathing politicians and pundits of the past century who vociferously protested everything from comic books to cable television, the waltz to the Walkman, and rock-and-roll to rap music. In order to save the youth of America, many past critics said, we must destroy the media or media platforms they are supposedly addicted to. That is exactly what Sen. Hawley would have us do to today’s leading media platforms because, in his opinion, they “do our country more harm than good.”
We have to hope that Sen. Hawley is no more successful than past critics and politicians who wanted to take these choices away from the public. Paternalistic politicians should not be dictating content choices for the rest of us or destroying technologies and platforms that millions of people benefit from. Continue reading →
In my first essay for the American Institute for Economic Research, I discuss what lessons the great prophet of innovation Joseph Schumpeter might have for us in the midst of today’s “techlash” and rising tide of techopanics. I argue that, “[i]f Schumpeter were alive today, he’d have two important lessons to teach us about the techlash and why we should be wary of misguided interventions into the Digital Economy.” Specifically:
We can summarize Schumpeter’s first lesson in two words: Change happens. But disruptive change only happens in the right policy environment. Which gets to the second great lesson that Schumpeter can still teach us today, and which can also be summarized in two words: Incentives matter. Entrepreneurs will continuously drive dynamic, disruptive change, but only if public policy allows it.
Schumpeter’s now-famous model of “creative destruction” explained why economies are never in a state static equilibrium and that entrepreneurial competition comes from many (usually completely unpredictable) sources. “This kind of competition is much more effective than the other,” he argued, because the “ever-present threat” of dynamic, disruptive change, “disciplines before it attacks.”
But if we want innovators to take big risks and challenge existing incumbents and their market power, then it is essential that we get policy incentives right or else this sort of creative destruction will never come about. The problem with too much of today’s “techlash” thinking is that it imagines the current players are here to stay and that their market power is unassailable. Again, that is static “snapshot” thinking that ignores the reality that new generations of entrepreneurs are in a sort of race for a prize and will make big bets on the future in the face of seemingly astronomical odds against their success. But we have to give them a chance to win that “prize” if we want to see that dynamic, disruptive change happen.
As always, we have much to learn from Schumpeter. Jump over to the
AIER website to read the entire essay.
Recently, Noah Smith explored an emerging question in tech. Is there a kill zone where new and innovative upstarts are being throttled by the biggest players? He explains,
Facebook commissioned a study by consultant Oliver Wyman that concluded that venture investment in the technology sector wasn’t lower than in other sectors, which led Wyman to conclude that there was no kill zone.
But economist Ian Hathaway noted that looking at the overall technology industry was too broad. Examining three specific industry categories — internet retail, internet software and social/platform software, corresponding to the industries dominated by Amazon, Google and Facebook, respectively — Hathaway found that initial venture-capital financings have declined by much more in the past few years than in comparable industries. That suggests the kill zone is real.
A recent paper by economists Wen Wen and Feng Zhu reaches a similar conclusion. Observing that Google has tended to follow Apple in deciding which mobile-app markets to enter, they assessed whether the threat of potential entry by Google (as measured by Apple’s actions) deters innovation by startups making apps for Google’s Android platform. They conclude that when the threat of the platform owner’s entry is higher, fewer app makers will be interested in offering a product for that particular niche. A 2014 paper by the same authors found similar results for Amazon and third-party merchants using its platform.
So, are American tech companies making it difficult for startups? Perhaps, but there are some other reasons to be skeptical. Continue reading →
There has been an increasing outcry recently from conservatives that social media is conspiring to silence their voices. Leading voices including President Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz have started calling for legislative or regulatory actions to correct this perceived “bias”. But these calls for fairness miss the importance of allowing such services to develop their own terms and for users to determine what services to use and the benefit that such services have been to conservatives.
Social media is becoming a part of our everyday lives and recent events have only increased our general awareness of this fact. More than half of American adults login to Facebook on a daily basis. As a result, some policymakers have argued that such sites are the new public square. In general, the First Amendment strictly limits what the government can do to limit speakers in public spaces and requires that such limits be applied equally to different points of view. At the same time, private entities are generally allowed to set terms regarding what speech may or may not be allowed on their own platforms.
The argument that modern day websites are the new public square and must maintain a neutral view point was recently rejected in a lawsuit between PraegerU and YouTube. Praeger believed that its conservative viewpoint was being silenced by YouTube decision to place many of its videos in “restricted mode.” In this case, the court found that YouTube was still acting as a private service rather than one filling a typical government role. Other cases have similarly asserted that Internet intermediaries have First Amendment rights to reject or limit ads or content as part of their own rights to speak or not speak. Conservatives have long been proponents of property rights, freedom of association, and free markets. But now, faced with platforms choosing to exercise their rights, rather than defend those values and compete in the market some “conservatives” are arguing for legislation or utilizing litigation to bully the marketplace of ideas into giving them a louder microphone. In fact, part of the purpose behind creating the liability immunity (known as Section 230) for such services was the principle that a variety of platforms would emerge with different standards and new and diverse communities could be created and evolve to serve different audiences.
Continue reading →
In recent essays and papers, I have discussed the growth of “innovation arbitrage,” which I defined as, “The movement of ideas, innovations, or operations to those jurisdictions that provide a legal and regulatory environment more hospitable to entrepreneurial activity.” A new Economist article about “Why startups are leaving Silicon Valley,” discusses innovation arbitrage without calling it such. The article notes that, for a variety of reasons, Valley innovators and investors are looking elsewhere to set up shop or put money into new ventures. The article continues:
Other cities are rising in relative importance as a result. The Kauffman Foundation, a non-profit group that tracks entrepreneurship, now ranks the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area first for startup activity in America, based on the density of startups and new entrepreneurs. Mr Thiel is moving to Los Angeles, which has a vibrant tech scene. Phoenix and Pittsburgh have become hubs for autonomous vehicles; New York for media startups; London for fintech; Shenzhen for hardware. None of these places can match the Valley on its own; between them, they point to a world in which innovation is more distributed.
If great ideas can bubble up in more places, that has to be welcome. There are some reasons to think the playing-field for innovation is indeed being levelled up. Capital is becoming more widely available to bright sparks everywhere: tech investors increasingly trawl the world, not just California, for hot ideas. There is less reason than ever for a single region to be the epicentre of technology. Thanks to the tools that the Valley’s own firms have produced, from smartphones to video calls to messaging apps, teams can work effectively from different offices and places.
That’s the power of innovation arbitrage at work. Continue reading →
A curious thing happened last week. Facebook’s stock, which had seem to have weathered the 2018 controversies, took a beating.
In the Washington Post, Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin explained that the stock market drop was representative of a larger wave:
The cost of years of privacy missteps finally caught up with Facebook this week, sending its market value down more than $100 billion Thursday in the largest single-day drop in value in Wall Street history.
Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy piled on, describing the drop as “a privacy wake-up call that the markets are delivering to Mark Zuckerberg.”
But the downward pressure was driven by more fundamental changes. Simply put, Facebook missed its earnings target. But it is important to peer into why the company didn’t meet those targets. Continue reading →
In cleaning up my desk this weekend, I chanced upon an old notebook and like many times before I began to transcribe the notes. It was short, so I got to the end within a couple of minutes. The last page was scribbled with the German term Öffentlichkeit (public sphere), a couple sentences on Hannah Arendt, and a paragraph about Norberto Bobbio’s view of public and private.
Then I remembered. Yep. This is the missing notebook from a class on democracy in the digital age.
Serendipitously, a couple of hours later, William Freeland alerted me to Franklin Foer’s newest piece in The Atlantic titled “The Death of the Public Square.” Foer is the author of “World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech,” and if you want a good take on that book, check out Adam Thierer’s review in Reason.
Much like the book, this Atlantic piece wades into techno ruin porn but focuses instead on the public sphere: Continue reading →
In preparation for a Federalist Society teleforum call that I participated in today about the compliance costs of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), I gathered together some helpful recent articles on the topic and put together some talking points. I thought I would post them here and try to update this list in coming months as I find new material. (My thanks to Andrea O’Sullivan for a major assist on coming up with all this.)
Key Points:
- GDPR is no free lunch; compliance is very costly
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- All regulation entails trade-offs, no matter how well-intentioned rules are
- $7.8 billion estimated compliance cost for U.S. firms already
- Punitive fees can range from €20 million to 4 percent of global firm revenue
- Vagueness of language leads to considerable regulatory uncertainty — no one knows what “compliance” looks like
- Even EU member states do not know what compliance looks like: 17 of 24 regulatory bodies polled by Reuters said they were unprepared for GDPR
- GDPR will hurt competition & innovation; favors big players over small
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- Google, Facebook & others beefing up compliance departments. (“ EU official, Vera Jourova: “They have the money, an army of lawyers, an army of technicians and so on.”)
- Smaller firms exiting or dumping data that could be used to provide better, more tailored services
- PwC survey found that 88% of companies surveyed spent more than $1 million on GDPR preparations, and 40% more than $10 million.
- Before GDPR, half of all EU ad spend went to Google. The first day after it took effect, an astounding 95 percent went to Google.
- In essence, with the GDPR, the EU is surrendering on the idea of competition being possible going forward
- The law will actually benefit the same big companies that the EU has been going after on antitrust grounds. Meanwhile, the smaller innovators and innovations will suffer.
Continue reading →
The Supreme Court is winding down for the year and last week put out a much awaited decision in Ohio v. American Express. Some have rung the alarm with this case, but I think caution is worthwhile. In short, the Court’s analysis wasn’t expansive like some have claimed, but incomplete. There are a lot of important details to this case and the guideposts it has provided will likely be fought over in future litigation over platform regulation. To narrow the scope of this post, I am going to focus on the market definition question and the issue of two-sided platforms in light of the developments in the industrial organization (IO) literature in the past two decades. Continue reading →
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