Alice Marwick, assistant professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University, discusses her newly-released book, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. Marwick reflects on her interviews with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, technology journalists, and venture capitalists to show how social media affects social dynamics and digital culture. Marwick answers questions such as: Does “status conscious” take on a new meaning in the age of social media? Is the public using social media the way the platforms’ creators intended? How do you quantify the value of online social interactions? Are social media users becoming more self-censoring or more transparent about what they share? What’s the difference between self-branding and becoming a micro-celebrity? She also shares her advice for how to make Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and other platforms more beneficial for you.
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Anupam Chander, Director of the California International Law Center and Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall Research Scholar at the UC Davis School of Law, discusses his recent paper with co-author Uyen P. Lee titled The Free Speech Foundations of Cyberlaw. Chander addresses how the first amendment promotes innovation on the Internet; how limitations to free speech vary between the US and Europe; the role of online intermediaries in promoting and protecting the first amendment; the Communications Decency Act; technology, piracy, and copyright protection; and the tension between privacy and free speech.
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I’m pleased to announce the release of my latest law review article, “A Framework for Benefit-Cost Analysis in Digital Privacy Debates.” It appears in the new edition of the George Mason University Law Review. (Vol. 20, No. 4, Summer 2013)
This is the second of two complimentary law review articles I am releasing this year dealing with privacy policy. The first, “The Pursuit of Privacy in a World Where Information Control is Failing,” was published in Vol. 36 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy
this Spring. (FYI: Both articles focus on privacy claims made against private actors — namely, efforts to limit private data collection — and not on privacy rights against governments.)
My new article on benefit-cost analysis in privacy debates makes a seemingly contradictory argument: benefit-cost analysis (“BCA”) is extremely challenging in online child safety and digital privacy debates, yet it remains essential that analysts and policymakers attempt to conduct such reviews. While we will never be able to perfectly determine either the benefits or costs of online safety or privacy controls, the very act of conducting a regulatory impact analysis (“RIA”) will help us to better understand the trade-offs associated with various regulatory proposals. Continue reading →
Sherwin Siy, Vice President of Legal Affairs at Public Knowledge, discusses emerging issues in digital copyright policy. He addresses the Department of Commerce’s recent green paper on digital copyright, including the need to reform copyright laws in light of new technologies. This podcast also covers the DMCA, online streaming, piracy, cell phone unlocking, fair use recognition, digital ownership, and what we’ve learned about copyright policy from the SOPA debate.
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Jane Yakowitz Bambauer, associate professor of law at the University of Arizona, discusses her forthcoming paper in the Stanford Law Review titled Is Data Speech? How do we define “data” and can it be protected in the same way as free speech? She examines current privacy laws and regulations as they pertain to data creation and collection, including whether collecting data should be protected under the First Amendment.
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The Internet’s greatest blessing — its general openness to all speech and speakers — is also sometimes its biggest curse. That is, you cannot expect to have the most widely accessible, unrestricted communications platform the world has ever known and not also have some imbeciles who use it to spew insulting, vile, and hateful comments.
It is important to put things in perspective, however. Hate speech is not the norm online. The louts who spew hatred represent a small minority of all online speakers. The vast majority of online speech is of a socially acceptable — even beneficial — nature.
Still, the problem of hate speech remains very real and a diverse array of strategies are needed to deal with it. The sensible path forward in this regard is charted by Abraham H. Foxman and Christopher Wolf in their new book, Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread on the Internet. Their book explains why the best approach to online hate is a combination of education, digital literacy, user empowerment, industry best practices and self-regulation, increased watchdog / press oversight, social pressure and, most importantly, counter-speech. Foxman and Wolf also explain why — no matter how well-intentioned — legal solutions aimed at eradicating online hate will not work and would raise serious unintended consequences if imposed.
In striking this sensible balance, Foxman and Wolf have penned the definitive book on how to constructively combat viral hate in an age of ubiquitous information flows. Continue reading →
Alexander Howard has put together this excellent compendium of comments on Mike Rosenwald’s new Washington Post editorial, “Will the Twitter Police make Twitter boring?” I was pleased to see that so many others had the same reaction to Rosenwald’s piece that I did.
For the life of me, I cannot understand how anyone can equate counter-speech with “Twitter Police,” but that’s essentially what Rosenwald does in his essay. The examples he uses in his essay are
exactly the sort of bone-headed and generally offensive comments that I would hope we would call out and challenge robustly in a deliberative democracy. But when average folks did exactly that, Rosenwald jumps to the preposterous conclusion that it somehow chilled speech. Stranger yet is his claim that “the Twitter Police are enforcing laws of their own making, with procedures they have authorized for themselves.” Say what? What laws are you talking about, Mike? This is just silly. These people are SPEAKING not enforcing any “laws.” They are expressing opinions about someone else’s (pretty crazy) opinions. This is what a healthy deliberative democracy is all about, bud!
Moreover, Rosenwald doesn’t really explain what a better world looks like. Is it one in which we all just turn a blind eye to what many regard as offensive or hair-brained commentary? I sure hope not!
I’m all for people vigorously expressing their opinions but I am just as strongly in favor of people pushing back with opinions of their own. You have no right to be free of social sanction if your speech offends large swaths of society. Speech has consequences and the more speech it prompts, the better.
I’m excited to announce the release of my latest law review article, “The Pursuit of Privacy in a World Where Information Control is Failing,” which appears in the next edition (vol. 36) of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. This is the first of two complimentary law review articles that I will be releasing this year dealing with privacy policy. The second, which will be published later this summer by the George Mason University Law Review, is entitled, “A Framework for Benefit-Cost Analysis in Digital Privacy Debates.” (FYI: Both articles focus on privacy claims made against private actors — namely, efforts to limit private data collection — and not on privacy rights against governments.)
The new
Harvard Journal article is divided into three major sections. Part I focuses on some of normative challenges we face when discussing privacy and argues that there may never be a widely accepted, coherent legal standard for privacy rights or harms here in the United States. It also explores the tensions between expanded privacy regulation and online free speech. Part II turns to the many enforcement challenges that are often ignored when privacy policies are being proposed or formulated and argues that legislative and regulatory efforts aimed at protecting privacy must now be seen as an increasingly intractable information control problem. Most of the problems policymakers and average individuals face when it comes to controlling the flow of private information online are similar to the challenges they face when trying to control the free flow of digitalized bits in other information policy contexts, such as online safety, cybersecurity, and digital copyright.
If the effectiveness of law and regulation is limited by the normative considerations discussed in Part I and the practical enforcement complications discussed in Part II, what alternatives remain to assist privacy-sensitive individuals? I address that question in Part III of the paper and argue that the approach America has adopted to deal with concerns about objectionable online speech and child safety offers a path forward on the privacy front as well. Continue reading →
[UPDATE
4/30/13: This article was subsequently published in Volume 65, Issues 2 of the Federal Communications Law Journal in April 2013. The links below now point to the final FCLJ version.]
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has just released a new paper by Brent Skorup and me entitled, “Uncreative Destruction: The War on Vertical Integration in the Information Economy.” Brent, who is the research director for the Information Economy Project at the George Mason University School of Law, and I have been working on this paper since the Spring and we are looking forward to getting it published in a law review shortly. The paper focuses on Tim Wu’s “separations principle” for the digital economy, something I’ve spent some time critiquing here in the past. Here’s the introduction from the 44-page paper that Brent and I just released:
Are information sectors sufficiently different from other sectors of the economy such that more stringent antitrust standards should be applied to them preemptively? Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu responds in the affirmative in his book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. Having successfully pushed net-neutrality regulation into the policy spotlight, Wu has turned his attention to what he regards as excessive market concentration and threats to free speech throughout the entire information economy.To support his call for increased antitrust intervention, Wu explains his view of competition in the information economy—a view that deviates substantially from current mainstream antitrust theory.
Continue reading →
Today I filed roughly 30 pages worth of comments with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in its proceeding on “Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: a Proposed Framework for Businesses and Policy Makers.” [Other comments filed in the proceeding can be found here.] Down below, I’ve attached the Table of Contents from my filing so you can see the major themes I’ve addressed, and I’ve also attached the entire document in a Scribd reader. In coming days and weeks, I’ll be expanding upon some of these themes in follow-up essays.
In my filing, I argue that while it remains impossible to predict with precision the impact a new privacy regulatory regime will have the Internet economy and digital consumers, regulation
will have consequences; of that much we can be certain. As the FTC and other policy makers move forward with proposals to expand regulation in this regard, it is vital that the surreal “something-for-nothing” quality of current privacy debate cease. Those who criticize data collection or online advertising and call for expanded regulation should be required to provide a strict cost-benefit analysis of the restrictions they would impose upon America’s vibrant digital marketplace.
In particular, it should be clear that the debate over Do Not Track and online advertising regulation is fundamentally tied up with the future of online content, culture, and services. Thus, regulatory advocates must explain how the content and services supported currently by advertising and marketing will be sustained if current online data collection and ad targeting techniques are restricted. Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.