We hear a lot these days about “technological moonshots.” It’s an interesting phrase because the meaning of both words in it are often left undefined. I won’t belabor the point about how people define–or, rather, fail to define–“technology” when they use it. I’ve already spent a lot of time writing about that problem. See, for example, this constantly updated essay here about “Defining ‘Technology.'” It’s a compendium I began curating years ago that collects what dozens of others have had to say on the matter. I’m always struck by how many different definitions are out there that I keep unearthing.
The term “moonshots” has a similar problem. The first meaning is the literal one that hearkens back to President Kennedy’s famous 1962 “we choose to go to the moon” speech. That use of the terms implies large government programs and agencies, centralized control, and top-down planning with a very specific political objective in mind. Increasingly, however, the term “moonshot” is used more generally, as I note in this new Mercatus essay about “Making the World Safe for More Moonshots.” My Mercatus Center colleague Donald Boudreaux has referred to moonshots as, “radical but feasible solutions to important problems,” and Mike Cushing of Enterprise Innovation defines a moonshot as an “innovation that achieves the previously unthinkable.” I like that more generic use of the term and think it could be used appropriately when discussing the big innovations many of us hope to see in fields as diverse as quantum computing, genetic editing, AI and autonomous systems, supersonic transport, and much more. I still have some reservations about the term, but I think it’s definitely a better term than “disruptive innovation,” which is also used differently by various scholars and pundits.
In 2015 after White House pressure, the FCC decided to take the radical step of classifying “broadband Internet access service” as a heavily-regulated Title II service. Title II was created for the AT&T long-distance monopoly and telegraph network and “promoting innovation and competition” is not its purpose. It’s ill-suited for the modern Internet, where hundreds of ISPs and tech companies are experimenting with new technologies and topologies.
Commissioner Brendan Carr was gracious enough to speak with Chris Koopman and me in a Mercatus podcast last week about his decision to vote to reverse the Title II classification. The podcast can be found at the Mercatus website. One highlight from Commissioner Carr:
Congress had a fork in the road. …In 1996, Congress made a decision that we’re going to head down the Title I route [for the Internet]. That decision has been one of the greatest public policy decisions that we’ve ever seen. That’s what led to the massive investment in the Internet. Over a trillion dollars invested. Consumers were protected. Innovators were free to innovate. Unfortunately, two years ago the Commission departed from that framework and moved into a very different heavy-handed regulatory world, the Title II approach.
Along those lines, in my recent ex parte meeting with Chairman Pai’s office, I pointed to an interesting 2002 study in the Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press about the stifling effects of Title II regulation:
[E]xisting economics scholarship suggests that a permissioned approach to new services, like that proposed in the [2015] Open Internet Order, inhibits innovation and new services in telecommunications. As a result of an FCC decision and a subsequent court decision in the late 1990s, for 18 to 30 months, depending on the firm, [Title II] carriers were deregulated and did not have to submit new offerings to the FCC for review. After the court decision, the FCC required carriers to file retroactive plans for services introduced after deregulation.
This turn of events allowed economist James Preiger to analyze and compare the rate of new services deployment in the regulated period and the brief deregulated period. Preiger found that “some otherwise profitable services are not financially viable under” the permissioned regime. Critically, the number of services carriers deployed “during the [deregulated] interim is 60%-99% larger than the model predicts they would have created” when preapproval was required. Finally, Preiger found that firms would have introduced 62% more services during the entire study period if there was no permissioned regime. This is suggestive evidence that the Order’s “Mother, May I?” approach will significantly harm the Internet services market.
Thankfully, this FCC has incorporated economic scholarship into its Restoring Internet Freedom Order and will undo the costly Title II classification for Internet services.
Over at Plain Text, I have posted a new essay entitled, “Converting Permissionless Innovation into Public Policy: 3 Reforms.” It’s a preliminary sketch of some reform ideas that I have been working on as part of my next book project. The goal is to find some creative ways to move the ball forward on the innovation policy front, regardless of what level of government we are talking about.
To maximize the potential for ongoing, positive change and create a policy environment conducive to permissionless innovation, I argue that policymakers should pursue policy reforms based on these three ideas:
The Innovator’s Presumption: Any person or party (including a regulatory authority) who opposes a new technology or service shall have the burden to demonstrate that such proposal is inconsistent with the public interest.
The Sunsetting Imperative: Any existing or newly imposed technology regulation should include a provision sunsetting the law or regulation within two years.
The Parity Provision: Any operator offering a similarly situated product or service should be regulated no more stringently than its least regulated competitor.
These provisions are crafted in a somewhat generic fashion in the hope that these reform proposals could be modified and adopted by various legislative or regulatory bodies. If you are interested in reading more details about each proposal, jump over to
Plain Text to read the entire essay.
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has just released a new paper on,”Permissionless Innovation and Immersive Technology: Public Policy for Virtual and Augmented Reality,” which I co-authored with Jonathan Camp. This 53-page paper can be downloaded via the Mercatus website, SSRN or Research Gate.
Here is the abstract for the paper:
Immersive technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality are finally taking off. As these technologies become more widespread, concerns will likely develop about their disruptive social and economic effects. This paper addresses such policy concerns and contrasts two different visions for governing immersive tech going forward. The paper makes the case for permissionless innovation, or the general freedom to innovate without prior constraint, as the optimal policy default to maximize the benefits associated with immersive technologies.
The alternative vision — the so-called precautionary principle — would be an inappropriate policy default because it would greatly limit the potential for beneficial applications and uses of these new technologies to emerge rapidly. Public policy for immersive technology should not be based on hypothetical worst-case scenarios. Rather, policymakers should wait to see which concerns or harms emerge and then devise ex post solutions as needed.
To better explain why precautionary controls on these emerging technologies would be such a mistake, Camp and I provide an inventory of the many VR, AR, and mixed reality applications that are already on the market–or soon could be–and which could provide society with profound benefits. A few examples include: Continue reading →
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has just released a new paper on, “Artificial Intelligence and Public Policy,” which I co-authored with Andrea Castillo O’Sullivan and Raymond Russell. This 54-page paper can be downloaded via the Mercatus website, SSRN, or ResearchGate. Here is the abstract:
There is growing interest in the market potential of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and applications as well as in the potential risks that these technologies might pose. As a result, questions are being raised about the legal and regulatory governance of AI, machine learning, “autonomous” systems, and related robotic and data technologies. Fearing concerns about labor market effects, social inequality, and even physical harm, some have called for precautionary regulations that could have the effect of limiting AI development and deployment. In this paper, we recommend a different policy framework for AI technologies. At this nascent stage of AI technology development, we think a better case can be made for prudence, patience, and a continuing embrace of “permissionless innovation” as it pertains to modern digital technologies. Unless a compelling case can be made that a new invention will bring serious harm to society, innovation should be allowed to continue unabated, and problems, if they develop at all, can be addressed later.
My professional life is dedicated to researching the public policy implications of various emerging technologies. Of the many issues and sectors that I cover, none are more interesting or important than advanced medical innovation. After all, new health care technologies offer the greatest hope for improving human welfare and longevity. Consequently, the public policies that govern these technologies and sectors will have an important bearing on just how much life-enriching or life-saving medical innovation we actually get going forward.
Few people are doing better reporting on the intersection of advanced technology and medicine — as well as the effects of regulation on those fields — than my Mercatus Center colleague Jordan Reimschisel. In a very short period of time, Jordan has completely immersed himself in these complex, cutting-edge topics and produced a remarkable body of work discussing how, in his words, “technology can merge with medicine to democratize medical decision making, empower patients to participate in the treatment process, and promote better health outcomes for more patients at lower and lower costs.” He gets deep into the weeds of the various technologies he writes about as well as the legal, ethical, and economic issues surrounding each topic.
I encouraged him to start an ongoing compendium of his work on these topics so that we could continue to highlight his research, some of which I have been honored to co-author with him. I have listed his current catalog down below, but jump over to this Medium page he set up and bookmark it for future reference. This is some truly outstanding work and I am excited to see where he goes next with topics as wide-ranging as “biohackerspaces,” democratized or “personalized” medicine, advanced genetic testing and editing techniques, and the future of the FDA in an age of rapid change.
Give Jordan a follow on Twitter (@jtreimschisel) and make sure to follow his Medium page for his dispatches from the front lines of the debate over advanced medical innovation and its regulation.
“Responsible research and innovation,” or “RRI,” has become a major theme in academic writing and conferences about the governance of emerging technologies. RRI might be considered just another variant of corporate social responsibility (CSR), and it indeed borrows from that heritage. What makes RRI unique, however, is that it is more squarely focused on mitigating the potential risks that could be associated with various technologies or technological processes. RRI is particularly concerned with “baking-in” certain values and design choices into the product lifecycle before new technologies are released into the wild.
In this essay, I want to consider how RRI lines up with the opposing technological governance regimes of “permissionless innovation” and the “precautionary principle.” More specifically, I want to address the question of whether “permissionless innovation” and “responsible innovation” are even compatible. While participating in recent university seminars and other tech policy events, I have encountered a certain degree of skepticism—and sometimes outright hostility—after suggesting that, properly understood, “permissionless innovation” and “responsible innovation” are not warring concepts and that RRI can co-exist peacefully with a legal regime that adopts permissionless innovation as its general tech policy default. Indeed, the application of RRI lessons and recommendations can strengthen the case for adopting a more “permissionless” approach to innovation policy in the United States and elsewhere. Continue reading →
[originally published on Plaintext on June 21, 2017.]
This summer, we celebrate the 20th anniversary of two developments that gave us the modern Internet as we know it. One was a court case that guaranteed online speech would flow freely, without government prior restraints or censorship threats. The other was an official White House framework for digital markets that ensured the free movement of goods and services online.
The result of these two vital policy decisions was an unprecedented explosion of speech freedoms and commercial opportunities that we continue to enjoy the benefits of twenty years later.
While it is easy to take all this for granted today, it is worth remembering that, in the long arc of human history, no technology or medium has more rapidly expanded the range of human liberties — both speech and commercial liberties — than the Internet and digital technologies. But things could have turned out much differently if not for the crucially important policy choices the United States made for the Internet two decades ago. Continue reading →
What are we to make of this peculiar new term “permissionless innovation,” which has gained increasing currency in modern technology policy discussions? And how much relevance has this notion had—or
should it have—on those conversations about the governance of emerging technologies? That’s what I’d like to discuss here today.
Uncertain Origins, Unclear Definitions
I should begin by noting that while I have written a book with the term in the title, I take no credit for coining the phrase “permissionless innovation,” nor have I been able to determine who the first person was to use the term. The phrase is sometimes attributed to Grace M. Hopper, a computer scientist who was a rear admiral in the United States Navy. She once famously noted that, “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.”
“Hopper’s Law,” as it has come to be known in engineering circles, is probably the most concise articulation of the general notion of “permissionless innovation” that I’ve ever heard, but Hopper does not appear to have ever used the actual phrase anywhere. Moreover, Hopper was not
necessarily applying this notion to the realm of technological governance, but was seemingly speaking more generically about the benefit of trying new things without asking for the blessing of any number of unnamed authorities or overseers—which could include businesses, bosses, teachers, or perhaps even government officials. Continue reading →
Written with Christopher Koopman and Brent Skorup (originally published on Medium on 4/10/17)
Innovation isn’t just about the latest gee-whiz gizmos and gadgets. That’s all nice, but something far more profound is at stake: Innovation is the single most important determinant of long-term human well-being. There exists widespread consensus among historians, economists, political scientists and other scholars that technological innovation is the linchpin of expanded economic growth, opportunity, choice, mobility, and human flourishing more generally. It is the ongoing search for new and better ways of doing things that drives human learning and prosperity in every sense — economic, social, and cultural.
As the Industrial Revolution revealed, leaps in economic and human growth cannot be planned. They arise from societies that reward risk takers and legal systems that accommodate change. Our ability to achieve progress is directly proportional to our willingness to embrace and benefit from technological innovation, and it is a direct result of getting public policies right.
The United States is uniquely positioned to lead the world into the next era of global technological advancement and wealth creation. That’s why we and our colleagues at the Technology Policy Program at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University devote so much time and energy to defending the importance of innovation and countering threats to it. Unfortunately, those threats continue to multiply as fast as new technologies emerge. 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. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.