I was honored to be asked by the editors at Reason magazine to be a part of their “Revolutionary Reading” roundup of “The 9 Most Transformative Books of the Last 45 Years.”  Reason is celebrating its 45th anniversary and running a wide variety of essays looking back at how liberty has fared over the past half-century. The magazine notes that “Statism has hardly gone away, but the movement to roll it back is stronger than ever.” For this particular feature, Reason’s editors “asked seven libertarians to recommend some of the books in different fields that made [the anti-statist] cultural and intellectual revolution possible.”

When Jesse Walker of Reason first contacted me about contributing my thoughts about which technology policy books made the biggest difference, I told him I knew exactly what my choices would be: Ithiel de Sola Pool’s Technologies of Freedom (1983) and Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies (1998). Faithful readers of this blog know all too well how much I love these two books and how I am constantly reminding people of their intellectual importance all these years later. (See, for example, this and this.) All my thinking and writing about tech policy over the past two decades has been shaped by the bold vision and recommendations set forth by Pool and Postrel in these beautiful books.

As I note in my Reason write-up of the books:

The past 45 years have seen remarkable advances in information technology: the Internet, mobile communications, ubiquitous news and entertainment options, and much more. What made these and other innovations possible was a general openness to the unplanned, the unpredictable, and even the uncontrollable. In our willingness to embrace a world of uncertainty and incessant change, we found unparalleled technological abundance. No two books more eloquently captured and celebrated the information age than Ithiel de Sola Pool’s Technologies of Freedom and Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies.

And I conclude by noting that “While plenty of tech pundits and academics cling to… stasist thinking today, Pool and Postrel’s books continue to provide beacons for a better world, free from the top-down, technocratic mentality and prescriptions of the past. At least thus far, permissionless innovation has largely trumped the precautionary principle in tech policy. Let’s hope the dynamist vision can hold the line for another 45 years.”

Head over to Reason to read the rest of my essay as well as all the other excellent books that contributors have recommended as part of the symposium.  There are some really great selections in there.

And if you care about the future of technological freedom and human liberty and progress more generally, please do read (or re-read) both Pool and Postrel’s books when you have a chance.  They changed my life and they will change yours, too.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age by the late communications theorist Ithiel de Sola Pool. It was, and remains, a remarkable book that is well worth your time whether you read it long ago or are just hearing about it for the first time. It was the book that inspired me when I first read in 1994 to abandon my chosen field of study (trade policy) and do a deep dive into the then uncharted waters of information technology policy.

A Technological Nostradamus

Long before most of the world had heard about this thing called “the Internet” or using terms like “cyberspace” or even “electronic superhighway,” Pool was describing this emerging medium, thinking about its ramifications, and articulating the optimal policies that should govern it. In Technologies of Freedom, Pool set forth both a predictive vision of future communications and “electronic publishing” markets as well as a policy vision for how those markets should be governed. “Networked computers will be the printing presses of the twenty-first century,” Pool argued in a remarkably prescient chapter on the future of electronic publishing. “Soon most published information will disseminated electronically,” and “there will be networks on networks on networks,” he predicted. “A panoply of electronic devices puts at everyone’s hands capacities far beyond anything that the printing press could offer.” As if staring into a crystal ball, Pool predicted:

Separate nations will have separate networks, as they do now, but these will interconnect. Within nations, the satellite carriers, microwave carriers, and local carriers may be—and in the United States almost certainly will be—in the hands of separate organizations, but they will interconnect. So even the basic physical network will be a network of networks. And on top of the physical networks will be a pyramid of service networks. Through them will be published or delivered to the public a variety of things: movies, music, money, education, news, meetings, scientific data, manuscripts, petitions, and editorials.

Remember folks, he was writing this in the early 1980s, when VCRs and the Sony Walkman were still considered cutting-edge electronic technologies! His predictions, which must have sounded like science fiction in 1983, are today’s reality. Few scholars or futurists were more accurate in their forecasts about the world of electronic commerce or online communications that was emerging. It’s worth reading the book just to see how much Pool got right about the future because it is absolutely astonishing. [ Note: You might also want to check out how he almost perfectly predicted the copyright policy wars of modern times in his posthumous book, Technologies without Boundaries.]

A Passionate Defense of Free Speech & Technological Freedom

But what made Technologies of Freedom truly special is that Pool did not stop with predictive judgments and scenarios about future tech developments. He continued on to offer a passionate defense of technological freedom and freedom of speech in the electronic age. Pool worried that technological convergence would lead to the convergence of regulatory policies unless action was taken to quarantine electronic publishing and digital networks from analog era regulatory policies:

In the coming era, the industries of print and the industries of telecommunications will no longer be kept apart by a fundamental difference in their technologies. The economic and regulatory problems of the electronic media will thus become the problems of the print media too. No longer can electronic communications be viewed as a special circumscribed case of a monopolistic and regulated communications medium which poses no danger to liberty because there still remains a large realm of unlimited freedom of expression in the print media. The issues that concern telecommunications and now becoming issues for all communications as they all become forms of electronic processing and transmission.

“The specific question to be answered,” Pool asserted, “is whether the electronic resources for communications can be as free of public regulation in the future as the platform and printing press have been in the past.” In his closing chapter on “Policies for Freedom,” Pool discussed possible futures for the emerging world of electronic communications and argued that:

Technology will not be to blame if Americans fail to encompass this system within the political tradition of free speech. On the contrary, electronic technology is conducive to freedom. The degree of diversity and plenitude of access that mature electronic technology allows far exceed what is enjoyed today. Computerized information networks of the twenty-first century need not be any less free for all to use without hindrance than was the printing press. Only political errors might make them so.

Guidelines for Freedom

To guard against those “political errors,” Pool set forth ten “Guidelines for Freedom”:

1. The First Amendment applies fully to all media.
2. Anyone may publish at will.
3. Enforcement must be after the fact, not by prior restraint.
4. Regulation is a last recourse. In a free society, the burden of proof is for the least possible regulation of communication.
5. Interconnection among common carriers may be required.
6. Recipients of privilege (monopolies) may be subject to disclosure.
7. Privileges (copyrights and patents) may have time limits.
8. The government and common carriers should be blind to circuit use. What the facility is used for is not their concern.
9. Bottlenecks should not be used to extend control.
10. For electronic publishing, copyright enforcement must be adapted to the technology.

Pool’s vision was quite libertarian for his time, but his embrace of minimal interconnection / common carriage regulation shows this he was open to some forms of regulatory oversight. Nonetheless, the role of law in Pool’s paradigm was tightly constrained to ensure new electronic networks developed free of the regulatory burdens of the past.

Importantly, Pool also identified regulation as the source of many of the “monopoly” problems that drove traditional communications and media policy. “The force that preserves most monopoly privilege is the law,” and “most monopolies exist by grace of the police and the courts,” he noted. Further, “most would vanish in the absence of enforcement.” This reflected his general concern about regulatory capture in tech sectors.

Toward Tech Liberty

So, on the occasion of its 30th anniversary, I strongly encourage you to give Pool’s Technologies of Freedom a second look, or a first look if you haven’t had the pleasure of taking it all in before. I think that, like me, you’ll find his predictive powers breathtaking and his principled policy vision refreshingly bold and enlightening. And I challenge you to find another Internet policy book since Technologies of Freedom that has contained more elegant, inspiring prose. It is a beautifully written polemic. Toward that end, I leave you with the final passage from the book and hope that it inspires you as it has me to keep up the good fight for tech liberty:

The easy access, low cost, and distributed intelligence of modern means of communication are a prime reason for hope. The democratic impulse to regulate evils, as Tocqueville warned, is ironically a reason for worry. Lack of technical grasp by policy makers and their propensity to solve problems of conflict, privacy, intellectual property, and monopoly by accustomed bureaucratic routines are the main reasons for concern. But as long as the First Amendment stands, backed by courts which take it seriously, the loss of liberty is not foreordained. The commitment of American culture to pluralism and individual rights is reason for optimism, as is the pliancy and profusion of electronic technology.

On numerous occasions here at the TLF over the past eight years, I’ve noted the profound influence that the late Ithiel de Sola Pool had on my thinking about the interaction of technology, information, and public policy. In fact, when I needed to pick a thematic title for my weekly Forbes column, it only took me a second to think of the perfect one: “Technologies of Freedom.” I borrowed that from the title of Pool’s 1983 masterpiece, Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age. As I noted in my short Amazon.com review, Pool’s technological tour de force is simply breathtaking in its polemical power and predictive capabilities. Reading this book three decades after it was published, one comes to believe that Pool must have possessed a crystal ball or had a Nostradamus-like ability to foresee the future.

I felt that same was this week when I was re-reading some chapters from his posthumous book, Technologies without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global Age–a collection of his remaining essays nicely edited and tied together by Eli Noam after Pool’s death in 1984. Re-reading it again reminded me of Pool’s remarkable predictive powers. In particular, the closing chapter on “Technology and Culture” includes some of Pool’s thoughts on the future of copyright. As you read through that passage below, please try to remember he wrote these words back in the early 1980s, long before most people had even heard of the Internet and when home personal computing was only just beginning to take off. Yet, from what he already knew about networked computers and digital methods of transmitting information, Pool was able to paint a prescient portrait of the future copyright wars that we now find ourselves in the midst of. Here’s what he had to say almost 30 years ago about how things would play out:

Can a computer infringe copyright? The printed output of recorded copyright material is likely to be a statutory violation of the Copyright Act which vests the exclusive right “to print, reporting, publish, copy and vend the…work.”

In short, the process of computer communication entails processing of texts that are partly controlled by people and partly automatic. They are happening all through the system. Some of the text is never visible but is only stored electronically; some is flashed briefly on a terminal display; some is printed out in hard copy. What started as one text varies and changes by degrees to other things. The receivers may be individuals and clearly identified, or they may be passers­by with access but whose access is never recorded; the passer­by may only look, as a reader browsing through a book, or he may make an automatic copy; sometimes the program will record that, sometimes it will not.

To try to apply the concept of copyright to all these stages and actors would require a most elaborate set of regulations. It has none of the simplicity of checking what copies rolled off a printing press. Good intentions about what one would like can be defined. One would like to compensate an author if a computer terminal is used as a printing press to run off numerous copies of a valuable text. One would like not to impose any control as someone works at a terminal in the role of a reader and checks back and forth through various files. The boundary, however, is impossible to draw. In the new technology of interactive computing, the reader, the writer, the bookseller, and the printer have become one. In the old technology of printing one could have a right to free press for the reader and the writer but try to enforce copyright on the printer and the bookseller. That distinction will no longer work, any more than it would ever have worked in the past on conversation.

Those whose livelihood is at stake in copyright do not like that kind of comment. They contend that creative work must be compensated. Indeed it must. Publishers may point the finger in accusation and charge that one is taking bread out of the mouths of struggling writers. But the system must be practical to work. On highly charged subjects there is an impulse to insist that those who make a negative comment must have a panacea to offer instead. If one says prisons do not cure criminals, the rejoinder is apt to be, “Do you want to let them out to kill people?” One does not necessarily want that at all, but it may still be true the prisons do not cure criminals. Likewise, one can say that in an era of infinitely varied, automated text manipulation there is no reasonable way to count copies and charge royalties on them.

That is the situation now emerging. It may be very unfair to authors. It may have a profoundly negative effect on some aspects of culture, and in any case, whether positive or negative, it may change things considerably. If it becomes more difficult for authors and artists to be paid by a royalty scheme, more of them will seek salaried bases from which to work. Some may try to get paid by personal appearances or other auxiliaries to fame. Or the highly illustrated, well-bound book may acquire a special marketing significance if the mere words of the text are hard to protect. Or one may try to sell subscriptions to a continuing service, with the customer knowing that he will be a first recipient.

These are the kinds of considerations one must think about in speculating about the consequences for culture of a world where the royalty-carrying unit copy is no longer easy to protect in many of the domains where it has been dominant. While Congress tries to hold the fort, it is clear that with photocopiers and computers, copyright is an anachronism. Like many other unenforceable laws that we keep on the statute books from the past, this one may be with us for some time to come, but with less and less effect. (pp. 257-59)

Indeed, as I wrote in one of my recent Forbes column’s (The Twilight of Copyright?”), it appears that–whether some of us like it or not–“copyright is dying… [as it] is being undermined by the unrelenting realities of the information age: digitization, instantaneous copying, borderless transactions, user-generated content, and so on.” Of course, I’m basing that assertion on the facts on the ground around me circa 2012. By contrast, Ithiel de Sola Pool already had it figured out 30 years ago. Absolutely remarkable.

I’m very excited to announce that I now have a regular Forbes column that will fly under the banner, “Technologies of Freedom.” My first essay for them is already live and it addresses a topic I’ve dealt with here extensively through the years: Irrational fears about tech monopolies and “information empires.” Jump over to Forbes to read the whole thing.

Regular readers of this blog will understand why I chose “Technologies of Freedom” as the title for my column, but I thought it was worth reiterating. No book has had a more formative impact on my thinking about technology policy than Ithiel de Sola Pool’s 1983 masterpiece, Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age.  As I noted in my short Amazon.com review, Pool’s technological tour de force is simply breathtaking in its polemical power and predictive capabilities. Reading this book almost three decades after it was published, one comes to believe that Pool must have possessed a crystal ball or had a Nostradamus-like ability to foresee the future.

For example, long before anyone else had envisioned what we now refer to as “cyberspace,” Pool was describing it in this book. “Networked computers will be the printing presses of the twenty-first century,” he argued in his remarkably prescient chapter on electronic publishing. “Soon most published information will disseminated electronically,” and “there will be networks on networks on networks,” he predicted. “A panoply of electronic devices puts at everyone’s hands capacities far beyond anything that the printing press could offer.” Few probably believed his prophecies in 1983, but no one doubts him now!

Far more importantly, Pool did all this while also providing a passionate defense of technological freedom and freedom of speech in the electronic age. In his closing chapter on “Policies for Freedom,” Pool discussed possible futures for the emerging world of electronic communications and noted that:

Technology will not be to blame if Americans fail to encompass this system within the political tradition of free speech. On the contrary, electronic technology is conducive to freedom. The degree of diversity and plenitude of access that mature electronic technology allows far exceed what is enjoyed today. Computerized information networks of the twenty-first century need not be any less free for all to use without hindrance than was the printing press. Only political errors might make them so. (p. 231)

Pool went on to outline his “Guidelines for Freedom.” #1 was that “the First Amendment applies fully to all media” and #2 was that “anyone may publish at will.” Regarding economic regulation of tech markets, Pool stressed in principles #3 and #4 that “enforcement must be after the fact, not by prior restraint” and that “regulation is a last recourse. In a free society, the burden of proof is for the least possible regulation of communication.”

This framework for freedom and innovation has governed everything I have done over my first two decades in the field of technology policy and it will shape everything I pen for Forbes, much like it has here at the TLF through the years. I can’t pretend to possess Pool’s predictive powers, but I can and will commit myself to espousing and defending his beautiful vision of technological freedom and progress.

This is what I wake up and go to work for each day.  The fight for technological freedom!

Stephen Schultze is an up-and-coming technology policy analyst who is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He is also finishing up his Masters of Science in Comparative Media Studies up at MIT. He’s been kind enough to stop by here at the TLF on occasion and comment on some of the things we have written — usually to give us grief, but we welcome that too! He’s very sharp and always has something of substance to say, and he says it in a respectful way. So I look forward to many years of intellectual combat with him. (Incidentally, we also share a mutual admiration for the work of Ithiel de Sola Pool, especially his 1983 classic, “Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age , which I have noted is my favorite tech policy book of all-time.]

Anyway, Stephen has just posted his master’s thesis: “The Business of Broadband and the Public Interest: Media Policy for the Network Society.” It’s a noble attempt to defend and extend the “public interest” concept in the Digital Age. Stephen attempts to “identify the several dimensions in which it remains relevant today.” In his thesis, Stephen cites some of my past work on the issue since I have articulated a very different view on the issue. Specifically, he cites a line of mine that I have used in multiple studies and essays on the issue:

“The public interest standard is not really a “standard” at all since it has no fixed meaning; the definition of the phrase has shifted with the political winds to suit the whims of those in power at any given time.”

I stand by that quote and down below I have pasted a lengthy passage on the mythology surrounding the public interest standard, which I pulled directly from my old 2005 “Media Myths” book. It explains in more detail why I feel that way.

“Right now is a critical point of media in transition that will affect the shape communications ecosystem going forward,” Stephen states in his thesis. I couldn’t agree more, but I completely disagree that that somehow justifies breathing new life into a standard-less standard that justifies open-ended, arbitrary governance of the Internet and digital media. Read on to understand why I feel that way…

[The following passage is cut from Chapter 4 of Media Myths: Making Sense of the Debate over Media Ownership, 2005, p. 97-100]

[M]any policymakers continue to prop up public interest notions and regulations in the belief that they are directing the content or character of media (and broadcasting in particular) toward a nobler end; a sort of noblesse oblige for the communications age. At times, their rhetoric takes on a fairy-tale quality as lawmakers and regulators speak of the public interest in reverential and fantastic terms, all the while deftly evading any attempt to define the term. For example, while testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee in January of 2003, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps paid homage to the public interest standard:

At all times, I strive to maintain my commitment to the public interest. As public servants, we must put the public interest front and center. It is at the core of my own philosophy of government…. The public interest is the prism through which we should always look as we make our decisions. My question to visitors to my office who are advocating for specific policy changes is always: how does what you want the Commission to do serve the public interest? It is my lodestar.

That is nice rhetoric, but Commissioner Copps’ public interest “lodestar” ultimately provides little practical guidance. Public interest proponents assume that their values or objectives — which, in their opinion, are consistent with the needs and desires of the public — should ultimately triumph within the public policy arena. Consequently, volumes of government rules and speeches have been penned advocating a large and expanding role for government in terms of defining “the public interest.” But while public interest regulation has been the cornerstone of communications and media policy since the 1930s, enabling regulators to control industry structures and outcomes, at no time during these seven decades of public interest regulation has the term been defined.

Even today, efforts are made to read new powers or responsibilities into the term in order to provide regulators with the flexibility to control modern electronic media (i.e., broadcasting, cable) in ways they could not control older print media (i.e., newspaper, magazines). For example, during the late 1990s, the Advisory Committee on Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters was formed by an executive order of President Bill Clinton to investigate expanding public interest obligations for television broadcasters. The group came up with numerous recommendations to impose new burdens on broadcasters, even as broadcasters struggle to remain competitive with other media outlets that are not burdened with similar public interest regulatory requirements.

Similarly, many academics have advocated a much broader role for government in dictating media outcomes. For example, even though they admit that “One of the dangers in evaluating the media in a public interest framework is that it can easily take on an elitist tone,” David Croteau and William Hoynes go on to pen an entire book dedicated to expanding public interest regulation of media. Among the expanded public interest responsibilities Croteau and Hoynes and other regulatory supporters endorse: public service announcements; expanding coverage of political campaigns, debates and developments; free (or lower-cost) campaign ad time; expanded “educational” or cultural programming (especially aimed at children); and expanded coverage of community affairs.

The problem with all this “public interest” thinking, as Ben Compaine aptly notes, is that “In democracies, there is no universal ‘public interest.’ Rather there are numerous and changing ‘interested publics.’” The viewing public is likely to have a broad array of interests and desires that cannot be adequately gauged by what five FCC commissioners believe to be in the public interest. Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase argued 40 years ago that “The phrase… lacks any definite meaning. Furthermore, the many inconsistencies in commission decisions have made it impossible for the phrase to acquire a definite meaning in the process of regulation.” That is still true today. The public interest standard is not really a “standard” at all since it has no fixed meaning; the definition of the phrase has shifted with the political winds to suit the whims of those in power at any given time.

If you are interested in reading the rest, jump to @ page 105 in the Scribd version….