Posts tagged as:

NRO Op/Ed: Government v. Google: Why Free Marketeers Should Rally Against Search Neutrality

by on July 22, 2010 · 4 comments

“Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” Thus did Ronald Reagan capture the essence of big government. The two biggest challenges facing defenders of free markets in technology policy lie in Reagan’s second point:

  • Telling the “Good News Story” about how “it” (human ingenuity—what the great economist Julian Simon called our “Ultimate Resource”) keeps “moving” (by inventing new hardware, software, services, etc.)
  • Holding the line against efforts to extend the regulatory regimes of the past over new technologies, and chipping away at those regimes as best we can

So one might think that believers in limited government would celebrate a company like Google as a great American success story: A university research program launched by two smart kids (one of whom fled Communist oppression) that grew from a garage start-up into a global tech titan whose wide-ranging innovations are revolutionizing more and more of the economy. Surely free marketeers would rally to the defense of such a company when, say, the New York Times—that if-it-moves-regulate-it bastion—calls for bringing “into the regulatory fold,” right?

Unfortunately, all too many free marketeers seem willing to hang Google out to dry, or at least stay silent because they resent the pro-regulatory policy positions taken by the company or the political leanings of its employees and leadership. The company has hardly been a champion of digital capitalism in Washington, allying itself with a number tax/regulate/subsidize groups, pushing for net neutrality regulation, and using antitrust as a sword against its rivals (some of whom seem willing to return the favor). But the principles at stake are too important for free marketeers to gloat, as Adam Thierer argued in an op/ed for National Review Online earlier this week: Government vs. Google: Why Free Marketeers Should Rally Against “Search Neutrality.” Continue reading →

SHARE: 4 comments

After the Deluge, More Deluge

by on July 22, 2010 · 0 comments

If I ever had any hope of “keeping up” with developments in the regulation of information technology—or even the nine specific areas I explored in The Laws of Disruption—that hope was lost long ago.  The last few months I haven’t even been able to keep up just sorting the piles of printouts of stories I’ve “clipped” from just a few key sources, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNET News.com and The Washington Post.

 

I’ve just gone through a big pile of clippings that cover April-July.  A few highlights:  In May, YouTube surpassed 2 billion daily hits.  Today, Facebook announced it has more than 500,000,000 members.   Researchers last week demonstrated technology that draws device power from radio waves.

Continue reading →

SHARE: 0 comments

Google’s Lobby Shop Creates Need for Itself

by on July 14, 2010 · 1 comment

“Live by the sword, die by the sword.”

“Play with fire and you might get burned.”

Those are lines that sprung to my mind as I read this FT article noting how Google’s support for ‘net neutrality regulation has transmogrified into a push for “search neutrality.” Such regulation would be aimed directly at Google’s heart throat nuts business model.

(I was the first to discuss “search neutrality” here on TLF. Ignore Adam’s comment.)

But sloganeering is cheap. Let’s take a minute to try and understand why things like this happen to companies like Google.

First, I think, most executives—certainly executives in tech companies—don’t understand Washington at all. They have a gauzy impression that good people work for the betterment of public policy here.

Actually, that’s true. Just about everyone is good. And everyone is working for the betterment of public policy as they see it. The thing is, everybody sees the betterment of public policy as turning it to their own interests. Washington, D.C. is a war of all against all—each trying to grab the most stuff—using politics instead of clubs, knives, and guns.

Next, I think it’s important to recognize the incentives of the people who advise tech executives. They are people with families and mortgages. They want to have and keep a job. So what do they do? They encourage involvement in public policy. The public policy advisor who says “steer clear of Washington” may be giving better advice, but his consulting contract is small and its term is short.

The government relations/lobbying shop in a company like Google is part of a larger business, yes, but it is a small bureaucracy within the business. It doesn’t produce anything subject to competitive pricing, so (accounting practices notwithstanding) there is little way to measure its value. The fallback measure is activity—the more things happening, the more ‘valuable’ the lobbying shop. (Surprise me, Google, so famous for measurement, testing, and rigor in product development. Have you got a way to measure the true value produced by your lobbying shop, law department, accounting group, etc.?)

You see how the dynamics quickly get perverse. A public policy advisor or lobbyist makes him- or herself ‘valuable’ by getting the client into trouble.

Google is not in trouble. The FT story is premature, and it’s overstatement to say that Google has been “hoisted by its own petard.”

But imagine a controlled experiment in which another Google in a parallel universe didn’t draw attention to itself in Washington, D.C., didn’t push for conditions in the 700 MHz spectrum auction, didn’t advocate for ‘net neutrality regulation, and so on. That Google might not have created—or might have delayed—the need for a permanent lobbying/government relations cost center.

SHARE: 1 comment

The Seven Deadly Sins of Title II Reclassification (NOI Remix)

by on July 13, 2010 · 4 comments

Better late than never, I’ve finally given a close read to the Notice of Inquiry issued by the FCC on June 17th.  (See my earlier comments, “FCC Votes for Reclassification, Dog Bites Man”.)  In some sense there was no surprise to the contents; the Commission’s legal counsel and Chairman Julius Genachowski had both published comments over a month before the NOI that laid out the regulatory scheme the Commission now has in mind for broadband Internet access.

Chairman Genachowski’s “Third Way” comments proposed an option that he hoped would satisfy both extremes.  The FCC would abandon efforts to find new ways to meet its regulatory goals using “ancillary jurisdiction” under Title I (an avenue the D.C. Circuit had wounded, but hadn’t actually exterminated, in the Comcast decision), but at the same time would not go as far as some advocates urged and put broadband Internet completely under the telephone rules of Title II.

Continue reading →

SHARE: 4 comments

FCC Votes for Reclassification, Dog Bites Man

by on June 17, 2010 · 8 comments

Not surprisingly, FCC Commissioners voted 3 to 2 today to open a Notice of Inquiry on changing the classification of broadband Internet access from an “information service” under Title I of the Communications Act to “telecommunications” under Title II.  (Title II was written for telephone service, and most of its provisions pre-date the breakup of the former AT&T monopoly.)  The story has been widely reported, including posts from The Washington Post, CNET, Computerworld, and The Hill.

As CNET’s Marguerite Reardon counts it, at least 282 members of Congress have already asked the FCC not to proceed with this strategy, including 74 Democrats.

I have written extensively about why a Title II regime is a very bad idea, even before the FCC began hinting it would make this attempt.  I’ve argued that the move is on extremely shaky legal grounds, usurps the authority of Congress in ways that challenge fundamental Constitutional principles of agency law, would cause serious harm to the Internet’s vibrant ecosystem, and would undermine the Commission’s worthy goals in implementing the National Broadband Plan.  No need to repeat any of these arguments here.  Reclassification is wrong on the facts, and wrong on the law. Continue reading →

SHARE: 8 comments

FCC “Third Way” Plan = Beginning of Big Government Broadband Era

by on June 17, 2010 · 4 comments

Today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted along party lines to adopt a Notice of Inquiry opening a new proceeding to regulate the Internet by reclassifying it under Title II of the Communications Act. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski calls this his “Third Way” plan. In a PFF press release, I issued the following response:

In its ongoing ‘by-any-means-necessary’ quest to regulate the Internet via Net Neutrality mandates, Chairman Genachowski’s FCC continues to flaunt the rule of law and magically invent its own authority as it goes along. If this Chairman wants to bring the Net under his thumb and regulate broadband networks like plain-vanilla public utilities, he should ask Congress for the authority to pursue such imperial ambitions. As the law stands today, the FCC has no such authority. Indeed, the unambiguously deregulatory thrust of the Telecom Act of 1996 stands in stark contrast to Chairman Genachowski’s outdated vision for Big Government Broadband. The FCC stands on the cusp of killing one of the great deregulatory success stories of modern economic history by reviving the discredited regulatory industrial policies of the 19th Century. The revisionism about that epoch is dead wrong: Price controls and protected markets limited choice and stifled innovation. With the agency rolling back the regulatory clock in this fashion, today marks the beginning of the Internet’s “Lost Decade” of stymied investment, innovation, and job creation as all sides wage battle over the legality of reclassification and its implementation.

SHARE: 4 comments

What the Oil Spill Really Says About Net Neutrality: Regulatory Capture v. the Nirvana Fallacy

by on June 9, 2010 · 18 comments

A diverse group of technology companies including broadband, video and wireless providers as well as Google, Microsoft and hardware giants like Intel and Cisco today launched the  Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (BITAG or TAG) to provide exactly the kind of self-regulatory forum for dealing with concerns about network management practices that we at PFF have long called for—most recently in Adam Thierer and Mike Wendy’s recent paper, “The Constructive Alternative to Net Neutrality Regulation and Title II Reclassification Wars.” But rather than applauding BITAG, the regulatory radicals at Free Press insisted that:

this or any other voluntary effort is not a substitute for the government setting basic rules of the road for the Internet.

Swansong of an Industry?

There must be a separate FCC rulemaking process, which can take the recommendations of this or any other voluntary advisory group into account, but rubber-stamping those recommendations would ignore the agency’s mandate to create public policy in the public interest. Allowing industry to set its own rules is like allowing BP to regulate its drilling. The Comcast BitTorrent case shows that without government oversight, Internet Service Providers will engage in what are already deemed by engineers to be bad practices

Free Press certainly wouldn’t have the influence they do if they weren’t so good at picking metaphors. But what does the oil spill really teach us about regulation? The Wall Street Journal notes the growing outrage on the political Left against president Obama from those who are “furious and frustrated that the President hasn’t demanded the heads of BP executives on pikes.” But the Journal points out the central irony of the situation:

The [so-called] liberals’ fury at the President is almost as astounding as their outrage over the discovery that oil companies and their regulators might have grown too cozy. In economic literature, this behavior is known as “regulatory capture,” and the current political irony is that this is a long-time conservative critique of the regulatory state…. In the better economic textbooks, regulatory capture is described as a “government failure,” as opposed to a market failure. It refers to the fact that individuals or companies with the highest interest or stake in a policy outcome will be able to focus their energies on politicians and bureaucracies to get the outcome they prefer.

Continue reading →

SHARE: 18 comments

Three Cheers for New Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group

by on June 9, 2010 · 8 comments

A new voluntary Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (BITAG or TAG) is being announced today with the goal of bringing together Internet engineers and other technical experts “to develop consensus on broadband network management practices or other related technical issues that can affect users’ Internet experience, including the impact to and from applications, content and devices that utilize the Internet.” BITAG’s goals include: (1) educating policymakers on such technical issues; (2) attempting to address specific technical matters in an effort to minimize related policy disputes; and (3) serving as a sounding board for new ideas and network management practices. BITAG will be chaired by University of Colorado at Boulder Adjunct Professor Dale Hatfield.

This is absolutely terrific news, and it’s exactly the sort of thing Mike Wendy and I called for in our recent PFF white paper, “The Constructive Alternative to Net Neutrality Regulation and Title II Reclassification Wars.”In that piece, we argued that we needed “quick, non-government-driven dispute resolution fora, best practices and industry-led guidance.”  That’s exactly what BITAG will provide.

Indeed, this new Technical Advisory Group is a very sensible step forward and it represents a constructive alternative to the ‘Net Neutrality Wars’ that continue to rage in Washington. BITAG essentially “de-politicizes” the Internet engineering issues by offering an independent forum for parties to have technical disputes mediated and resolved – without government involvement or onerous rulemakings. Consequently, this will help avoid the red tape and incessant delays that usually accompany bureaucratic resolution mechanisms, which can stifle continuous technological innovation and investments. Continue reading →

SHARE: 8 comments

Broadband Reclassification: The Third Way or the Highway?

by on May 25, 2010 · 4 comments

The announcement yesterday from key Congressional Democrats of an effort to reform the Communications Act put me in a nostalgic mood. Here follows one of my longest efforts yet to bury the lede.

One of my favorite courses in law school was Abner Mikva’s “Legislative Process” course, which he taught while serving on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and before his tenure as White House counsel to President Clinton. Mikva had previously served in Congress; indeed, one of the first votes I ever cast was for Mikva while an undergraduate at Northwestern University.

(It was a remarkable period at the law school. The year Mikva signed on as a lecturer was also the first year on the faculty for three professors just starting their academic careers: Larry Lessig, Elena Kagan, and Barack Obama. I took two classes with Lessig, including an independent study on the impact of technology on the practice of law, but regrettably none from the other two.) Continue reading →

SHARE: 4 comments

“The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” & Constant Growth of Regulation

by on May 23, 2010 · 1 comment

Today’s NYT piece by Brad Stone about Google (Sure, It’s Big. But Is That Bad?) offers a superb example of how to use the rhetorical question in an article headlined to suggest that you might actually be about to write a thoughtful, balanced piece—while actually writing a piece that, while thoughtful and interesting, offers little more than token resistance to your own preconceived judgments.  But perhaps I’m being unfair: Perhaps Stone’s editors removed “YES! YES! A THOUSAND TIMES, YES!” from the headline for brevity’s sake?

Anyway, despite its one-sidedness, the piece is fascinating, offering a well-researched summary of the growing cacophony of cries for regulatory intervention against Google, and also a suggestion of where they might lead in crafting a broader regulatory regime for online services beyond just Google.  In short, the crusade against Google and the crusade for net neutrality (in which Google has, IMHO unwisely been a major player) are together leading us down in intellectual slippery slope that, as Adam and I have suggested, will result in “High-Tech Mutually Assured Destruction” and the death of Real Internet Freedom.

Ironically, this push for increased government meddling—a veritable “New Deal 2.0″—is all justified by the need to “protect freedom.”  But it would hardly be the first time that this had happened. As the great defender of liberty Garet Garrett said of the New Deal 1.0 in his 1938 essay The Revolution Was:

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.

That theme lives on in the works of those like antitrust warrior Gary Reback, an anti-Google stalwart whose book Free the Market: Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive Adam savaged in his review last year. Reback argues:

Google is the “arbiter of every single thing on the Web, and it favors its properties over everyone else’s,” said Mr. Reback, sitting in a Washington cafe with the couple. “What it wants to do is control Internet traffic. Anything that undermines its ability to do that is threatening.”

Move over, ISPs! Search engines are the real threat! Somehow, I feel fairly confident in predicting that this will be among the chief implications of Tim Wu’s new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, to be released in November, which his publisher summarizes as follows: Continue reading →

SHARE: 1 comment

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →