This Book is NOT about the Net

My latest Forbes column takes a look at Andrew Keen’s latest book, Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us. It’s an interesting book, and a much better one than his previous screed, Cult of the Amateur. Andrew raises valid concerns about the sheer volume of over-sharing taking place online today. As I note in my review:

Keen is on solid ground when outlining the many downsides of over-sharing, beginning with the privacy and reputational consequences for each of us. “Social media is the confessional novel that we are not only all writing but also collectively publishing for everyone else to read,” he says. That can be a problem because the Internet has a very long memory. A youngster’s silly pranks or soul-searching self-revelations may seem like a fun thing to upload when such juvenile antics or angst will win praise (and plenty of pageviews) from teen peers. Your 34-year-old self, however, will likely have a very different view of that same rant, picture, or video. Yet, that content will likely still be around for the world to see when you do reach adulthood.

And Keen offers many other reasons why we should be concerned about a world of over-sharing and “hypervisibility.” The problem is that Keen drowns out these valid concerns by assaulting the reader with layers of over-the-top pessimistic prognostications and apocalyptic rhetoric. In particular, again and again and again in the book he comes back to George Orwell and his dystopian novel, 1984. Keen insists that some sort of Orwellian catastrophe is set to befall humanity because of social media over-sharing. (See this other Forbes column on Keen’s book, “Why 1984 Is Upon Us,” to see just how far this theme can be pushed).

Interestingly, Keen is not the only person to raise the specter of Orwell’s “Big Brother” nightmare in an Internet policy tract. Allusions to Orwell’s 1984 and “Big Brother” are increasingly common in Net policy books, blogs, essays and even newspaper articles. Variants on the “Big Brother” theme include: “Corporate Big Brother,” “Big Brother Inc.,” and even “Big Browser.” Similarly, back in 2008, a Public Knowledge analyst likened Apple’s management of applications in its iPhone App Store to an “1984 kind of total control.”

Let’s put an end to this silliness. George Orwell’s 1984 is a book about coercive, totalitarian governmental control in which citizens are forcibly and relentlessly brainwashed by an all-encompassing tyrannical Big Brother. It is a world of propaganda, censorship, historical revisionism, mind control, top-down planning, and total war.

By contrast, the modern digital devices and social media services that Keen and others repeatedly decry as “Orwellian” are nothing of the sort. First, and most obviously, they are purely voluntary. No one forces us to use Apple, Google, or Microsoft devices or any other company’s digital technologies. Likewise, no one forces us to join Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, or others social media services.These companies and countless others compete for our allegiance and try to win our business. If we do choose to use their services, we are also free to later abandon them. These are not “crystal prisons,” as this recent EFF blog post suggested (at least of Apple). These companies can’t coercively keep us in their “walled gardens,” which really aren’t all that “walled” or “closed” as I have argued here before. And while we are using those services, there is no effort by any of them to brainwash us or encourage us to take up arms against others. They are just looking to make money, not war.

To reiterate, I absolutely understand that there are very legitimate privacy and reputational concerns associated with excessive social media sharing and online living more generally. Again, Keen and others are on strong ground in raising some alarm about the perils of hypervisibility and over-sharing of personal information. But such concerns are in a totally different league than the sort of issues Orwell was raising in 1984. It’s hard for me to take seriously those Net policy authors and analysts who conflate the two.  I hope they stop.

Forbes.com has just published an editorial that Berin Szoka and I penned about yesterday’s net neutrality announcement from the FCC.

The Day Internet Freedom Died

by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka

There was a time, not so long ago, when the term “Internet Freedom” actually meant what it implied: a cyberspace free from over-zealous legislators and bureaucrats. For a few brief, beautiful moments in the Internet’s history (from the mid-90s to the early 2000s), a majority of Netizens and cyber-policy pundits alike all rallied around the flag of “Hands Off the Net!” From censorship efforts, encryption controls, online taxes, privacy mandates and infrastructure regulations, there was a general consensus as to how much authority government should have over cyber-life and our cyber-liberties. Simply put, there was a “presumption of liberty” in all cyber-matters.

Those days are now gone; the presumption of online liberty is giving way to a presumption of regulation. A massive assault on real Internet freedom has been gathering steam for years and has finally come to a head. Ironically, victory for those who carry the banner of “Internet Freedom” would mean nothing less than the death of that freedom.

We refer to the gradual but certain movement to have the federal government impose “neutrality” regulation for all Internet actors and activities—and in particular, to yesterday’s announcement by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski that new rules will be floated shortly. “But wait,” you say, “You’re mixing things up! All that’s being talked about right now is the application of ‘simple net neutrality,’ regulations for the infrastructure layer of the net.” You might even claim regulations are not really regulation but pro-freedom principles to keep the net “free and open.”

Such thinking is terribly short-sighted. Here is the reality: Because of the steps being taken in Washington right now, real Internet Freedom—for all Internet operators and consumers, and for economic and speech rights alike—is about to start dying a death by a thousand regulatory cuts. Policymakers and activists groups are ramping up the FCC’s regulatory machine for a massive assault on cyber-liberty. This assault rests on the supposed superiority of common carriage regulation and “public interest” mandates over not just free markets and property rights, but over general individual liberties and freedom of speech in particular. Stated differently, cyber-collectivism is back in vogue—and it’s coming very soon to a computer near you!

“Net Neutrality” proponents insist, however, that only regulation can save us from nefarious corporate schemers out to quash our rights and destroy all innovation. Over the last decade, a cabal of activist-minded cyber-law professors have successfully turned the world of Internet policy upside down by persuading an entire generation of law students, policymakers, and a number of large Internet companies that “Internet Freedom” means the very opposite of what it used to mean. Borrowing tactics that would have made Orwell proud, they have convinced many in the public and the policymaking community that the old Internet Freedom is slavery, in that we are all just tools of Corporate Big Brother. Thus, they offer us a new Internet Freedom: Neutrality über alles! Their freedom, as in Orwell’s Oceania, is not a freedom from the State, but a gleaming utopia that can only be created by the State.

We see the triumph of this thinking with Chairman Genachowski’s proclamation that, “This is not about government regulation of the Internet. It’s about fair rules of the road for companies that control access to the Internet. We will do as much as we need to do, and no more, to ensure that the Internet remains an unfettered platform for competition, creativity and entrepreneurial activity.”

Yet, no matter how vociferously the proponents of FCC-enforced “neutrality” insist that it is not regulation they seek, the reality is that the steps they counsel would put the FCC in the driver’s seat for a host of Internet economic and social issues. Internet companies and technologies will come to be regulated like crusty old “common carriers” and broadcast stations that must serve some amorphous “public interest.”

But as the FCC’s long history of meddling in media and communications markets makes clear, micro-management of dynamic markets is a recipe for economic stagnation, strangled innovation, and speech controls. And the path to regulation does not end with infrastructure providers. The specter of neutrality haunts not just today’s Internet service providers but also all high-tech innovators, like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and their descendents. Although the FCC’s original mandate was mostly to deal with spectrum “interference”—something that could have been, and actually was being, dealt with using property rights—the agency quickly expanded its mission: Broadcast regulation metastasized into government control over speech, innovation, campaign advertising and a “fairness doctrine” for news coverage. Likewise, Net Neutrality mandates will give rise to neutrality mandates for other areas.

The slope is slippery and we’re already heading down it: The push for “Wireless Neutrality” is already well under way and the FCC is currently investigating Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice application for the iPhone. Thus, “Net Neutrality” leads to “Device Neutrality” and “Application Neutrality,” but the same rationale would apply equally to any circumstance in which access to a communications platform is supposedly limited to a few “gatekeepers.” Some academics have already proposed a “Federal Search Commission” to deal with accusations of “search bias.” At the end of the day, we’ll need a full-blown Federal Information Commission with a Search Bureau, a Cloud Computing Division and several other ministries to micro-manage the many flavors of neutrality regulation.

The path back toward real Internet freedom lies in restoring the presumption of liberty enshrined in the First Amendment, which is not a sword with which the government can ensure fairness, diversity or openness, but a shield against government meddling in media, communications and online markets.

Speaking of socializing media, acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps is someone who has devoted much of his life to regulating the media marketplace into the ground. If he had his way, federal bureaucrats would be controlling virtually every aspect of the media universe. Nothing would get done with Big Nanny’s permission.

That’s what makes his recent comments about the impact of media regulation so delicious.. and hypocritical.  According to an article  Bloomberg ran on Thursday, Copps is now saying that, with newspapers struggling to remain afloat, the FCC should now reconsider regulations that prohibit combined ownership of broadcast stations and newspapers.  The agency should “visit this whole problem” before long, Copps apparently told Bloomberg.

“Visit this problem before long”??  Please!  Congress and the FCC have had opportunities to “visit” and revisit this problem for many years now, but it has been Michael Copps and his merry band of media reformistas who have stopped every reform effort dead in its tracks.  (See my essays “Congress Fiddles, Newspapers Burn” and “Media Deregulation is Dead” for more evidence of how these radicals hijacked media policy in this country.)  As I documented in my 2005 Media Myths book, these charlatans have used hyperbolic rhetoric, shameless fear-mongering, and unsubstantiated claims in opposition to each and every sensible effort to reform our nation’s outdated media ownership policies.  Those laws and regulations have created artificial market structures and hindered the ability of media operators to find new business models that might throw them a lifeline in difficult times.

Consider the fact that it was just 14 months ago that then-Commissioner Copps issued this gem of a hysteria-ridden statement in response to the agency’s last effort to ever-so-slightly loosen the newspaper-broadcast cross ownership rule:

Today’s decision would make George Orwell proud. We claim to be giving the news industry a shot in the arm—but the real effect is to reduce total newsgathering. We shed crocodile tears for the financial plight of newspapers—yet the truth is that newspaper profits are about double the S&P 500 average.

I remember when I read that back in Dec ’07 and thinking to myself that Michael Copps is either willfully blind to the facts or intentionally twisting them to suit his own ends.  Regardless, the writing was on the wall years ago with the rise of unprecedented information abundance and media competition and there was no good reason to force traditional media operators to face these new challenges with one arm tied behind their backs.  But that’s exactly what Copps and his radical cronies over at Free Press and other groups did.

But now Copps is suddenly having second thoughts?  Now that he has dug their graves and driven stakes through their hearts, he suddenly wants to cast himself as an Information Age Jesus and resurrect Lazarus?  Oh, the hypocrisy of it all!  As my boss Ken Ferree recently pointed out:

They’ve all now suddenly discovered that the business model for daily newspapers is under strain and may not be sustainable? Was it the New York Times slouching toward bankruptcy that got their attention, or the failure of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer? […] The sad truth is, the newspaper business has been heading toward a cliff for the last ten years; only willful ignorance can explain the failure of these people who have so recently come to be concerned about the fate of journalism to acknowledge the threat. Time will tell whether their new-found concern has come too late, or whether they have poisoned the political well too thoroughly for any effective policy change.

Moreover, as Ken also points out, it’s not just Copps who has apparently seen the light and had a sudden conversion.

This follows a letter from Speaker Pelosi to Attorney General Holder suggesting restrained antitrust review of transactions involving newspaper assets, and a proposal from Senator Cardin (D-MD) for a quasi-government bailout of newspaper firms.

Ken has more commentary on the Pelosi letter here.   Like Ken, when reading these comments from Pelosi and Copps, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.  I suppose I should be happy that they have finally seen the error in their ways.  It’s just a shame it took such devistation for them to open their eyes to the truth.  Regulatory reform might not have been able to save these old media operators, but they should have at least been giving the freedom to structure their affairs and restructure their business models in an attempt to avoid extinction.  Copps and Pelosi now have to live with the grim reality that it’s tough to throw someone a lifeline after you’ve already sank the ship.

Channeling Jonathan Zittrain, Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge continues his incessant ranting against Apple and the iPhone for supposedly not being open enough and, therefore, somehow harming consumers and 3rd party developers. In his essay today about the supposed evils of the iPhone App Store, he accuses Apple of an “1984 kind of total control.”

Hmmm, let’s see… Apple creates a great new product that is so insanely sexy and innovative that even Apple-haters like me are forced to admit that it is the most brilliant tech gadget of the decade. Millions of people have flocked to Apple stores, stood in lines so long that you’d think they were giving away free pot and floor bongs inside, and then voluntarily handed over seemingly all their disposable monthly income to get their hands on one of these things.

OK, so how is this like 1984 again? Is evil Steve Jobs forcing the masses to buy this product? Of course not. So it strikes me that we can easily dispense with analogies to a book about coercive, totalitarian government control like 1984.

And if all this anti-iPhone ranting is just about the degree of control that Steve Jobs and Apple exercise over product add-ons then hey, I’ve got an easy answer for you: go get a different phone! My current phone — and I tend to cycle through phones pretty quickly in the search of increasing functionality and 3rd party app-friendliness — is the wonderful HTC Touch. Specifically, I have the newer model that Verizon is offering with the oh-so-clunky moniker XV6900. (The Verizon branding / marketing department isn’t going to win any awards with robotic phone names like that!) Anyway, despite the silly name, this phone is a masterpiece. It has more functions than I know what to do with. And did you say you want 3rd party apps? Well, head over to Handango and check out the HTC Touch store there. I hope you have some time on your hands because you’ll be sorting through 5,100+ software apps available there for the device. But that just scratches the surface. There are so many other apps and freeware I have pulled off the Net for this phone that I can’t even begin to count them all. Hell, spend a couple of hours over on the Howard Forums trying to sort through all the stuff that you can do with this phone and your head will start to spin. It’s insane. And, as I’ve found out with this phone and my previous and equally app-friendly HTC XV6700, it’s also an easy way to quickly eat up all your storage and slow your memory down to a crawl.

The bottom line is, Apple offers people a choice. Yes, there is a little more hand-holding in their world than I can stand. I wrote about that in my original review of Zittrain’s book; a book that makes Apple out to be some sort of evil anti-consumer nemesis because their products aren’t perfectly open to tinkering. But that’s not what everyone is looking for in a phone. Many people just want stability, sexiness, and a somewhat smart device with a degree of tinkerability. Thus, Apple creates some trade-offs for its consumers, but it’s a deal most of them will gladly take.

Again, if Curtis doesn’t like the sound of that deal, then he should just go get a different device. There are millions of people who would happily buy his old iPhone, or take his place in line the next time Jobs rolls out another upgraded iPhone at an even lower price.