The UN has created several multilateral mechanisms to pursue those objectives, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the Biological Weapons Convention. Progress on these fronts has always been slow and limited, however. The Secretary-General observed that nuclear non-proliferation efforts have recently “descended into fractious deadlock,” but the effectiveness of those and similar UN-led efforts have long been challenged by the dual realities of (1) rapid ongoing technological change that has made WMDs more ubiquitous than ever, plus (2) a general lack of teeth in UN treaties and accords to do much to slow those advances, especially among non-signatories.

Despite those challenges, the Secretary-General is right to remain vigilant about the horrors of chemical, biological and nuclear attacks. But what was interesting about this address is that the Secretary-General continued on to discuss his concerns about a rising class of emerging technologies, which we usually don’t hear mentioned in the same breath as those traditional “weapons of mass destruction”:

I will now say a few words about new global threats emerging from the misuse of science and technology, and the power of globalization. Information and communication technologies, artificial intelligence, 3D printing and synthetic biology will bring profound changes to our everyday lives and benefits to millions of people. However, their potential for misuse could also bring destruction. The nexus between these emerging technologies and WMD needs close examination and action. As a starting point, the international community must step up to expand common ground for the peaceful use of cyberspace and, particularly, the intersection between cyberspace and critical infrastructure.  People now live a significant portion of their lives online. They must be protected from online attacks, just as effectively as they are protected from physical attacks. Disarmament and non-proliferation instruments are only as successful as Member States’ capacity to implement them.

And the Secretary-General concluded by calling on “all Member States to re-commit themselves and to take action. The stakes are simply too high to ignore.”

The Secretary-General’s inclusion of all these emerging technologies in a speech about WMDs and the dangers of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons raises an interesting question: Are all these things actually equivalent? Does a danger exist from the continued evolution of ICTs, AI, 3D printing, and synthetic biology that is equal to the very serious threat posed by chemical, biological and nuclear weapons?

On one hand, it is tempting to say, Yes! If nothing else, most of us have seen more than enough techno-dystopian Hollywood plots through the years to understand the hypothetical dangers that some of these technologies pose. But even if (like me) you dismiss most of the movie plots as far-fetched Chicken Little-ism meant to drum up big box office, plenty of serious scholars out there have sketched out more credible pictures of the threat some of these new technologies might pose to humanity. Information platforms can be hacked and our personal data or security compromised. 3D printers can be used to create cheap, undetectable firearms. Robotics and autonomous systems can be programmed to kill. Synthetic biology might help create genetically-modified super-soldiers. And so on.

These are serious questions with profound ramifications and I discussed them at much greater length in my lengthy review of Wendell Wallach’s important book, A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping beyond Our Control. Like many other books and essays on these technologies, Wallach champions “the need for more upstream governance” as in “more control over the way that potentially harmful technologies are developed or introduced into the larger society. Upstream management is certainly better than introducing regulations downstream, after a technology is deeply entrenched or something major has already gone wrong,” he suggests. “Yet, even when we can access risks, there remain difficulties in recognizing when or determining how much control should be introduced. When does being precautionary make sense, and when is precaution an over-reaction to the risks?”

Indeed, that is the right question, and quite a profound one. The problem associated with all such “upstream governance” and preemptive controls on emerging technologies is determining how to avoid hypothetical future risks without destroying the potential for these same technologies to be used in life-enriching and even life-saving ways.

Solutions are illusive and involve myriad trade-offs. More generally, it’s not even clear that they would be workable. That is especially true when you expand the scale of governance to include the entire planet. It seems unlikely, for example, that a hypothetical UN-led Synthetic Biology Non-Proliferation Treaty, 3D-Printed Weapons Convention, or Agreement on the Peaceful Use of Cyberspace are going to be workable solutions in a world where these technologies are so radically decentralized and proliferating so rapidly. At least with some of the older technologies, the underlying materials were somewhat harder to obtain, manufacture, weaponize, and then distribute/use. But the same is not true of many of these newer technologies. It’s a heck of lot easier to get access to a computer and 3D printer than uranium and enrichment facilities, for example.

Moreover, when we discuss the risks associated with emerging technologies compared to past technologies, there needs to be some sort of weighing of the actual probability of serious harm coming about. In the expanded Second Edition of my Permissionless Innovation book, I tried to offer a rough framework for when formal precautionary regulation (i.e., operational restrictions, licensing requirements, research limitations, or even formal bans) might be necessary. In a section of Chapter 3 of my book entitled, “When Does Precaution Make Sense?” I argued that:

Generally speaking, permissionless innovation should remain the norm in the vast majority of cases, but there will be some scenarios where the threat of tangible, immediate, irreversible, catastrophic harm associated with new innovations could require at least a light version of the precautionary principle to be applied.  In these cases, we might be better suited to think about when an “anti-catastrophe principle” is needed, which narrows the scope of the precautionary principle and focuses it more appropriately on the most unambiguously worst-case scenarios that meet those criteria.

“But most [emerging technology] cases don’t fall into this category,” I concluded. It is simply not the case that most emerging technologies pose the same sort of tangible, immediate, irreversible, catastrophic, and highly probably risk that traditional “weapons of mass destruction” do.

And that gets at my problem with that recent address by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. By so casually moving from a heated discussion of traditional WMDs into a brief discussion about the potential risks associated with ICTs, AI, 3D printing and synthetic biology, I really worry about the sort of moral equivalence that some might read into this speech. Again, these things, and the threats they pose, are simply not the same. Yet, when the UN Secretary-General sandwiches these technologies in between impassioned opening and closing statements about the need “to take action” because “the stakes are simply too high to ignore,” it seems to suggest he is prepared to speak of them all in the same breath as traditional “weapons of mass destruction” and suggest similar global control efforts are needed. I do not believe that is sensible.

Does this mean we just throw our hands up in the air and give up any inquiry into the matter? Of course not. As I noted in my review of Wallach’s book, some very sensible “soft law” approaches exist that are worth pursuing. Soft law approaches can include a wide variety of efforts to “bake a dose of precautionary directly into the innovation process through a wide variety of informal governance/oversight mechanisms,” as I noted in my review of Wallach’s book. “By embedding shared values in the very design of new tools and techniques, engineers improve the prospect of a positive outcome,” Wallach says in his book.

Many soft law or informal governance systems already exist in the forms of  so-called “multistakeholder governance” systems, informal industry codes of conduct, best practices, and other coordinating mechanisms. But these solutions would likely fall short of addressing some extreme scenarios that many people are worried about. Toward that end, when the case can be made that a particular application of a new general purpose technology will result in tangible, immediate, irreversible, catastrophic, and highly probably dangers, then perhaps some international action should be considered. For example, a case can be made that governments (and perhaps even the UN) should do more to preemptively curb the most nefarious uses of robotics. There’s already a major effort underway called the “Campaign to Stop Killer Robots” that seeks a multinational treaty to stop deadly uses of robotics. Again, I’m not sure how enforcement will work, but I think it’s worth investigating how some of the uses of “killer robots” might be limited through international accords and actions. Moreover, I could imagine an extension of existing the UN’s Biological Weapons Convention framework to cover some synthetic biology applications that involve extreme forms of human modification.

That being said, policymakers and international figures of importance like UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon should be extremely cautious about the language they use to describe new classes of technologies lest they cast too wide a net with calls for controlling “weapons of mass destruction” that may be nothing of the sort.

Additional Reading 

• “Wendell Wallach on the Challenge of Engineering Better Technology Ethics“
• “On the Line between Technology Ethics vs. Technology Policy“
• “What Does It Mean to “Have a Conversation” about a New Technology?”
• “Making Sure the “Trolley Problem” Doesn’t Derail Life-Saving Innovation”
• Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom

In a terrific little essay on “Local Economic Revival and The Unpredictability of Technological Innovation,” Michael Mandel, the chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute, makes several important points regarding the fundamental folly for future forecasting efforts as it pertains to new innovations. He notes, for example:

There are plenty of candidates for the “next big thing,” ranging from the Internet of Things to additive manufacturing to artificial organ factories to autonomous cars to space commerce to Elon Musk’s hyperloop. Each of these has the potential to revolutionize an industry, and to create many thousands or even millions of jobs in the process–not just for the highly-educated, but a whole range of workers. Yet the problem–and the beauty–is that technological innovation is fundamentally unpredictable, even at close range. Consider this: The two most important innovations of the past decade, economically, have been the smartphone and fracking. The smartphone transformed the way that we communicate and hydraulic fracturing has driven down the price of energy, not to mention shifting the geopolitical balance of power.

But few saw the smartphone and fracking revolutions coming, he notes. The pundits and the press were too focused on technologies of the past.

In fact, as I noted in a case study in the 2nd edition of my book,  Permissionless Innovation (p. 50-51), various pundits denigrated Apple and Google’s entry into the smartphone business because many industry analysts believed the market was mature. After all, in the early and mid-2000s, the big names of the mobile world were Palm, Blackberry, Motorola, and Nokia. And their market power seemed unassailable. Thus, as perplexing as it sounds now, the common wisdom in the mid-2000s regarding Apple and Google’s potential entry into the smartphone business was that, if they dare tried, they were destined to fail miserably!

For example, in December 2006, Palm CEO Ed Colligan summarily dismissed the idea that a traditional personal computing company could compete in the smartphone business. “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” Similarly, in January 2007, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laughed off the prospect of an expensive smartphone without a keyboard having a chance in the marketplace: “Five hundred dollars? Fully subsidized? With a plan? I said that’s the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good e-mail machine.” (Quotes from John Paczkowski, “Apple: How Do You Say ‘Eat My Dust’ in Finnish?” All Things D, November 11, 2009.)

Even better, in March 2007, computing industry pundit John C. Dvorak insisted that “Apple Should Pull the Plug on the iPhone,” because he believed the mobile handset business was already locked up by the era’s major players. “This is not an emerging business,” Dvorak said. “In fact it’s gone so far that it’s in the process of consolidation with probably two players dominating everything, Nokia Corp. and Motorola Inc.”

Just a few years later, of course, Nokia’s profits and market share plummeted, and Google had purchased the struggling Motorola. Meanwhile, Palm was dead, Blackberry was languishing, and Microsoft continued to struggle to win back market share lost to Apple and Google. So much for tech prophecy!

Tech pundits also usually fail when forecasting the professions of the future. As I noted in Chapter 5 of my  Permissionless Innovation book (p. 101-2):

It’s also worth noting how difficult it is to predict future labor market trends. In early 2015, Glassdoor, an online jobs and recruiting site, published a report on the 25 highest paying jobs in demand today. Many of the job titles identified in the report probably weren’t considered a top priority 40 years ago, and some of these job descriptions wouldn’t even have made sense to an observer from the past. For example, some those hotly demanded jobs on Glassdoor’s list include software architect (#3), software development manager (#4), solutions architect (#6), analytics manager (#8), IT manager (#9), data scientist (#15), security engineer (#16), quality assurance manager (#17), computer hardware engineer (#18), database administrator (#20), UX designer (#21), and software engineer (#23). Looking back at reports from the 1970s and ’80s published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal agency that monitors labor market trends, one finds no mention of these computing and information technology-related professions because they had not yet been created or even envisioned. So, what will the most important and well-paying jobs be 30 to 40 years from now? If history is any guide, we probably can’t even imagine many of them right now.

Indeed, as Mandel concludes in his new essay, history tells us that, “the next big job-creating innovation isn’t likely to announce itself in bold letters before it arrives. Just because the next big thing isn’t obvious today doesn’t mean it won’t be obvious a year from now.”

Today’s tech pundits would be wise to remember that insight when making forecasts about a future that is, as Mandel suggests, so “fundamentally unpredictable, even at close range.”

Last week, it was my pleasure to speak at a Cato Institute event on “The End of Transit and the Beginning of the New Mobility: Policy Implications of Self-Driving Cars.” I followed Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randal O’Toole and Marc Scribner, a Research Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. They provided a broad and quite excellent overview of all the major issues at play in the debate over driverless cars. I highly recommend you read the excellent papers that Randal and Marc have published on these issues.

My role on the panel was to do a deeper dive into the privacy and security implications of not just the autonomous vehicles of our future, but also the intelligent vehicle technologies of the present. I discussed these issues in greater detail in my recent Mercatus Center working paper, “Removing Roadblocks to Intelligent Vehicles and Driverless Cars,” which was co-authored with Ryan Hagemann. (That article will appear in a forthcoming edition of the Wake Forest Journal of Law & Policy.)  I’ve embedded the video of the event down below (my remarks begin at the 38:15 mark) as well as my speaking notes. Again, please consult the longer paper for details.

The privacy & security implications of self-driving cars are already driving public policy concerns because of the amount of data they collect. Here are a few things we should keep in mind as we consider new regulations for these technologies:

1)      Security & privacy are relative concepts with amorphous boundaries

• Not everyone affixes the same value on security & privacy; very subjective
• Some people are hyper-cautious about security or hyper-sensitive about their privacy; others are risk-takers or are just somewhat indifferent (or pragmatic) about these things

2)      Security & privacy norms can and often do evolve very rapidly over time

• With highly disruptive technologies, we tend to panic first but then when move to a new plateau with new ethical and legal baselines
• [I’ve written about this in my recent law review articles on about privacy and security]
• The familiar cycle at work: initial resistance, gradual adaptation, eventual assimilation
• This was true for the first cars a century ago; true today as well

3)      For almost every perceived privacy or security harm, there is a corresponding consumer benefit that may outweigh the feared harm

• We see this reality at work with the broader Internet & we will see it at work with intelligent vehicles
• Ex: Compare vehicle telematics to locational tracking technologies for smartphones
• In both contexts, locational tracking raises rather obvious privacy considerations
• But has many benefits and could not exist without them (traffic)
• “tracking” concerns may dissipate for cars like smartphones (but not evaporate!)

4)      As it pertains to intelligent vehicle technologies, today’s security & privacy concerns are not the same as yesterdays and they will not be the same as tomorrow’s either.

• Today’s “intelligent vehicle” technology privacy issues may be more concerning that tomorrow’s for fully autonomous vehicles
• today’s on-baord EDRs & telematics may cause more privacy concerns for us as drivers than tomorrow’s technologies
• ex: concerns about tailored insurance & automated law enforcement

• That may lead to some privacy concerns in the short-term (or fears of “discrimination”)
• BUT… What happens when cars are no longer a final good but merely a service for hire? (i.e., What happens when we combine Sharing Economy w/ self-driving cars?)
• Car of future = robotic chauffeur (like Uber + Zip Car)
• Old privacy concerns will evolve rapidly; security likely to become bigger concern

5)      Any security & privacy solutions must take these realities into account in order to be successful and those solutions must also accommodate the need to balance many different values and interests simultaneously.

• There are no silver bullet solutions to privacy & security problems
• + it will be difficult for law to keep up with pace of innovations
• Therefore, We need a flexible, “layered approach” with many different solutions

we need “simple rules for a complex world” (Richard Epstein) 

• Contracts / enforce Terms of Service
• Common law / torts / products liability
• see excellent new Brookings paper by John Villasenor: “when confronted with new, often complex, questions involving products liability, courts have generally gotten things right. . . . Products liability law has been highly adaptive to the many new technologies that have emerged in recent decades, and it will be quite capable of adapting to emerging autonomous vehicle technologies as the need arises.”

• liability norms & insurance standards will evolve rapidly as cars move from final good to service
• “least-cost avoider” implications (the more you know, the more responsible you become)

Privacy & Security “by design” (“Baking-in” best practices)

• Data collection minimization
• Limit sharing w 3^rd parties
• Transparency about all data collection and use practices
• Clear consent for new uses

• see Future of Privacy Forum best practices for intelligent vehicle tech providers
• this is already happening (GAO report noted 10 smart car tech makers already doing so)

• Hopefully some firms compete on privacy & exceed these standards for those who want it
• And hopefully privacy & security advocates develop tools to better safeguard these values, again for those who want more protection

 Query: But shouldn’t there be some minimal standards? Federal or state regulation?

• Things moving too quick; hard for law to keep pace w/o limiting innovation opportunities
• The flexible approach and methods I just listed are better suited to evolve with the cases and controversies that pop up along the way

• it is better to utilize a “wait and see” strategy & see if serious & persistent problems develop that require regulatory remedies; but don’t lead with preemptive, precautionary controls
• “permissionless innovation” should remain our default policy position

• Ongoing experimentation should be permitted not just with technology in general, but also with privacy and security solutions and standards
• In sum… avoid One Size Fits All solutions

6)      Special consideration should be paid to government actions that affect user privacy

• Whereas many of the privacy and security concerns involving private data collection can be handled using the methods discussed previously, governmental data collection raises different issues
• Private entities cannot fine, tax, or imprison us since they lack the coercive powers governments possess.
• Moreover, although it is possible to ignore or refuse to be a part of various private services, the same is not true for governments, whose grasp cannot be evaded.
• Thus, special protections are needed for law enforcement agencies and officials as it pertains to these technologies.
• When government seeks access to privately-held data collected from these technologies, strong constitutional and statutory protections should apply.
• We need stronger 4th Amendment constraints
• Courts should revisit the “third-party doctrine,” which holds that an individual sacrifices their Fourth Amendment interest in their personal information when they divulges it to a third party, even if that party has promised to safeguard that data.

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.

I very much enjoyed Dennis Baron’s new book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, and highly recommend you pick it up. Baron does a wonderful job exploring the history of techno-pessimism and the endless battles about the impact of new technologies on life and learning, something I have written about here before in my essays on “Internet optimists vs. pessimists” (See: 1, 2, 3).

I have a complete review of Baron’s A Better Pencil now up on the City Journal‘s website here.  I’ve also pasted it down below.

Plato Wrote it Down by Adam Thierer

a review of A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, by Dennis Baron (Oxford University Press, 280 pp., $24.95)

In the beginning, Dennis Baron reminds us in his new book, A Better Pencil, there was the word—the spoken word, that is. Oral tradition, the passing of knowledge through stories and lectures, was the primary method of instruction and learning throughout early human civilization. But then a few innovative souls decided to start writing everything down on stones and clay. Almost as soon as they did, a great debate began on the impact of new communications technology on culture and education. And it rages on today, with a new generation of optimists and skeptics battling over the impact that computing, the Internet, and digital technologies have on our lives and on how we learn about the world.

Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois, begins his splendid history of these debates with the well-known tale from Plato’s Phaedrus about the dangers of the written word. The Egyptian god Theuth boasts to King Thamus about how his invention of writing will improve the wisdom and memory of the masses. Thamus shoots back, “The discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it.” Thamus then passes judgment on writing’s impact on society, saying he fears that the people “will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.”

Of course, as Baron points out, we remember this warning only “because Plato wrote it down.” It’s one of the recurrent ironies in the history of techno-skepticism that while “the shock of the new often brings out critics eager to warn us away,” those critics often embrace—or, at the very least, benefit from—the very tools that they want the rest of us to shun. Whether it’s Luddites On-Line winning Yahoo’s “Cool Site of the Day” award, or the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association promoting National Handwriting Day via the Internet, or Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber Manifesto attracting unprecedented readership thanks to its availability on the Web, those who have a “common tendency to romanticize the good old ways” of doing things often fail to appreciate how new technology can benefit society—including themselves.

Baron walks us through a litany of historical examples—the printing press, the telegraph, telephones, typewriters, pocket calculators, personal computers, word processors, webpages, blogs, social-networking sites, and more—and identifies the usual pattern: we greet each new technology with deep distrust and dire warnings, but in time we adapt to the new realities. Indeed, as a species, we have an unparalleled ability to learn new ways of doing things. We don’t always like technological change, and often we deeply resent or fear it, but in the end, we learn to live with it and eventually to embrace it.

With the rise of the Internet and digital technologies, we see this pattern unfolding once again. “According to the latest generation of critics and naysayers,” Baron notes, “today it is computers that are producing texts whose value and credibility we question; computers that are giving too many people control over the creation and publication of text; computers that are wreaking havoc with our handwriting.” Contemporary critics also fret over “information overload.”

The backlash against computers and digitization began while the Internet was still in its cradle, with the 1992 publication of Neil Postman’s anti-technology screed, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Postman’s intellectual descendants include Internet critics such as Lee Siegel, Andrew Keen, and Mark Helprin, whose works drip with disdain for all things digital. They warn of a coming dystopia where truth and authority vanish, culture crumbles, and political polarization breeds closed-mindedness and even the death of deliberative democracy.

These overly pessimistic critics turn a blind eye to both the wonders of the digital age and humanity’s ability to adapt. As Baron persuasively argues, “English survives, conversation thrives online as well as off, and on balance, digital communications seems to be enhancing human interaction, not detracting from it.” In fact, we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that previous generations would have found unimaginable. As Baron puts it: “The Internet is a true electronic frontier where everyone is on his or her own: all manuscripts are accepted for publication, they remain in virtual print forever, and no one can tell writers what to do.” Such human empowerment is worth celebrating, even if it does have the occasional downside. Abundance is better than a world of scarce choices and few voices.

Baron’s retelling of the history of techno-skepticism is edifying, but it leaves one with the nagging feeling that these debates will never cease. Each generation will witness a technological watershed that brings out a fresh crop of both pollyannas and pessimists. Like Plato, however, most of us will embrace whatever’s next and move forward.

Today I was invited to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to testify at one of the agency’s Broadband Working Group workshops. This particular workshop was on “Broadband Consumer Context,” which focused on “a range of challenges and opportunities as the internet becomes a focal point for commercial transactions, social networking, and a host of activities pertaining to information gathering and exchange.”

I was asked to address the issue of whether there is a relationship between online safety concerns and broadband uptake. In my testimony, I noted that, in my 15 years of research in this area, I have never unearthed any substantive empirical evidence suggesting a correlation between parental concerns about online activity and overall household broadband uptake. I have seen occasional anecdotal news stories discussing the concerns some parents have had about their kids online that led them to reject online connectivity, but these stories have been exceedingly rare (and I haven’t seen any in recent memory).

I also argued that I did not think it at all surprising that such anecdotes are harder to find, or that empirical evidence on this front seems non-existent. I argued that there were four logical explanations for why parental concerns about online safety haven’t “moved the broadband needle” much in the negative direction:

1. Not every home has children present
2. Parents use a variety of household media rules to control media & Internet usage
3. A vibrant marketplace of parental control technologies exists
4. Likely that most parents believe that the benefits of broadband outweigh the potential downsides

For all the details on each of those, read my entire testimony or check out the presentation embedded below that I made to the FCC today.

Is There a Relationship Between Online Safety Concerns and Broadband Uptake? (Adam Thierer – PFF) http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=19575851&access_key=key-1igiha619z8f15dm6hg5&page=1&version=1&viewMode=