Robert Scoble, Startup Liaison Officer at Rackspace discusses his recent book, Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy, co-authored by Shel Israel. Scoble believes that over the next five years we’ll see a tremendous rise in wearable computers, building on interest we’ve already seen in devices like Google Glass. Much like the desktop, laptop, and smartphone before it, Scoble predicts wearable computers represent the next wave in groundbreaking innovation. Scoble answers questions such as: How will wearable computers help us live our lives? Will they become as common as the cellphone is today? Will we have to sacrifice privacy for these devices to better understand our preferences? How will sensors in everyday products help companies improve the customer experience?
Alice Marwick, assistant professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University, discusses her newly-released book, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. Marwick reflects on her interviews with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, technology journalists, and venture capitalists to show how social media affects social dynamics and digital culture. Marwick answers questions such as: Does “status conscious” take on a new meaning in the age of social media? Is the public using social media the way the platforms’ creators intended? How do you quantify the value of online social interactions? Are social media users becoming more self-censoring or more transparent about what they share? What’s the difference between self-branding and becoming a micro-celebrity? She also shares her advice for how to make Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and other platforms more beneficial for you.
Related Links
- Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age, Marwick
- Engineered Performances Alice E. Marwick’s ‘Status Update’, The New York Times
- Biography, Marwick
Timothy B. Lee, founder of The Washington Post’s blog The Switch discusses his approach to reporting at the intersection of technology and policy. He covers how to make tech concepts more accessible; the difference between blogs and the news; the importance of investigative journalism in the tech space; whether paywalls are here to stay; Jeff Bezos’ recent purchase of The Washington Post; and the future of print news.
Related Links
- Here are eight ways investing in Bitcoins could go horribly wrongn, Lee
- Blind advocates: Hollywood lobbying threatens deal for accessible books, Lee
- New Job, Lee
Adam Thierer, Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center discusses his recent working paper with coauthor Brent Skorup, A History of Cronyism and Capture in the Information Technology Sector. Thierer takes a look at how cronyism has manifested itself in technology and media markets — whether it be in the form of regulatory favoritism or tax privileges. Which tech companies are the worst offenders? What are the consequences for consumers? And, how does cronyism affect entrepreneurship over the long term?
Related Links
- A History of Cronyism and Capture in the Information Technology Sector, Thierer
- Video: A History of Cronysim and Capture in the Information Technology Sector, Thierer
- Adam Thierer Biography, Mercatus Center
- Adam Thierer on Anti-Tech Grump Evgeny Morozov, Thierer
This afternoon, Berin Szoka asked me to participate in a TechFreedom conference on “COPPA: Past, Present & Future of Children’s Privacy & Media.” [CSPAN video is here.] It was a in-depth, 3-hour, 2-panel discussion of the Federal Trade Commission’s recent revisions to the rules issued under the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
While most of the other panelists were focused on the devilish details about how COPPA works in practice (or at least should work in practice), I decided to ask a more provocative question to really shake up the discussion: What are we going to do when COPPA fails?
My notes for the event follow down below. I didn’t have time to put them into a smooth narrative, so please pardon the bullet points. Continue reading →
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has just released a new paper by Brent Skorup and me entitled, “A History of Cronyism and Capture in the Information Technology Sector.” In this 73-page working paper, which we hope to place in a law review or political science journal shortly, we document the evolution of government-granted privileges, or “cronyism,” in the information and communications technology marketplace and in the media-producing sectors. Specifically, we offer detailed histories of rent-seeking and regulatory capture in: the early history of the telephony and spectrum licensing in the United States; local cable TV franchising; the universal service system; the digital TV transition in the 1990s; and modern video marketplace regulation (i.e., must-carry and retransmission consent rules, among others.
Our paper also shows how cronyism is slowly creeping into new high-technology sectors.We document how Internet companies and other high-tech giants are among the fastest-growing lobbying shops in Washington these days. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, lobbying spending by information technology sectors has almost doubled since the turn of the century, from roughly $200 million in 2000 to $390 million in 2012. The computing and Internet sector has been responsible for most of that growth in recent years. Worse yet, we document how many of these high-tech firms are increasingly seeking and receiving government favors, mostly in the form of targeted tax breaks or incentives. Continue reading →
The Internet’s greatest blessing — its general openness to all speech and speakers — is also sometimes its biggest curse. That is, you cannot expect to have the most widely accessible, unrestricted communications platform the world has ever known and not also have some imbeciles who use it to spew insulting, vile, and hateful comments.
It is important to put things in perspective, however. Hate speech is not the norm online. The louts who spew hatred represent a small minority of all online speakers. The vast majority of online speech is of a socially acceptable — even beneficial — nature.
Still, the problem of hate speech remains very real and a diverse array of strategies are needed to deal with it. The sensible path forward in this regard is charted by Abraham H. Foxman and Christopher Wolf in their new book, Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread on the Internet. Their book explains why the best approach to online hate is a combination of education, digital literacy, user empowerment, industry best practices and self-regulation, increased watchdog / press oversight, social pressure and, most importantly, counter-speech. Foxman and Wolf also explain why — no matter how well-intentioned — legal solutions aimed at eradicating online hate will not work and would raise serious unintended consequences if imposed.
In striking this sensible balance, Foxman and Wolf have penned the definitive book on how to constructively combat viral hate in an age of ubiquitous information flows. Continue reading →
I’ve been hearing more rumblings about “API neutrality” lately. This idea, which originated with Jonathan Zittrain’s book, The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It, proposes to apply Net neutrality to the code/application layer of the Internet. A blog called “The API Rating Agency,” which appears to be written by Mehdi Medjaoui, posted an essay last week endorsing Zittrain’s proposal and adding some meat to the bones of it. (My thanks to CNet’s Declan McCullagh for bringing it to my attention).
Medjaoui is particularly worried about some of Twitter’s recent moves to crack down on 3rd party API uses. Twitter is trying to figure out how to monetize its platform and, in a digital environment where advertising seems to be the only business model that works, the company has decided to establish more restrictive guidelines for API use. In essence, Twitter believes it can no longer be a perfectly open platform if it hopes to find a way to make money. The company apparently believes that some restrictions will need to be placed on 3rd party uses of its API if the firm hopes to be able to attract and monetize enough eyeballs.
While no one is sure whether that strategy will work, Medjaoui doesn’t even want the experiment to go forward. Building on Zittrain, he proposes the following approach to API neutrality:
- Absolute data to 3rd party non-discrimination : all content, data, and views equally distributed on the third party ecosystem. Even a competitor could use an API in the same conditions than all others, with not restricted re-use of the data.
- Limited discrimination without tiering : If you don’t pay specific fees for quality of service, you cannot have a better quality of service, as rate limit, quotas, SLA than someone else in the API ecosystem.If you pay for a high level Quality of service, so you’ll benefit of this high level quality of service, but in the same condition than an other customer paying the same fee.
- First come first served : No enqueuing API calls from paying third party applications, as the free 3rd-party are in the rate limits.
Before I critique this, let’s go back and recall why Zittrain suggested we might need API neutrality for certain online services or digital platforms. Continue reading →
The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has just released my new white paper, “The Perils of Classifying Social Media Platforms as Public Utilities.” [PDF] I first presented a draft of this paper last November at a Michigan State University conference on “The Governance of Social Media.” [Video of my panel here.]
In this paper, I note that to the extent public utility-style regulation has been debated within the Internet policy arena over the past decade, the focus has been almost entirely on the physical layer of the Internet. The question has been whether Internet service providers should be considered “essential facilities” or “natural monopolies” and regulated as public utilities. The debate over “net neutrality” regulation has been animated by such concerns.
While that debate still rages, the rhetoric of public utilities and essential facilities is increasingly creeping into policy discussions about other layers of the Internet, such as the search layer. More recently, there have been rumblings within academic and public policy circles regarding whether social media platforms, especially social networking sites, might also possess public utility characteristics. Presumably, such a classification would entail greater regulation of those sites’ structures and business practices.
Proponents of treating social media platforms as public utilities offer a variety of justifications for regulation. Amorphous “fairness” concerns animate many of these calls, but privacy and reputational concerns are also frequently mentioned as rationales for regulation. Proponents of regulation also sometimes invoke “social utility” or “social commons” arguments in defense of increased government oversight, even though these notions lack clear definition.
Social media platforms do not resemble traditional public utilities, however, and there are good reasons why policymakers should avoid a rush to regulate them as such. Continue reading →
That’s the question I take up in my latest Forbes column, “The Danger Of Making Facebook, LinkedIn, Google And Twitter Public Utilities.” I note the rising chatter in the blogosphere about the potential regulation of social networking sites, including Facebook and Twitter. In response, I argue:
public utilities are, by their very nature, non-innovative. Consumers are typically given access to a plain vanilla service at a “fair” rate, but without any incentive to earn a greater return, innovations suffers. Of course, social networking sites are already available to everyone for free! And they are constantly innovating. So, it’s unclear what the problem is here and how regulation would solve it.
I don’t doubt that social networking platforms have become an important part of the lives of a great many people, but that doesn’t mean they are “essential facilities” that should treated like your local water company. These are highly dynamic networks and services built on code, not concrete. Most of them didn’t even exist 10 years ago. Regulating them would likely drain the entrepreneurial spirit from this sector, discourage new innovation and entry, and potentially raise prices for services that are mostly free of charge to consumers. Social norms, public pressure, and ongoing rivalry will improve existing services more than government regulation ever could.
Read my full essay for more.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.