The Wall Street Journal has run my response to troubling recent opeds by President Biden (“Republicans and Democrats, Unite Against Big Tech Abuses“) and former Trump Administration Attorney General William Barr (“Congress Must Halt Big Tech’s Power Grab“) in which they both called for European-style regulation of U.S. digital technology markets.

“The only thing Europe exports now on the digital-technology front is regulation,” I noted in my response, and that makes it all the more mind-boggling that Biden and Barr want to go down that same path. “[T]he EU’s big-government regulatory crusade against digital tech: Stagnant markets, limited innovation and a dearth of major players. Overregulation by EU bureaucrats led Europe’s best entrepreneurs and investors to flee to the U.S. or elsewhere in search of the freedom to innovate.”

Thus, the Biden and Barr plans for importing European-style tech mandates, “would be a stake through the heart of the ‘permissionless innovation’ that made America’s info-tech economy a global powerhouse.” In a longer response to the Biden oped that I published on the R Street blog, I note that:

“It is remarkable to think that after years of everyone complaining about the lack of bipartisanship in Washington, we might get the one type of bipartisanship America absolutely does not need: the single most destructive technological suicide in U.S. history, with mandates being substituted for markets, and permission slips for entrepreneurial freedom.”

What makes all this even more remarkable is that they calls for hyper-regulation come at a time when China is challenging America’s dominance in technology and AI. Thus, “new mandates could compromise America’s lead,” I conclude. “Shackling our tech sectors with regulatory chains will hobble our nation’s ability to meet global competition and undermine innovation and consumer choice domestically.”

Jump over to the WSJ to read my entire response (“EU-Style Regulation Begets EU-Style Stagnation“) and to the R Street blog for my longer essay (“President Biden Wants America to Become Europe on Tech Regulation“).

This weekend, The Wall Street Journal ran my short letter to the editor entitled, “We Can Protect Children and Keep the Internet Free.” My letter was a response to columnist Peggy Noonan’s April 9 oped, “Can Anyone Tame Big Tech?” in which she proposed banning everyone under 18 from all social-media sites. She specifically singled out TikTok, Youtube, and Instagram and argued “You’re not allowed to drink at 14 or drive at 12; you can’t vote at 15. Isn’t there a public interest here?”

I briefly explained why Noonan’s proposal is neither practical nor sensible, noting how it:

would turn every kid into an instant criminal for seeking access to information and culture on the dominant medium of their generation. I wonder how she would have felt about adults proposing to ban all kids from listening to TV or radio during her youth. Let’s work to empower parents to help them guide their children’s digital experiences. Better online-safety and media-literacy efforts can prepare kids for a hyperconnected future. We can find workable solutions that wouldn’t usher in unprecedented government control of speech.

Let me elaborate just a bit because this was the focus of much of my writing a decade ago, including my book, Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods, which spanned several editions. Online child safety is a matter I take seriously and the concerns that Noonan raised in her oped have been heard repeatedly since the earliest days of the Internet. Regulatory efforts were immediately tried. They focused on restricting underage access to objectionable online content (as well as video games), but were immediately challenged and struck down as unconstitutionally overbroad restrictions on free speech and a violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

But practically speaking, most of these efforts were never going to work anyway. There was almost no way to bottle up all the content flowing in the modern information ecosystem without highly repressive regulation, and it was going to be nearly impossible to keep kids off the Internet altogether when it was the dominant communications and entertainment medium of their generation. The first instinct of every moral panic wave–from the waltz to comic books to rock or rap music to video games–has often been to take the easy way out by proposing sweeping bans on all access by kids to the content or platforms of their generation. It never works.

Nor should it. There is a huge amount of entirely beneficial speech, content, and communications that kids would be denied by such sweeping bans. That would make such ban highly counter-productive. But, again, usually such efforts just were not practically enforceable because kids are often better at the cat-and-mouse game than adults give them credit for. Moreover, imposing age limitations of speech or content are far more difficult than age-related bans on specific tangible products, like tobacco or other dangerous physical products.

Acknowledging these realities, most sensible people quickly move on from extreme proposals like flat bans of all kids using the popular media platforms and systems of the day. Over the past half century in the U.S., this has led to a flowering of more decentralized governance approach to kids and media that I have referred to as the “3E approach.” That stands for empowerment (of parents), education (of youth), and enforcement (of existing laws). The 3E approach includes a variety of mechanisms and approaches, including: self-regulatory codes, private content rating systems, a wide variety of different parental control technologies, and much more.

Over the past two decades, many multistakeholder initiatives and blue-ribbon commissions were created to address online safety issues in a holistic fashion. I summarized their conclusions in my 2009 report, “Five Online Safety Task Forces Agree: Education, Empowerment & Self-Regulation Are the Answer.” The crucial takeaway from all these task forces and commissions is that no silver-bullet solutions exist to hard problems. Child safety demands a vigilant but adaptive approach, rooted in a variety of best practices, educational approaches, and technological empowerment solutions to address various safety concerns. Digital literacy is particularly crucial to building wiser, more resilient kids and adults, who can work together to find constructive approaches to hard problems.

Importantly, our task here is never done. This is an ongoing and evolving process. Issues like underage access to pornography or violent content have been with us for a very long time and will never be completely “solved.” We must constantly work to improve existing online safety mechanisms while also devising new solutions for our rapidly evolving information ecosystem. Nothing should be off the table except the one solution that Noonan suggested in her essay. Just proposing outright bans on kids on social media or any other new media platform (VR will be next) is an unworkable and illogical response that we should dismiss fairly quickly. No matter how well-intentioned such proposals may be, moral panic-induced prohibitions on kids and media ultimately are not going to help them learn to live better, safer, and more enriching lives in the new media ecosystems of today or the future. We can do better.

[Originally published on the Cato Institute blog.]

Examples were everywhere. Distilleries started producing hand sanitizers to address shortages while average folks began sharing do‐​it‐​yourself sanitizer recipes online. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) looked to modify hand sanitizer guidelines quickly to allow for it, but few really cared because those rules weren’t going to stop them. Gray markets in face masks, medical face shields, and respirators developed. Some people and organizations worked together to make medical devices using off‐​the‐​shelf hardware and open source software. More simply, others just fired up sewing machines to make masks—and then, faced with an emerging public health consensus, the guidance from the federal government shifted dramatically: where formerly ordinary people were instructed not to buy or use masks, within a matter of days, the policy reversed, and all were encouraged to make and use cloth protective masks.

Meanwhile, doctors and nurses started “writing the playbook for treating coronavirus patients on the fly” by improvising treatments and then sharing them on social media. A few doctors even converted breathing machines to ventilators themselves using 3-D printed parts to address shortages for their patients even though the FDA had not yet authorized it.

Social media sites were also suddenly filled with discussions about how average people might come together to build tools or share information to assist with virus testing or treatments. A 17‐​year‐​old used his coding skills to build one of the most popular coronavirus‐​tracking websites in the world (ncov2019.live) after noticing how hard it was to use government sites. And two high school science teachers in Tennessee set up testing operations in their school lab to help reduce testing time in their area.

Meanwhile, journalists and columnists like the  Wall Street Journal’s Andy Kessler cheered on such activity, encouraging the public to “innovate from your couch.” Modern digital technologies and platforms that had been pariahs and the target of a regulatory‐​minded “techlash” just a few months earlier suddenly became essential public services that were showered with praise for helping people cope with social distancing and the solitude associated with shelter‐​in‐​place requirements. Headlines in major media outlets explained how “Facebook Is More Trustworthy than the President” and “Twitter Is Making the Coronavirus World a Better Place.”

Philanthropists like Bill Gates were also funding their own solutions. The former Microsoft founder and CEO pointed out that, in an effort to find testing solutions and vaccines, private groups like his Gates Foundation could likely mobilize faster than governments. Gates likely had grown frustrated with government responses after a Seattle‐​based lab that the Gates Foundation funded figured out an effective way to test for coronavirus, only to be blocked from expanding it by over‐​cautious federal bureaucrats. Frustrated by federal intransigence, that Seattle lab started testing for COVID-19 anyway to prove they indeed had an effective test. Commenting on the case study, the New York Times  expressed exasperation about “how existing regulations and red tape—sometimes designed to protect privacy and health—have impeded the rapid rollout of testing nationally.”

Wait, Isn’t All This Illegal?

What is interesting about all these examples of bottom‐​up innovation and evasive entrepreneurialism is that they are remarkably inspiring, but also mostly illegal. Almost all these activities butted up against longstanding regulations governing medical devices, practices, or therapies. Some of those rules are enforced by large and powerful federal bureaucracies like the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Others take the form of state‐​based occupational licensing limitations or certificate‐​of‐​need laws, which require healthcare providers to first obtain permission before they open or expand their facilities or services. This crazy quilt of medical laws and regulations accumulated steadily over time, creating what constitutional scholar Timothy Sandefur calls a “permission society,” which values proceduralism and conformity over practicality and common sense.

Eventually, however, the mountains of red tape that the permission society is built upon start to collapse under their own weight. Laws and agencies that previously commanded obedience are now viewed as an opaque, ossified, and confusing morass of one‐​size‐​fits‐​all mandates, prohibitions, and penalties that actually undermine the very health goals they were put in place to achieve. Suddenly, headlines in every major newspaper screamed of how, as it pertained to virus testing procedures, “The Government Failed” (Wall Street Journal) because of “Flawed Tests, Red Tape and Resistance” (Washington Post) and this resulted in “The Lost Month” (New York Times) in the United States.

Eventually, people take notice of how regulators and their rules encumber entrepreneurial activities, and they act to evade them when public welfare is undermined. Working around the system becomes inevitable when the permission society becomes so completely dysfunctional and counterproductive.

Technological Empowerment vs. the Status Quo

What’s going on here, and what lessons can we derive from it?

In a new Cato Institute book, Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance, I document how the sort of behavior we have recently witnessed was growing rapidly even before the COVID-19 crisis. In many different contexts, evasive entrepreneurs—innovators who don’t always conform to social or legal norms—are using new technological capabilities to circumvent traditional regulatory systems. They at least want to put pressure on public policymakers to reform or selectively enforce laws and regulations that are outmoded, inefficient, or counterproductive.

Evasive entrepreneurs rely on a strategy of permissionless innovation in both the business world and the political arena. They push back against the permission society by creating exciting new products and services without always receiving the blessing of public officials before doing so. While evasive entrepreneurialism has always been with us to some extent, many of the responses to the pandemic would not have been possible even just a few decades ago. Recent advancements have supercharged in a more technologically empowered world of information abundance and decentralized, inexpensive tools.

As I show in the book, evasive entrepreneurs are taking advantage of the growth of what we might think of as technologies of freedom or resistance. These are devices and platforms that let citizens circumvent (or perhaps just ignore) public policies that limit their liberty or freedom to innovate or to enjoy the fruits of innovation. These can include common tools like smartphones, computers, and various new interactive platforms, as well as more specialized technologies like cryptocurrencies, private drones, immersive technologies (like virtual reality), 3D printers, the “Internet of Things,” and sharing economy platforms and services. But that list just scratches the surface. When the public uses tools such as these to explicitly evade public policies on moral grounds because they find then offensive, illogical, or perhaps just annoying, we can think of that as technological civil disobedience.

Common Sense Prevails

Evasive entrepreneurialism and technological civil disobedience accelerated during the pandemic because both the practicality and morality of government policies came into question in stark fashion. The first month of the crisis witnessed “a torrent of governmental incompetence that is breathtaking in scale,” my Mercatus colleague Scott Sumner argues. “There are regulations so bizarre that if put in a novel no one would believe them,” he notes. “In contrast, the private sector has reacted fairly well, and has been far ahead of the government in most areas.”

Indeed, the pandemic has been a stress test for our institutions, and many of them have failed it. Confusing rules and inflexible agencies that should have been reformed years ago were suddenly exposed and judged harshly. Philip K. Howard, founder of Common Good, says that “Covid‐​19 is the canary in the bureaucratic mine.” Bloated bureaucracies and overbearing regulatory systems, he argues, have created a “toxic atmosphere that silenced common sense” and managed to “institutionalize failure.” Cato’s Paul Matzko has documented how the FDA has been particularly guilty of blocking sensible forms of progress on simple things like face mask production or distribution.

While countless others lambasted the practical failures of our institutions, the morality of government policies was also coming into focus. Why should citizens have their innovative efforts to help others stifled at seemingly every juncture? Must we really follow the law when it undercuts the basic human need to care for others and ourselves?

These are the issues addressed in my new book, which explains the practical reasons why evasive entrepreneurialism is on the rise and then provides a moral defense of it. When innovators and average citizens use tools and technological capabilities to pursue a living, enjoy new experiences, or improve the human condition, they often disrupt legal or social norms in the process. That is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, evasive entrepreneurialism can transform our society for the better because it can help expand the range of life‐​enriching (and often life‐​saving) innovations. Evasive entrepreneurialism can help citizens pursue lives of their own choosing—both as creators looking for the freedom to earn a living and as individuals looking to discover and enjoy important new goods and services.

Defending evasive entrepreneurialism is easy  after it occurs, but few defend it before or as it is happening. I argue in the book that the freedom to innovate is essential to human betterment—for each of us individually and for civilization as a whole—and that freedom deserves to be taken more seriously today. The COVID-19 pandemic has made this more apparent than ever before.

There are few things more human than acts of invention. At its root, innovation involves efforts to discover new and better ways of solving practical human needs and wants. People have a right to innovate and create technologies because they possess a more general right to take steps to improve their lot in life and the lives of others around them. When misguided or archaic government programs and policies blocked that potential during the pandemic, people began ignoring or evading them. That was both practically sensible and morally justifiable.

Innovation as the New Checks and Balances

By extension, the response to the pandemic has proven the second thesis set forth in my book: Evasive entrepreneurialism and technologically enabled civil disobedience can actually help us improve government by keeping public policies fresh, sensible, and in line with common sense and the consent of the governed. Evasiveness and technological disruption can act as a sort of relief valve or circuit breaker to counteract negative pressures in the system before things break down completely. By challenging legislators and regulators to reevaluate the wisdom of their policies, evasive entrepreneurs can help us break political logjams and force governments to become more adaptive and accountable.

The proof is in the pudding. As the crisis unfolded, agencies at the federal, state, and local levels were forced to suspend hundreds of regulations that were clearly undermining helpful responses. These “rule departures” would not have been necessary if governments had engaged in periodic spring cleanings earlier. When COVID-19 hit, it became essential to suspend or repeal hundreds of misguided old rules that clearly undermined public health. The only question now is whether those inefficient, counterproductive policies will be put back on the books to do harm again in the next crisis.

But even before the current crisis, rule departures by government actors were becoming more common because  even government officials could no longer understand their own rules. Just as private citizens have increasingly resorted to evasive techniques to get things done, many regulatory agencies have given up trying to “go by the book” themselves because endless regulatory accumulation has made it impossible to understand what the law means.

My book documents many cases of public officials essentially ignoring their own policies and making up governance solutions as they go along. This is another sign of profound institutional failure, yet it should also give us some hope that even policymakers themselves now realize that government cannot just grow forever without breaking down at some point. The need for comprehensive reform is now abundantly clear, and the pandemic has moved the so‐​called “Overton Window” (i.e., the acceptable range of possible policy reforms) on many fronts.

A New Approach to Governance

Policymakers need a new approach for technological governance that is more in line with modern realities. Flexibility and humility will be essential. Regulators do not need to throw out the old rulebooks altogether, though. Some precautionary rules still make sense, particularly in cases involving extreme risk. But why not embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of the citizenry and allow more experimental trials, flexible testing procedures, and perhaps even prizes for particularly innovative ideas?

When enforcing the rules that remain on the books, policymakers should also consider targeted waivers and ex post regulatory reviews as opposed to ex ante regulatory prohibitions on any and all evasive innovations. Liability rules can also be tweaked so innovators do not have to live in constant fear of getting sued for trying to make the world a better place. Finally, post‐​market monitoring and recall notices can also be used to ensure flexible experiments have some regulatory guardrails.

But shutting down creative solutions and unique thinking simply because they run counter to some crusty old rulebook is never the right response. We should view evasive entrepreneurialism as an important part of a broader discovery process that incorporates the profound importance of ongoing, decentralized, trial‐​and‐​error experimentation to the process of societal learning and improvement. Lawmakers should find a way to accommodate a little more outside‐​the‐​box thinking and innovating—and not just when our lives are on the line.

Additional Reading 

• read the opening chapter of the book
• watch the event launch video
• 10 Highlights from the Book
• 13 Key Terms from the Book
• 5 innovation policy scholars who inspired this book
• “Innovation & the Precautionary Principle” (AIER essay)
• “Congress as a Non-Actor in Tech Policy” (Medium essay)

I’ve always been perplexed by tech critiques that seek to pit “humanist” values against technology or technological processes, or that even suggest a bright demarcation exists between these things. Properly understood, “technology” and technological innovation are simply extensions of our humanity and represent efforts to continuously improve the human condition. In that sense, humanism and technology are compliments, not opposites.

I started thinking about this again after reading a recent article by Christopher Mims of The Wall Street Journal , which introduced me to the term “techno-chauvinism.” Techno-chauvinism is a new term that some social critics are using to identify when technologies or innovators are apparently not behaving in a “humanist” fashion. Mims attributes the term techno-chauvinism to Meredith Broussard of New York University, who defines it as “the idea that technology is always the highest and best solution, and is superior to the people-based solution .” [Italics added.] Later on Twitter, Mims defined and critiqued techno-chauvinism as “the belief that the best solution to any problem is technology, not changing our culture, habits or mindset.”

Everything Old is New Again

There are other terms critics have used to describe the same notion, including: “ techno-fundamentalism ” (Siva Vaidhyanathan), “cyber-utopianism,” and “ technological solutionism ” (Evgeny Morozov). In a sense, all these terms are really just variants of what scholars in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) have long referred to as “technological determinism.”

As I noted in a recent essay about determinism, the traditional “hard” variant of technological determinism refers to the notion that technology almost has a mind of its own and that it will plow forward without much resistance from society or governments. Critics argue that determinist thinking denies or ignores the importance of the human element in moving history forward, or what Broussard would refer to as “people-based solutions.”

The first problem with this thinking is there are no bright lines in these debates and many “softer” variants of determinism exist. The same problem is at work when we turn to discussions about both “humanism” and “technology.” Things get definitionally murky quite quickly, and everyone seemingly has a preferred conception of these terms to fit their own ideological dispositions. “Humanism is a rather vague and contested term with a convoluted history,” observes tech philosopher Michael Sacasas. And here’s an essay that I have updated many times over the years to catalog the dozens of different definitions of “technology” I have unearthed in my ongoing research.

Thus, when we hear “humanist” critiques of “technology,” I can’t help but think that many of them begin with an unclear explanation of what both those terms mean and how they are related. Here’s how I think about them.

“Technology” is not some magical force or shiny device that appeared out of thin air. All technology is the product of human design . The most straightforward definition of “technology” is simply the application of knowledge to a task. When critics claim that innovators or their defenders are “chauvinists” who think that technological solutions are “superior to the people-based solution,” they are creating a nonsensical dichotomy because technological solutions are the same thing as “people-based solution.” People create technologies to solve problems. We can imagine the first person who struck two stones together to make a spark and light a fire, or the first humans who fashioned knives or bows and arrows to hunt game. Were they not being “humanist” by pursuing a better way to feed themselves and others? Personally, I cannot think of anything more “humanist” than creating or using whatever tools one can to put the next meal on the table! Eventually, most tools and processes like these become so ordinary that we no longer even consider them “technology” at all. They just become part of the fabric of our lives and we come to take them for granted.

What some critics mean by “humanism” is also confusing for reasons that were nicely identified by Andrew McAfee in his 2015 Financial Times essay , “Who are the humanists, and why do they dislike technology so much?” McAfee pointed out that some “humanist” critiques of technological innovation are relatively banal to the extent they are simply reminding us that all people are important, or that all technological process involve trade-offs that we should be aware of.

Of course these things are true, McAfee noted. But it is also true that technological advancement solves far more problems than it creates by helping to reduce hunger and disease, travel further, communicate more widely, gain leisure time, and so on. Moreover, there are trade-offs associated with all human actions. Limiting ongoing innovations and improvements that could better the human condition gives rise to equally significant trade-offs. In any event, to the extent “humanism” can be reduced to UP WITH PEOPLE! and TRADE-OFFS MATTER!, I think all of us would consider ourselves to be “humanists.”

The Vision of the Anointed

But there’s a third conception of “humanism” McAfee identified that he regarded as far more problematic. I will label it the “ Vision of the Anointed ,” to borrow a phrase Thomas Sowell used in his book about the way some elites allow rhetorical flourishes and good intentions to trump actual real-world evidence and results. McAfee summarized this humanist version of the Vision of the Anointed as follows: “Because I am for the people I should be free from having to support my contentions with anything more than rhetoric.” Or, more simply: “You can trust what I say, because I am on the side of people instead of the cold, hard machines.”

That sort of vision is at work in a great deal of STS scholarship, and has been for a long, long time. Indeed, modern conceptions of “humanism” and critiques of “techno-chauvinism” or “solutionism” are just restatements of the lamentations of countless previous media critics or technology critics from the past, including Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Neil Postman, Langdon Winner, Christopher Lasch, and many others. Much criticism of this sort ends up suggesting — either directly or implicitly — that technological innovation is anti-human or “de-humanizing” in some fashion and should, therefore, be rejected, reversed, or at least slowed down considerably.

For example, in Lasch’s 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven , the social critic lambasted what he called “progressive optimism” for its supposed “denial of the natural limits on human power and freedom.” Lasch desired a “populism for the twenty-first century” that “would find much of its moral inspiration in the popular radicalism of the past and most generally in the wide-ranging critique of progress, enlightenment, and unlimited ambition.”

This gets to the real irony associated with the Humanistic Vision of the Anointed: It doesn’t place a lot of faith in humans! In this highly pessimistic and often quite elitist worldview, the masses seemingly do not understand what is in their own best interests, and the material gains of modern civilization are, at once, both a fiction to be scoffed at and a reality to be scorned as counterproductive or “anti-human.” What is the alternative arrangement for society that is set forth by those subscribing to the Vision of the Anointed? As Lasch suggests, it comes down to acceptance of limits . In closing his book, Lasch called for the return of a humanistic “state of heart and mind” that “asserts the goodness of life in the face of its limits.” In other words, we should be happy with what we’ve got because progress ain’t so great.

Pastoral Myths & the “Good ‘Ol Days”

This also explains the enduring power of “pastoral myths” in the work of such critics. If you spend enough time reading through works of technology and media criticism, you often find allusions made to some supposedly better time  — the proverbial “good ‘ol days” — when life was supposed simplier or better in some way. Other times, it is just implied that life in the present isn’t as good as it was in the past.

The problem is that those good ‘ol days weren’t so great. “Demonizing innovation is often associated with campaigns to romanticize past products and practices,” Calestous Juma noted in his 2016 book, Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies . “Opponents of innovation hark back to traditions as if traditions themselves were not inventions at some point in the past.” That was especially the case in battles over new farming methods and technologies, when opponents of change were frequently “championing a moral cause to preserve a way of life,” as Juma discusses in several chapters of his book. New products or methods of production were repeatedly but wrongly characterized as dangerous or anti-human simply because they were not supposedly “natural” or “traditional” enough in character.

Of course, if all farming and other work was to remain frozen in some past “natural” state, we’d all still be hunters and gathers struggling to find the next meal to put in our bellies. Or, if we were all still on the farms of the “good ‘ol days,” then we’d still be stuck using an ox and plow in the name of preserving the “traditional” ways of doing things.

Humanity has made amazing strides—including being able to feed more people more easily and cheaply than ever before—precisely because we broke with those old, “natural” traditions. Alas, many vested interests, and even quite a few academics, still employ these same pastoral appeals and myths to oppose new forms of technological change. The case studies in Juma’s book powerfully illustrate why that dynamic continues to be a driving force in innovation policy debates and how it delays the diffusion of many important new life-enriching goods and services.

Trial and Error

When the opponents of change rest their case on pastoral myths and nostalgic arguments about the good ‘ol days, we should remind them that those days were, in reality, eras of abject misery. Widespread poverty, mass hunger, poor hygiene, short lifespans, and so on were the norm. What lifted humanity up and improved our lot as a species is that we learned how to apply knowledge to tasks in a better way through incessant trial and error experimentation. In other words, we flourished by innovating . And the results of our innovative activities were called technologies .

In this sense, humanism and technology have gone hand in hand throughout history. Steven Pinker put it best in his new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress : “Progress consists of deploying knowledge to allow all of humankind to flourish in the same way that each of us seeks to flourish. The goal of maximizing human flourishing–life, happiness, freedom, knowledge, love, richness of experiences–may be called humanism.”

Our technologies are simply extensions of our knowledge and represent profoundly humanist efforts to improve our lives and the lives of others around us. “We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one,” Pinker notes. “But there is no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing,” he rightly concludes.

The Right Balance

Of course, as Pinker hints, we can go too far sometimes or place too much faith in our tools. Pursuing perfection through technological betterment can end in folly, or worse. In my previous essay, “ Deep Technologies & Moonshots: Should We Dare to Dream ,” I noted that over-exuberant tech boosters are sometimes guilty of the same rhetorical excesses and inflated claims that some humanist critics practice. Some tech evangelists go too far in suggesting that technological innovation can solve all the problems of the world. Other times, they ignore or ridicule the importance of other human values, traditions, or institutions to long-term human flourishing and over-value convenience or efficiency.

When innovation advocates go overboard, they should be called out for it. But that doesn’t mean we should stop striving for a better future, and one in which technology is rightly viewed as the fundamental driver of human well-being. No matter what some critics say, technological solutions are people-based solutions. We craft tools to solve important problems and to better our lives and the lives of our loved ones. What could be more “humanist” than that?

Additional Reading :

• Adam Thierer, “ The Pacing Problem, the Collingridge Dilemma & Technological Determinism ,” Technology Liberation Front , August 16, 2018.
• Adam Thierer, “ Defining ‘Technology ’” Technology Liberation Front , originally published April 29, 2014, last updated July 2017.
• “ Evasive Entrepreneurs and Permissionless Innovation: An Interview with Adam Thierer ,” The Bridge , September 11, 2018.
• Adam Thierer, “ Deep Technologies & Moonshots: Should We Dare to Dream ?” Medium , September 7, 2018.
• Adam Thierer, “ Are “Permissionless Innovation” and “Responsible Innovation” Compatible ?” July 12, 2017.
• Adam Thierer, “ What Does It Mean to “Have a Conversation” about a New Technology ?,” Technology Liberation Front , May 23, 2013.
• Adam Thierer, “On the Line between Technology Ethics vs. Technology Policy,” August 23, 2013.

The White House has announced a new effort to help prepare workers for the challenges they will face in the future. While it’s a well-intentioned effort, and one that I hope succeeds, I’m skeptical about it for a simple reason: It’s just really hard to plan for the workforce needs of the future and train people for jobs that we cannot possibly envision today.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal today, Ivanka Trump, senior adviser to the president, outlines the elements of new Executive Order that President Trump is issuing “to prioritize and expand workforce development so that we can create and fill American jobs with American workers.” Toward that end, the Administration plans on:

• establishing a National Council for the American Worker, “composed of senior administration officials, who will develop a national strategy for training and retraining workers for high-demand industries.” This is meant to bring more efficiency and effectiveness to the “more than 40 workforce-training programs in more than a dozen agencies, and too many have produced meager results.”
• “facilitat[ing] the use of data to connect American businesses, workers and educational institutions.” This is meant to help workers find “what jobs are available, where they are, what skills are required to fill them, and where the best training is available.”
• launching a nationwide campaign “to highlight the growing vocational crisis and promote careers in the skilled trades, technology and manufacturing.”

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[1] 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.[2] 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. Of course, as with previous periods of turbulent technological change, many of today’s jobs and business models will be rendered obsolete, and workers and businesses will need to adjust to new marketplace realities. That transition takes time, but as James Bessen points out in his book Learning by Doing, for technological revolutions to take hold and have a meaningful impact on economic growth and worker conditions, large numbers of ordinary workers must acquire new knowledge and skills. But “that is a slow and difficult process, and history suggests that it often requires social changes supported by accommodating institutions and culture.”[3] Luckily, however, history also suggests that, time and time again, society has adjusted to technological change and the standard of living for workers and average citizens alike improve at the same time.

Bessen’s point is really important, and too often forgotten in discussions about reskilling for the future. When I think about the sort of skills that I picked up the early 1980 as a teenager using a clunky old Commodore 128 computer, or that my own teenage kids pick up today just by tinkering with their gadgets (computers, smartphones, gaming consoles, etc), I think about how those skills were not centrally planned for by anyone. It was mostly just learning by doing. A lot of the coding skills people use today they learned by trial and error and without taking any course to do so.

In his book, Bessen uses the example of bank tellers to illustrate how convention wisdom about future trends is often wildly off the mark. With the rise of ATMs a few decades ago, many thought the days of bank tellers were numbered. But Bessen’s research shows that we have more bank tellers today than we did 40 years ago because once the ATMs could handle the menial tasks of counting and distributing money, the tellers were freed up to do other things.

I’m not saying we can just leave the future of workers to chance and hope everyone can learn on the fly like that. Some government programs will be needed, and many could even help. But let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that we somehow have a crystal ball that we can stare into and, like a technological Nostradamus, somehow divine the jobs and skills of a radically uncertain future.

Our better hope lies in creating an innovation culture that is open to new types of ideas, jobs, and entrepreneurialism. We might better serve the workers of the future by ensuring that they are not encumbered by mountains of accumulated red tape in the form of archaic rules, licenses, permitting schemes, and other obstacles to progress. My colleague Michael Farren also testified last year and offered some concrete near-term reform proposals to help bridge the skills gap by “revis[ing] the federal tax code to allow tax deductions for all forms of productivity-enhancing investments, including investment in training workers to perform new jobs,” and also addressing government aid programs “that might be lowering the supply of workers, thereby contributing to the lack of skilled workers available.”

In theory, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) exists to save lives and improve health outcomes. All too often, however, that goal is hindered by the agency’s highly bureaucratic, top-down, command-and-control orientation toward drug and medical device approval.

Today’s case in point involves families of children with diabetes, many of whom are increasingly frustrated with the FDA’s foot-dragging when it comes to approval of medical devices that could help their kids. Writing today in The Wall Street Journal, Kate Linebaugh discusses how “Tech-Savvy Families Use Home-Built Diabetes Device” to help their kids when FDA regulations limit the availability of commercial options. She documents how families of diabetic children are taking matters into their own hands and creating their own home-crafted insulin pumps, which can automatically dose the proper amount of proper amount of the hormone in response to their child’s blood-sugar levels. Families are building, calibrating, and troubleshooting these devices on their own. And the movement is growing. Linebaugh reports that:

More than 50 people have soldered, tinkered and written software to make such devices for themselves or their children. The systems—known in the industry as artificial pancreases or closed loop systems—have been studied for decades, but improvements to sensor technology for real-time glucose monitoring have made them possible. The Food and Drug Administration has made approving such devices a priority and several companies are working on them. But the yearslong process of commercial development and regulatory approval is longer than many patients want, and some are technologically savvy enough to do it on their own.

Linebaugh notes that this particular home-built medical project (known as OpenAPS), was created by Dana Lewis, a 27-year-old with Type 1 diabetes in Seattle. Linebaugh says that:

Ms. Lewis began using the system in December 2014 as a sort of self-experiment. After months of tweeting about it, she attracted others who wanted what she had. The only restriction of the project is users have to put the system together on their own. Ms. Lewis and other users offer advice, but it is each one’s responsibility to know how to troubleshoot. A Bay Area cardiologist is teaching himself software programming to build one for his 1-year-old daughter who was diagnosed in March.

In essence, these individuals and families are engaging in a variant of the sort of decentralized “biohacking” that is becoming increasingly prevalent in society today. As I discussed in a recent law review article, biohacking refers to the efforts of average citizens (often working together in a decentralized fashion) to enhance various human capabilities. This can include implanting things inside one’s body or using external devices to supplement one’s abilities or to address health-related issues.

I documented other examples of this trend in my essays on average citizens making 3D-printed prosthetics (The Right to Try, 3D Printing, the Costs of Technological Control & the Future of the FDA) as well as retainers (“In a World Where Kids Can 3D-Print Their Own Retainers, What Should Regulators Do?”) As “software eats the world” and allows for this sort of democratized medical self-experimentation, more and more citizens are likely going to be engaging in biohacking. In the process, they will often be doing an end-around the FDA and its complex maze of regulatory restrictions on health innovation.

Stated more provocatively, thanks to new technological capabilities and networking platforms, the public may increasingly enjoy a de facto “right to try” for many new medical devices and treatments. Technological innovation will decentralize and democratize medical decisions even when the legal status of such actions is unclear or even flatly illegal.

But is a world of increasingly decentralized, democratized, and such highly personalized medicine actually safe? Well, all risk is relative and as I discussed extensively in my recent book and other work on innovation policy, sometimes the greatest risk of all is the refusal to take any risk to begin with. If you disallow or limit efforts to engage in certain risky endeavours, ultimately, you could end up doing more harm because there can be no reward without a corresponding amount of risk-taking. It is only through constant trial and error experimentation that we find new and better ways of doing things. That is particularly true as it pertains to life-enriching or even life-saving medical treatments. While the FDA likes to think that its hyper-cautious approach to medical drug and device approval ultimately saves lives, in the aggregate, we have no idea how many lives are actually being lost (or how much pain and suffering is occurring) due to FDA prohibitions on our freedom to experiment with new products and services.

One of the parents Linebaugh interviewed for her story made the following remark: “Diabetes is dangerous anyway. Insulin is dangerous. I think what we are doing is actually improving that and lowering the risk.” That is exactly right. This father understands the reality of risk trade-offs. There are certainly risks associated with what these families are doing for their children. But these families also have a very palpable sense of the opposite problem: There is a profound and immediate risk of doing nothing and waiting for the FDA to finally get around to approving the devices that their children need  right now.

All this raises another interesting policy question: Why is it legal for these parents to engage in this sort of medical self-experimentation–experimentation on their children, no less!–while it remains flatly illegal for any commercial operator to offer similar products that could help these families? Many modern regulatory regimes accord differential treatment to commercial activities. Non-commercial versions of some activities are left alone, but as soon as commercial opportunities arise, policymakers seek to apply regulation.

Does this sort of commercial vs. non-commercial regulatory asymmetry make any sense? As far as I can tell, this regulatory distinction is mostly rooted in the fact that deep-pocked commercial operators make easier targets for regulators to go after when compared to harassing average citizens.  Going after average citizens would be bad PR and a serious legal hassle as well because issues pertaining to personal autonomy or parental rights would likely be raised both in the court of public opinion and courts of law.

Regardless, let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that this regulatory distinction is rooted in safety considerations. After all, it is almost certainly the case that those commercial medical innovators are likely building safer products, made by medical professionals with years of experience. Moreover, commercial operators are more likely to carry insurance to address any problems that may develop, and they possess strong reputational incentives to be good market actors. Commercial operators have to maintain brand loyalty to earn new or repeat business, or perhaps just to avoid stiff legal liability that non-commercial operators might not face. 

In any event, one thing should be abundantly clear: If the FDA doesn’t change its ways, we can expect an increasing number of citizens to begin pursuing medical treatments outside the boundaries of the law (and potentially outside the realm of common sense). Many people want a right to try new devices and therapies, and in our modern networked world, they are increasingly going to get it whether regulators like it or not.

Lawmakers in Congress need to exercise better oversight of rogue agencies like the FDA, which face no serious penalties for the sort of endless regulatory foot-dragging that threatens public welfare. If the agency was required by Congress to improve its drug and device approval process, then perhaps fewer Americans would be forced to take matters into their own hands to begin with. Down below, I’ve included a few reports suggesting how we might get this much-needed reform process started.

Additional reading from Mercatus Center scholars:

• white paper: “US Medical Devices: Choices and Consequences,” by Richard Williams, Robert Graboyes & Adam Thierer
• white paper: “The Proper Role of the FDA for the 21st Century,” by Joseph V. Gulfo, Jason Briggeman, Ethan Roberts
• white paper: “How Productive Is the FDA’s Devices Program?” by Richard Williams, Jason Briggeman, Ethan Roberts
• special report: “From Fortress to Frontier: How Innovation Can Save Health Care,” by Robert Graboyes
• blog post: “The Right to Try, 3D Printing, the Costs of Technological Control & the Future of the FDA,” by Adam Thierer
• blog post: “In a World Where Kids Can 3D-Print Their Own Retainers, What Should Regulators Do?” by Adam Thierer

I suppose it was inevitable that the DRM wars would come to the world of drones. Reporting for the Wall Street Journal today, Jack Nicas notes that:

In response to the drone crash at the White House this week, the Chinese maker of the device that crashed said it is updating its drones to disable them from flying over much of Washington, D.C.SZ DJI Technology Co. of Shenzhen, China, plans to send a firmware update in the next week that, if downloaded, would prevent DJI drones from taking off within the restricted flight zone that covers much of the U.S. capital, company spokesman Michael Perry said.

Washington Post reporter Brian Fung explains what this means technologically:

The [DJI firmware] update will add a list of GPS coordinates to the drone’s computer telling it where it can and can’t go. Here’s how that system works generally: When a drone comes within five miles of an airport, Perry explained, an altitude restriction gets applied to the drone so that it doesn’t interfere with manned aircraft. Within 1.5 miles, the drone will be automatically grounded and won’t be able to fly at all, requiring the user to either pull away from the no-fly zone or personally retrieve the device from where it landed. The concept of triggering certain actions when reaching a specific geographic area is called “geofencing,” and it’s a common technology in smartphones. Since 2011, iPhone owners have been able to create reminders that alert them when they arrive at specific locations, such as the office.

This is complete overkill and it almost certainly will not work in practice. First, this is just DRM for drones, and just as DRM has failed in most other cases, it will fail here as well. If you sell somebody a drone that doesn’t work within a 15-mile radius of a major metropolitan area, they’ll be online minutes later looking for a hack to get it working properly. And you better believe they will find one.

Second, other companies or even non-commercial innovators will just use such an opportunity to promote their DRM-free drones, making the restrictions on other drones futile.

Perhaps, then, the government will push for all drone manufacturers to include DRM on their drones, but that’s even worse. The idea that the Washington, DC metro area should be a completely drone-free zone is hugely troubling. We might as well put up a big sign at the edge of town that says, “Innovators Not Welcome!”

And this isn’t just about commercial operators either. What would such a city-wide restriction mean for students interested in engineering or robotics in local schools? Or how about journalists who might want to use drones to help them report the news?

For these reasons, a flat ban on drones throughout this or any other city just shouldn’t fly.

Moreover, the logic behind this particular technopanic is particularly silly. It’s like saying that we should install some sort of kill switch in all automobile ignitions so that they will not start anywhere in the DC area on the off chance that one idiot might use their car to drive into the White House fence. We need clear and simple rules for drone use; not technically-unworkable and unenforceable bans on all private drone use in major metro areas.

[ Update 1/30: Washington Post reporter Matt McFarland was kind enough to call me and ask for comment on this matter. Here’s his excellent story on “The case for not banning drone flights in the Washington area,” which included my thoughts.]

If you want a devastating portrait of how well-intentioned regulation sometimes has profoundly deleterious unintended consequences, look no further than the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) current ban on commercial drones in domestic airspace. As Jack Nicas reports in a story in today’s Wall Street Journal (“Regulation Clips Wings of U.S. Drone Makers“), the FAA’s heavy-handed regulatory regime is stifling America’s ability to innovate in this space and remain competitive internationally. As Nicas notes:

as unmanned aircraft enter private industry—for purposes as varied as filming movies, inspecting wind farms and herding cattle—many U.S. drone entrepreneurs are finding it hard to get off the ground, even as rivals in Europe, Canada, Australia and China are taking off. The reason, according to interviews with two-dozen drone makers, sellers and users across the world: regulation. The FAA has banned all but a handful of private-sector drones in the U.S. while it completes rules for them, expected in the next several years. That policy has stifled the U.S. drone market and driven operators underground, where it is difficult to find funding, insurance and customers. Outside the U.S., relatively accommodating policies have fueled a commercial-drone boom. Foreign drone makers have fed those markets, while U.S. export rules have generally kept many American manufacturers from serving them.

Of course, the FAA simply responds that they are looking out for the safety of the skies and that we shouldn’t blame them. Again, there’s no doubt that the agency’s hyper-cautious approach to commercial drone integration is based on the best of intentions. But as we’ve noted here again and again, all the best of intentions don’t count for much–or at least shouldn’t count for much–when stacked against real-world evidence and results. And the results in this case are quite troubling.

An article last week from Alan McQuinn of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (“Commercial Drone Companies Fly Away from FAA Regulations, Go Abroad“) documented how problematic this situation has become:

With no certainty surrounding a timeline, limited access to exemptions, and a dithering pace for setting its rules, the FAA is slowing innovation. . . .  These overbearing rules have pushed U.S. companies to move their drone research and development projects to more permissive nations, such as Australia, where Google chose to test its drones. Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority, the agency in charge of commercial drones, offers a great example of unrestrictive regulations. While it has not yet finalized its drone laws, it still allows companies and citizens to test and use these technologies under certain rules. Instead of forcing companies to reveal their technologies at government test sites, it allows them to test outdoors if they receive an operator’s certificate and submit their test area for approval. Australia’s more permissive nature shows how a country can allow innovation to thrive while simultaneously examining it for potential safety concerns.

The Wall Street Journal’s Nicas similarly observes that foreign innovators are already taking advantage of America’s regulatory mistakes to leapfrog us in drone innovation. He reports that Germany, Canada, Australia and China are starting to move ahead of us. Nicas quotes Steve Klindworth, head of a DJI drone retailer in Liberty Hill, Texas, who says that if the United States doesn’t move soon to adopt a more sensible policy position for drones that, “It’ll reach a point of no return where American companies won’t ever be able to catch up.”

In essence, the United States is adopting the exact opposite  approach we did a generation ago for the Internet and digital technology.  I’ve written recently about how “permissionless innovation” powered the Information Revolution and helped American companies become the envy of the globe. (See my essay, “Why Permissionless Innovation Matters,” for more details and data.) That happened because America got policy right, whereas other countries either tried to micromanage the Information Revolution into existence or they adopted policies that instead actively stifled it. (See my recent book on this subject for more discussion.)

In essence, we see this story playing out in reverse with commercial drones. The FAA is adopting a hyper-precautionary principle position that is holding back innovation based on worse-case scenarios. Certainly the safety of the national airspace is a vital matter. But to shut down all other aerial innovation in the meantime is completely unreasonable. As I wrote in a filing to the FAA with my Mercatus Center colleagues Eli Dourado and Jerry Brito last year:

Like the Internet, airspace is a platform for commercial and social innovation. We cannot accurately predict to what uses it will be put when restrictions on commercial use of UASs are lifted. Nevertheless, experience shows that it is vital that innovation and entrepreneurship be allowed to proceed without ex ante barriers imposed by regulators. We therefore urge the FAA not to impose  any  prospective restrictions on the use of commercial UASs without clear evidence of actual, not merely hypothesized, harm.

Countless life-enriching innovations are being sacrificed because of the FAA’s draconian policy. (Below I have embedded a video of me discussing those innovations with John Stossel, which was taped earlier this year.) New industry sectors and many jobs are also being forgone. It’s time for the FAA to get moving to open up the skies to drone innovation. Congress should be pushing the agency harder on this front since the agency seems determined to ignore the law, which requires the agency to integrate commercial drones into the nation’s airspace.

Additional  Reading

• Filing to FAA on Drones & “Model Aircraft”, Sept. 23, 2014
• Private Drones & the First Amendment, Sept. 19, 2014
• [TV interview] The Beneficial Uses of Private Drones, March 28, 2014
• Comments of the Mercatus Center to the FAA on integration of drones into the nation’s airspace, April 23, 2o13
• Eli Dourado, Deregulate the Skies: Why We Can’t Afford to Fear Drones, Wired, April 23, 2013
• Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom (2014)
• [Video] Cap Hill Briefing on Emerging Tech Policy Issues (June 2014)

If there is one thing I have learned in almost 23 years of covering communications and media regulation it is this: No matter how well-intentioned, regulation often has unintended consequences that hurt the very consumers the rules are meant to protect. Case in point: “universal service” mandates that require a company to serve an entire area as a condition of offering service at all. The intention is noble: Get service out to everyone in the community, preferably at a very cheap rate. Alas, the result of mandating that result is clear: You get less competition, less investment, less innovation, and less consumer choice. And often you don’t even get everyone served.

Consider this Wall Street Journal article today, “Google Fiber Is Fast, but Is It Fair? The Company Provides Neighborhoods With Faster and Cheaper Service, but Are Some Being Left Behind?” In the story, Alistair Barr notes that:

U.S. policy long favored extending service to all. AT&T touted its “universal service” in advertisements more than a century ago. The concept was codified in a 1934 law requiring nationwide “wire and radio services” to reach everyone at “reasonable charges.” In exchange for wiring a community, telecommunications providers often gained a monopoly. Cities made similar deals with cable-TV providers beginning in the 1960s.

The problem, of course, is that while this model allowed for the slow spread of service to most communities, it came at a very steep cost: Monopoly and plain vanilla service. I documented this in a 1994 essay entitled, “Unnatural Monopoly: Critical Moments in the Development of the Bell System Monopoly.” As well-intentioned regulatory mandates started piling up, competition slowly disappeared. And a devil’s deal was eventually cut between regulators and AT&T to adopt the company’s advertising motto — “One Policy, One System, Universal Service” — as the de facto law of the land.

It took us almost a century to dig ourselves out of that mess and move towards telecommunications competition. Alas, we’re still living with the vestiges of this old regulatory mentality. Cities and counties across America still impose a wide variety of “universal service” regulatory mandates. Again, their intention is noble: They want everyone in their community served. You can’t blame them for that. But the result is still the same: Limited facilities-based competition and investment.

And so we return to today’s Wall Street Journal story about Google Fiber, which explains how local officials are finally starting to understand these realities. The story notes:

In 2011, Google struck a deal with authorities in both Kansas City, Kan., and Kansas City, Mo., to build the service based on customer demand. City officials say they didn’t push hard for universal coverage because they thought faster Internet service would boost the local economy and they were competing against so many other cities. “The main point was to win and bring that infrastructure to our city,” said Rick Usher, assistant city manager of Kansas City, Mo. As phone and cable companies slowed their own expansion plans, more cities allowed the selective approach.

Google’s ‘build-to-demand’ model is catching on because it produces results: More infrastructure investment, innovation, and competition. Traditional telecom and broadband operators are prepared to step up investment, too, when the incentives are right:

Verizon was required by cities and some state laws to build and offer its FiOS service widely across cities. It stopped expanding to new cities in 2010; to date, it has spent more than $23 billion on the FiOS rollout. Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said in March that the company wouldn’t expand to additional markets until FiOS had “finally returned its cost of capital.” If Verizon resumes expansion, the company would consider Google’s build-to-demand model because it has the potential to be more profitable, said Chris Levendos, a Verizon executive overseeing the FiOS build-out in Manhattan. Others are doing just that. AT&T said in April it would offer Internet speeds of up to one gigabit in as many as 100 cities. It is building to demand and working with local authorities to reduce construction costs, the company said. Tuesday, it said it would bring the high-speed service to Cupertino, Calif., close to Google’s headquarters. This approach “starts to make this business model look quite attractive,” John Stankey, AT&T’s chief strategy officer, said at an investor conference on Aug. 13.

Again, when you get the incentives right and give investors and innovators a green light, they will seize the opportunity. And that’s even true — actually, it is especially true — for high fixed-cost investments like fiber networks.

But wait, aren’t there some pockets of the population that will fall through the cracks under this alternative arrangement? In the short-term, potentially yes. But the right answer to that “digital divide” problem is never to restrict short-term investment and innovation opportunities just because you think you have a better, more “well intentioned” plan. That is the crucial mistake policymakers made in the past. Their desire to get everyone served at the exact same time with the exact same plain vanilla service meant we got sub-optimal technologies and stagnant markets with little hope of any new innovation or investment over the long-haul.

This is how “universal service” consistently fails us. Universal service sells us short. It sells human ingenuity short. The logic that motivates universal service regulation is that: ‘Well, this is about the best we can do. Let’s just get everyone some basic level of service and that will be just and good.’  Can you imagine if we would have applied this logic to other major markets and technologies?!

But what about the under-served communities? First, when you allow new innovation in networks, you never know how or where they might spread next. If you have more competitors offering unique networks architectures and services, there is a very good chance that entrepreneurial minds will figure out how to push out the boundaries of what is possible, especially in terms of how the service is delivered.

Consider this: Back in the old days, did it really make sense to try to stretch a thin copper wire way, way out into the middle of every valley, desert, farm field, and mountain? The myopic universal service mindset says: ‘Well, that’s all we had at the time.’ Perhaps for a time it really was. But how much quicker might we have seen some sort of alternative system if we hadn’t locked in those old assumptions as policy requirements? Is it impossible to believe that wireless technologies might have developed much more quickly if the incentives would have been right? Again, there was no reason for any innovators or investors to even consider the idea at a time when policymakers were mandating copper wires be stretched to every corner of the land, and as they were showering favored companies with subsidies to achieve that goal. That’s not something a new innovator could compete with, and so no one did. It would have been like policymakers saying we needed a “universal service” policy for cheap hamburgers for the masses and then showering McDonald’s with subsidies since they were the first one in many local markets who could deliver on that promise. Had we had such a universal cheap hamburger policy, do you think any other fast food places would have ever come to town and tried to compete against those subsidized burgers? Not likely.

The lesson for today’s policymakers is clear: Open up markets, relax regulatory burdens, eliminate discriminatory taxes and subsidies, and clear away other barriers to investment. Then see what happens. As the Google Fiber experience suggests, innovative minds can and will emerge to offer constructive solutions and slowly spread new networks and technologies.

OK, but won’t there still be some communities that are underserved, even with all that new innovation and investment. It’s certainly possible. And where those communities exist, some government action may be necessary to incentivize the spread of some sort of network to them, or even have the government build it for the community. I’m not opposed to that. (Have you ever driven through the hills of West Virginia or the mountains of rural Western states? Hard places to get wired networks out to!) I’m not very optimistic local governments will do a very good job of building sophisticated networks because they already have a horrible track record in this regard. But, again, I don’t oppose local action on this front if no other alternatives appear after a certain period of time.

But, again, the answer here is not crazy national and state-based universal service mandates that regulate everyone in every community as if they had the same problem. Let competition and innovation work its magic where it can and do not mess that up. Where it proves much harder for that network competition and innovation to take root, use smart incentives to get companies to build out their networks further, or offer alternative wireless infrastructure of some sort, or just have the government build the networks themselves. But we should always give competition and innovation the benefit of the doubt and see what happens first.

So, let me perfectly clear what I am saying here: GOOD INTENTIONS ARE NEVER ENOUGH! [And yes, I am using all caps because I am shouting!] The next time somebody starts mouthing something about how they have the moral high ground in these debates because their intentions are supposedly pure as the driven snow, ask them to show you results. Tell them you want evidence that their intentions have actually produced something concrete and positive for society. If their answer is, in essence, ‘Well, with our regulatory mandates we can at least get everybody some basic level of really crappy monopoly service,’ then tell them that they can take their good intentions and shove them. We can do better.

Few people have been more tireless in their defense of the notion of “permissionless innovation” than Wall Street Journal columnist L. Gordon Crovitz. In his weekly “Information Age” column for the Journal (which appears each Monday), Crovitz has consistently sounded the alarm regarding new threats to Internet freedom, technological freedom, and individual liberties. It was, therefore, a great honor for me to wake up Monday morning and read his latest post, “The End of the Permissionless Web,” which discussed my new book “Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom.”

“The first generation of the Internet did not go well for regulators,” Crovitz begins his column. “Despite early proposals to register websites and require government approval for business practices, the Internet in the U.S. developed largely without bureaucratic control and became an unstoppable engine of innovation and economic growth.” Unfortunately, he correctly notes:

Regulators don’t plan to make the same mistake with the next generation of innovations. Bureaucrats and prosecutors are moving in to undermine services that use the Internet in new ways to offer everything from getting a taxi to using self-driving cars to finding a place to stay.

This is exactly why I penned my little manifesto. As Crovitz continues on to note in his essay, new regulatory threats to both existing and emerging technologies are popping up on almost a daily basis. He highlights currently battles over Uber, Airbnb, 23andme, commercial drones, and more. And his previous columns have discussed many other efforts to “permission” innovation and force heavy-handed top-down regulatory schemes on fast-paced and rapidly-evolving sectors and technologies. As he argues:

The hardest thing for government regulators to do is to regulate less, which is why the development of the open-innovation Internet was a rare achievement. The regulation the digital economy needs most now is for permissionless innovation to become the default law of the land, not the exception.

Amen, brother! What we need to do is find more constructive ways to deal with some of the fears that motivate calls for regulation. But, as I noted in my little book,  how we address these concerns matters greatly. If and when problems develop, there are many less burdensome ways to address them than through preemptive technological controls. The best solutions to complex social problems are almost always organic and “bottom-up” in nature. Luckily, there exists a wide variety of constructive approaches that can be tapped to address or alleviate concerns associated with new innovations. I get very specific about those approaches in Chapter 5 of my book, which is entitled, “Preserving Permissionless Innovation: Principles of Progress.”

So, I hope you’ll download a free copy of the book and take a look. And my sincerest thanks to Gordon Crovitz for featuring it in his excellent new column.

Additional Reading:

• I summarized the major themes and conclusions of my book in this Medium essay, “Why Permissionless Innovation Matters” (4/24/14).
• A short essay I penned for the R Street Blog, “Bucking the ‘Mother, May I?’ Mentality.”
• I discussed my book on the “New Books in Technology” podcast (4/4/14).
• Konstantinos Komaitis discusses my book in his essay, “Permissionless Innovation: Why It Matters” (4/24/14).

The war among the states to see who can lavish the film industry with more generous tax credits in their attempt to become “the next Hollywood” continues, and it is quickly descending into a classic race to the bottom. A front-page article in today’s Wall Street Journal notes that the tax incentive bidding war has gotten so intense that it is hollowing out the old Hollywood labor pool and sending it on a road trip across the America in search of tax-induced job activity:

As film and TV production scatters around the country, more workers…  are packing up from California and moving to where the jobs are. Driving this exodus of lower-wage workers — stunt doubles, makeup artists, production assistants and others who keep movie sets humming — are successful efforts by a host of states to use tax incentives to poach production business from California. […]  Only two movies with production budgets higher than $100 million filmed in Los Angeles in 2013, according to Film L.A. Inc., the city’s movie office. In 1997, the year “Titanic” was released, every big-budget film but one filmed at least partially in the city. The number of feature-film production days in Los Angeles peaked in 1996 and fell by 50% through last year, according to Film L.A. Projects such as reality television and student films have picked up some of the slack. But overall entertainment-industry employment has slid. About 120,000 Californians worked in the industry in 2012, down from 136,000 in 2004, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The labor migration has arisen in part because California hasn’t competed aggressively on the tax-break front, officials and executives say, while states like Georgia have made efforts to grab a sizable chunk of the industry. More than 40 states and 30 foreign countries are offering increasingly generous and creative tax incentives to lure entertainment producers.

On one hand, hooray for labor mobility! But seriously, this stinks because this labor shift is taking place in a wholly unnatural way, with a complex and growing web of tax inducements leading to massive distortions in this marketplace. While proponents will insist these programs are job creators for the communities that win, in reality, they are really just job reshufflers that net limited jobs at that. Meanwhile, the costs to their taxpayers grows as more and more state and local governments jump in this game. It’s classic “smokestack chasing” activity, except in this case the firms probably didn’t even create that many jobs while they were there and then you don’t even have a factory left when the firms leave town!

If things continue like this, it probably won’t be long before some “innovative” state or local government leader gets the idea of actually just paying some film producers cold hard cash to come set up shop in their area. Hey, at least that way the programs would be on-budget and nominally more accountable!

Anyway, I’ve documented the cost of this ruinous race to the bottom in my essay, “State Film Industry Incentives: A Growing Cronyism Fiasco,” which documents the economic evidence about just how inefficient these programs are in practice.  I later expanded that essay and included in my massive paper with Brent Skorup, “A History of Cronyism and Capture in the Information Technology Sector.” Warning: It makes for miserable reading if you care about fiscal accountability and good government. Maybe somebody will make a movie about this racket someday! (But don’t hold your breath.)

P.S. For more on the corrupting influence of cronyism on American capitalism, please visit this Mercatus Center page for a comprehensive set of studies on the issue. Also, check out this outstanding paper by my colleague Matt Mitchell (“The Pathology of Privilege: The Economic Consequences of Government Favoritism“) and this excellent recent book on cronyism by Randall G. Holcombe and Andrea Castillo. And here’s a little slide show I put together on the costs of cronyism.

I think I owe Tom Brokaw an apology. When I first started reading his most recent Wall Street Journal column, “Imagine the Tweets During the Cuban Missile Crisis,” I assumed that I was in for one of those hyper-nosalgic essays about how the ‘good ‘ol days’ of mass media had passed us by and why the new media era is an unmitigated disaster. Instead, I was pleased to read his very balanced and sensible view of the old versus news media environments. Reflecting on the evolution of the media marketplace over the past 50 years since JFK’s assassination, Brokaw notes that:

The media climate has changed dramatically. The New Frontier, as Kennedy liked to call his administration, received a great deal of attention, but 50 years ago the major national information sources consisted of a handful of big-city daily newspapers, a few weekly news periodicals and two dominant TV network evening newscasts. Now the political news comes at us 24/7 on cable, through the air, the digital universe, on radio and print. And it comes to us more and more as opinion rather than a recitation of the facts as best they can be determined. News is a hit-and-run game, for the most part, with too little accountability for error.

This leads Brokaw to wonder if the amazing media metamorphosis has been, on net, positive or negative. “The virtual town square has been wired and expanded,” he notes, “but the question remains whether more voices make for a healthier political climate. With a keystroke we can easily move from an online credible source of information to a website larded with opinion or deliberately malicious erroneous claims. Have we simply enlarged the megaphone, cranked up the decibel level, and rallied the like-minded without regard to facts or consequences?”

While he’s obviously concerned about what we might label “quality control issues” associated with some new media outlets, Brokaw’s answer to the previous question he posed generally gets it right:

Still, as a child of an earlier media era, I much prefer the contemporary news and information culture—even when I am occasionally singled out by one side or the other for something I’ve said. I like the range of choices, the new voices, the ease of cross-checking and getting the most obscure information with a minimum of effort. This empowers us as no technological advancement has before. And while it may be easier to stay within one’s ideological comfort zone, left or right, it is a good deal more stimulating to wander beyond the boundaries to find what else is out there.

Good for Tom Brokaw. That generally reflects my own thinking on the issue, which can be found in the essays down below. Generally speaking, we’re better off with today’s world of information abundance than the old world of information scarcity, limited outlets, constrained choices, and homogenous fare.  That’s not to say everything is perfect in the new media ecosystem. In particular, Brokaw is right to point to the quality control issues that accompany a world were every voice can be heard. But we’re still figuring out ways to grapple with that problem, largely by encouraging still more voices to join the endless conversation and check the assertions made by others. As Brokaw correctly notes, “This empowers us as no technological advancement has before.” And it leads to more truth and wisdom in the long-run.

Additional Read ing:

• Thoughts on Andrew Keen, Part 1: Why an Age of Abundance Really is Better than an Age of Scarcity
• We Are Living in the Golden Age of Children’s Programming
• Book Review: Eli Pariser’s “Filter Bubble”
• Television: From Vast Wasteland to Vast Wonders
• testimony at FCC’s Hearing on “Serving the Public Interest in the Digital Era”
• Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society

As I noted in an addendum to my previous post, less than an hour after I posted an essay about how the District of Columbia’s subsidy deal with LivingSocial was potentially set to unravel, I received a call from two representatives of the D.C. Mayor’s office asking me to clarify a few aspects of the deal. The tone and substance of the call was courteous and profession from the start and I told them I would be happy to post a quick update to my essay letting readers know of the points that they wanted stressed.

After I did so, however, I kept thinking how strange it was that I received such a quick response from the Mayor’s office about my little post. After all, I can’t imagine that the Technology Liberation Front is on the top of their morning reading list! I just figured that someone in the Mayor’s office probably had a Google Alert set up that caught it.  But then, as luck would have it, I was reading through the Wall Street Journal at lunch and came across a story entitled, “In D.C., Social-Media Surveillance Pays Off” by Sarah Portlock. She reports that:

The local government in the nation’s capital is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to a startup to gather comments on Twitter, Facebook and other online message boards as well as the government’s own website. The data help form a letter grade for the bureaucracies that handle drivers licenses, building permits and the like. These social-media analytics services are already common for businesses such as restaurants and hotel chains that want to go beyond the comment cards most customers ignore. The D.C. experiment suggests governments are beginning to mirror the private sector in seeking real-time unvarnished feedback.

The D.C. government apparently has a 2-year $670,000 contract with newBrandAnalytics, Inc. to gather social media feedback and insights about the District.  So, I figure that’s how the folks in the D.C. Mayor’s office stumbled upon my little rant. I had posted a link to my essay on both Twitter and Google+ and they probably got an immediate report back about it.

In any event, that got me wondering about how people are going to respond to this sort of “surveillance” of social media sites and activities by governments.

I can imagine that some people will feel it’s “creepy” and suggest it violates some privacy norms. But the sort of “surveillance” happening here isn’t the typical “law-and-order” stuff. What we’re talking here about is really just the same sort of customer service efforts that many private sector companies undertake regularly. Like those private companies, the District is interested in getting feedback about how it’s doing its job. The Journal article quotes Nicholas Majett, head of the District’s Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, saying: “Knowing that every day you’re going to get a report about how you’re doing, that actually puts you on your toes and makes sure you’re doing the best possible job.”

In that sense, I applaud the District’s effort to gather impressions and insights from social media sites and use them to improve their public service record. (Of course, I’m of the mind that the District government is doing far more than it needs to and that many of its licensing and regulatory processes, for example, should be completely abolished or privatized. I’m also not sure that the system is worth $670,000 of taxpayer money.)

About the only way I could imagine any of this raising privacy concerns is if the District was gathering these social media insights, matching them up with other databases they have access to, and then using that information to somehow intimidate citizens or deny them some sort of service. It’s always easy to conjure up privacy boogeyman stories like that, but until there is any evidence that social media insights are being used in some nefarious way, I’m not too worried about what the District is doing here.

Going forward, however, it will certainly be interesting to see what happens when government “customer service” efforts such as these grow more sophisticated and come into conflict with certain privacy expectations. While I’m not of the mind that you really have much of a reasonable expectation of privacy on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter, I can imagine that many people are going to be freaked out if they start getting regular emails, tweets, texts, or even phone calls from government officials responding to complaints that were written just moments prior on their favorite social media sites.

Of course, these efforts are also worth monitoring to see if they actually do anything to help improve government service / responsiveness. If these efforts can make my DMV experience even moderately more tolerable, I would probably consider them a success!

Psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris had an interesting editorial in The Wall Street Journal this weekend asking, “Do Our Gadgets Really Threaten Planes?” They conducted an online survey of 492 American adults who have flown in the past year and found that “40% said they did not turn their phones off completely during takeoff and landing on their most recent flight; more than 7% left their phones on, with the Wi-Fi and cellular communications functions active. And 2% pulled a full Baldwin, actively using their phones when they weren’t supposed to.”

Despite the widespread prevalence of such law-breaking activity, planes aren’t falling from the sky and yet the Federal Aviation Administration continues to enforce the rule prohibiting the use of digital gadgets during certain times during flight. “Why has the regulation remained in force for so long despite the lack of solid evidence to support it?” Simons and Chabris ask. They note:

Human minds are notoriously overzealous “cause detectors.” When two events occur close in time, and one plausibly might have caused the other, we tend to assume it did. There is no reason to doubt the anecdotes told by airline personnel about glitches that have occurred on flights when they also have discovered someone illicitly using a device. But when thinking about these anecdotes, we don’t consider that glitches also occur in the absence of illicit gadget use. More important, we don’t consider how often gadgets have been in use when flights have been completed without a hitch. Our survey strongly suggests that there are multiple gadget violators on almost every flight.

That’s all certain true, but what actually motivated this ban — and has ensured its continuation despite a lack of evidence it is needed to diminish technological risk — is the precautionary principle. As the authors correct note:

Fear is a powerful motivator, and precaution is a natural response. Regulators are loath to make policies less restrictive, out of a justifiable concern for passenger safety. It is easy to visualize the horrific consequences should a phone cause a plane to crash, so the FAA imposes this inconvenience as a precaution. Once a restriction is in place, though, removing it becomes a challenge because every day without a gadget-induced accident cements our belief that the status quo is right and justified. Unfortunately, this logic is little better than that of Homer Simpson, who organized an elaborate Bear Patrol in the city of Springfield and exulted in the absence of bear sightings that ensued.

This is a prime example of the precautionary principle in action. In my recent 80-page paper entitled, “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle.” I noted that how we might be witnessing the rise of a “precautionary principle” for some information technology policy matters. The adoption of an information precautionary principle would restrict progress in this arena until technology creators or proponents can demonstrate new tools are perfectly safe. That’s essentially what the FAA has done with its ban on digital gadgets during certain times of air travel.

Of course, it is easier to sympathize with the precautionary perspective in this case than others because the risks of digital gadgetry and wireless communications during flight really were unknown early on, and few wanted to conduct a real-time experiment when the potential downsides were so catastrophic. And yet, as Simons and Chabris observe, we’ve conducted that experiment anyway! Air travelers decided to ignore the ban and continue to use digital gadgets. And, luckily, the sky didn’t fall, or in this case planes didn’t fall out of the sky, at least.

What’s amazing about this case, however, is that the FAA has continued to enforce its precautionary-minded regulation long after it’s been shown to be needed and has been so widely ignored anyway. I suppose that, like Homer Simpson, some of these officials believe that their precautionary steps have led to greater safety, or don’t have any costs or trade-offs and, therefore, there’s nothing wrong with their “better to be safe than sorry” thinking. Of course, that’s the fatal flaw in all precautionary principle thinking, as I note in my paper. There most certainly are many costs and trade-offs associated with banning technology or its use. They may not be as profound in this case as in others, but that doesn’t mean that they do not exist.

Regardless, now that the FAA has finally decided to take a second look at their policy, perhaps they be willing to admit that there never really was much sense to this particular application of the precautionary principle and that the time has come to end this ban and let individual airlines experiment with different approaches.

In the wake of last week’s big SOPA showdown, a lot of people are talking about the expanded presence and power of the Internet, online operators, and digital Netizens in Washington policy debates. I certainly don’t mean to diminish the importance of this particular episode. It certainly is historic, regardless of how you feel about the specifics of SOPA. What does concern me, however, is the way this episode is prompting questions about how much more “engagement” Internet companies need to consider inside the Beltway. For example, today’s Wall Street Journal features an article on “The Web’s Growing Muscle” and notes:

The Internet industry has found a rare sweet spot in Washington. With Google in the lead, the companies have begun building a strong traditional lobbying force in Washington. And, to complement that inside game, websites’ millions of users have become a powerful outside weight on Congress. What’s more, in a rare Washington double play, the concerns of Internet companies have found a sympathetic ear both in the Democratic White House and among Republican presidential candidates who otherwise can’t agree with Barack Obama on anything.

The piece concludes with a quote from an anonymous media executive saying “People are looking at what Google spent on lobbying and wondering, ‘Can we match that?’ It has to be a big spend.”

I cannot possibly think of anything more demoralizing than that. The idea that web companies should spend more of their time in Washington showering politicians with cash instead of out there in the real world innovating and making consumers happy is extremely troubling. I wrote about this growing trend in my 2010 Cato essay on “The Sad State of Cyber-Politics.” I built that essay around an old manifesto by Cypress Semiconductor CEO T. J. Rodgers on “Why Silicon Valley Should Not Normalize Relations with Washington, D.C.”  Rodgers had argued that “The political scene in Washington is antithetical to the core values that drive our success in the international marketplace and risks converting entrepreneurs into statist businessmen,” and that “The collectivist notion that drives policymaking in Washington is the irrevocable enemy of high-technology capitalism and the wealth creation process.”

But no one was listening then and they certainly aren’t listening now. We find ourselves in the midst a mad rush to see who can open a bigger, fancier office in Washington and have glitzier parties to make the political class happy. As I noted in the Cato essay:

There’s enormous pressure on the high-tech sector to actually become more entrenched in coming years, at least to remain “competitive” with other companies who have planted a flag inside the Beltway. Recently, for example, Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, a social networking site for professionals, worried that policymakers tend to ignore high-tech startups. “We don’t have an entrepreneurship lobby,” he said, “because entrepreneurs are off doing it.” As if that was a bad thing! In particular, he fretted about startups not getting their share of recent stimulus funding and argued that “It’s much easier when you’re embedded in the political infrastructure to respond to immediate things” such as nabbing stimulus dollars, he said.

Am I being naive about all this? Don’t these new tech companies have to have armies of lobbyists pressing the flesh and greasing the palms here in DC in order to compete against other entrenched competitors who are doing to same thing?  Perhaps, but there’s always been self-fulfilling circularity to the argument that you have to be here in order to “be a player” or “have a seat at the table.” The end result of that thinking is always the same: more lobbying, more logrolling, more of “the big spend.” And then we end up with one giant cesspool of protected markets, protracted legal nightmares, bloated bureaucracies, and widespread regulatory capture. Welcome to the wonderful world of crony capitalism! And your tech sector superstars are now falling all over themselves to make sure they have that proverbial “seat at the table” so they can feast at this Big Government supper.

It makes me sick to my stomach to even think about it. So, I’ll continue right on being a naive dope and conclude this piece the same way I concluded my old Cato essay on the sad state of cyber-politics:

For that small remnant of believers in real Internet Freedom — freedom from incessant government techno-meddling — we will never stop hoping that disputes among high-tech companies might be settled in the marketplace instead of within regulatory agencies and congressional committee rooms. And we must continue our push to discourage high-tech companies from an excessive “normalization” of relations with the parasitic culture that dominates Washington by reminding them, as Rodgers noted in 2000, “that free minds and free markets are the moral foundation that has made our success possible. We must never allow those freedoms to be diminished for any reason.”

Just let me dream, people.

Of all the shockingly naive and shamelessly self-serving editorials I’ve read by businesspeople in recent years, today’s Wall Street Journal oped by Netflix general counsel David Hyman really takes the cake. It’s an implicit plea to policymakers for broadband price controls. Hyman doesn’t like the idea of broadband operators potentially pricing bandwidth according to usage /demand and he wants action taken to stop it. Of course, why wouldn’t he say that? It’s in Netflix’s best interest to ensure that somebody else besides them picks up the tab for increased broadband consumption!

But Hyman tries to pull a fast one on the reader and suggest that scarcity is an economic illusion and that any effort by broadband operators to migrate to usage-based pricing schemes is simply a nefarious, anti-consumer plot that must be foiled. “Consumers and regulators need to take heed of what is happening and avoid winding up like the proverbial frog in a pot of boiling water,” Hyman warns. “It’s time to jump before it’s too late.”

Rubbish! The only thing policymakers need to do is avoid myopic, misguided advice like Hyman’s, which isn’t based on one iota of economic theory or evidence.

Hyman’s economic illiteracy is evident from the get-go. He tries to spook people with the headline, “Why Bandwidth Pricing Is Anti-Competitive.” No it isn’t. Usage-based pricing is used in countless economic sectors every day and it is overwhelming viewed by economists as a sensible way to calibrate supply and demand while ensuring costs are covered. But Hyman says the laws of economics don’t apply to broadband!  No seriously, he says:

Cable and telecom companies argue that bandwidth is a scarce resource and that imposing caps and overage fees will relieve pressure on high-speed networks. Families pay more when they use more electricity, these companies point out, so why shouldn’t households pay more if they use more bandwidth?  The analogy is a false one. Wireline bandwidth is an almost unlimited resource due to advances in Internet architecture. Adding more capacity is easy. The marginal cost of providing an extra gigabyte of data—enough to deliver one episode of “30 Rock” from Netflix—is less than one cent, and falling. […] Consumer access to unlimited bandwidth is good for society. It fosters innovation, drives commerce, and advances political and social discourse. Given that bandwidth is cheap and plentiful and will only grow more so with time, there is no good reason for bandwidth caps and fees to take root.

Oh my goodness. Really? Hyman appears to be suffering from a rather serious case of marginal cost fallacy: the belief that prices should, as a rule, equal marginal costs. The problem with such thinking is that it leaves zero room for investment, innovation, and other real-world dynamics that get conveniently forgotten as “fixed costs.”  Of course, if you begin with the truly outrageous claim that “bandwidth is an almost unlimited resource,” and “bandwidth is cheap and plentiful and will only grow more so with time,” then it’s only logical that you’d fall prey to this fallacy!

Meanwhile, back in the real world, economists and financial analysts will explain to you that high fixed-cost goods like broadband networks don’t just grow on trees or fall like manna from heaven. Yes, of course it is true that “consumer access to unlimited bandwidth is good for society.”  But the same is true of countless other goods that we’d all like to have access to at zero cost. But that doesn’t invalidate the fundamental laws of economics. Someone financed and built those networks and someone has to keep building and improving them. You’d never get anything built if you adopted the view that scarcity was a myth and that prices must equal marginal cost.

On that point, I was tickled to see in the online comments to Hyman’s piece that one gentleman asked, “what happens when you allow unlimited access at.. marginal cost?” and for another to say in response, “Answer: You turn into Greece.”   Quite right. There is no free lunch. Something has to pay the bills, including the broadband bills. You can’t just free-ride on the future forever by pretending that bandwidth is an abundant good and holding prices at or below marginal cost.

Once you understand these facts you can point out what’s really wrong with Mr. Hyman’s reasoning: He basically wants average costs for all consumers to go up so that his costs (or the costs of any high-bandwidth use or user) will never go up. Shameful!  Indeed, let’s just call Mr. Hyman’s editorial what it is: a blatant attempt to get government to impose price controls on broadband providers to favor his company. End of story.  He could have spared us all the sloppy economic sophistry and just told us that. It would have made it a bit easier to take him seriously.

P.S. Incidentally, Mr. Hyman’s one and only suggestion for how to deal with network demand/congestion is this: “If Internet service providers really wanted to manage traffic efficiently, they would limit speeds at peak times.” Interesting. I wonder how the Net neutrality crowd feels about Netflix’s new-found love of broadband throttling!

I enjoyed this Wall Street Journal essay by Daniel H. Wilson on “The Terrifying Truth About New Technology.”  It touches on many of the themes I’ve discussed here in my essays on techno-panics, fears about information overload, and the broader battle throughout history between technology optimists and pessimists regarding the impact of new technologies on culture, life, and learning. Wilson correctly notes that:

The fear of the never-ending onslaught of gizmos and gadgets is nothing new. The radio, the telephone, Facebook — each of these inventions changed the world. Each of them scared the heck out of an older generation. And each of them was invented by people who were in their 20s.

He continues:

Young people adapt quickly to the most absurd things. Consider the social network Foursquare, in which people not only willingly broadcast their location to the world but earn goofy virtual badges for doing so. My first impulse was to ignore Foursquare—for the rest of my life, if I have to. And that’s the problem. As we get older, the process of adaptation slows way down. Unfortunately, we depend on alternating waves of assimilation and accommodation to adapt to a constantly changing world. For [developmental psychologist Jean] Piaget, this balance between what’s in the mind and what’s in the environment is called equilibrium. It’s pretty obvious when equilibrium breaks down. For example, my grandmother has phone numbers taped to her cellphone. Having grown up with the Rolodex (a collection of numbers stored next to the phone), she doesn’t quite grasp the concept of putting the numbers in the phone. Why are we so nostalgic about the technology we grew up with? Old people say things like: “This new technology is stupid. I liked (new, digital) technology X better when it was called (old, analog) technology Y. Why, back in my day….” Which leads inexorably to, “I just don’t get it.”

There’s a simple explanation for this phenomenon: “adventure window.” At a certain age, that which is familiar and feels safe becomes more important to you than that which is new, different, and exciting. Think of it as “set-in-your-ways syndrome.”

I first heard the term “adventure window” on an NPR program back in 2006 during a wonderful Robert Krulwich spot entitled “Does Age Quash Our Spirit of Adventure?” Krulwich’s piece featured a neuroscientist who had been studying why it is that humans (indeed, all mammals) have an innate tendency to lose their willingness to try new things after a certain point in their lives. He called this our “adventure window.” The neuroscientist came to study this phenomenon after growing increasingly annoyed with his young male research assistant, who would come to work every day of the week listening to something new and quite different than the day before. Meanwhile, the much older neuroscience professor lamented the fact that he had been listening to the same Bob Marley tape seemingly forever.

Simply stated, our willingness to try new things and experiment with new forms of culture — our “adventure window” — fades rapidly after certain key points in life, as we gradually get set in our ways. For the professor and many of the rest of us, our adventure window comes slamming shut sometime in our mid-30s.

This is doubly interesting to me because it provides another explanation for why one generation protests an older generation’s censorial ways only to themselves become advocates of repressing the next generation’s culture and technology when they grow older.  Many cultural critics and average folk alike always seem to think the best days are behind us and the current good-for-nothing generation and their new-fangled gadgets and culture are garbage. This is the reason I opened my old report on “Parental Controls & Online Child Protection” in the following way:

What effect does media exposure have on our children? That question has generated heated debates from one generation to the next. From the waltz to rock and roll to rap music, from movies to comic books to video games, from radio and television to the Internet and social networking websites — every new media format or technology spawns a fresh debate about the potential negative effects it might have on kids. Parents, educators, academics, social scientists, media pundits, and many others all offer their opinions, but rarely is any consensus reached.

“These concerns stretch back to the birth of literacy itself,” notes Vaughan Bell in his excellent Slate essay from February 2010 entitled, “Don’t Touch That Dial! A History of Media Technology Scares, from the Printing Press to Facebook.”  Bell observed:

Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain. From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label.

Indeed, as I point out in my old “Net optimists vs. pessimisms” essay and subsequent book chapter, you can actually trace this debate all the way back to the well-known allegorical tale from Plato’s Phaedrus about the dangers of the written word. The debate between King Thamus and the god Theuth has been the template for every debate about culture and technology that has followed.  Read it for yourself and see.  Basically, King Thamus’ adventure window had slammed shut and the spoken tradition of learning was where he wanted progress to stop. Theuth stressed the benefits of a new technology — writing — for memory and learning.

And so the debate continues. It will never end.

Loyal readers know of my generally bullish, optimistic outlook regarding the Internet’s impact on society, economy, and even politics. On that last front, columnist Peggy Noonan has a nice piece in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled, “The Internet Helps Us Get Serious.” Serious about politics and political rhetoric, she means. Speaking about how politicians are addressing the current fiscal crisis in the U.S., Noonan argues:

One way to change minds about the current crisis is through information. We all know this, and we all know about the marvelous changes in technology that allow for the spreading of messages that are not necessarily popular with gatekeepers and establishments. But there’s something new happening in the realm of political communication that must be noted. Speeches are back. They have been rescued and restored as a political force by the Internet.

She then makes the point that I always stress when debating Net pessimists: You have to measure progress against the yardstick of the past and ask yourself if we really better off in a world of information scarcity. Noonan does that beautifully when she notes:

In the past quarter-century or so, the speech as a vehicle of sustained political argument was killed by television and radio. Rhetoric was reduced to the TV producer’s 10-second soundbite, the correspondent’s eight-second insert. The makers of speeches (even the ones capable of sustained argument) saw what was happening and promptly gave up. Why give your brain and soul to a serious, substantive statement when it will all be reduced to a snip of sound? They turned their speeches into soundbite after soundbite, applause line after applause line, and a great political tradition was traduced. But the Internet is changing all that. It is restoring rhetoric as a force. When Gov. Mitch Daniels made his big speech—a serious, substantive one—two weeks ago, Drudge had the transcript and video up in a few hours. Gov. Chris Christie’s big speech was quickly on the net in its entirety. All the CPAC speeches were up. TED conference speeches are all over the net, as are people making speeches at town-hall meetings. I get links to full speeches every day in my inbox and you probably do too.

And Noonan debunks the argument skeptics like Cass Sunstein and others have made about the atomization of the audience or fracturing of the public’s attention:

People in politics think it’s all Facebook and Twitter now, but it’s not. Not everything is fractured and in pieces, some things are becoming more whole. People hunger for serious, fleshed-out ideas about what is happening in our country. … A funny thing about politicians is that they’re all obsessed with “messaging” and “breaking through” and “getting people to listen.” They’re convinced that some special kind of cleverness is needed, that some magical communications formula exists and can be harnessed if only discovered. They should settle down, survey the technological field and get serious. They should give pertinent, truthful, sophisticated and sober-minded speeches. Everyone will listen. They’ll be all over the interwebs.

Amen, sister.

I absolutely loved this quote about the dangers of regulatory capture from Holman Jenkins in today’s Wall Street Journal in a story (“Let’s Restart the Green Revolution“) about how misguided agricultural / environmental policies are hurting consumers:

When some hear the word “regulation,” they imagine government rushing to the defense of consumers. In the real world, government serves up regulation to those who ask for it, which usually means organized interests seeking to block a competitive threat. This insight, by the way, originated with the left, with historians who went back and reconstructed how railroads in the U.S. concocted federal regulation to protect themselves from price competition. We should also notice that an astonishingly large part of the world has experienced an astonishing degree of stagnation for an astonishingly long time for exactly such reasons.

I’ve just added it to my growing compendium of notable quotations about regulatory capture.  It’s essential that we not ignore how — despite the very best of intentions —  regulation often has unintended and profoundly anti-consumer / anti-innovation consequences.

I’ve noted here before that Gordon Crovitz is my favorite technology policy columnist and that everything he pens for his “Information Age” column for The Wall Street Journal is well worth reading.   His latest might be his best ever.  It touches upon the great debate between Internet optimists and pessimists regarding the impact of digital technology on our culture and economy.  His title is just perfect: “Is Technology Good or Bad? Yes.”  His point is that you can find evidence that technological change has both beneficial and detrimental impacts, and plenty of people on both sides of the debate to cite it for you.

He specifically references the leading pessimist, Nicholas Carr, and optimist, Clay Shirky, of our time. In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains and The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, Carr paints a dismal portrait of what the Internet is doing us and the world around us. Clay Shirky responds in books like Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in the a Connected Age, arguing that we are much better off because of the rise of the Net and digital technology.

This is a subject I’ve spent a lot of time noodling over here through the years and, most recently, I compiled all my random thoughts into a mega-post asking, “ Are You an Internet Optimist or Pessimist?”  That post tracks all the leading texts on both sides of this debate.  I was tickled, therefore, when Gordon contacted me and asked for comment for his story after seeing my piece. [See, people really do still read blogs!]  I told Gordon that I label my own position “pragmatic optimism,” which I summarized as follows: “The Internet and digital technologies are reshaping our culture, economy and society in most ways for the better, but not without some serious heartburn along the way.”  My bottom line comes down to a simple cost-benefit analysis: “Were we really better off in the scarcity era when we were collectively suffering from information poverty? I’ll take information overload over information poverty any day.”

Moreover, practically speaking, I don’t see any realistic way to roll back the clock to some supposed “good ‘ol days”–whenever those were.  As Gordon argues, “Whatever the mix of good and bad, technology only advances and cannot be put back in the bottle.”  Exactly right.  Thus, we need to learn to assimilate new technologies into our lives, culture, and economy.  Luckily, adaptation is something that we humans are very good at. Past experience tells us that we got through previous gut-wrenching technological / social revolutions; we can get through this one, too.  But, again, there will be rough patches and legitimate issues that need to be addressed as we make this journey.

So, make sure to check out Gordon’s article. It’s a terrifically interesting topic, and one that I still hope to turn into a book as I noted here before.

P.S. Here are a couple of other interesting essays on this topic that that have been released recently:

• Andrew McAfee’s terrific essay “I Know I’m Not the Only Internet Optimist…” from his blog
• Michiko Kakutani essay in the New York Times, “Texts Without Contexts”
• Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal argues that “Information Overload is Nothing New“
• a great PBS documentary about these issues: “Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier” (+ my thoughts on the film)
• a video from a Family Online Safety Institute event about the PBS documentary that features a discussion about Internet optimism vs. pessimism

I have a piece on Internet privacy in the Wall Street Journal today. It’s one side of a “debate” on Internet privacy and tracking. I say be careful what you give up if you thwart online tracking—personalization, free content, and other goodies may go by the wayside.

My “opponent” is Nicholas Carr, whose identity and arguments I didn’t know as I wrote, nor likely did he mine. His is a good piece that lays out the many legitimate concerns with online tracking. Must be nice to be the maximal-privacy “good guy”!

For the sake of making it interesting I’ll pick out one important point that highlights the nub of the issue.

Privacy tradeoffs have always been a part of life, Carr says, “But now, thanks to the Net, we’re losing our ability to understand and control those tradeoffs—to choose, consciously and with awareness of the consequences, what information about ourselves we disclose and what we don’t.”

This sentence brought back to me a memorable moment from law school. In a seminar course, the professor called upon a fellow student who rather dopily apologized, “Sorry, I didn’t have time to do the reading.”

“In fact you did have time to do the reading,” replied the teacher, “but you just didn’t take it. Isn’t that correct?”

It was funny, if embarrassing for my colleague, and a great illustration of precision with language.

Holding to that standard of precision, I’ll disagree with Carr’s statement: The Net is not affecting our ability to understand and control privacy tradeoffs. Its development has outstripped that capacity. Developing consumers’ understanding of information flows, information uses, and consequences will position them to restore privacy.

I don’t think Carr would disagree with that sentiment in the main. Later he says, agreeably to me, “We need to take personal responsibility for the information we share whenever we log on.”

And I do think that’s the heart of the problem: “Education is the hard way, and it is the only way, to get consumers’ privacy interests balanced with their other interests.”

Reliable national security reporter Siobhan Gorman at the Wall Street Journal has broken a story about an Internet surveillance program called “Perfect Citizen” to be managed by the National Security Agency.

Reading about it is frustrating, and for me blame quickly settles on Congress. Our legislature is utterly supine before the national security bureaucracy, which exaggerates cybersecurity threats and consistently uses the secrecy trump card to defy oversight.

If there is to be a federal government role in securing the Internet from cyberattacks, there is no good reason why its main components should not be publicly known and openly debated. Small parts, like threat signatures and such—the unique characteristics of new attacks—might be appropriately kept secret, but no favor is done to any potential attackers by revealing that there is a system for detecting their activities.

A cybersecurity effort that is not tested by public oversight will be weaker than ones that are scrutinzed by private-sector experts, academics, security vendors, and watchdog groups.

Benign intentions do not control future results, and governmental surveillance of the Internet for “cybersecurity” purposes may warp over time to surveillance for ideological and political purposes.

These abstract criticisms of “Project Citizen” are all that publicly available information allows. Far better would come from me and others more qualified if Congress were to do its job.

Congress owes it to us, the United States’ true citizens, to have public hearings on “Perfect Citizen.” Congress should reject broad assertions of secrecy so that the whole body politic can participate in securing our country from all threats.

Congressional and public oversight—searching oversight that tests assumptions and asks hard questions—would strenghten any government cybersecurity effort we find warranted. It would also ameliorate the threat of such programs to our civil liberties, democratic processes, and privacy.

I’ve always viewed web traffic numbers with great suspicion, if for no other reason than they are all over the board. But the amazing Carl Bialik, the Wall Street Journal’s “numbers guy,” does us another great service today in his latest column, “The Trouble With Web-Traffic Numbers,” by walking us through exactly how big of a mess these numbers really are. Carl is the closest thing we have to a statistical ombudsman for the Internet as he repeatedly illustrates in his column how numbers can deceive and distort.

In terms of bogus web traffic numbers, there’s plenty of distortion going on. He quotes Erin Pettigrew, marketing director for Gawker Media, as saying that “For an industry that relies so heavily on accurate data and numerical accountability, relying on an estimate is embarrassing, antiquated.” Too true.  Of course, with so many people frequently deleting their cookies and now accessing websites from different machines, it’s not surprising that the numbers are such a jumble.

One of the reasons it’s so important to try to improve web traffic metrics is because it is essential to the advertising business, which powers the web and all the great content and services we consume online. More accurate web traffic metrics can help better direct and target ads across the web. But it won’t be easy.

Anyway, read Carl’s piece for all the details. And thank you Carl for always reminding us that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Today I appeared on CNBC [video here and embedded down below] to discuss concerns about emerging “smart-sign” technology, which could give rise to a new generation of interactive retail advertising and marketing efforts. This is in the news because, as Don Clark and Nick Wingfield report today in The Wall Street Journal (“Intel, Microsoft Offer Smart-Sign Technology: Retailers, Product Marketers Could Discern Viewer, Make Choices on What to Display and Transfer Coupons Via Phone“), Intel and Microsoft have announced that:

they will collaborate to help companies create and use new forms of digital signs. By exploiting Intel chips and Microsoft software, the companies hope to bring more interactivity to such devices and help retailers customized marketing offers to consumers. Signs equipped with cameras and specialized software could recognize the age, gender and height of people in front of them, and tell what products and images received the most attention, the companies said. By gathering information about which messages are more effective, they add, traditional retailers could develop marketing approaches that better counter Web-based competitors. “Every year retailers lose more ground to online [sellers], and they have to do something about that,” said Joe Jensen, general manager of Intel’s embedded computing division.

Down below, I have jotted down a couple of thoughts about the rise of “digital signage” and more targeted forms of retail marketing, only a few of which I was able to get across in this short TV spot. I think it’s an exciting new development for both retailers and consumers for the reasons I explain down below:

http://plus.cnbc.com/rssvideosearch/action/player/id/1383744249/code/cnbcplayershare

There was a very interesting front-page article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday by Julia Angwin and Geoffrey Fowler wondering whether Wikipedia, the wildly popular online encyclopedia, was dying because of new posting guidelines which have apparently led to a drop off in the number of volunteers contributing to the site. In their article (“Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages“), Angwin and Fowler note that:

In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega, who analyzed Wikipedia’s data on the editing histories of its more than three million active contributors in 10 languages. Eight years after Wikipedia began with a goal to provide everyone in the world free access to “the sum of all human knowledge,” the declines in participation have raised questions about the encyclopedia’s ability to continue expanding its breadth and improving its accuracy. Errors and deliberate insertions of false information by vandals have undermined its reliability.

The article suggests that new posting and editing guidelines may have something to do with the drop:

But as it matures, Wikipedia, one of the world’s largest crowdsourcing initiatives, is becoming less freewheeling and more like the organizations it set out to replace. Today, its rules are spelled out across hundreds of Web pages. Increasingly, newcomers who try to edit are informed that they have unwittingly broken a rule — and find their edits deleted, according to a study by researchers at Xerox Corp. “People generally have this idea that the wisdom of crowds is a pixie dust that you sprinkle on a system and magical things happen,” says Aniket Kittur, an assistant professor of human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied Wikipedia and other large online community projects. “Yet the more people you throw at a problem, the more difficulty you are going to have with coordinating those people. It’s too many cooks in the kitchen.”

Let’s say it’s true that the new guidelines have resulted in fewer people contributing.  Is that that automatically a bad thing?  I suppose it depends on other variables that are harder to measure. Namely, quality metrics. This is where every discussion about Wikipedia gets sticky. Personally, I’m a big Wikipedia fan and think it represents crowdsourcing and online collaboration at its finest.  But I’m not one of those Internet pollyannas who claims Wikipedia represents the pinnacle of human knowledge or some sort of proof that the collective “hive mind” produces better results that individual or proprietary efforts. Rather, I think both models and modes of production have their place and their own strengths and weaknesses.  The value of Wikipedia lies in the sheer diversity of human interests covered. The staggering array of topics for which someone has seen fit to create an entry never ceases to amaze–and inform–me.

But not all entries are equal, and some are downright pathetic.  That being said, if you treat Wikipedia as a launching pad– and not the ultimate destination–for your investigation of an issue, then this isn’t a problem.  Most people understand that there are other sources out there to consult, and Wikipedia entries typically do a nice job pointing readers to many of the best things to look at for additional information or perspectives. And even if the entry does not offer outbound links, you’re still free to search for other sources!  But for the vast majority of topics under the sun, a Wikipedia entry now exists and offers a great place to begin–again, not end–your search for enlightenment.

Nonetheless, the quality issue for Wikipedia remains a problem for many. Personally, I welcome Wikipedia’s recent changes and think it’s a sign that the Wikimedia Foundation takes quality control seriously.  If, in an effort to improve the quality of entries, new posting guidelines result in small drop-off in the number of contributors, some of us can live with that.  The question is: Does it diminish Wikipedia’s overwhelming strength–diversity.  I’d hate to think that certain niche topics go uncovered because new guidelines are overly restrictive.  Regardless, I think the folks at the Wikimedia Foundation are on the right track here.

Post script: Over at ZDNet, Larry Dingan asks “Is Wikipedia Maxed Out?” and wonders whether crowdsourcing has certain inherent limits. But he points out that even it it does, it still has benefits:

The larger question is whether crowdsourcing has a cap or not. Is there a point where crowdsourcing gets so big that it crumbles under its own weight? It’s a worth asking the question, but let’s put this in a little perspective. If Wikipedia somehow imploded it would still be one of the best examples of the Web at work. For corporate purposes, you could crowdsource R&D, get huge, perhaps create some neat products and dismantle if it got unwieldy.

I think that’s spot on.

Last Wednesday, Holman Jenkins penned a column in The Wall Street Journal about net neutrality (Adam discussed it here). In response, I have a letter to the editor in today’s The Wall Street Journal:

To the Editor: Mr. Jenkins suggests that Google would likely “shriek” if a startup were to mount its servers inside the network of a telecom provider. Google already does just that. It is called “edge caching,” and it is employed by many content companies to keep costs down. It is puzzling, then, why Google continues to support net neutrality. As long as Google produces content that consumers value, they will demand an unfettered Internet pipe. Political battles aside, content and infrastructure companies have an inherently symbiotic relationship. Fears that Internet providers will, absent new rules, stifle user access to content are overblown. If a provider were to, say, block or degrade YouTube videos, its customers would likely revolt and go elsewhere. Or they would adopt encrypted network tunnels, which route around Internet roadblocks. Not every market dispute warrants a government response. Battling giants like Google and AT&T can resolve network tensions by themselves. Ryan Radia Competitive Enterprise Institute Washington

To be sure, the market for residential Internet service is not all that competitive in some parts of the country — Rochester, New York, for instance — so a provider might in some cases be able to get away with unsavory practices for a sustained period without suffering the consequences. Yet ISP competition is on the rise, and a growing number of Americans have access to three or more providers. This is especially true in big cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington D.C.

Instead of trying to put a band-aid on problems that stem from insufficient ISP competition, the FCC should focus on reforming obsolete government rules that prevent ISP competition from emerging. Massive swaths of valuable spectrum remain unavailable to would-be ISP entrants, and municipal franchising rules make it incredibly difficult to lay new wire in public rights-of-way for the purpose of delivering bundled data and video services.

Holman Jenkins has a stinging editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled, “Neutering the ‘Net,” which borrows a term that my friend Randy May coined long ago to describe what net neutrality regulation will ultimately accomplish. What I like best about the Jenkins essay was the way he exposed Free Press for their hypocrisy over metering as a possible alternative approach to network management, something I documented in this piece and this piece about their new-found love of Internet price controls.  Here’s how Jenkins puts it in his essay today:

The mask really slipped earlier this year when Time Warner Cable began experimenting with usage-based pricing to protect the average broadband customers from the 20% of users who create 80% of the traffic. A lobby called Free Press, the most extreme of the pro-net neutrality interests, went ballistic, calling metered pricing a “price-gouging scheme” and backing a bill in Congress to ban it. Never mind that Free Press had previously argued just the opposite, saying usage-based pricing was a fairer way to deal with congestion than, say, by selectively slowing down file-sharing sites that gobble up disproportionate broadband capacity. Never mind, too, the irony that the net-neut campaign against the selective slowing of non-urgent traffic has left only differential pricing as a way to bring a modicum of efficiency to network usage.

Indeed.  Of course, we should expect nothing less from the neo-Marxist media reformistas as the UnFree Press.

Over the past couple of years here, I have relentlessly hammered Harvard’s dynamic duo of digital doom, Jonathan Zittrain (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) and Lawrence Lessig (see 1, 2, 3), for their extraordinarily gloomy predictions about the Internet creating a world of “perfect control.”  In the hyper-pessimistic Lessig-Zittrain view of things, cyberspace is perpetually haunted by the specter of nefarious corporate schemers out to suffocate innovation, screw consumers, and quash dissent.  In the 1990s, Lessig’s big-bad-bogeyman was AOL.  Today, Zittrain casts Apple in the lead role of Cyber-Big Brother.  The problem with their thesis? In a word: Reality.  As Tim Lee has pointed out before, “Lessig’s specific predictions in Code turned out to be… spectacularly wrong”:

Lessig was absolutely convinced that a system of robust user authentication would put an end to the Internet’s free-wheeling, decentralized nature. Not only has that not happened, but I suspect that few would seriously defend Lessig’s specific prediction will come to pass.

Absolutely correct, and the same is true of the fears and predictions Zittrain tosses around in The Future of the Internet.  And yet, as we saw most recently during my debate with Lessig and Zittrain over at Cato Unbound upon the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the publication Code, neither of them have relented one bit. Indeed, they have actually been escalating their morose rhetoric recently.

The fact that Zittrain casts Apple as the central villain in his drama is particularly interesting because millions upon millions of people absolutely love the company and its amazingly innovative products — even if I’m not one of them.  And there is absolutely no way Zittrain can continue to sell us this story of Apple quashing innovation when, in just one year’s time, there were 1.5 Billion iPhone Store downloads of over 65,000 free and paid apps by consumers in 77 countries.  I mean, seriously, is there any application you cannot get for the iPhone these days?

Apparently not, because over at the Wall Street Journal “Digits” blog,  Andrew LaVallee writes of the latest innovative application to pop up in the Apple iPhone Store, iPot — a tool to help you find dope shops in California!!

Seeing an untapped opportunity in the growing number of legal California dispensaries and limited advertising outlets, app developer NexStudios launched iPot, an application for Apple’s iPhone that lists nearby stores. .. The free version of the app provides basic location information for nearby stores, while the $2 upgrade adds reviews and ratings and does away with advertising. The two apps have been downloaded nearly 100,000 times since their July launch, with about 80% opting for the free one.

Holy smokes, pot on your iPhone!  Geo-located in real time!  With reviews!  Am I living in a “Cheech & Chong” movie?

OK, seriously, let’s get back to that Zittrain-Lessig thesis.  My point here is that, contrary to their belief that the whole digital world is going to hell in a handbasket because of excessive “control” by corporate actors, in reality, things are getting better all the time.  Does Apple exercise some “control” over the iPhone store? Yes. Do they use that control to bock innovation at every juncture, restrict choice, and screw consumers?  Show me the evidence.

And when I say I want to see evidence, it has to be something more than a random anecdote like this “gem” I have heard Zittrain use many times:

Recently Apple got rid of the “I Am Rich” app, which cost the maximum $999.99, and simply featured a glowing red gem on buyers’ screens. Eight people apparently bought it, with several receiving refunds.  (”Category: Lifestyle.”  Heh.)  The app’s author doesn’t yet know whether he’ll get the money from the rest, minus Apple’s 30% vig.

Come on, seriously?  Is that the best you got? Moreover, Jonathan is willing to acknowledge that at least a certain amount of “gatekeeping might help keep malicious or poor quality apps away.”  Indeed, that’s about all the gatekeeping Apple does.  For God’s sake they are apparently not even trying to keep out the potheads anymore!  And finally, it goes without saying that Apple can’t even keep people from jailbreaking their phones in a matter of hours after release when users want to do even more with them.

How all this adds up to the specter of “perfect control” is beyond me.

The Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing yesterday where a number of Senators as well as Julius Genachowski, the new Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, did a lot of fretting about the state of the modern children’s television programming marketplace.  According to the Wall Street Journal, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV):

suggested that a “little red button” be required on TVs so that a child could push the button to find out how a show is rated. Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas agreed that a red button might help since parents often have difficulties figuring out which shows are appropriate for their children to watch.

Well, I have some good news for the Senators: There are already quite a few little buttons on every remote control made today, and at least one of those buttons can pull up an on-screen guide to get more program info! (Another of them can turn the TV off!) Moreover, the ratings for just about every program already appear at the beginning of each show, and sometimes in between. And you can find out plenty more online about every TV show under the sun if you care to look.  So, I’m not sure what that fuss is all about, and we certainly don’t need to mandate “little red buttons” on every TV set when program information can be found in so many other ways.

What is more troubling about all the hand-wringing taking place at the hearing, as well as the talk of reopening the Children’s Television Act of 1990 to potentially impose more content mandates on video programmers and distributors, is that: (1) there doesn’t seem to be much appreciation for just how much wonderful children’s programming is out there today compared to the past, and (2) there doesn’t seem to be much recognition of the serious First Amendment issues at stake when government gets involved in the messy business of regulating video programming.

On that first point, let me just reiterate what I have found after conducting an exhaustive survey of the market for children’s programming in my ongoing PFF special report, Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods.  I found that the overall market for family and children’s programming options continues to expand quite rapidly. Thirty years ago, families had a limited number of children’s television programming options at their disposal on broadcast TV.  Today, by contrast, there exists a broad and growing diversity of children’s television options from which families can choose. The list below highlights just some of the more popular family- or child-oriented networks available on cable, telco, and satellite television today. And this list continues to grow rapidly.

• ABC Family Channel (http://abcfamily.go.com)
• Animal Planet (http://animal.discovery.com)
• Anime Network (www.theanimenetwork.com)
• Black Family Channel (www.blackfamilychannel.com)
• Boomerang (www.cartoonnetwork.com/tv_shows/boomerang)
• Cartoon Network (www.cartoonnetwork.com)
• Discovery Channel (www.discovery.com)
• Discovery Kids (http://kids.discovery.com)
• Disney Channel (www.disney.go.com/disneychannel)
• Encore WAM!
• Familyland Television Network (www.familyland.org/content/Content.aspx?CategoryID=51)
• FUNimation (www.funimation.com)
• Hallmark Channel (www.hallmarkchannel.com)
• Hallmark Movie Channel (www.hallmarkmoviechannel.com)
• HBO Family (www.hbofamily.com)
• History Channel (www.history.com)
• KTV – Kids & Teens Television (www.ktvzone.com)
• Learning Channel (http://tlc.discovery.com)
• National Geographic Channel (http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel)
• Nickelodeon (www.nick.com)
• Nick 2
• Nick Toons (http://nicktoonsnetwork.nick.com/home.html)
• Noggin (www.noggin.com)
• N Channel (www.the-n.com)
• PBS (www.pbs.org)
• PBS Kids (http://pbskids.org/go)
• Science Channel (http://science.discovery.com)
• Showtime Family Zone
• Sprout (www.sproutonline.com)
• Starz! Kids and Family (http://www.starz.com/appmanager/seg/s?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=starz_kids_family)
• Toon Disney (http://psc.disney.go.com/abcnetworks/toondisney)
• Varsity World (www.varsityworld.com)

Importantly, this list does not include the growing universe of religious / spiritual television networks. Nor does it include the many family or educational programs that traditional TV broadcasters offer. Finally, the list does not include the massive market for interactive computer software or websites for children.  All of this begs the obvious question: What more is it that policymakers want?

More offerings are always welcome, of course.  But, on a personal note, as the parents of two young kids (ages 5 and 7), my wife and I regularly struggle to sort through all the wonderful video programming options at our disposal.  We often find ourselves swimming through an ocean of choices available from our local broadcasters and multichannel video provider. Moreover, our kids are spending an increasing amount of time watching snippets of video via kid-oriented online search portals like KidZui and Glubble. Such online walled gardens offer a safe place for parents to find terrific online content for their kids.

I have to admit, all the choices my kids have today have left me a bit jealous!  I grew up in small central Illinois town with a couple of crummy (Iowa-based!) broadcast stations that were barely visible on our TV (and usually only when my Dad made me hold the antenna and stick my arms up in the air to get reception!) There was also one local cinema in town that usually showed old movies from the ‘50s and ‘60s that few kids cared to see.  And that was generally the extent of video choices for kids in our town.  Sure, the 1970s brought us Sesame Street as well as Mister Rogers (if that was your cup of tea).  Today, however, we still have those shows and much, much more.  Our kids now enjoy an unprecedented cornucopia of media alternatives and, contrary to what some policymakers would have us believe, many of them are extremely high-quality in nature.  My parents would have likely given anything to just have even one network as incredibly enriching as Noggin at their disposal in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  Instead, on the occasions that the TV had to become a babysitter and nothing worthwhile was on the tube, I usually ended up watching trashy soap operas.  (Don’t even get me started on “Days of Our Lives.” I could write a short history of the show’s 1975-1982 seasons!)

Speaking of trashy shows, there was a lot of talk at yesterday’s hearing about the “need to protect our children from harmful content,” as Sen. Rockefeller began the hearing by arguing.  But as I have shown in my parental controls report, not only are there more and better quality options to steer your kids toward today, but it is easier than ever before to steer them right to those preferred options and lock down everything else in sight.  As I concluded in that report:

there has never been a time in our nation’s history when parents have had more tools and methods at their disposal to help them decide what constitutes acceptable media content in their homes and in the lives of their children. […] parents now have [many tools and techniques] at their disposal to better control media content and raise their children as they see fit. That is not to say that media and communications technologies don’t continue to play a major role in our society and culture. But… parents have been empowered with tools, controls, strategies, and information, that can help them devise and then enforce a media plan for their families that is in line with their own values.

So, again, it must be asked: What is the problem here?

Finally, it should be noted that any effort by Congress or the FCC to tinker with video programming marketplace will eventually run up against serious First Amendment concerns and eventual court challenges.  In a previous session of Congress, before he became Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Sen. Rockefeller aggressively pushed for expanded content controls, not just for broadcast television, but for cable and satellite platforms as well.  In a 2005 PFF report on Sen. Rockefeller’s “Indecent and Gratuitous and Excessively Violent Programming Control Act of 2005,” First Amendment attorney Robert Corn-Revere of the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine argued that efforts to expand the horizons of FCC regulation to cover more content and platforms “would be almost certain to fail a constitutional challenge.”  Likewise, in a 2007 PFF white paper, constitutional law expert Laurence H. Tribe of the Harvard Law School, noted that the old “it’s-for-the-children” rationale for such content regulation is exactly backwards:

the malleability of children—how easy it is to mold their minds and to influence them—counts against and not in favor of centralized governmental controls. One of the arguments that you will often find is, yes, it’s all very well to believe in free speech between consenting adults but we’re talking about kids here and their minds are like plastic and they are being molded and shaped and, therefore, we have greater power to protect them. Therefore, you should keep your hands off them because they are so easy to shape. No, no, no. The argument is not that kids are malleable and therefore, Big Brother should be empowered. The argument is that kids are malleable and, therefore, families should be empowered. Parental authority should be at the center of decision making.

Indeed. And, as already noted, parents have more tools and strategies to exercise that authority than ever before, as well as more programming options to choose from. Policymakers should be celebrating these modern media marketplace developments, not bemoaning them.  We are blessed to be living in the Golden Age of children’s video programming.

When it comes to theories about how to best raise kids, I’m a big believer in what might be referred to “a resiliency approach” to child-rearing.  That is, instead of endlessly coddling our children and hovering over them like “helicopter parents,” as so many parents do today, I believe it makes more sense to instill some core values and common sense principles and then give them some breathing room to live life and learn lessons from it.  Yes, that includes making mistakes.  And, oh yes, your little darlings might actually gets some bump and bruises along the way — or at least have their egos bruised in the process.  But this is how kids learn lessons and become responsible adults and citizens.  Wrapping them in bubble wrap and filling their heads without nothing but fear about the outside would will ultimately lead to the opposite: sheltered, immature, irresponsible, and unprepared young adults — many of whom expect someone else (the government, their college, their employer, or still their parents!) to be there to take care of them well into their 20’s or even 30’s.  Again, you gotta let kids live a little and learn from their experiences.

This explains why I find Lenore Skenazy’s new book, Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry , to be such a breath of fresh air.  [Here’s her blog of the same name.] She argues that “if we try to prevent every possible danger of difficult in our child’s everyday life, that child never gets a chance to grow up.” (p. 5) As she told Salon recently:

You want kids to feel like the world isn’t so dangerous. You want to teach them how to cross the street safely. You want to teach them that you never go off with a stranger. You teach them what to do in an emergency, and then you assume that generally emergencies don’t happen, but they’re prepared if they do. Then, you let them go out. The fun of childhood is not holding your mom’s hand. The fun of childhood is when you don’t have to hold your mom’s hand, when you’ve done something that you can feel proud of. To take all those possibilities away from our kids seems like saying: “I’m giving you the greatest gift of all, I’m giving you safety. Oh, and by the way I’m taking away your childhood and any sense of self-confidence or pride. I hope you don’t mind.”

Exactly right, in my opinion. Again, let kids live and learn from it.  Teach lessons but then encourage ‘learning by doing’ and let them understand these things for themselves.  That is resiliency theory in a nutshell.

When writing about Gever Tulley’s brilliant “Tinkering School” in this post last year, I noted how I have already started teaching my kids how to use various tools even though they are both under the age of 8.  One of my safety-obsessed yuppie friends stopped by one day to get something and saw my kids playing with hammers, nails, and saws and he thought I was nuts.  But it is he who is nuts for shielding his kids to the joys of learning to build something with their own hands (and for denying them the skills to actually do some honest-to-God manual labor when they get older)!  Have my kids hammered their thumbs on occasion? Yep.  Have they cut or poked their fingers? Check.  But you know what? They bounced back and learned how to be more careful. It’s not like I put a nail gun or power saw in their hands and let them go at it!  But there will be a day that they will be competent enough to know how to use such tools properly, especially because I drill some basic lessons into them each time we pull out those tools. Without me even saying so anymore, they already put on their safety goggles and take other common sense precautions before they use such tools.

Why is it that things have gotten so out of whack, with parents instilling so much fear in their kids about the world?  Skenazy rightly notes that the fundamental problem is that “a lot of parents today are really bad at assessing risk.” (p. 5)  Parents today suffer from “extravagant worry,” she notes. “Extravagant in that it inflates remote possibilities into looming threats that we think we have to watch out for.” (p. 93) “Worrying,” she argues, “has become our national pastime.” (p. 94) “What has changed over the past generation or so is than now people worry… about every activity, even ones that used to be considered simple and pleasant,” she says. (p. 42). Camping, ball games, bike rides, walking to school, etc., are increasingly going out of style. “Millions of moms and almost (but not quite as many) dads now see the world as so fraught with danger that they can’t possibly let their children explore it.” (p. 5)  “And the result is a lot of people so busy preparing for the hideous and unpredictable future that they think nothing of trampling the safe and happy present.” (p. 44)

This has spawned the rise of what Skenazy refers to as the “Just In Case” and “Total Control” mentalities that exist among many parents throughout society today. Many modern parents seem to believe that with just enough safety locks, knee pads, toilet locks, stair gates, and so on, they can keep their kids perfectly safe from all the harms of the world —  both real or (more likely) imagined. Alas, Skenazy argues, “Control is a figment of our imagination. Seeking it only make us more anxious.” (p. 92)  Worse yet, after wrapping those kids in all that bubble wrap, a lot of these same parents force nonsense on them like Baby Einstein videos and Mozart tapes at very young ages hoping that will make those kids geniuses in later life.  It’s more likely they’ll grow up to be Ted Kaczynski.

But if Skenazy is right in arguing that most parents now behave as if “normal childhood has just become too risky to permit,” think of the long-term consequences that has on kids.  Such a relentlessly fear-based mentality breeds distrust, even loathing, of the outside world and all others in it.  Moreover, as I mentioned at the outset, excessive coddling makes it impossible to learn life lessons and build resiliency and responsibility into youngster such that they can go on to become productive citizens.

Skenazy also has some common sense thoughts on the over-hyped issue of Internet sexual predation. As she told Salon:

The world online turns out to be not very different from the world offline. There are some really seedy neighborhoods where you wouldn’t want your kids hanging out, especially if they were wearing high-heeled shoes and fishnets stockings at night. If your kids don’t go there, then your kids are not going to be stalked by predators just looking up prom pictures on Facebook.

Again, exactly right.  And yet, as I have pointed out here before, an irrational “techno-panic” has taken place in recent years over this issue even though the research just doesn’t back up the claim that predators are lurking on every cyber-corner.  Moreover, there’s not a stalker or a child abductor hanging out on every real world corner either. As she notes in the book, “the number of children abducted and killed by strangers [has held] pretty steady over the years — about 1 in 1.5 million. Put another way, the chances of any one American child being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are almost infinitesimally small: .00007 percent.” (p. 16)  And yet, parents today are practically paralyzed by the fear that if they let their kids out of their sight for even a millisecond, they will be snatched.

Skenazy blames sensationalized news coverage for much of this, and I tend to agree.  Even though there are many other tragic ways young kids die each year — and do so in far greater numbers — the media tends to focus on the freakishly rare missing child or abduction scenario until they have whipped up a full-blown public panic.  Incidentally, when those exceedingly rare abductions do take place, it is almost never at the hands of a complete stranger. Generally speaking, abductions by strangers “represent an extremely small portion of all missing children [cases].”  That conclusion was a central finding of the 2002 National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART), a study conducted by the Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.  Instead, it’s known acquaintances and family members that represent the overwhelming portion of offenders. As psychologist Anna C. Salter, author of Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders, points out, “[Sex offenders] are part of our communities, part of our network of friends, worse yet, sometimes part of our families.” Same goes for the abductions. In the vast majority of cases, it is relatives or parties close to the family (say, a disgruntled nanny) who snatches the child.  In other words, instead of being obsessed about letting your kids ride their bike around the neighborhood or play in the center of the mall, parents should be far more concerned with those they marry, date, or employ!!

In any event, read Lenore Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids.  It is beautifully written and immensely enjoyable. She is an insanely gifted writer that will keep you thinking and laughing at the same time.  That’s a rare gift, and her book is a much-needed gift to over-worried parents everywhere.  Read this book, stop worrying, and then tell you kid to go outside and play!

P.S. Quick closing rant… Can I just tell you how much I hate the scumbag trial lawyers who have made it impossible for my kids to experience the joys of diving boards at the local pool.  Steve Moore of The Wall Street Journal, who takes his kids to the same McLean pool my kids go to, explains how some greedy leeches lawyers have made it impossible for pools like ours to keep high-dive board around like we had growing up.  Maybe we should just ban pools altogether while we’re at it.  Fence-off all the lakes and streams, too.  After all, kids could drown!!

Incidentally, this reminds me of the most sensible thing every written about online child safety. In 2002, a blue-ribbon panel of experts was convened by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences to study how best to protect children in our new, interactive, “always-on” multimedia world.  Under the leadership of former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, the group produced a massive report that outlined a sweeping array of methods and technological controls for dealing with potentially objectionable media content or online dangers. Ultimately, however, the experts used a compelling metaphor to explain why education and sensible mentoring was the most important tool on which parents and policymakers should rely:

Technology-in the form of fences around pools, pool alarms, and locks-can help protect children from drowning in swimming pools. However, teaching a child to swim-and when to avoid pools-is a far safer approach than relying on locks, fences, and alarms to prevent him or her from drowning. Does this mean that parents should not buy fences, alarms, or locks? Of course not-because they do provide some benefit. But parents cannot rely exclusively on those devices to keep their children safe from drowning, and most parents recognize that a child who knows how to swim is less likely to be harmed than one who does not. Furthermore, teaching a child to swim and to exercise good judgment about bodies of water to avoid has applicability and relevance far beyond swimming pools-as any parent who takes a child to the beach can testify. (p. 187)

“A child who knows how to swim is less likely to be harmed than one who does not.”  We could apply that lesson to just about everything in this world.  Teach your children well, and then let them live and learn.  And swim!