Adam Thierer's Blog, page 52

Alice Marwick on social dynamics and digital culture

Alice Marwick, assistant professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University, discusses her newly-released book, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. Marwick reflects on her interviews with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, technology journalists, and venture capitalists to show how social media affects social dynamics and digital culture. Marwick answers questions such as: Does “status conscious” take on a new meaning in the age of social media? Is the public using social media the way the platforms’ creators intended? How do you quantify the value of online social interactions? Are social media users becoming more self-censoring or more transparent about what they share? What’s the difference between self-branding and becoming a micro-celebrity? She also shares her advice for how to make Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and other platforms more beneficial for you.

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Related Links

Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age, Marwick
Engineered Performances Alice E. Marwick’s ‘Status Update’, The New York Times
Biography, Marwick

Reminder: TLF Happy Hour This Wednesday (with special surprise)

Just a quick reminder to join us this Wednesday night (Dec. 4) for the next “Alcohol Liberation Front” happy hour featuring many Tech Liberation Front contributors and friends. The happy hour will be held at Churchkey (1337 14th St., NW) at 6 p.m.  Churchkey is one of the very best beer bars not just in D.C. but in all of America.  If you’ve never been there before, you are in for a real treat.

In addition to mixing and mingling with the witty and wacky TLF crew, we have a special surprise for attendees: Our guests will be given an early preview of our prototype TLF drone! Our Advanced Robotics Division here at the TLF has been hard at work on the “FreedomCopter” and we look forward to showing guests how we plan to use it coming years to spread the good word of tech liberty!  We plan on doing special fly-bys during the evening and buzzing past EPIC and CDT headquarters to have our autonomous agent inquire about our general freedom to tinker, innovate, and gather information freely. We look forward to their response.

No word yet if our Advanced Robotics Division will have the new driverless “TLF-Mobiles” ready in time to give inebriated guests a free ride home, but we will do our best.

Hope to see you on Wednesday night.

The Great Disintermediation

Yesterday at Forbes, William Pentland had an interesting piece on possible disintermediation in the electricity market.

In New York and New England, the price of electricity is a function of the cost of natural gas plus the cost of the poles and wires that carry electrons from remotely-sited power plants to end users. It is not unusual for customers to spend two dollars on poles and wires for every dollar they spend on electrons.

The poles and wires that once reduced the price of electricity for end users are now doing the opposite. To make matters worse, electricity supplied through the power grid is frequently less reliable than electricity generated onsite. In other words, rather than adding value in the form of enhanced reliability, the poles and wires diminish the reliability of electricity.

If two thirds of the cost of electricity is the distribution mechanism, then, as Pentland notes, there is a palpable opportunity to switch to at-home electricity generation. Some combination of solar power, batteries, and natural gas-fired backup generators could displace the grid entirely for some customers. And if I understand my electricity economics correctly, if a significant fraction of customers go off-grid, the fixed cost of maintaining the grid will be split over fewer remaining customers, making centrally-generated electricity even more expensive. The market for such electricity could quickly unravel.

While it remains to be seen whether electricity generation will indeed become decentralized, such disintermediation would be the continuation of a decades-long social trend. It all began (plausibly) in 1984. The Macintosh was released, and desktop computing became a thing. Desktop printers disintermediated printing departments, Kinkos, and the steno pool. The Internet has disintermediated telephone companies, music labels, television networks, newspapers, and much more. Online education is unbundling university courses.

What’s even more exciting is the next generation of disintermediating technologies. Bitcoin could displace some financial institutions—to varying degrees, banks, the Federal Reserve, Western Union, and credit card companies. Mesh networks could solve the last-mile problem of Internet service delivery, which tends to be monopolized or at least concentrated. 3D printers could disintermediate supply chains. 3D chemical printers could disintermediate drug companies and the FDA.

Delivery drones like Amazon Prime Air‘s arguably disrupt package delivery services, though not entirely because FedEx and UPS will still run drone-utilizing distribution networks. More importantly, delivery drones disintermediate the real estate market for small businesses. It will no longer be important, if you run a local business, to have a storefront in a prime location. Your customers can order online and items can be delivered to them in half an hour straight from the factory or artisanal workshop. It could be the Etsyfication of the economy.

If information, electricity, money, and production all get disintermediated, what is left? If these trends continue, the future will be one in which human interaction is unmediated, and to a surprising degree, unregulable. It will be difficult to stop a willing buyer and seller from transacting. Information about the proposed transaction might not be censorable. Payment via Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies can’t be stopped. Production and delivery of the item may be difficult or impossible to detect and intercept.

Intermediaries are often used by governments as points of control. As we shed intermediaries, it may become possible to live one’s entire life without any particular authority even knowing that one exists. I doubt that we’ll ever get that far in the process, because using non-abusive intermediaries often makes economic sense. But for the next few decades, at least, I expect the trend to continue and the world to get a lot more interesting.

Originally posted at elidourado.com

New Progress in the 2014 Spectrum Auctions

Both parties of Congress has been increasingly critical of federal agencies’ inefficient use of spectrum in the past few years and it seems like agencies are getting the message. The NTIA, which is the official manager of federal agency spectrum, released a letter yesterday announcing that the Department of Defense would be relocating some of its systems. Defense had reached an agreement with broadcasters that Defense systems will share spectrum in the Broadcast Auxiliary Service (BAS) band.

The soon-to-be vacated band held by Defense will eventually be auctioned off–hopefully in 2014–for billions of dollars and likely used for mobile broadband provided by wireless carriers like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. These carriers face serious congestion problems because of government-created scarcity of spectrum.

The carriers actually had targeted some of BAS spectrum because they weren’t convinced Defense would be willing to move their systems. The broadcaster deal reached with Defense means everyone’s apparently happy–the broadcasters can keep their BAS spectrum, the feds get new equipment and Congress off their back (temporarily), and the carriers get new spectrum for auction.

The deal is welcome news because the spectrum will be put to a higher-valued use once auctioned. The federal government pays almost nothing for its own spectrum and is a poor steward of the resource. Transferring spectrum from agencies to carriers means lower phone bills and more mobile broadband coverage. Government agencies are notoriously resistant to moving their systems or sharing with others, so entering into a sharing pact with the broadcasters indicates some of the resistance is thawing.

It’s not unequivocal good news, though.

The government is clearing out from a 25 MHz band of spectrum and occupying the larger, 85 MHz BAS band that will be shared with broadcasters. The military will need a larger band because sharing imposes some capacity constraints necessitating new, agile systems that search the airwaves to make sure they don’t interfere with existing broadcast users. Dynamic sharing like this only adds to the cost and complexity and may imperil next years’ planned auction.

Further, the BAS band is unavailable for auction only because of the antiquated command-and-control regime the FCC uses to award spectrum licenses. BAS is mostly used for electronic news gathering, which relays local and national newscasts from reporters on the scene to broadcast studios. Broadcasters have used BAS spectrum since the 1960s when it was allocated to them for free.

In a market, broadcasters likely would not have as much BAS spectrum as they currently have. In fact, because of technology changes and squeezed newsroom budgets, broadcasters are finding cheaper alternatives. Increasingly, journalists are using carriers’ LTE technology to transmit their breaking newscasts since the technology costs a fraction of the cost of news vans and equipment needed for BAS transmissions. That is to say, there are alternative business models in the absence of Soviet-style allocations.

So despite these industry changes, BAS spectrum cannot be auctioned for its highest-valued use (probably mobile broadband) under current FCC rules. Further, it will be even more difficult to bring the benefits of auctions to the airwaves if federal users are intermingling with existing users, broadcasters in this case. It’s a trend to be wary of. Let’s just hope that next year’s planned auctions occur on time so that more consumers can benefit from mobile broadband.

Alcohol Liberation Front 15 at Churchkey on December 4th

It’s been way too long since the Tech Liberation Front hosted an IRL meetup, more than a year in fact, so we’re looking to make amends next week. You’re invited to the 15th Alcohol Liberation Front happy hour, which we’ll hold at Churchkey on 14th Street at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, December 4th.

Lots of us from the TLF gang will be there, including quite a few of our out-of-town contributors. So please come by and have a beer with us, and bring a friend!

Our sousveillance future is now: Fred Smith taped by increasingly common wearable camera

In my Reason column this week I took inspiration from the fact that I will soon be sporting a Narrative Clip life-logging camera, and I wrote about our coming sousveillance future when everyone will be recording everyone else with wearable cameras. Lo and behold, looks like our good friend Fred Smith of CEI last night lived that future.

That’s a video posted by a biker who apparently wears a camera on his helmet and records his rides. He was calling the police to report a car blocking the bike lane when Fred and his wife Fran asked him not to. One thing I find fascinating is that being recorded, their instinct was to record back with the cameras on their phones.

As wearables become mainstream we’re going to begin to see many more videos like this, and I leave it to the reader to decide whether that’s a good thing. Sousveillance, whether we like it or not, will be a giant accountability machine. Obviously, recording the behavior of police and other government agents will help keep them accountable, but we’ll also be recording each other. Indeed, this biker wears a camera in part, I’m sure, to hold others accountable should anything happen to him on the road. What’s interesting is that what we will be held accountable for will be not just traffic accidents, but also sidewalk interactions that until now would have remained private and anonymous. Do check out my column in which I go into much more detail about the coming mainstreaming of sousveillance.

New Dourado and Tabarrok Paper on Intellectual Property

I’m pleased to announce that Alex Tabarrok and I have a new working paper out from the Mercatus Center today, “Public Choice and Bloomington School Perspectives on Intellectual Property.” The paper will appear in Public Choice in 2014.

Here’s the abstract:

We mine two underexplored traditions for insights into intellectual property: the public choice or Virginia school, centered on James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, and the Bloomington or Institutional Analysis and Development school, centered on Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom. We apply the perspectives of each school to issues of intellectual property and develop new insights, questions, and focuses of attention. We also explore tensions and synergies between the two schools on issues of intellectual property.

The gist of the paper is that the standard case for intellectual property—that a temporary monopoly is needed in order to recoup the sunk costs of innovation or creation—ignores issues raised by the two schools we investigate.

From a public choice perspective, a temporary monopoly provides enormous opportunities for rent seeking. Copyright and patent owners are constantly manipulating the political environment to expand either the duration of the monopoly or the scope of what can be monopolized. We document the evolution of intellectual property in the United States from its modest origins to its current strong and expansive state.

From a Bloomington perspective, the standard case for IP wrongly treats the commons as a kind of wasteland. In fact, numerous innovations and sprawling creative works occur without monopolization—just look at Wikipedia. Innovation occurs when the right institutional structures are in place, and intellectual property that is too severe can hamper the smooth operation of these institutions. Too much IP can harm as much as too little.

Read the whole thing, cite it copiously, etc.

Are you totally sick of Bitcoin yet? No? OK, here’s a little more.

“Selfie” was selected today as the word of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary’s editors, beating both “twerking” and “bitcoin.” Bitcoin’s company in that word list makes me appreciate the fact that others may be as sick of hearing about Bitcoin as I am about twerking. Nevertheless, it’s a pretty important week for Bitcoin, an I wanted to highlight some of the work I’ve been doing.

Yesterday the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing on the promises and challenges that virtual currencies hold for consumers and law enforcement respectively. I testified at that hearing and video of my testimony is below. You can also check out the written testimony, which is an updated version of the Bitcoin primer for policymakers I wrote with Andrea Castillo earlier this year. And ahead of the hearing I published an op-ed in The Guardian arguing that if the U.S. doesn’t foster a sane regulatory environment for Bitcoin, entrepreneurs will go to other jurisdictions that do.

All in all the hearing was hearteningly positive. The federal regulators and law enforcement representatives all agreed that Bitcoin is a lawful and legitimate payments system and that it holds great promise. They also agreed that plain old cash and centralized virtual currencies (contra Bitcoin’s decentralized design) are much greater magnets for money laundering, and that they needed no new laws or authority to deal with illegal uses of Bitcoin. I discuss the hearing and its implications on today’s Cato Daily Podcast with Caleb Brown.

Finally, I think there are lots of folks, especially in the wonkosphere, who think they know what Bitcoin is, but really don’t, and so the opinions they offer about its viability or significance are based on misunderstanding. For example, Neil Irwin at Wonkblog today wrote a 700-word post to suggest that what Bitcoin needs is a central bank. Now, if he’s trolling, kudos to him. But I really think he’s innocently ignorant of the fact that Bitcoin’s seminal design feature is that it is a decentralized payments system, and that the moment you add a central banker (which would in any case be impossible) you would no longer have Bitcoin, but Facebook Credits or Microsoft Points or airline miles.

So, if you think you have an inkling about what Bitcoin is, but you’re not too sure, or you don’t know why it’s so significant, please check out my cover story in the December issue of Reason, which was just made available online. Apart from explaining the basics, I go into detail about the little understood fact that Bitcoin is much more than just money. Value transmission is just the most obvious use case for Bitcoin, and thus the one that’s being built out first, but the Bitcoin platform is essentially a decentralized ledger, so it is also able to support property registrations, decentralized futures markets, and much more.

And truly finally, if you want to keep up with all the happenings in Bitcoin, including the Senate Banking Committee hearing later today, check out MostlyBitcoin.com, a site a built for myself but that I hope is useful to others that tracks Bitcoin stories in the mainstream media.

Save the Covered Business Method program expansion

The Hill is reporting that Rep. Goodlatte, under pressure from “companies like Microsoft, IBM and Apple,” is planning to drop the provision in his patent reform bill that expands the Covered Business Method (CBM) program. Mike Masnick also has commentary.

Julie Samuels explains CBM review:

The “Covered Business Method Review” (CBM) was first introduced in 2011′s America Invents Act. It created, for a limited time, an additional avenue of patent review at the Patent Office. Unfortunately, as drafted, it really was only intended to apply to patents that deal with financial institutions.

CBM is a good program. First, we have long favored the use of Patent Office procedure to challenge patents; it is much cheaper and much quicker than going to court. Second, it allows for more ways to challenge patents than other types of Patent Office review—making it a more robust procedure that promises to knock out more improvidently granted patents. Third, it automatically puts concurrent patent litigation between the parties on hold.

Putting ongoing litigation on hold is no small thing. Patent litigation often costs each side well into the millions of dollars, while CBMs cost just a fraction of that. This means that more people will be in a position to challenge bad patents and fight back against the trolls who wield those patents.

The original Goodlatte bill would have expanded CBM review to patents beyond the financial sector.

From a public choice perspective, it is unsurprising that finance would have better patent law than the rest of the economy: finance is a concentrated industry that can go up politically against and offset another concentrated industry, the patent bar. But non-finance covered business method patents are asserted against all kinds of companies, for practices as banal as retrieving data from a database (not joking: “A method of retrieving information from a database record having plural fields“) or selling things online (“An apparatus to market and/or sell goods and/or services over an electronic network“). The fact that the victims of these patent assertions are dispersed throughout the economy means that they are not organized enough to effectively oppose the patent interests that are lobbying against the CBM program expansion.

Still, it is very disappointing that Rep. Goodlatte is caving to such lobbying. I already thought that his bill did not go far enough; now it goes even less far.

What’s at Stake with the FTC’s Internet of Things Workshop

Tomorrow, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will host an all-day workshop entitled, “Internet of Things: Privacy and Security in a Connected World.” [Detailed agenda here.] According to the FTC: “The workshop will focus on privacy and security issues related to increased connectivity for consumers, both in the home (including home automation, smart home appliances and connected devices), and when consumers are on the move (including health and fitness devices, personal devices, and cars).”

Where is the FTC heading on this front? This Politico story by Erin Mershon from last week offers some possible ideas. Yet, it still remains unclear whether this is just another inquiry into an exciting set of new technologies or if it is, as I worried in my recent comments to the FTC on this matter, “the beginning of a regulatory regime for a new set of information technologies that are still in their infancy.”

First, for those not familiar with the “Internet of Things,” this short new report from Daniel Castro & Jordan Misra of the Center for Data Innovation offers a good definition:

The “Internet of Things” refers to the concept that the Internet is no longer just a global network for people to communicate with one another using computers, but it is also a platform or devices to communicate electronically with the world around them. The result is a world that is alive with information as data flows from one device to another and is shared and reused for a multitude of purposes. Harnessing the potential of all of this data for economic and social good will be one of the primary challenges and opportunities of the coming decades.

The report continues on to offer a wide range of examples of new products and services that could fulfill this promise.

What I find somewhat worrying about the FTC’s sudden interest in the Internet of Things is that it opens to the door for some regulatory-minded critics to encourage preemptive controls on this exciting new wave of digital age innovation, based almost entirely on hypothetical worst-case scenarios they have conjured up. And plenty of those boogeyman scenarios are floating around already because the Internet of Things has created a potential perfect storm of four major information policy concerns: online safety, privacy, security, and even intellectual property issues. You can find concerned critics from each of those quarters already wringing their hands about what the Internet of Things means for their pet issues.

This is why in both my filing to the agency and in an upcoming eBook, I discuss the danger of letting “precautionary principle” reasoning trump the alternative paradigm of “permissionless innovation.” As I’ve explained here before as well in this longer law review article, the precautionary principle generally holds that, because a given new technology could pose some theoretical danger or risk in the future, public policies should control or limit the development of such innovations until their creators can prove that they won’t cause any harms.

The problem with letting such precautionary thinking guide policy is that it poses a serious threat to technological progress, economic entrepreneurialism, and human prosperity. Under an information policy regime guided at every turn by a precautionary principle, technological innovation would be impossible because of fear of the unknown; hypothetical worst-case scenarios would trump all other considerations. Social learning and economic opportunities become far less likely, perhaps even impossible, under such a regime. In practical terms, it means fewer services, lower quality goods, higher prices, diminished economic growth, and a decline in the overall standard of living.

For these reasons, to the maximum extent possible, the default position toward new forms of technological innovation should be innovation allowed. This policy norm is better captured in the well-known Internet ideal of “permissionless innovation,” or the general freedom to experiment and learn through trial-and-error experimentation.

Which leads back to the FTC workshop tomorrow. Which path will the agency head down? If the recent comments of FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez are any indication, there is certainly a healthy appetite for precautionary principle policymaking, at least as it pertains to “big data.” As I noted here in a critique of one of her recent speeches, Chairwoman Ramirez has offered “a rather succinct articulation of precautionary principle thinking as applied to modern data collection practices.”

She worried that “‘big data’ leads to the indiscriminate collection of personal information,” and that “the indiscriminate collection of data violates the First Commandment of data hygiene: Thou shall not collect and hold onto personal information unnecessary to an identified purpose. Keeping data on the offchance that it might prove useful is not consistent with privacy best practices,” she continued, and she went on to argue that “Information that is not collected in the first place can’t be misused” and then suggests a parade of horribles that will befall if such data collection is allowed at all.  So, it would not be surprising to see her extend that sort of precautionary reasoning to the Internet of Things since all those fears would apply equally to it.

A better approach can be found in some remarks delivered by Ramirez’s fellow FTC Commissioner Maureen K. Ohlhausen. In an important speech last month entitled, “The Internet of Things and the FTC: Does Innovation Require Intervention?” Ohlhausen noted that, “The success of the Internet has in large part been driven by the freedom to experiment with different business models, the best of which have survived and thrived, even in the face of initial unfamiliarity and unease about the impact on consumers and competitors.” This reflects Ohlhausen’s general embrace of permissionless innovation reasoning and a rejection of the precautionary principle mindset articulated by FTC Chairwoman Ramirez.

More importantly, in her speech, Commissioner Ohlhausen went on to highlight another crucial point about why the precautionary mindset is dangerous when enshrined into laws or regulations. Put simply, many elites and regulatory advocates ignore regulator irrationality or regulatory ignorance. That is, they spend so much time focused on the supposed irrationality of consumers and their openness to persuasion or “manipulation” that they ignore the more concerning problem of the  irrationality or ignorance of those who (incorrectly) believe they are always in the best position to solve every complex problem. Regulators simply do not possess the requisite knowledge to perfectly plan for every conceivable outcome. This is particularly true for information technology markets, which generally evolve much more rapidly than other sectors, and especially more rapidly that law itself.

That insight leads Ohlhausen to issue a wise word of caution to her fellow regulators:

It is [] vital that government officials, like myself, approach new technologies with a dose of regulatory humility, by working hard to educate ourselves and others about the innovation, understand its effects on consumers and the marketplace, identify benefits and likely harms, and, if harms do arise, consider whether existing laws and regulations are sufficient to address them, before assuming that new rules are required.

That is absolutely right and this again makes it clears how Commissioner Ohlhausen’s approach to technological innovation is consistent with the permissionless innovation approach while Chairwoman Ramirez’s is based on precautionary principle thinking. This conflict of visions dominates almost all policy debates over new technology today, even if it is not always on such vivid display as it is in this case.

This also makes it abundantly clear just what is at stake as the FTC embarks on its exploration of the Internet of Things. Will we continue to embrace and defend the philosophy that made America’s digital economy the envy of the world (i.e., “permissionless innovation”), or will we be paralyzed by fear of the unknown and hypothetical worst-case scenarios.  As I have said here many times before, living in constant fear of such worst-case scenarios — and premising public policy upon them — means that best-cast scenarios will never come about.

So, stay tuned. The fight over the Internet of Things promises to be one of the most important public policy battles in the technology policy arena for many years to come.

___________

This issue will be the focus of my forthcoming eBook, “Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom,” but until that is released, here are a few other recommended readings on the topic:

Blog posts:

“Who Really Believes in ‘Permissionless Innovation’?” Technology Liberation Front, March 4, 2013.
“What Does It Mean to ‘Have a Conversation’ about a New Technology?” Technology Liberation Front, May 23, 2013.
“Planning for Hypothetical Horribles in Tech Policy Debates,” Technology Liberation Front, August 6, 2013.
“On the Line between Technology Ethics vs. Technology Policy,” Technology Liberation Front, August 1, 2013.
“Edith Ramirez’s ‘Big Data’ Speech: Privacy Concerns Prompt Precautionary Principle Thinking,” Technology Liberation Front, August 29, 2013.
“When It Comes to Information Control, Everybody Has a Pet Issue & Everyone Will Be Disappointed,” Technology Liberation Front, April 29, 2011.
“Copyright, Privacy, Property Rights & Information Control: Common Themes, Common Challenges,” Technology Liberation Front, April 10, 2012.
“Can We Adapt to the Internet of Things?” IAPP Privacy Perspectives, June 19, 2013.

Testimony / Filings:

Senate Testimony on Privacy, Data Collection & Do Not Track, April 24, 2013
Comments of the Mercatus Center to the FTC in Privacy & Security Implications of the Internet of Things, May 31, 2013.
Comments of the Mercatus Center to FAA on commercial domestic drones (with Jerry Brito and Eli Dourado) , April 23, 2013.

Journal articles & book chapters:

“Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle,” Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology, Vol. 14, (2013): 309-386.
“The Pursuit of Privacy in a World Where Information Control Is Failing,” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Vol. 36, (2013): 409-455.
“A Framework for Benefit-Cost Analysis in Digital Privacy Debates,” George Mason University Law Review, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Summer 2013): 1055-1105.