I finished reading Wendy M. Grossman’s Net Wars, which came out in 1997. The specific examples are no longer interesting, but the larger issues seem rather current. A couple of interesting excerpts:
p. 7:
I’d argue instead that what makes a community is a mark of difference between the community members and the rest of the world and, more importantly, an external threat, real or imagined.
…The Net started like that, as a loose group of people who all used computers but knew that other people were desperately bored by them.
p. 160:
an interesting battle lies ahead between two net.obsessions: freedom of information and privacy. Commercial interests don’t want to give their information away; if advertising is going to pay all those costs, then Net users must be prepared to give up their demographic secrets. If users want privacy and anonymity, they may have to pay extra for it.
This distinguishing trait of kinship is called ‘greenbeard’ in the parlance of evolutionary sociobiology.
People who say “information wants to be free,” rarely add, “including your information.”
What we get now is a kind of automatic, passive, and continuous barter between two valuable things that people are reluctant to capture in multiple, formal, monetized transactions. Indeed, reluctant to even think about, preferring to maintain a state of ignorance and willful blindness regarding what is going on in the black box behind the scenes.
It’s kind of like keeping funds in a money market account (or I suppose passive ‘investing’ more generally). It’s too challenging or otherwise infeasible for most people to scrutinize institutional activity and to frequently reassess and renegotiate terms. And anyway, what banks or funds do with the money – or what internet companies do with the data – is necessarily obscure.
So most people adopt a “Big Brother must protect us from ourselves in dealings of this type and with these entities” attitude. I can’t tell if the bank is solvent or behaving properly and prudently, so I want to outsource that activity to the state which not only claims to be able to tell whether the banks are doing that or not, but which also has the power to regulate and make them act the ‘right’ way.
I think Cowen is right that this attitude will be extended to the powerful, quasi-monopolistic internet companies, with some new FDIC / CFPB agency probably being set up to guard privacy and regulate content, so that people don’t have to it for themselves. We already see movement in the direction of this trend in Europe, with the “right to be forgotten” and the new General Data Protection Regulation.
In addition to privacy, another benefit of paid services is that they tend to weed out “trolls.” As a result, conversations tend to be far more civil and in-depth.
Perhaps there’s a “tragedy of the commons” at work with free Internet services.
Depends on the forum. The most valuable people on Facebook are the ones that don’t value Facebook that much.
If say I want to organize a house warming party for a few dozen friends the fact that we are all on Facebook is very valuable. If Facebook charged I would have some friends I wanted to invite that weren’t on Facebook, making it useless. However, I tend to prefer those friends that use Facebook only in the manner I do. Hyper users that obsess over it tend to be a bit unbalanced, and are probably the ones more likely to pay if it were fee based.
The problem of filtering participants in a somewhat public internet discussion for civility, quality, intelligence, forthrightness, and productivity is both fundamental and profoundly difficult.
In my experience, there is no good and easy filter, and that includes “pay to play.” Part of the problem of course is that socially powerful groups don’t want the problem to be easily solvable and will actively work against it, because control over public opinion is both priceless and requires policing of acceptable messages, and thus precisely because solving of the above problem would allow the broadcasting of influential messages that could undermine their hold on power and agenda.
The trouble with paid services is that most of them mean lack of anonymity (including from the forum manager). Verifiable real life identity means consequences for speech, but it’s a double-edge sword. It helps with excluding people guilty of bad behavior (e.g., spam) but hurts when hoping to hear a wide range of opinion, because certain opinions are effectively actionable heresy and lives can be ruined. That includes opinions which are ok today, but not tomorrow (something that is hard to predict), and even willful misinterpretations in attempts to cast someone in the least favorable light.
That unfortunately leads to presumptive heuristics like mine when I say I never really trust anyone writing under their own name when writing on a controversial topic.
This problem is nothing new. Even the founding fathers frequently used pseudonyms, and even when they weren’t in danger of being (legitimately) accused of treason. So, insulating people from consequences when they cannot write anonymously – such as giving judges lifetime appointments or giving professors tenure – is also an old technique. But, again, an imperfect one. Judges have power, and freedom from consequences means that power can be used and abused, thus inevitably abused.
In the case of professors, tenure could be used to express opinions the expression of which is effectively prohibited to those without similar security, but they usually either don’t want to, or feel they still can’t because they still rely on the favor of a harshly judgmental social scene, which defeats the whole purported purpose of the institution, which is reduced to something more akin to a very nice perquisite of seniority.
This is very true and we have to understand the issues of privacy are only going to get larger as the continued move to digital world leaves lots of traces that easily tracked. Just think if the Feds cared how much your money can be traced. With the right warrants, it would be easy for the Feds to see how much you buy from Amazon, Verizon, Walgreen prescriptions and the local grocery store. The trials of Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort are going to bare this out for the population.
1) Look at the latest updates about Michael Cohen transactions that AT&T other companies completely wasted on somebody who claimed his close relationship with the President. (Ford got really lucky not doing ‘business’ with Cohen. Also there will be scandal on how Michael Avenatti got this information. Seriously how Avenatti got this information might get him arrested.)
2) Now think about Manafort trial where the Mueller team lays out the details of $30 – $40M of money laundering against Manafort.
3) Just look at the Dennis Hastert case for another example of how much the Feds can track your bank transactions.
(Of course, in the modern world I do believe one reason for the decline of crime is it is extremely costly to make illegal transactions and how much less cash is being circulated in the economy.)
If you grew up before cable TV, like I did, you never paid for your entertainment content. Music was AM/FM radio and was advertiser supported. TV was advertiser supported. In the U.S. , we didn’t even have a TV fee like England did.
The internet just followed the model already laid down by ad-supported entertainment. And yes, they know a lot about you because it makes ads more valuable. Internet ads still aren’t worth much, since most users are blind to them.
If Netflix can charge, eventually everyone else will too, and that will be the end of advertising, at least to upscale consumers who can afford to block it or pay not to get it. Like over the air TV and radio, ad-supported stuff might hang on for markets that don’t care and won’t pay.
Keeping private and paying your way go together.
Think Telegram, the asset swap network with social media. Everyone is anonymous, and everyone can swap assets. The design goal to to have all your personal privacy buried in a plastic card, or dongle. The privacy mechanism is being produced for sale as we speak, but you will have to wait a bit as it gets integrated in the Telegram swap net.
How many Free Marketeers
does it take
to change
a light bulb
??
none! The Free Market will do it… << my favorite old Libertarian joke.
The market will come to reasonable trade offs, over time, without much gov't regulation. However, that time might well be years, possibly still a couple of decades — since the changing tech & company choices ensure there is no "equilibrium".
Gov't regulation promises both answers to the problems, plus speed. Benign dictators seldom do any decisions that couldn't be done by the market, but are able to do them much more quickly – without slowing down for much feedback.
The internet is much better and different than 20 years ago; it will be less different in the coming years, yet with surprising new cool stuff. It will be better if gov't does less — and user voters do more. But lazy voters want the benefits they want with the least effort, and often at the lowest cost, and often without much caring as much about their privacy as they should. Because they don't want to have to choose so much, so often.
So more opt-out / opt-in regulation may be the smarter type to support, rather than none, so as to allow more space for divergent consumers to make more other choices.
I'm now using Opera, and trying to reduce my Google/ chrome and other tracker traces, but not obsessive about it. Brave is not yet as good. For browsers. Changing gmail address is harder, due to legacy!