Category Archives: Internet

Asymmetrical Surveillance

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Bruce Schneier writes,

welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the government accesses it at will without a warrant.

I was strongly influenced by David Brin’s The Transparent Society, which envisioned a world where surveillance is symmetric: you can be watched by corporations and government, but in turn you can watch them. The current state, as described by Schneier, is asymmetrical.

My own view is that we need a new set of checks and balances for the 21st century. I articulated this about ten years ago in The Constitution of Surveillance. Comments on that essay would be welcome. However, please compare my proposals to the status quo or to alternative proposals, not to nirvana.

Patents in Reality

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Petra Moser writes,

Historical evidence suggests that in countries with patent laws, the majority of innovations occur outside of the patent system. Countries without patent laws have produced as many innovations as countries with patent laws during some time periods, and their innovations have been of comparable quality. Even in countries with relatively modern patent laws, such as the mid-nineteenth-century United States, most inventors avoided patents and relied on alternative mechanisms when these were feasible.

From the latest Journal of Economic Perspectives. Timothy Taylor shares the table of contents.

Recall Alex Tabarrok’s patent napkin.

The Wireless Last Mile

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According to the Washington Post, the FCC seems finally to be coming around to the idea that the spectrum ought to be used for digital communication. In 2002, I wrote about the issue for TCS Daily and for the Liberty Fund site. The latter essay began,

Imagine what the Internet might do for you if high-speed access were available anywhere and everywhere. You could access the Internet in all of the rooms of your house, or in your yard, or in your car, or on the beach, as easily as listening to the radio today. Imagine that this connectivity is at broadband speed, meaning equal to or better than the download speeds of cable or digital subscriber lines (DSL). Now, imagine something else—this pervasive, high-speed Internet access available for a small monthly fee—or even for free.

I believe we would have arrived at this much faster had there been no FCC.

Seeing Broadband Like a State

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A commenter on my post on Why Large corporations? asks

Any thoughts on subscription tv and/or broadband service? There are obviously economies of scale for the providers. But, how does that impact consumers?

I think it is relatively easy to tell a story in which the state prefers less competition. For one thing, they can tax the heck of out of broadband service. For another, the process of awarding cable franchises fattened many a local politician’s wallet, because the rent-seeking behavior was so heavy.

Technically, I believe it is possible to imagine a world in which spectrum is not allocated to specific uses. Instead, devices are designed to share spectrum, automatically roaming to find the best available band on which to communicate. This approach would take the FCC totally out of the picture. It might allow wireless broadband Internet access without people having to sign up for service from a big telecom company. Not surprisingly, the FCC is not pushing this. From a political perspective, the status quo is much preferable.

Look, maybe I am paranoid. I picked up on the Open Spectrum idea years ago from lefty-techies, and as far as I know they have not backed away from their view that this approach to spectrum usage is feasible. If they are correct, then broadband Internet might very well be a poster child for an industry where large corporations emerge because of government policy rather than any inherent efficiency.

Adverse Consequences of the Internet

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Jaron Lanier warns of them, in a story by Ron Rosenbaum.

he [Lanier] singled out one standout aspect of the new web culture—the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websites—as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself. At the time, this objection seemed a bit extreme. But he saw anonymity as a poison seed. The way it didn’t hide, but, in fact, brandished the ugliness of human nature beneath the anonymous screen-name masks. An enabling and foreshadowing of mob rule, not a growth of democracy, but an accretion of tribalism.

Read the whole article. Some thoughts.

1. Lanier’s view that Google and other companies that aggregate user information (in his example, to train Google’translation algorithm) are taking unfair advantage of those users was not at all persuasive to me.

2. His concern about the down side of anonymity is one that I share.

3. Suppose we use the three-axis model to examine anonymity. For a conservative, the concern would be that anonymity would encourage man’s barbarous nature. Thus, Lanier’s argument should resonate well with conservatives. For a libertarian, anonymity represents a way to evade government control. Hence, along the freedom-coercion axis it is a plus. For a progressive, anonymity is good if it is used by the weak and bad if it is used by the strong. Note that in the story Lanier emphasizes different axes on different issues (that is by no means a bad thing).

4. Facebook cuts against the grain of anonymity on the Internet. I think that this is one of the most interesting and important aspects of Facebook, and I have not come across any commentary about it.