Category Archives: Internet

Concerning intellectual property

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Brink Lindsey and Daniel Takash write,

Eliminate patents for software and business methods. One crucial requirement for any workable system of property rights is the ability to define boundaries. The expansion of patent law in recent decades to include software and business methods runs afoul of this requirement. These patents currently make up a substantial fraction of all patents granted, and instead of serving to encourage innovation they have created a legal minefield that innovators now have to cross.

This proposal sounds sensible, as do the others that they offer.

When I think about this issue, I think in terms of two questions about the originator (who claims intellectual property in our current system) and the follower (who is prevented from using the originator’s work).

1. How much effort did the originator have to go through? In the case of pharmaceuticals, these days the effort required is usually a lot. In the case of new business methods, more of the effort goes into the execution than into the conception.

2. How much effort did the follower not have to undertake because of what the first inventor did? Again, the case of a pharmaceutical, this is a lot. In the case of a new business method (Amazon’s “one-click ordering” is a widely-used example), I would say not so much.

I guess the ideal for me would be if the follower had to compensate the originator according to the answers to these two questions.

Marc Andreessen is a fast talker

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and I really enjoyed listening to his half-hour podcast about the Internet’s past and the outlook for cryptocurrencies.

Essentially everything he says about the Internet explosion in 1993-1995 resonates with me, especially his discussion of how hard it was for an ordinary civilian to get Internet access in 1994.*

When he talks about what it was like trying to persuade legacy financial firms to use the Internet, it also resonates.**

I also agree that the advertising model is the cause of much bad juju on the Internet.

But I hear Marc as saying (and he talks very fast, so I may have this wrong) that cryptocurrencies will enable micropayments, and micropayments will enable content providers to ditch the advertising model. If that is indeed what he is saying, then I disagree. I think that the main barrier to micropayments is not technological. It is psychological–what Clay Shirky dubbed mental transaction costs. I have talked about this several times, for instance in this essay.

*I quit my job at Freddie Mac launched a commercial web site in April of 1994. I did so by going to an Internet publishing start-up called Electric Press, where at their site one of the partners taught me the rudiments of HTML–rudiments being pretty much all there were at that point. He coded up the first pages I wanted for my site, registered the domain name, set up the server, and loaded the pages onto the server.

Then I wanted to be able to access the Internet myself, so that I could edit pages, add new pages, and so on. Previously, I had only accessed it through online services like AOL which did not have web access. There was a service you could use through a library that offered a text-only browser called Lynx, but I had only seen a graphical web browser twice:
once when some of us at Freddie went to visit a General Electric research site and while the higher-ups were having a pow-wow a tech guy took me to the basement to show me Mosaic (developed by Marc) and the second time was when I got my training session at Electric Press.

Electric Press was not in the business of helping individuals get on the Net, so they referred me to an Internet Service Provider, called us.net. They sent me a floppy disk. I could not install that software properly. So I called us.net, and the President of that small start-up (he may have been the sole employee) drove to my office during a torrential downpour helped me load the software on to my PC.

Rather than take this as a clue that the Internet was not for ordinary civilians, I kept at it, waiting for the day when getting on the Internet would be easy. That day arrived in August of 1995, when Microsoft finally released Windows 95 (which they had been promising since 1994) and America Online added the Web to their Internet offerings. That is when the traffic on my web site went from a trickle to a tsunami.

**I convinced a large mortgage banker to put up some pages on my site. They sent me a draft contract which read, in part, “Arnold Kling, who owns a service known as the Internet. . .” If only.

Social media platforms as utilities

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James D. Miller writes,

imagine electric companies stood up for progressive values by cutting off power to homes with pro-Trump yard signs. Even staunch supporters of free markets would likely object to these restrictions on expression by privately owned enterprises. When we examine why power companies shouldn’t be able to make service contingent on not violating political sensibilities, we see that analogous arguments should stop social media giants from exiling political dissidents.

. . .if an electric utility decided to just exclude a few customers, it would be extremely costly for a competing power company to sell energy to those people and the former customers would likely go unpowered.

Similarly, he argues that if your speech is cut off by Facebook, no competitor is going to jump in and offer you equivalent service. The network effect gives Facebook monopoly power.

My thoughts:

1. What Google or Facebook can take away from you is your ability to easily reach certain audiences. That does not interfere with your right to free speech. Just because you have a right to free speech does not mean that you are entitled to the listeners you may desire.

2. I think it is the wrong business model for Google or Facebook to shut people down. I think it would be better to allow each listener to decide who he or she wants to hear. If I had sufficient control over my Facebook account, I would not see anybody’s political posts. (As it is, the best I can do is unfollow somebody who goes overboard with political posts. I done that.)

3. If I were in charge of Facebook, I would run it very differently. As I’ve said on a number of occasions, I would aim toward a subscription model, not an advertising model. This in turn would facilitate another major difference, which is that instead of having what you see determined by a secret algorithm, I would give you tools to set your own priorities.

4. Assigning Facebook or Google the status of utilities would only serve to entrench them, making it less likely that my ideas in (3) or any other major innovations will ever be seen.

Regulate big tech?

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Peggy Noonan writes,

In February 2018 Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein of Wired wrote a deeply reported piece that mentioned the 2016 meeting. It was called so that the company could “make a show of apologizing for its sins.” A Facebook employee who helped plan it said part of its goal—they are clever at Facebook and knew their mark!—was to get the conservatives fighting with each other. “They made sure to have libertarians who wouldn’t want to regulate the platform and partisans who would.” Another goal was to leave attendees “bored to death” by a technical presentation after Mr. Zuckerberg spoke.

It all depends on Congress, which has been too stupid to move in the past and is too stupid to move competently now. That’s what’s slowed those of us who want reform, knowing how badly they’d do it.

Yet now I find myself thinking: I don’t care. Do it incompetently, but do something.

On this issue, I am in the libertarian camp. It is not just that government regulation will be incompetent. In the end, it will lead to concentration of power that is tighter and more dangerous than what we have now. The more power we cede to government over the Internet, the less open and free it is going to be.

Rooting for government to regulate tech is like rooting for Putin to kill off Russian oligarchs. The oligarchs may be no-goodniks, but Putin is not going to make Russia a better place by killing them.

I am also wary of the government taking the initiative to stop robocalls. It seems almost certain that any government solution is going to involve enhanced technology for tracking individuals on the Internet and for censorship. Eventually, it is going to be used for those purposes.

All I want are spam filters on my phone. Imagine an app that sent into voicemail a call from any phone number that is not in my contacts. How hard is that to do?

UPDATE: not hard at all, according to this article. On an iPhone, just deploy do not disturb, but with exceptions for you contacts.

Open Settings > Do Not Disturb.
Tap Allow Calls From.
You have several options, but one is All Contacts.

Thanks to a commenter on this post for the pointer.

Why does the Google News algorithm lean left?

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Nicholas Diakopoulos writes,

Our data shows that 62.4 percent of article impressions were from sources rated by that research as left-leaning, whereas 11.3 percent were from sources rated as right-leaning. 26.3 percent of impressions were from news sources that didn’t have ratings. But even if that last set of unknown impressions happened to be right-leaning, the trend would still be clear: A higher proportion of left-leaning sources appear in Top Stories [on Google].

This reinforces my own impression. But I don’t think that the Google News algorithm is constructed in a sinister way. Suppose that the algorithm is designed to put at the top the stories that users are most likely to click on. To the extent that Google’s users tend to prefer left-leaning news sources, this will lead the algorithm to highlight those sources.

Moreover, the news outlets themselves are driven to appeal to a progressive audience. Progressives want the WaPo to give them news with a slant that makes Trump’s impeachment seem imminent, an the WaPo obliges.

In short, I suspect that the reason Google News promotes so much left-leaning outrage porn is that a lot of people want it.

Worth re-reading on Internet regulation

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I recently noticed that one of the most favorably-viewed essays of mine on medium is the one about How the Internet Turned Bad. It says many things, including

I compare IETFs with government agencies this way:

— IETFs are staffed by part-time or limited-term volunteers, whose compensation comes from their regular employers (universities, corporations, government agencies). Agencies are staffed by full-time permanent employees, using taxpayer dollars.

— IETFs solve the problems that they work on. Agencies perpetuate the problems that they work on.

— A particular group of engineers in an IETF disbands once it has solved its problem. An agency never disbands.

When I hear calls for government regulation of the Internet, to me that sounds like a step backward. The IETF approach to regulation seems much better than the agency approach.

The whole essay is worth a re-read.

Too little, too late?

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In the WSJ, David Pierce writes,

For $10 a month, you get access to what Apple says is more than 300 titles. I counted 251 magazines in the library, from “ABC Soaps in Depth” to “Zoomer.” Every popular magazine I looked for was available in some form. Besides Wall Street Journal articles, the rest of News+ includes content from the Los Angeles Times plus digital publications like Vox and theSkimm.

This sounds like what I argued for 18 years ago.

Pierce concludes,

As it is now, though, News+ feels like a product several years too late.

Tax robocalls?

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Roger Meiners proposes

Call it the Penny for Sanity Tax: a 1-cent tax on every call made. Fifty billion robocalls would cost $500 million—a powerful incentive to stop.

I would add that you could have a feature where the recipient of a call could press a button to forgive the tax. That way, the tax would fall even less on legitimate callers.

But my guess is that the cost of collecting the tax would be prohibitive. Many robocalls originate in foreign countries. I saw a story in the WSJ about the FCC’s collection rate on fines that it has levied against known violators of the law. It’s pathetically low.

My suggestion would be to offer a prize for a firm that develops an effective phone spam filter. I might define an effective spam filter as one that does not delay calls for more than 1/4 of a second, that filters out at least 95 percent of robocalls that get through existing filters (such as they are) at major phone service providers, and that filters out no more than 1 out of 1000 legitimate calls.

Maybe the government could offer the prize. Or maybe someone will just put up a GoFundMe and see if those of us who hate robocalls will put money where are mouths are.

Cultural mixing watch

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Elisabeth Braw writes (WSJ),

For a model, look to Finland. For nearly six decades, the Finnish government has offered the National Defense Course, a quarterly boot camp for leaders from the armed forces, government, industry and civil society. “The beauty is that every sector of society is present,” explains retired Lt. Gen. Arto Räty, a former director of the National Defense Course. “Yes, the course is run by the armed forces, but it’s not a military course. It’s a national security course.”

Without the course, many of the participants would never cross paths. The course has allowed Finland to bridge the national-security gap between civil society and the armed forces that exists in most other developed countries.

Recall that in my annotation of the Cowen-Andreessen-Horowitz podcast. I wrote

In the case of government and tech, I think that the highest potential for mixing is in applications related to the military and to security.