Coevolving with new technology

A little bit of history

I remember the sinking feeling I had when the Communications Decency Act (CDA) passed, back in the 1990s. I was stunned. A veil was ripped off for me. I had grown up with the U.S. government doing lots of things I didn't understand but that sounded like things that were going to protect me. Our president was building up our defenses while also negotiating with the leader on the other side for disarmament and peace. (Though, our side didn't disarm?) I heard tales about how recreational drugs were going to destroy us, and the government was running these big campaigns to protect us all, because one taste is all it takes before your life will be destroyed. I was enough of a STEM student to be very confused why "drugs" will be the end of your life if you have one single taste, but everywhere around me people were drinking and smoking and not having such a bad result; how do you draw the line for such a thing? I went along with it, though, and sort of thought that smarter people than me must know the reasons for all this. Plus, as Paul Graham says, I was mindful of What you can't say. These topics I mention would get you instantly socially ostracized if you weren't on the right side of them.

The CDA was different, in that it covered a topic I do know about. I knew enough about computer software to see that one individual could set up and run a bulletin board system that could then host a billion people using it. I could picture how this would work, and whenever people talked about social forums, my mind's eye would fill in the gaps of what they are saying with a number of the details--servers, networks, databases, and so on. In the world of the CDA, these rooms are supposed to be monitored, so the picture in my mind can no longer be implemented by one person. The CDA vision was that a chat room would have maybe 1 chaperone for every 1000 users, so to support a chat room with a billion users, you would need one developer and one million chaperones. The CDA vision would make a basic chat room literally one million times more expensive to run than it was before the CDA.

The cost to humanity can be very high. I can't say what we are missing from social networking, because we live in a post-CDA world, and we don't know what we are missing out on by raising the bar on who can even run an experiment. I can given an example from another kind of high, however. Research and limited trials have begun, today, for mind-altering substances including a parade of the villains from my 1980s classrooms: ketamine, psilocybin, and LSD. This is a complex subject, but imagine for a moment that the new trials are at least sometimes heading in the right direction. If that is true, then the American people lost 60 years where we could not access something that, it is now looking like, can turn people's lives completely around. 60 years is a long time. My brother was born and then died during that 60-year window of dark-out.

When I think about how to regulate AI, we are in a similar situation to chatrooms of the 90s or psychedelics in the 60s. We don't yet know what is possible. We don't know what people will try, or what the results will be. Some of those experiments will lead to good results, and some of them will lead to bad results. How do we pursue these experiments while keeping ourselves safe?

My general sense, based on the history of technology and of governance to date, is that it's preliminary to have any blanket AI regulation right now that can do more good than harm. Instead, it is better to wait for those slow-burn problems that take a while to happen, but that don't get phased out all by themselves. Let me paint a picture of what this can look like, from my point of view as a technologist for four decades.

The concept of coevolution

I believe we can think of AI-based technology as co-evolving with humanity. We can think of technology as moving forward in a way akin to evolution, and we can approach our responses to that evolution based on our experience with other instances of coevolution that are by now very familiar.

The mycelial network. I enjoyed the new form of space travel in Star Trek: Discovery, but I have learned that there is a real-world mycelial network that is even more interesting. It turns out that fungi are everywhere. Tree root systems of the real world are permeated by mycelia that stabilize the soil and provide vital nutrients. All living plants include endophytic fungi that they can't live without. The larger ecosystem would not function as we know it without fungi recycling nutrients from dead plants and animals.

The living world would simply not exist without this weird third kingdom of life that permeates it in many different ways. Imagine, now, a national government trying to regulate the evolution of fungi, and the challenges they would face. We need fungi for human life as we know it to exist, but also fungi can harm us. There's no one simple way that fungi interact with us and with our environment, so there's also no one simple rule that fungi need to follow in order to be safe for us. In a territory like this, the perspective that seems best to me is one of growing together. We are here, and fungi are here, and we need to move forward by inches, with diversity in each kingdom and some way to respond if a change looks harmful.

The Butlerian Jihad. Movies like Dune are always grasping for a reason to make heroes with fantastically advanced technology still resort to low-grade sword fighting. In the case of the Dune universe, the in-story answer is called the Butlerian Jihad, and it's based on a real-world novelist named Samuel Butler. Butler explored the idea that the machines around us are developing from a selection mechanism that is similar to the natural selection of Charles Darwin.

Butler didn't limit this idea to AI. Butler meant the idea very broadly as applying to all of the machines we create and market to each other in order to automate our lives. People are always making machines that don't work very well; for a humorous example, check out Thoren Bradley's review of a 4-way splitting wedge. The machines that catch on are produced more widely and become the basis of the next round of machines. Any software engineer can tell you that new software is created by modifying old software. As a result, the development of machines follows the two ingredients that are needed for natural selection to occur: new entities are replicated from old ones, with a modest rate of mutation; and entities are selected for continued existence by some kind of selection criteria.

Butler's idea seems right to me. Machines are evolving along with us, and it doesn't really change anything that newer machines are doing tasks that used to be things only a human could do. On the contrary, the most helpful machines for humanity are those that remove some of our toil.

Of these two ideas, fungi are the scarier one to me. I know how to turn off a machine, but fungi work at a molecular level that cannot be directly controlled. And yet, fungi have not just gone okay but are an essential part of the world as we know it. Life can exist without fungi, but humans wouldn't be there. Yet, both fungi and machines have so far made human life much, much better than it ever was before.

How to regulate coevolving systems

If we follow the idea of coevolution, then we can think through the conditions where a U.S. intervention is likely to help more than it hurts.

Above all, one of the biggest reasons that we can feel safe about fungi, and less safe about other things, is that fungi exist in a large, diverse ecosystem where any damage will have a limited distance it can travel. It scares me more than any specific technological risk that several categories of technology are near monocultures right now. Chrome, Firefox, and Edge are the only real desktop web browsers; Facebook is ascendant for a certain kind of social media; Gmail is about the only email reader; and Amazon is by far the online market for physically shipped goods. These companies can cause tremendous harm with any mistakes they make, because those mistakes will propagate to all 8 billion of us within seconds of being launched. Monocultures are death traps, and I worry that we have so many of them right now.

For specific technological developments, it seems like there are three categories to bear in mind.

• In some cases, direct contact with a human and the new machine will quickly kill both of them. In a case like this, there's nothing useful for the regulation to do, because the machine will go away on its own all by itself. An example would be the Clippy assistant for Microsoft Word. It died all on its own.
• Many developments are unambiguously simple and positive. For these, as well, any attempt to regulate it is just going to reduce some of the benefits we gain. An example would be the original Google Web Search. Unless you've used some intranet search engine such as Atlassian's, you may have a hard time imagining how bad the web search engines used to be. It's a very good thing for all of us that Page and Brin were able to do their web search experiments without needing a lot of approvals. Imagine what kind of search engine we would have if it took 5-10 years to get an experiment approved, and if the search engine were only able to present results that incorporate today's suite of politically correct speech and representation. It would never have gotten off the ground, and very likely most people would assume that an effective web searcher just can't be made.
• That leaves the category that is neither of the above. Something that is harmful, but not harmful enough that people immediately balk in terror and shut the whole thing down voluntarily. An example in my mind is the slot machine. The slot machine doesn't do anything dramatic like shoot out laser beams or organize armies to go marching around. Yet, it does enough harm, to a significant number of people, that I would say there is a significant practical benefit that a little bit of regulation could establish.

Regulating slot machines is tough after the fact, but take a moment to imagine if someone had tried to regulate them before they took off. Imagine looking at a slot machine before they really caught on, and imagine deciding just based on its design that it might cause some harm. I posit that essentially no one could effectively figure out what the rules should be. The negative effects of slot machines cannot be understood from the technology, which after all is pretty simple. To understand the effects, and therefore to know what to do about them, one has to reason about things like: human psychology; the kinds of establishments that slot machines end up at; the kind of clientele that end up at these establishments; and the larger market developments that would lead to situations of the mass-produced slot machines that have a large enough effect to be worth doing anything about. Based on all of that, a lot of the regulation wouldn't even be about the technology itself; some of the slot machine regulation on the books today is about fairness and about the maximum rate of money that the player will lose. It seems better to me, though, to do things like require payment up front, and to limit payments to once per hour; likewise, it seems likely helpful to put limits on the visual effects and on the advertising claims that surround these machines. It's tricky and is subtle, and it can only be done after the fact, and even after the fact, a lot of the attempts aren't going to go well. I would say that even today, after decades of tinkering, regulation around slot machines is not yet really figured out.

The good news is that slot machines haven't destroyed the world just yet. They have been a slow burn, long in development, because anything that was hyper-bad simply wouldn't have caught on at all. As well, our existing social immune systems are carrying a lot of the slack. Each of us that sees someone else in the herd get caught up in a gambling addiction is quick to raise an alarm to the rest of us. The regulation can be better, but it's more than fast enough to settle in and spend multiple decades working out what that regulation should look like.

It strikes me that generative AI can be thought of the same way. Lots of things will be really good, and we don't want to wait one year to get them, much less 5, 10, or, based on U.S. history, 60 years to get the benefits. Lots of things will be super-bad, and almost everyone will stop using them immediately. Lots of things will seem somewhat bad, and most people will stop using them, but a few will carry on; that small fraction is actually good for humanity as a whole, because it increases diversity in the gene pool. Then in some tiny remaining pie slice, after all the previous cases are covered, there will be a harmful technology that wasn't weeded out by itself and that wasn't stopped by our more general-purpose defense mechanisms. That tiny pie slice is where regulation can help, and it won't be machines shooting laser beams. It will be something we haven't thought of, that hardly anyone is talking about, because we haven't even tried yet and don't have any information to go on.

Surveillance states are possible

While clamping down on private encryption is bad policy, both for the economy and for privacy, I don't think it's technically impossible to implement. Let me draw a couple of comparisons to show why.

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As background, here is Cory Doctorow explaining, like many other commenters, that the Internet is too wild and wooly for major governments to possibly implement widespread surveillance:

For David Cameron's proposal to work, he will need to stop Britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of his jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.

With cellular phones, any phone that uses the relevant chunks of bandwidth is legally required to use certain protocols that are registered with the government. This has been bad economically, in that the telephone network has developed much more slowly than the relatively unregulated Internet. However, being bad economically has never exactly stopped rules from being put into place.

Yes, you can rig up a wireless network in your garage that breaks the rules. However, as soon as you try to use it over a wide geographic region, you're going to be relatively easy to catch. You will have to either broadcast a strong signal, or make use of the existing telephone backbone, or both.

To draw another comparison, consider the income tax. Income tax is easy to avoid with small operations, because you can just pay cash under the table. However, larger operations have to file a variety of paperwork, and the interlocking paperwork is what will get you. The more you take part in the above-ground economy, the harder it is to spin a big enough web of lies to get out of your taxes.

To get back to Internet protocols, it will certainly always be possible to break the rules on an isolated darknet you assemble in your garage. However, as soon as you send packets across the Internet backbone, any use of unregistered protocols is going to be very easy to detect.

To rub the point in further, don't forget that the authorities have no requirement to go after everyone who they detect doing something fishy. If they are anything like the American tax service, they'll randomly (or politically....) select people to target, and those people will then be required to undergo an audit at their own expense. If they survive the audit, the tax service just says "I'm sorry" and moves on to the next victim. Because of selective enforcement, law enforcement has no requirement to go after everyone using illegal encryption.

Of course all this is bad for the economy and for humanity's development at large. Don't oppose a cryptography clampdown because it's technically impossible, or you will look just as silly as the people that say DNS takedowns are technically impossible. Rather, oppose a cryptography clampdown because we don't want to live like that. We want to have private communications, and we want to allow innovation on the Internet. It's brand new, and if we clamp down on it, it will ossify in its current state the same way that the telephone network did.

FCC inches away from neutrality

The FCC’s latest proposal for network neutrality rules creates space for broadband carriers to offer “paid prioritization” services.[11] While the sale of such prioritization has been characterized as a stark and simple sorting into “fast” and “slow” traffic lanes,[12] the offering is somewhat more subtle: a paid prioritization service allows broadband carriers to charge content providers for priority when allocating the network’s shared resources, including the potentially scarce bandwidth over the last-mile connection between the Internet and an individual broadband subscriber. Such allocation has historically been determined by detached—or “neutral”—algorithms. The Commission’s newly proposed rules, however, would allow carriers to subject this allocation to a content provider’s ability and willingness to pay.

That's from a review on Standard Law Review a few months ago. I think this evolution in the FCC's approach will benefit the public.

It seems important to consider realistic developments of the Internet. Here's a thought experiment I've used for a long time, and that seems to be happening in practice. Try to imagine what goes wrong if a site like YouTube or Netflix pays--with its own money--to install some extra network infrastructure in your neighborhood, but only allows its own packets to go across that infrastructure. Doing so is a flagrant violation of network neutrality, because packets from one site will get to you faster than packets from another site. Yet, I can't see the harm. It seems like a helpful development, and just the sort of thing that might get squashed by an overly idealistic commitment to neutrality.

As a follow-on question, what changes if instead of Netflix building the infrastructure itself, it pays Comcast to do it? It's the same from a consumer's view as before, only now the companies in question are probably saving money. Thus, it's even better for the general public, yet it's an even more flagrant violation of network neutrality. In this scenario, Netflix is straight-up paying for better access.

It seems that the FCC now agrees with that general reasoning. They not only support content delivery networks in general, but now they are going to allow generic ISPs to provide their own prioritized access to sites that pay a higher price for it.

I believe "neutrality" is not the best precise goal to go for. Rather, it's better to think about a more general notion of anti-trust.

Is Internet access a utility?

I forwarded a link about Network Neutrality to Google Plus, and it got a lot of comments about how Internet access should be treated like a utility. I think that's a reasonable perspective to start with. What we all want, I think, is to have Internet access itself be a baseline service, and that Internet services on top of it have fierce competition.

In addition to considering the commonalities with Internet access and utilities, we should also note the differences.

One difference is that a utility is for a monopoly, but Internet access is not monopolized. You can only put one road in any physical location, and I will presume for the sake of argument that you don't want to have multiple power grids in the same locale. Internet access is not a monopoly, though! At least in Atlanta, we have cable, DSL, WiMax, and several cellular providers. We have more high-speed Internet providers than supermarket chains.

Another difference is that utilities lock down technology change to a snail's pace. With roads and power grids, the technology already provides near-maximum service for what is possible, so this doesn't matter. With telephony, progress has been locked down for decades, and I think we all lost out because of that; the telephone network could have been providing Skype-like services a long time ago, but as a utility they kept doing things the same way as always. Meanwhile, the Internet is changing rapidly. It would be really bad to stop progress on Internet access right now, the way we did with telephony several decades ago.

I believe a better model than utilities would be supermarkets. Like Internet providers, supermarkets carry a number of products that are mostly produced by some other company. I think it has gone well for everyone that supermarkets to have tremendous freedom in their content selection, pricing, promotional activities, hours, floor layout, buggies, and checkout technology.

In contrast to what some commenters ask, I do not have any strong expectation about what Comcast will or won't try. I would, however, like them to be free to experiment. I've already switched from Comcast and don't even use them right now. If Comcast is locked into their current behavior, then that does nothing for me good or bad. If they can experiment, maybe they will come up with something better.

In principle, I know that smart people disagree on this, but I currently don't see anything fundamentally wrong with traffic shaping. If my neighbor is downloading erotica 24/7, then I think it is reasonable that Comcast give my Game of Thrones episode higher priority. The fact that Comcast has implemented this badly in the past is troubling, but that doesn't mean the next attempt won't work better. I'd like them to be free to try.

Changing views toward recorded music

I frequently encounter the following argument, in this case voiced by Terrence Eden:

Imagine, just for a moment, that your Sony DVD player would only play Sony Movies' films. When you decided to buy a new DVD player from Samsung, none of those media files would work on your new kit without some serious fiddling. That's the walled garden that so many companies are now trying to drag us into. And I think it stinks.

I agree as far as it goes. Many people are involved in walled gardens, and they aren't as good as open versions. I am particularly worried about the rise of Facebook, a site that is openly dismissive of rights such as privacy and pseudonymity.

I am less worried about walled gardens for music because I think about music differently. Let me describe two relevant changes.

First, copies of music are now very easy to replace. Aside from the price being low, the time is now instant: you can click on a song on Amazon or iTunes and have that song right now. As such, the value of a stockpile of music copies is much lower than it used to be; I haven't pulled out my notebook of carefully accumulated and alphabetized CDs in well over a year.

I saw the same thing happen a decade ago in a much smaller media market: academic papers. For most of the 20th century, anyone who followed academic papers kept a shelf full of journals and a filing cabinet full of individual papers. That changed about a decade ago, when I started encountering one person after another who had a box full of papers that they never looked into. Note I said box, not cabinet: they had moved offices more recently than they'd gone fishing for a printed copy, so the papers were all still in a big box from their last move.

The second change is that I have been mulling over how a reasonable IP regime might work for music. While copies of music have been a big part of the music market in our lifetimes, it's a relatively recent development in the history of professional music. We shouldn't feel attached to it in the face of technological change. There are a number of models that work better for music than buying copies, including Pandora and--hypothetically--Netflix for music.

Selling copies has not been particularly good for music in our culture. Yes, it provides a market at all, and for that I am grateful. However, it's a market at odds with how music works. Music is transient, something that exists in time and then goes away. Copies are not: they are enshrined forever in their current form, like a photograph of a cherished moment. As listeners, the copy-based market has led to us listening to the same recordings over and over. On the performers side, we have a winner-takes-all market where the term "rock star" was born.

We would be better off with a market for music that is more aligned with performance than with recordings. Imagine we switched to something like Pandora and completely discarded digital copyright. Musicians would no longer be able to put out a big hit and then just ate the money in indefinitely. They'd have to keep performing, and they'd have to compete with other performers that are covering their works for free. I expect a similar amount of money would be in the market, just spread more evenly across the producers. Listeners, meanwhile, would have a much more dynamic and vibrant collection of music to listen to--a substantial public good. Yes, such a scenario involves walled gardens, but that's a lesser evil than digital copyright.

Greg Mankiw on SOPA

Greg Mankiw proposes a productive starting point for discussion about SOPA:

This is an important economic issue for the United States. We are large producers of intellectual property: movies, novels, software, video games, TV shows, and even economics textbooks. If offshore websites find a way to distribute this intellectual property without paying for it, it is as if organized crime were stealing merchandise from a manufacturing firm at the loading dock.

I fully agree. Heck, I make my living in intellectual property.

However, I strongly feel that when there is a conflict, basic liberties take priority. People playing DVDs they own, on DVD players they own, should not be liable for inducing infringement. Teenagers making mix tapes for each other should not be criminals, not even formally. Web sites should not be taken down until the people running them have had their day in court.

We should all find a way to understand that changing technologies mean that some businesses will rise and others decline. However, there are plenty of business models within the parameters of basic freedom. I have suggested controlling performance, and Arnold Kling has suggested controlling aggregates of data. Those are two ideas, and I am sure there are plenty more.

Before we can really try to find the next business models around intellectual property, we must all get used to the idea that the 20th century is neither the beginning nor the end of history. Business models developed during the 20th century made some amount of sense for their time. Technology has significantly improved, especially technology that involves computation and data transmission, and we owe it to ourselves to improve the business models, too.

Posner on digital copyright

Richard Posner takes on digital copyright:

The importance of copyright, and hence the negative consequences of piracy for the creation of new works, are, however, often exaggerated. Most of the world’s great literature was written before the first copyright statute, the Statute of Ann, enacted in 1710. [...] Copyright law needs to be adapted to the online revolution in distribution.

Posner has a radical suggestion that I believe would work out just fine:

So, were Google permitted to provide complete online access to all the world’s books, in their entirety, the gain in access might more than offset the loss in authors’ royalties.

Posner justifies his claim by considering the increase in creativity and in creative works that would result.

I would further justify such a policy by considering what it is going to take to protect copyright in its current form. SOPA, PROTECT-IP, ACTA, and the DMCA are all based on controlling copies. I have little doubt that measures like them will succeed over time and grow stronger. The main way to fight them is more fundamental. Stop trying to prevent copies--which is impossible--and focus more on other revenue models. The models don't even have to be designed as a matter of public policy. Simply remove the props on the old-fashioned models, and make room for entrepreneurs to search for new models.

DNS takedowns alive and well

I wrote earlier that PROTECT-IP and SOPA are getting relatively too much attention. Specifically, I mused about this problem:

First, DNS takedowns are already happening under existing law. For example, the American FBI has been taking down DNS names for poker websites in advance of a trial. SOPA and PROTECT-IP merely extend the tendrils rather than starting something new.

Today I read news that indeed, the FBI has taken down the DNS name for Megaupload.com. I'm not sure the American public is in tune with precisely what its federal government is doing.

The news has other sad aspects than the use of DNS takedowns. A few other aspects lept out for me:

• There has been not yet been a trial. If I ask most Americans about how their legal system works, I expect one of the first things people would say is that, in America, people are innocent until proven guilty.
• There is twenty years of jail time associated with the charges. Isn't that a little harsh for copyright violations? I think of jail as how you penalize murderers, arsonists, and others who are going to be a threat to the public if they are left loose. Intellectual property violations somehow seem to not make the cut.
• It's an American law, but New Zealand police arrested some of the defendants.
• The overall demeanor of the authorities comes off as rather thuggish. For example, they seized all manner of unrelated assets of the defendants, including their cars.

I am glad SOPA and PROTECT-IP went down. However, much of what protesters complained about is already happening.

DNS takedowns under fire in the U.S.

I get the impression that SOPA, the latest version of a U.S. bill to enable DNS takedowns of non-American web sites, is under a lot of pressure. A major blow to its support is that the major gaming console companies backing out.

I am certainly heartened. However, the problem is still very real, for at least two reasons.

First, DNS takedowns are already happening under existing law. For example, the American FBI has been taking down DNS names for poker websites in advance of a trial. SOPA and PROTECT-IP merely extend the tendrils rather than starting something new.

Second, this bill won't be the last. So long as the Internet uses DNS, there is a vulnerability built right into the protocols. Secure DNS doesn't make it any better; on the contrary, it hands the keys to the DNS over to national governments.

The only long term way to fix this problem is to adjust the protocols to avoid a single point of vulnerability. It requires a new way to name resources on the Internet.

Joshua Gans on ebook lending

Our approach to copyright is outdated now that we have a wide-spread Internet. What should we do? Joshua Gans proposes an approach based on lending and on tracking usage:

If lending is the appropriate mode for books, then how would the business of publishing look if it is built around lending rather than ownership? So here is my conjecture. All books are read on devices. Imagine that each device has built in a means of tracking what people read and how much. Imagine that it can also do this in a manner that respects privacy. Then the model I have in mind would allow publishers to receive money based on how much of a book people read and to price that at will.

I like the idea. One point of comparison is to the way radio works. In radio, the content is not DRMed, and you don't pay for each song you listen to. Instead, you subscribe in bulk to content and then flip around to whatever you feel like listening to. There are a variety of specific payment schemes on both sides of the arrangement. For the customer, I've encountered payment based on public taxes (Switzerland), by subscription (Sirius Radio), and by listening to ads (broadcast in the U.S.).

For the content producers, I am less clear about what contracts are out there. At least indirectly, however, they are paid more when there are more users listening to them. I imagine that radio has the same sort of marketing research that television does, and that radio stations know how many people are listening to their station and at what times. They then, through mechanisms that are probably kludgy, buy more of the popular music and less of the unpopular music.

It's a good idea, and I would be happy for it to catch on. Copies are trivial to make, nowadays, so the only ways to control copies are rather draconian. Far better to put a good society first and then find business models that work with it.

Schmidt on federal policy

Eric Schmidt testified before Congress on its technology policy, and he tells the Washington Post that he is not happy.

Much of the issue he blames on age. For example:

And inevitably what happens is everyone says ‘yes,’ yet inevitably on the Hill you have an older gentleman or lady. The staffers—and the staffers are young—the staffers get it. They’re 25, 30 years old and they all get it. So that’s what we depend on. And of course we’ve hired ex-staffers as well. They all know each other. So that’s how it really works. And I believe what we’re doing is extremely defensible if it’s around ideas. I would have a lot of trouble if we in our industry started following the other kind of lobbying.

I'm not sure I agree. I know a lot of younger people that haven't thought through the horror that search neutrality will be if it goes through. I think there's a more fundamental problem computers are changing quickly. Search engines didn't exist twenty years ago, and twenty years from now, they will be completely different. How is it realistic for Washington to regulate something that completely changes every couple of decades?

I admit I appreciate his suggestion about how to improve the state of IT in the U.S. even further:

A classic example is H-1B visas. Now, the following arguments are so obvious, it’s hard for me to believe that anyone would believe that they’re false. These industries are full of very smart people. There are very smart people who don’t live in America. They come to America, we educate them at the best universities, they are smarter than I am, and then we kick them out. If they stayed in the country, let’s just review: They would create jobs, pay taxes, have high incomes, pay more taxes than the average American, and generally increase the GDP of the country. I hope my argument is clear, and if it isn’t I’ll start screaming about it. It’s the stupidest policy the government has with respect to high tech. So you have this conversation and people say “yes,” and you say, ”This is the single thing that you can do that will lead to innovation occurring in our country, and the future economic wealth of our country.” And then they don’t act.... It’s stupid. So my point is that if you want to get a sense of how to screw this up, to put it negatively, then make it harder for us to bring in the world’s smartest people.

Tell 'em, Eric!

TechDirt on the latest draft of PROTECT IP

Tech Dirt has an analysis of the latest available version of PROTECT IP.

Yesterday, we got our hands on a leaked copy of the "summary" document put together by those writing the new version of COICA, now renamed the much more media friendly PROTECT IP Act. It looked bad, but some people complained that we were jumping ahead without the actual text of the bill, even if the summary document was pretty straightforward and was put together by the same people creating the bill. Thankfully, the folks over at Don't Censor the Internet have the full text of the PROTECT IP Act, which I've embedded below as well. Let's break it down into the good, the bad and the horribly ugly.

I find it hard to care about the nitty gritty details of the approach. The bill is still fundamentally about taking down DNS names on the mere allegation of infringement, and that seems like a very bad idea to me.

Brad on foreign CEOs

Brad Templeton describes a good way to explain the current distribution of nationalities in the tech field:

I gave him one suggestion, inspired by something I saw long ago at a high-roller CEO conference for the PC industry. In a room of 400 top executives and founders of PC and internet startups, it was asked that all who were born outside the USA stand up. A considerable majority (including myself) stood. I wished every opponent of broader immigration could see that.

I agree with Brad that, at least in the software field, we benefit tremendously from foreign workers.

I suspect most observers would agree if they thought about it. You don't have to look just at executives. Walk into any software shop and you will see a large fraction of the workers who were born abroad. Futhermore, talk to any software developer about the job market, and it's not like they are hurting for work. If we sent all the foreign workers home, it's not like we'd have more American programmers at work. We'd simply have less total computer work being done.

It seems that software is getting swept up in laws and regulation that were developed with other fields in mind. If you follow the political discussions on the topic, it is always about lower-skilled jobs in fields where it is tough to start a new company. This depiction simply does not match computer science.

It's the same sort of thing that happens with research oversight. Research oversight is driven by the needs of medical research, and it just doesn't match the ethical issues that computer researchers face.

Inducing infringement alive and well

Mitch Golden writes, in a good analysis of the legal state of LimeWire's file-sharing software, that inducing infringement was a key part of the October 2010 court case against them:

Interestingly, the court largely sidestepped the technical issues as to whether Gnutella itself had non-infringing uses or not, or whether a Gnutella client can be legally distributed. The court's decision instead turned on evidence submitted by the plaintiffs that LimeWire intended to facilitate filesharing.

I continue to feel that we are much better off leaving content carriers alone. Trying to make content carriers into IP policemen is not going to work out well.

It was just getting started...

There are many things wrong with California jumping in to regulate Facebook's privacy policies:

• Facebook is a world-wide service, not a California service. Why is this up to California?
  
• Facebook has over five hundred million users. That's five times more than the number of people who watch the SuperBowl. Whatever Facebook is doing, it must be pretty reasonable.
  
• Social network sites tend to only last about five years before the next new hotness overtakes them. The odds are against Facebook lasting all that long.
  

All of these matter, but the last one is most peculiar to Internet services. I really want to see what the next social site is like, and the next site after that. I don't relish a long sequence of watered-down Facebook clones with all of their paperwork properly stamped and in order. How dreary.

Free linking on the web?

Lauren Weinstein has a great article up on the efforts of governments around the world to make Internet material disappear. One tactic for this is to go after search engines:

In Europe, one example of this is the so-called Spanish “right to be forgotten” -- currently taking the form of officials in Spain demanding that Google remove specific search results from their global listings that “offend” (one way or another) particular plaintiffs.

I agree with Weinstein's conclusion:

We are at the crossroads. Now is the time when we must decide if the Internet will continue its role as the most effective tool for freedom of information in human history, or if it will be adulterated into a mechanism for the suppression of knowledge, a means to subjugate populations with a degree of effectiveness that dictators and tyrants past could not even have imagined in their wildest dreams of domination.

The U.S. is in a position to affect that future. Currently, it is gradually inserting censorship backdoors into the Internet at the request of its music and film industries. It's not worth the cost. I freely admit that Hollywood is wonderful, but we should remember that Broadway is pretty cool, too. Unlike Hollywood, Broadway has business models that don't require an Internet overload.

Prior permission for indexing books?

Timothy Lee writes that the agreements backing Google Books are undergoing renegotiation. He argues that Google should seek a fundamental legal principle rather than negotiating a contract via class-action law.

Fair use exists as a kind of safety valve for the copyright system, to ensure that it does not damage free speech, innovation, and other values. Although formally speaking judges are supposed to run through the famous four factor test to determine what counts as a fair use, in practice an important factor is whether the judge perceives the defendant as having acted in good faith. Google has now spent three years looking for a way to build its Book Search project using something other than fair use, and come up empty.

I like this approach better myself. It's better to have simple, common-sense rules about proper rules of engagement than to have a thousand-page contract that nobody has even read in its entirety. For books, part of the common sense rules would include that indexing is allowed, and that abandonware is largely free reign, at least until the owner shows up again.

To contrast, the current approach has Google negotiating a contract that will bind all authors. That seems a little weird given that all authors aren't really present. It doesn't seem like a good fit for contract negotiation. It's one of those rare beasts that is a good fit for our legislative bodies to sort out.

Robin Hanson against IRBs

Robin Hanson makes the case against Internal Review Boards for research on human subjects:

IRBs seem a good example of concern signaling leading to over-reaction and over-regulation. It might make sense to have extra regulations on certain kinds of interactions, such as giving people diseases on purpose or having them torture others. But it makes little sense to have extra regulation on researchers just because they are researchers. That mainly gets in the way of innovation, of which we already have too little.

I agree with Robin. Mistreatment of fellow humans should certainly be stopped. However, why should academic researchers have to go before a board any time they want to interact with humans, just because they are researchers?

For the majority of legal responses that our society makes, the approach we take is that people act first and then, if there is wrongdoing, the legal system follows up. For example, you don't get interviewed before you buy a gallon of gas. You get interviewed after a house burned down with your car parked outside of it. You don't go before a board before you grade a stack of papers. You go before a board after it is rumored that you told people what other people's grades were. Prior review is stifling.

People who defend IRBs probably assume that they will apply a large dose of common sense about what is dangerous and what is not. For example, surely the IRBs for an area like computer science will simply green light research all day long. In practice, it seems they look for work to do to justify their budgets. Witness the treatment of "exempt" research, where IRBs that have the manpower to do so tend to require review even of "exempt" research projects.

I can only speculate why such a useless and harmful institution persists, but a big part of my guess is that Robin's signalling explanation is correct. If you are the president of a university, could you ever take a stand against IRBs? Such a stand would have the appearance of signalling that you are soft on protection of humans. I wish that people would pay less attention to signals and more attention to results. Pay less attention to how many institutes, regulations, and vice presidencies have been created, and pay more attention to exactly how a university is treating the people it draws data from.

Defining neutral web search

I like South Bend Seven's depiction of that process:

"Let's adjust the learning parameter to .00125 and the momentum factor to .022." "Sure thing, but we better run that by Legal first." There's a recipe for success

Perhaps in 40-50 years, there will be a stable version of the World Wide Web that it makes sense to clamp down with regulation, including search neutrality. However, right new, the web is changing way too fast.

Looking backward, imagine what kind of standards would have been written for a web search back when Alta Vista was the best. What are the odds that a government effort would have a reasonable approach to ranking pages according to linkage patterns? How about deciding what counts as a keyword? Is Zeitgeist one word or two? How about the "did you mean" results? If such an attempt had succeeded, then today we wouldn't even know about these innovations. They would have been squashed by the regulation before anyone could try.

Looking forward, imagine all the ways the web might change in the coming decade. What if more of the web moves into social spaces that have severe privacy needs, such as Facebook and Orkut? What if more of the content uses rich media, as do physical magazines, and is less possible to describe using plain text? What if things go the other way, and the web's information becomes a scattering of little sentences that are glued together on the fly for a particular user's settings?

The search neutrality project can only impoverish our Internet. I'm not clear on why the American government has jurisdiction over the "World" Wide Web, but to the extent they do, I hope they do the right thing and just go take a nap.

Trial by jury in the U.S.

Pretty sad stuff from the WikiLeaks case:

Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, the Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking government files to WikiLeaks, will be stripped of his clothing every night as a “precautionary measure” to prevent him from injuring himself, an official at the Marine brig at Quantico, Va., said on Friday. Private Manning will also be required to stand outside his cell naked during a morning inspection, after which his clothing will be returned to him, said a Marine spokesman, First Lt. Brian Villiard.

Imagine how he'll be treated if he is actually convicted of anything.

I don't believe that U.S. oversight over most any aspect of the Internet will make things better. I don't expect them to support content carriers in the best of times, and certainly not ones like WikiLeaks that post material embarrassing to the U.S.