Government Intervention's Double-Edged Blade

Susan Crawford just posted her remarks at last week's Freedom to Connect gathering in Washington. She begins:

A right to connect, or freedom to connect, signals that we need permission -- rights only operate against someone who has the ability to say no. Freedom of speech, all of that -- all operates against the government. A digital bill of rights assumes that someone has the power to cut those rights off.

We're here to affirm that we don't need permission. We are more threatened by ourselves and our willingness to look to government for permission than by anything else.

Many of the people at the conference had problems with what she said; I agree that we need at least antitrust law, but I also believe government has a positive role (among other things) in preventing data control by the cable/phone giants.

Her essay shows powerful thinking, and is worth much consideration.

Comments

[Ran Talbott]

At the risk of seeming to give short shrift to Crawford's piece (which really requires a lot of thought to do it justice), I see two problems with her thinking.

One is the (ethnocentric? "urbanocentric"?) assumption of a multiplicity of choices for connectivity. Yes, if you live in a North American/EU city you probably have 5, 10, or more ways to get connected to the net. Where I live, I have two-and-a-half:

1. Cable modem,
2. Dial-up, and
c. Build my own infrastructure.

While it's theorectically possible for me to organize a WiFi network or buy a SHF link that would connect me to someone in town with a T3, or put a Motosat dish on my roof, those options have problems of their own, and are a pretty substantial financial barrier for the vast majority.

So, I agree with you that we need to give serious consideration to keeping the telecom (near-)monopolies from turning into abusive gatekeepers.

I also have a problem with her seemingly-blithe assumption that "bits don't kill people". Bandwidth has become wonderfully cheap and abundant for most First World residents, but it's not free, and it's not unlimited. There are socialized costs associated with letting people blast whatever the hell they want onto the net, and a very real risk that those costs can become "oppressive" for those who don't live in the relative luxury of the developed world's middle and upper classes.

And there's a very real sense in which bits _can_ "kill": the explosion of spam and other forms of abuse is consuming the time of their targets, in effect shortening their lives by making that time unavailable for other necessary/desirable uses.

Crawford's vision of the net sounds uncomfortably like the way our 17th- and 18th-century forebears used to talk about our atmosphere and waterways.

[Bob Rosenberg]

Ran

Seems to me Crawford is arguing for freedom of thought/speech. Freedom to communicate *freely*. Absence of gov't intervention [regulation of who/what goes on the internet.].

I don't see a problem with that.

What am I missing?

[Robert Leonard]

Ron,

I also am in full agreement with Susan Crawford and frequently use a very similar statement to her statement "A digital bill of rights assumes that someone has the power to cut those rights off". We need to let these "American Ways" self regulate themselves; freedom of speech being the greatest. If no one is reading, listening or buying - does it matter? Do any of us want a governing body making our decisions or telling us what we can read or say?

Read what happen when the administration tried to supress the student school paper in Wellington, Florida.

http://www.out2.com/copyroom/articles_mail.asp?StoryKey=270343

bob

[Ran Talbott]

"What am I missing?"

Receiving 1000 emails per hour for products promising to make your penis 17 feet long and/or prehensile.

Having complete copies of your credit report emailed to every identity thief on the planet.

Finding out that pictures of someone Photoshopped to look like your 16-year-old daughter, having sex with a horse, are being hosted on a website in Uzbekistan.

Missing the announcement of your childhood friend's funeral because its request for donations to breast cancer research in lieu of flowers ran afoul of your ISPs draconian spam filters.

Getting sick on vacation, and being unable to retrieve your medical history because some prankster's trojan has your own doctor's fileserver calculating pi to 162 million decimal places.

Anarchy _could_ be wonderful, _if_ essentially everyone acted with goodwill and reasonable respect for others all the time. In the real world, however, it's almost always an engraved, hand-delivered invitation to disaster.

[Ran Talbott]

"Do any of us want a governing body making our decisions or telling us what we can read or say?"

You betcha.

I want "a governing body" to tell Cox that they can't disconnect me for saying that Rush Limbaugh is a hypocritical blowhard because Faux News threatened to turn off their feed if they didn't start silencing people who speak ill of "conservatives".

I want "a governing body" to be able to send marshalls to shut down rushisamurderingpedophile.com for violating a court order to remove faked photos of him sodomizing and strangling young boys.

I want "a governing body" to give the scumbags who've been forging my email address on pornsite spams a few months in jail.

I want "a governing body" to charge the owners of mediaplex.com and their lying "customers" with false advertising for telling the google search engine that their webpages have product information I'm looking for, then redirecting me to an irrelevant ebay search when I try to access it.

I want "a governing body" to be able to stop people from redistributing any non-free software that I've written.

In short: I want to see online standards of freedom _and_ responsibility similar to the best of those we have offline.

We've seen enough tragedies, on a variety of commons, in our history to know that many, if not most, of the results of not having such standards will be bad.

And many of those "results" will have effects that go far beyond the boundaries of the net: if this ever really was about "just bits", that ceased to be the case a long time ago.