Who's the competition?
I had a visit today from a Taiwanese legislator who is interested in finding out about internet policy here in the U.S. He said that Taiwan has required its DSL and cable companies to interconnect on standard fees with all ISPs. No vertical integration — he seemed horrified by the idea that a telecommunications company would be a content company as well. He was confident that internet access should be a public utility, not a privately-held entertainment source.
He was shocked (really, I'm not kidding, shocked) that his five-star hotel here in New York charged him $10/day for internet access. He found that just outrageous. In Taiwan, internet access is virtually free.
At one point, he noted that Taiwan watches Japan and Korea very closely and tries to compete with them in making low-cost broadband access available. They're going great guns, so Taiwan is too.
He asked me whether the US was watching Europe closely to see what they were doing — we talked about northern Europe, and the UK, and I told him about the European Commission's rejection of Deutsche Telekom's plans. “Aren't they your competitors?” he said.
I said that as far as I could tell the US doesn't care what Europe is doing with broadband access policy. We don't feel that they're competitors of ours. We're content to slide farther and farther behind, while feeling confident that we're leading the world.
Nice visit, a little chilling. He really had trouble understanding why we were going in the direction we are. He suggested that this scandal be widely publicized.
Privacy and public records
Say you're a juvenile offender of some kind — some minor disgrace, but serious enough that you were sent to an institution with a locked door for a while. Let's assume that after a certain amount of time (ten years?) your offense has been expunged from public files. From your perspective, as a fine upstanding citizen who gets haircuts and takes a lunch to work, you have a clean record.
Now say you decide to change jobs. You see something advertised that looks just right, and you decide to take the leap and try. During your first interview with your prospective employer, he says to you “When you filled out this form for us you said you'd never been convicted of a crime. But that's not true, is it?”
What happened was that your record, when it existed and when it was public, was copied down in some way by (or maybe even sold to) a commercial company. Why not? It was available at the corner courthouse. Although the public record was changed after ten years, the privately-held record persisted. And now it has come back to life — to your life.
You don't feel as if you were lying to your prospective employer. Your lawyer told you those ten long years ago that your record would be clean and you would be free to start fresh. But there's this guy across the table from you who paid a company to check up on you and now no longer trusts you. You won't be getting that new job.
What's the right policy for something like this? It can't be the right answer to make all public records secret. There are good reasons to have the records of court procedures be public. Nor does it seem feasible to have all data tagged in some way so that it can be yanked back automatically when it ceases to be part of the public record. Information wants to be available to be aggregated, and generally that's a good thing both for information and for people.
It would be good if employers and educational institutions and insurance companies and other deciders didn't use datamined information in isolation — if the guy across the table for you asked a few more questions, he'd get the whole story and probably wouldn't be as worried. But people will always make decisions based on too few data points.
I don't have an answer. My intuition is that the social risks of locking up information exceed the benefits of doing so. But if you're the person trying to get that new job, you probably don't share that view.