Smugness and Self-Satisfaction
The real enemies of the net are not just yearnings for control on the part of BigNetworks, but also smug, squelching, and self-satisfied attitudes on both sides of the divide.
If you talk to an engineer and say “I'm worried about the regulatory trend in Washington,” he'll say, “Where? We'll just route around whatever they do. They're irrelevant. We've got some slick new open source telephony things coming out. They'll never be able to stop us.” And that's the end of the conversation.
If you talk to a regulatory maximalist and say “I'm worried about cutting ourselves off from the development of new kinds of interactions and services that will be very useful to mankind,” he'll say, “What? The internet isn't working very well. We've got spam and spyware and terrorists — right and left. It clearly has to be fixed for your safety. Why should the internet be any different from any other form of communications?” And that's the end of the conversation.
Neither side is considering the amplifying, complex, non-linear events that follow from either too much randomness or too much rigidity. From the regulatory maximalist point of view, we've got a completely random situation that requires amelioration; from the free-to-be technician's point of view, rigidity is simply impossible. Neither side is right.
The smugness is striking. We need to inject some humility and some hard facts into the discussion (to the extent there is a discusssion — which is another problem). We need to solve the problems of law enforcement and emergency services and funding universal service without crippling the open internet. This takes work.
There is a middle ground. It's not (quite) impossible to imagine a better way forward.
In the Television Without Frontiers setting, Yahoo! filed some very thoughtful comments. They noted that taking broadcast regulations from a 1980s context (characterized by spectrum scarcity and absence of user control) and applying them wholesale to internet audiovisual content would make no sense. Broadcast TV is not the same as IP TV, and even IP TV will take on myriad forms in the coming years:
[I]n a very short time, IP TV will bear no resemblance to today’s broadcast world. . . . It will be a world of on-demand, streamed, live, pre-recorded and citizen-created services mixed into a melange of interactive information, education and entertainment. At the centre will be the consumer (not the broadcaster), controlling his/her choice of content, the timing, format and so on, and also having the ability to restrict access to certain content for themselves and other family members. Already, Internet users have access to a host of filtering, parental control and other tools enabling them to decide what is appropriate viewing for them and their families. It is not unreasonable to expect similar market-driven solutions to be provided for IP TV.
That's not smug. That's reasonable and forward-looking. We need to get many more filings like Yahoo!'s in front of policymakers around the world.
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2 Responses to “Smugness and Self-Satisfaction”
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In your brief discussion of the revision of the TV without Frontiers directive, you describe the EC's regulatory power over broadcasting as steming from spectrum scarcity and lack of user control. This leaves out the EC's main justification for its regulatory powers: the Internal Market. The Commission sees itself and is seen by European governments and even companies as necessary because it keeps the playing field level for companies operating in Europe. The role of the EU, wearing its Internal Market hat, is not unlike that of the WTO, but because it's trying to bring together something new rather than balance off disparate interests it's much more of a regulator.
The main way it levels the playing field is by ensuring the different European governments have similar or identical regulatory regimes. This makes it much easier for all companies to operate across the EU and it keeps the governments from racing to the bottom on regulatory policy.
But it gives a hell of a lot of power to the EU, in which the Commission has the main responsibility for initiating new legislation.
The Europeans' idea of what government (the EU in this case) has the right to do is far wider than what people in the US think is healthy for its government to do.
So the Commission — along with many people throughout the public and private sector — thinks it's got a right to, for example, make websites give a “right to reply” to anybody they talk about.
Most of what the TVwF directive does would be a nightmare to implement at the level of websites, but there's no reason to expect the Commisison to realize this or to limit their powers effectively if they do realize it.
I ran my thoughts together and garbled them just now when I was talking about how, “The role of the EU, wearing its Internal Market hat, is not unlike that of the WTO…”
What I was trying to say is that the EU, which exists to create a single market among its Member States, uses regulation as its main tool. The WTO, on the other hand, although it is also charged with leveling the playing field for trade among its member states, is more often seen denying national governments the right to regulate for environmental or consumer safety, for example, on the basis that such regulation would be a barrier to trade. The EU is more likely to see that its member states have the same regulations. So it levels up more often than down while the WTO levels down more often.
And when it comes to regulating individual websites, as the planned revision of the Television without Frontiers Directive seems headed, leveling down seems to make more sense.