Category Archives: Internet

A proposal for tech regulation

Posted on by

Michael Lind writes,

Define online opinion and video platforms as regular publishers, subject to traditional publishing regulations that seek to deter dissemination of libels, profanity, obscenity, intellectual property theft and so on. And define all the other big tech firms either as common carriers or public accommodations that are clothed in a public interest.

It sounds like an interesting idea, but it needs to be spelled out. I am not sure that I really understand what Lind means. And I am not sure that I would agree with him if I did.

I interpret Lind as saying that Amazon Web Services and Apple are common carriers, so that they cannot exclude Parler. But Parler is a regular publisher, so it is subject to all of the laws that apply to magazines.

I first learned about the Internet in terms of Ed Krol’s “pony express” metaphor. You put your content into an envelope, and the Internet delivers it to the recipient the way that the Pony Express used to deliver mail. In this metaphor, all of the responsibility for the content is on the sender, and all of the responsibility for what gets done with the content is on the recipient. The Pony Express riders who are in the middle are not responsible. That means that the companies that manufacture the routers are not responsible. The Internet backbone providers are not responsible. The Internet access providers are not responsible. They are all common carriers, if I understand Lind’s use of that term. Common carriers can plausibly deny responsibility for what the user sees.

Suppose we went with Lind’s system as I interpret it. If I were running YouTube, I would want to classify it as a common carrier, so that it is not allowed to exclude any content. I would push the responsibility for complying with publishing laws out to those who post content on YouTube. But that means I would have to stop creating “feeds” that offer suggestions of what to watch. The job of creating feeds is a publishing job, and YouTube would have to outsource that if it wants to avoid the burdens of being a publisher.

But what about, say, Gmail? Does the spam filter make Gmail a publisher?

Technology and the future

Posted on by

Eli Dourado has a nice roundup.

Both Moderna and BioNTech have personalized vaccine candidates targeting cancer. Although called a “cancer vaccine,” the treatment is only administered once the subject has cancer—it isn’t preventative. The companies use an algorithm to analyze the genetic sequences of the tumor and the patient’s healthy cells and predict which molecules could be used to generate a strong immune response against the cancer.

He is optimistic about the Hyperloop. Peter Diamindis is, also.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. The tone is optimistic. Years ago, I noted that the print publication that gives me the most optimism is Technology Review. The one that gives me the most pessimism is Regulation.

We can compare Eli’s post to what I wrote in 2005.

I wrote,

Is the new trend rate of productivity growth 3 percent or higher?

Obviously, it wasn’t. I was thinking about labor productivity, which is not the same as TFP, which Eli wants to look at. All productivity measures are dubious, in my opinion.

I wrote that cognitive neuroscience was the field of the future. I think I was wrong. It gets no mention in Eli’s survey.

I quoted the U.S. Department of Energy to the effect that by 2015 solar power would be competitive with traditional sources of energy. Eli says

The 2010s were the wind and solar decade. We observed stunning declines in the cost of both

I wrote about optimism regarding cancer therapy. We have seen some improvement, but “the emperor of all maladies” is still a formidable killer.

Finally, I wrote that mainstream media were losing attention as well as credibility. Actually, they figured out how to hang on to attention by dialing up the outrage and clickbait. They decided not to bother with credibility.

If I were a billionaire, instead of wasting money on non-profits, I would buy some land and try to build a start-up city. Build roads that work well with autonomous vehicles, and only allow autonomous vehicles–visitors have to leave their ordinary cars in a parking lot outside the city. Design and build an electric grid optimized for today’s technology. Make 5G available everywhere. Implement a set of protocols that allow all sorts of drones to operate without colliding with one another or with humans.

The key to a start-up city might be making it easy for people to interact with people from other cities. This could mean rapid transit in and out, or it could mean the use of augmented reality.

Perhaps in the future cities that have major impediments to livability will be at a disadvantage. It may prove easier to give people in other cities the amenities that they appreciate about NY or SF than it is for NY or SF to escape their downward spirals. Boston, Chicago, and Minneapolis will have a harder time convincing people to live with winter.

That is not a sure-fire prediction–it may prove no more prescient than my 2005 blog post–but I offer it as a possible future scenario.

My intellectual influences, part 5: Net-heads

Posted on by

In the winter of 1993, a group of us at Freddie Mac visited snowbound Albany, New York, to meet with some researchers at General Electric about their automated underwriting project. But while higher-ups were conferring, one of the nerds took me down to the basement to show me Mosaic, the first graphical browser for the World Wide Web. At that point, I became a net-head. Continue reading →

Depopulation

Posted on by

Glenn T. Stanton writes,

No fewer than 23 leading nations—including Japan, Spain, South Korea, and Italy—will see their population cut in half by 2100. China’s will drop by a stunning 48 percent. . .

. . .Another 34 countries will see dramatic population declines by 25 to 50 percent by 2100. Beyond this, the projected fertility rates in 183 of 195 countries will not be high enough to maintain current populations by the century’s end. That is called negative population growth and once it starts, it probably won’t stop. These scholars predict that sub-Saharan and North Africa, as well as the Middle East, will be the only super regions fertile enough to maintain their populations without dramatic immigration policies.

The article refers to a Gates Foundation projection.

Professor Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine and head of the Gates study, told the BBC, “I find people laugh it off… they can’t imagine it could be true, they think women will just decide to have more kids. If you can’t [find a solution] then eventually the species disappears.”

Have a Happy New Year.

Centralization, Decentralization, and Coordination

Posted on by

David Rosenthal writes,

very powerful economic forces drive centralization of a successful decentralized system. . .

the fundamental problem is that decentralized systems inherently provide users a worse experience than centralized systems along the axes that the vast majority of users care about.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

The argument over whether software should be centralized or decentralized is analogous to the argument about command vs. a market. In Specialization and Trade, I describe two forms of coordination, or resource allocation. A command system is used within a firm. A price system is used in the market.

I discovered during my business career that software does not evolve independently of the context in which it is created. I used to say that every organization gets the information system it deserves. Tightly-run organizations end up with very reliable systems. More free-flowing organizations end up with very fragmented systems.

People’s needs differ from and conflict with one another. In a command system, a central planner determines which needs will be met. In a market system, the price and profit system directs entrepreneurs to which needs will be met.

A command system is fine if the pattern of needs is given, or if you have enough power over people to treat their needs as given. A central planner can seek to optimize to meet a given set of needs. But a market system works better at discovering needs.

The original communication network–the telephone system–was centralized. That is because switches were expensive relative to bandwidth. But as computers took over switching, the cost of switching plummeted, obeying Moore’s Law. This opened the way for the Internet to take over communications around the turn of the 21st century.

When the Web first arrived, people did not know how it was going to be used. The challenge was one of discovering needs, and decentralization was most appropriate.

Eventually, some needs coalesced, and we started to see well-worn paths through the Internet jungle. So there emerged big, centralized systems, such as caching servers and search engines.

Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple are able to take people’s needs as given. They try to optimize to meet those needs.
One of them could falter if and only if it gets caught flat-footed by a new service that has discovered needs that its customers have that are not being met.

If you don’t know exactly what your software will need to do, then a decentralized architecture might make sense. But once you find a clear pattern of usage, you will want to optimize the software for that pattern, and one can predict that the architecture will evolve in a centralized direction.

Big Tech and the State

Posted on by

National Affairs has an interesting forum on this topic. In an article about the issue of speech regulation on the big social media sites, Jon Askonas and Ari Schulman write,

Writing increasingly specific policies, hiring more moderators, developing appeals processes, automating speech moderation with machine learning, and outsourcing fact-checking decisions to “trusted sources” are all attempts shore up legitimacy by bolstering the validity of a process. “Because that’s the policy” holds much more legitimacy for us moderns than “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it” or “Because I said so.”

. . .Any kind of legitimacy requires communal norms. Ironically, despite the language of the platforms — all that talk of community standards and norms — it is precisely in the ways they have failed to form coherent communities that they have been unable to find the legitimacy to enforce norms of speech.

They talk about the good old days when there were actual communities on the Internet. They formed around old Usenet groups or blogs. These have a real human moderator serving to police norms.

They have written a great essay, difficult to excerpt. Yet I found their diagnosis more persuasive than their prescription.

Some of it reminds me of my essay, How the Internet turned bad.

Unbundling or rebundling?

Posted on by

Allison Schrager writes,

Up until fairly recently, we consumed many goods and services bundled together. Your airline ticket price included a meal and checked luggage. Your cable bill included hundreds of channels. A newspaper subscription offered content from many journalists. But changing economics and technology have made bundling less necessary and attractive—at least in the short run. A bundled service offers lots of variety for a fixed price, but you end up paying for things you don’t want. Now, when we book flights online, we can see other airlines’ prices for identical routes; an airline can appear more competitive by breaking out different services. Streaming platforms mean that we no longer must pay for cable channels we don’t watch. And now, members of the media whom colleagues deem “problematic” don’t have to tolerate a hostile newsroom; they can send out an email newsletter or broadcast a podcast to their audience and collect money directly.

I don’t think that unbundling is the endgame in music, journalism, or punditry. Yes, we have pretty much seen the end of bundling music from physical forms, such as a vinyl record or a CD. And we are pretty near the end of the unbundling of the written word from physical forms, such as magazines and newspapers. But as Allison points out, only a few high-profile writers can expect viable subscription revenue in a totally unbundled world. If nothing else, what Clay Shirky called the mental transactions costs make people unwilling to pay for all the content they might like on a case-by-case basis.

Instead, I return to a prediction I made twenty years ago.

For an economic model, I continue to recommend the idea of “clubs.” A club would provide content aggregation, recommendation, and annotation services. Journalists would be paid by clubs, rather than by individual publications. For a consumer, joining a club will provide access to value-added services relative to online content.

Where we something that most closely resembles the club model I had in mind is in the video streaming world. Netflix, Amazon, etc.

If my prediction eventually holds, most writers, will not be able to make it on their own. Instead, they will be bundled together, just not in the traditional magazine or newspaper format. I think that once the club model gets going, the superstars will be recruited by the clubs for competitive purposes.

Digital culture

Posted on by

L. M. Sacasas writes,

Certain features of the self in an enchanted world are now reemerging in the Digital City. Digital technologies influence us and exert causal power over our affairs. In the Digital City, we are newly aware of operating within a field of inscrutable forces over which we have little to no control. Though these forces may be benevolent, they are just as often malevolent, undermining our efforts and derailing our projects. We often experience digital technologies as determining our weal and woe, acting upon us independently of our control and without our understanding. We are vulnerable, and our autonomy is compromised.

I describe the essay as a collection of loose threads. Many are interesting, but none are sufficiently well developed for my taste. Still, I think that the basic theme strikes me as increasingly important: our media environment is novel, and this has a significant impact on individual psychology and the culture at large.

Sacasas writes of our “re-enchantment” in this media environment, as we feel ourselves captive of invisible forces. He refers to algorithms as these hidden forces. But I think that the belief in systemic racism is another example of re-enchantment.

His thoughts on the anachronistic nature of fact-checking struck me as spot-on.

Whose course will scale?

Posted on by

Tyler Cowen writes,

My fall semester teaching was assigned to be online even before Covid-19 came along. The enrollment for that class – Principles of Economics – will be much larger, with hundreds more students, but with some assistance, I expect to handle it.

Suppose that none of the top tier colleges can have on-campus learning in the fall. If a lot of students are taking courses on line, then they should be able to choose courses from colleges other than the one in which they are enrolled. As an online student, your best approach might be to take econ with Tyler, engineering from someone at Carnegie-Mellon, journalism from someone at Northwestern, etc.

The online course market could end up looking like the textbook market. The per-student cost should fall to about the cost of a textbook. The market structure will tend toward winners-take most. If Tyler is one of the winners, he could have a few hundred thousand students.

In the online environment, having a good traditional brand, like “Mankiw,” will not matter much. Your competitors have been focused on the online product and persistently iterating and improving it.

With on-location college, the school can foist on you an inexperienced teaching assistant who can barely speak comprehensible English and charge your parents a fortune for the privilege. I don’t think that model will be viable if colleges go on line.

[UPDATE: Read Scott Galloway’s take, which is somewhat different from mine, but is still based on the view that online education scales differently from in-person education.

In ten years, it’s feasible to think that MIT doesn’t welcome 1,000 freshmen to campus; it welcomes 10,000. What that means is the top-20 universities globally are going to become even stronger. What it also means is that universities Nos. 20 to 50 are fine. But Nos. 50 to 1,000 go out of business or become a shadow of themselves.

}

The medium is the mess

Posted on by

Adam Garfinkle writes,

The deep-reading brain excels at making connections among analogical, inferential, and empathetic modes of reasoning, and knows how to associate them all with accumulated background knowledge. That constellation of sources and connections is what enables not just strategic thinking, but original thinking more broadly. So could it be that the failures of the American political class to fashion useful solutions to public- and foreign-policy challenges turn not just on polarization and hyper-partisanship, but also on the strong possibility that many of these non-deep readers are no longer able to think below the surface tension of a tweet?

If the printing press helped produce the Enlightenment, then perhaps the iPhone is producing the Endarkenment.