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defrogI get emails.
Sometimes they’re from Rand Paul.
Well, technically this one is from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a conservative think tank that focuses mainly on technology, which has been spamming me in the course of my day job for years. Their basic philosophy goes something like this: Govt should never regulate business. Ever. The end.
Something like that.
Anyway, the email was promoting a talk by Senator Paul – with special guest star Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) – to outline their preferred approach to Internet regulation. Given the speakers involved, CEI’s involvement and the fact that it was held at the Heritage Foundation, you can more or less guess what that approach might be.
What you might not guess is that I agree with some of it.
Not Marsha Blackburn’s part. She’s still pushing the concept that net neutrality regulation is a plot by Obama and the FCC to nationalize the Internet. Which is not just misleading but 100% wrong. That’s like arguing the FCC nationalized the broadcast industry by telling broadcasters they can’t stick up their towers just any old place and blast away at full power to drown out the competition.
As for Rand Paul … well, here’s something you won’t hear me say too often: I agree with some of what he said.
For example, I agree that the govt is wrong to insist that information entrusted to a third party loses the search-and-seizure protection of the Fourth Amendment. I agree that SOPA/PIPA were very bad ideas. And I agree that the govt shouldn’t force Google, Facebook and yr ISP to hand it yr personal data regardless of what yr T&C contract says.
However, I don’t agree with Paul’s stance that the free market and consumer power are sufficient enough forces to regulate privacy policies:
One other thing, and this is a minor point, but:
This conservative meme making the rounds that the US government did not invent the Internet?
Sorry, but it did. It also invented the World Wide Web, which is an application that runs on the Internet, not the Internet itself.
Maybe the govt didn’t commercialize the Web. But commercialization only happened because the brainiacs at DARPA and CERN designed the Internet and the Web as an open platform that anyone could innovate upon – something that no commercial business in its right mind would ever have done.
It’s a series of govt tubes,
This is dF
Sometimes they’re from Rand Paul.
Well, technically this one is from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a conservative think tank that focuses mainly on technology, which has been spamming me in the course of my day job for years. Their basic philosophy goes something like this: Govt should never regulate business. Ever. The end.
Something like that.
Anyway, the email was promoting a talk by Senator Paul – with special guest star Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) – to outline their preferred approach to Internet regulation. Given the speakers involved, CEI’s involvement and the fact that it was held at the Heritage Foundation, you can more or less guess what that approach might be.
What you might not guess is that I agree with some of it.
Not Marsha Blackburn’s part. She’s still pushing the concept that net neutrality regulation is a plot by Obama and the FCC to nationalize the Internet. Which is not just misleading but 100% wrong. That’s like arguing the FCC nationalized the broadcast industry by telling broadcasters they can’t stick up their towers just any old place and blast away at full power to drown out the competition.
As for Rand Paul … well, here’s something you won’t hear me say too often: I agree with some of what he said.
For example, I agree that the govt is wrong to insist that information entrusted to a third party loses the search-and-seizure protection of the Fourth Amendment. I agree that SOPA/PIPA were very bad ideas. And I agree that the govt shouldn’t force Google, Facebook and yr ISP to hand it yr personal data regardless of what yr T&C contract says.
However, I don’t agree with Paul’s stance that the free market and consumer power are sufficient enough forces to regulate privacy policies:
"You make a contract with Google, and Google has a right to whatever you sign away," he said. "You can give up certain things." Users can choose not to give up personal information, he noted, but then they "won't get some of the benefits of Google's search engine."
I have a couple of issues with this.
1. Paul assumes that Google’s customers are its users. We aren’t. Google’s customer base is its advertisers and marketing partners. Yes, Google has contractual service obligations to you as an account holder. But in a purely commercial sense, its privacy provisions are developed and implemented with advertisers in mind, not you. As far as Google is concerned, all yr personal data belongs to Google, not you. So it’s theirs to package and sell however they want. Advertisers benefit from having full access to yr data.
So, from a purely market-forces perspective, Google has every incentive to treat yr personal data like product to sell to whoever it wants, and very little incentive to take yr feelings about into account.
2. Paul’s argument to this is that all of this can be controlled by consumer power. It’s completely up to you what personal info you share, and if you don’t like Google’s privacy policies, you can always switch to Yahoo or Bing, for example. Sure. Only their business model and motivations are the same as Google’s, so their privacy policies will be similar.
Also, the “consumer power” argument doesn’t really hold water when you factor in social networking. Don’t like Facebook’s privacy policies? Hey, take yr business to Google Plus or Friendster or whatever. Here’s hoping everyone you know also moves their account there, otherwise it’s going to be pretty quiet.
That’s why Facebook hasn’t lost a whole lot of subscribers over its privacy policies.
So I do think there needs to be some privacy regulation. I don’t think it needs to be overreaching, mind. But I do think web companies need to understand that they have to take user privacy seriously, and I don’t think market forces alone will be sufficient incentive.
I have a couple of issues with this.
1. Paul assumes that Google’s customers are its users. We aren’t. Google’s customer base is its advertisers and marketing partners. Yes, Google has contractual service obligations to you as an account holder. But in a purely commercial sense, its privacy provisions are developed and implemented with advertisers in mind, not you. As far as Google is concerned, all yr personal data belongs to Google, not you. So it’s theirs to package and sell however they want. Advertisers benefit from having full access to yr data.
So, from a purely market-forces perspective, Google has every incentive to treat yr personal data like product to sell to whoever it wants, and very little incentive to take yr feelings about into account.
2. Paul’s argument to this is that all of this can be controlled by consumer power. It’s completely up to you what personal info you share, and if you don’t like Google’s privacy policies, you can always switch to Yahoo or Bing, for example. Sure. Only their business model and motivations are the same as Google’s, so their privacy policies will be similar.
Also, the “consumer power” argument doesn’t really hold water when you factor in social networking. Don’t like Facebook’s privacy policies? Hey, take yr business to Google Plus or Friendster or whatever. Here’s hoping everyone you know also moves their account there, otherwise it’s going to be pretty quiet.
That’s why Facebook hasn’t lost a whole lot of subscribers over its privacy policies.
So I do think there needs to be some privacy regulation. I don’t think it needs to be overreaching, mind. But I do think web companies need to understand that they have to take user privacy seriously, and I don’t think market forces alone will be sufficient incentive.
One other thing, and this is a minor point, but:
This conservative meme making the rounds that the US government did not invent the Internet?
Sorry, but it did. It also invented the World Wide Web, which is an application that runs on the Internet, not the Internet itself.
Maybe the govt didn’t commercialize the Web. But commercialization only happened because the brainiacs at DARPA and CERN designed the Internet and the Web as an open platform that anyone could innovate upon – something that no commercial business in its right mind would ever have done.
It’s a series of govt tubes,
This is dF
