Think Tank Argues That Giving Up Privacy Is Good For The Poor

from the hurting-the-poor-helps-the-poor dept

With ISPs like AT&T now charging broadband customers a steep premium just to protect their own privacy, the FCC has begun looking at some relatively basic new privacy protections for broadband. This has, as you might expect, resulted in a notable bump in histrionics from the industry. Comcast, for example, quickly tried to inform the FCC that charging users a surcharge for privacy was ok because it would somehow magically lower broadband prices, and banning them from this kind of behavior would do a tremendous disservice to the internet at large.

Anybody even marginally aware of the lack of competition in broadband understands this is just another attempt to take advantage of captive customers in a broken market. But the broadband industry quickly doubled down, using the usual assortment of payrolled think tanks to pollute the discourse pool. The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), for example, was quick to try and claim that charging all broadband users steep premiums for privacy would generate huge benefits for the entire "internet ecosystem," and that anybody who couldn't see the genius of such a practice was an "absolutist."

But a think tank by the name of the Technology Policy Institute has doubled down on the already dumb double down, with an op-ed at the Hill that tries to claim that such a privacy surcharge would actually help the poor:

"'Pay-for-privacy' plans disproportionately benefit lower-income individuals. Indeed, the notion that offering an additional option would be detrimental to any consumers, whatever their income, is misguided..."A plan that offers a discount in exchange for data may enable a lower-income consumer both to have internet service and pay for groceries. Depriving the consumer of that choice may put the internet connection out of reach."

Pause with me to understand what's being claimed here for a moment. Mr. Thomas M. Lenard is actually trying to claim that adding a privacy surcharge to what's already some of the most expensive broadband in the developed world will somehow help the poor buy groceries. I've seen a lot of nonsense in sixteen years writing about telecom, but this latest storm of disinformation surrounding the FCC's new privacy push should qualify for some kind of award.

Like AT&T and Comcast, these think tanks are violently misrepresenting what's actually happening here. AT&T charges its U-Verse broadband customers $528 to $792 more every year (up to $62 more per month) to opt out of the company's Internet Preferences program, which uses deep packet inspection to track your online behavior -- down to the second. Not only is that not anything close to a discount, but AT&T makes opting out as cumbersome as possible. The hope is to heavily penalize opting out and to actively punish broadband users that protect their own privacy.

ISPs consistently try to argue that they shouldn't be regulated differently from Google and Facebook on privacy, and that argument surfaces again here:

"AT&T is giving the subscriber the opportunity to allow advertisers to pay part of the subscription fee. What would be the rationale for allowing Google to offer advertising-supported service but not AT&T?

(Raises hand) Because AT&T and Comcast enjoy a duopoly or monopoly over the last mile? Google or Facebook customers unhappy with their privacy policies can simply stop using these services (imagine the exodus by customers of either company if they tried to charge money to opt out of select privacy practices?). Broadband customers, in contrast, have nowhere to flee if one or both of their broadband options engages in hostile privacy practices the likes of which we're seeing here. Because AT&T, Verizon and Comcast are pushing harder into content and online ads doesn't change this underlying reality.

Between privacy surcharges, Verizon's getting busted for covertly modifying user packets to track user behavior, and cable companies bragging how they provide worse customer service for low credit customers, most people should be able to understand why the FCC thinks it may be time for some basic broadband privacy rules. Given that an informed broadband subscriber with the tools to protect their privacy could potentially cost these companies billions, it should also be easy to understand why think tanks and the ISPs that fund them have ratcheted up attempts to derail the effort using some of the most ridiculous arguments imaginable.

Filed Under: broadband, pay for privacy, think tanks
Companies: at&t, comcast, technology policy institute, tpi

The Old 'Partisan' Lines Don't Fit Nicely With Modern Civil Liberties And Tech Policy Issues

from the rethinking-partisanship dept

I've said a few times in the past that, as someone who doesn't identify with any particular group on the political/partisan spectrum, I've appreciated the fact that the issues I tend to cover aren't normally considered "partisan" and can often create "strange bedfellows." Copyright, for example, isn't an issue that fits into partisan lines at all (though, unfortunately, that's because for a long time, both major parties supported ever greater maximalism -- though that may finally be changing). In fact, when issues did become partisan, it often meant that all reasoned discussion and debate (and chance for actual forward motion) went out the window. Net neutrality was a good example of that. When it first came about, the discussions concerning net neutrality weren't partisan at all, but then the Democrats embraced it, and the Republicans lined up against it, and any reasoned or nuanced discussion or debate about it seemed to vanish.

Still, some issues are historically associated with one side or the other. Things like "national security" often seem to be an issue that the traditional "right" lines up behind, while "civil liberties" is an issue that the traditional "left" lines up behind. I'm old enough to remember when being a "a card carrying member of the ACLU" was used as an insult by Republicans to smear Democrats. Obviously, there are libertarians who are often (in my view, incorrectly) associated as being on "the right," who care deeply about civil liberties, but for the most part, the general stereotype is that Republicans on the "right" lined up behind strong national security fights and were less interested in civil liberties, while the Democrats on the "left" were "weak" on national security.

So it's at least a little bizarre to see this piece in Foreign Policy Magazine talking about how the Heritage Foundation, often considered the keepers of the Republican platform, refused to publish a paper that defended the NSA's surveillance efforts as perfectly legal and constitutional. The Heritage Foundation was a big supporter of the Patriot Act, and urged that the key provisions that enabled the dragnet data collection of phone records be renewed. Even more bizarre? When Heritage refused to publish the paper, Benjamin Wittes, of the Brookings Institution -- often considered a "liberal" think tank in DC -- jumped in to publish a version of the paper instead:

Cully Stimson, a senior Defense Department official in the Bush administration who now runs Heritage's national security law program, called Benjamin Wittes, the editor-in-chief of the national security blog Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Stimson "asked me whether Lawfare might be interested in [the papers], and I was delighted to publish them," Wittes told The Cable. "We asked Steve to consolidate them into a single paper, and there were some subsequent revisions as well because of the document release that took place in the intervening period," Wittes said, referring to the government's decision in August to declassify a large number of documents about NSA programs.

Now, there could be a few different things at work here. For example, while Brookings is traditionally considered more on the liberal end of the spectrum, Wittes has long been a full on cheerleader for the surveillance state, so it was a natural fit. Similarly, Heritage is now under the leadership of Jim DeMint, who has long been identified as being more closely aligned with the more libertarian wings of the Republican Party. So this could be simply a case where the leanings of those two individuals resulted in what might be seen as a "strange bedfellows" situation with this paper.

Alternatively, there's an argument that rather than a sort of post-partisan issue that some of us hope these kinds of issues will become, this really is an overtly partisan issue, to the point that Heritage is less eager to support NSA surveillance by the administration because it's not "their guy" in the White House, The same may be true for those on the left who are willing to support the NSA's actions (even when they protested angrily about similar, and potentially less egregious, civil liberties abuses under George W. Bush) because it's okay with President Obama in charge. If this is true, it's not just incredibly cynical and short-sighted, but it's kind of depressing at the intellectual dishonesty of it all.

While either of those scenarios may be true, I'm still hopeful that more and more of these important issues having to do with technology and civil liberties policy will be viewed as post-partisan (which is very different than "bi-partisan"), in that they're important issues that should be dealt with on their own merits, rather than if you happen to prefer the red team or the blue team. Part of the problem that many of us who focus on things like innovation and civil liberties policy have with the way the political efforts break down is that neither party comes close to representing what we're interested in. If more of these important issues that are getting attention don't fit neatly along party lines, perhaps the political landscape can be reconfigured in a more effective way to actually deal with the issues of tomorrow, rather than mere bickering about the issues of the past.

Filed Under: civil liberties, conservative, intellectual property, left, liberal, national security, partisan politics, politics, right, think tanks
Companies: brookings, heritage foundation

The Fine Line Between Legitimate Think Tank And Industry Shills

from the reputational-arbitrage dept

Tim Lee recently had an excellent post that deserves even greater attention. It kicks off by talking about how a series of groups that purported to be "free market" think tanks have, over the past few years, tried to become active in debates over copyright and patent law, often promoting stronger IP laws -- which seems a bit odd for supposedly "free market" operations, since intellectual property is a government-granted monopoly on an abundant resource -- or the very antithesis of a free market ideal. What Lee noted, is that these newer groups weren't really intellectually honest "think tanks," but rather were operations funded by certain business interests, set up to look like independent think tanks, and then trying to ride on the good reputation of the think tanks out there who are intellectually honest:

What was going on is that property rights are popular, while the pharmaceutical and recording industries are not. The panel was a small part of a long-range, carefully planned campaign to hitch their rent-seeking agenda to the broader free-market movement. I don't think SPN discloses who pays for its conferences, but I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that the "intellectual property" industries wrote large checks for the privilege of putting that panel together. The situation irritated me so much that I wrote a piece for reason denouncing the project.

The campaign to co-opt the free-market movement for the agenda of "intellectual property" intersts continues to this day. Another quasi-think tank called the Institute for Policy Innovation tried to get me fired in 2006 for writing this admittedly intemperate post about a shoddy study they had put out on the costs of copyright infringement. And just today I was followed on Twitter by a representative from the Property Rights Alliance, the (presumably industry-funded) organization that sponsored that 2005 conference and puts out embarrassingly bad "studies" promoting stronger copyright and patent protections.

While he notes that, so far, these groups haven't been all that successful in the "reputational arbitrage" attempt of using the good names of some real free market think tanks to suggest that stronger intellectual property is, in fact, a "free market" concept, similar attempts elsewhere have had pretty drastic consequences. Take, for example, the extremely controversial Arizona immigration law. It turns out that part of the support for it came out of some very questionable places:

Which brings me to this appalling story (via E.D. Kain) documenting that private prison companies were a key lobbying force behind Arizona's "papers, please" immigration law. If private prison companies had openly drafted and lobbied for a new immigration law that would increase the state's prison population, it would have been obvious what was going on and the effort would have gone nowhere. So instead, the prison companies went to the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that performs think tank-type work for conservative state legislators (and regularly attends SPN conferences), and asked them to draft the language. The legislation was drafted by an ALEC committee, with industry input. An Arizona ALEC member then took the legislation back to his state, where several other ALEC members signed on as co-sponsors.

It's important to be clear that ALEC isn't just about this kind of corruption. I imagine ALEC provides real services to its legislator-members, who often have small staffs and benefit from the help of ideologically like-minded policy experts. And ALEC often collaborates with state-based think tanks, many of which employ genuine policy experts. The problem is that the details of legislation drafted this way are likely to be driven by sponsors' interests. Even assuming that conservatives are going to push for anti-immigrant legislation, there are a number of ways you might do that. If the prison lobby has a seat at the table, the legislation is likely to be written in a way that maximizes the prison population—and the cost to state taxpayers.

Unfortunately, this kind of institutional rot is endemic in the public policy world. This ALEC story is particularly egregious, but most of the time the process is more subtle. Some think tanks (such as Cato) do a pretty good job of insulating their scholars from donor pressure. But there are lots of quasi-think tanks who make no such effort. And the result is a steady gravitational pull in directions that benefit corporate sponsors.

Tim notes that this is not specific to any particular political ideology. It shows up on all sides of the political spectrum. And, he notes (accurately) that many of those involved would deny any sort of "corruption," often pointing out that their own interests already very much "agree" with the positions of their corporate sponsors. But it does worry Lee that this is becoming more common, and when some researchers and scholars from more reputable firms move to others that are less reputable, it sometimes becomes tricky to determine the borderlines of what is legitimate output, and what's really propaganda.

He points out that he's not quite sure what the solution is, but I'd argue transparency, and more openness to debate is a key aspect that could help. Those who are being intellectually honest do not fear an honest debate about the research and claims they make -- and often will encourage it. Those who are simply trying to drive home a certain point for a certain interest will do whatever possible to avoid an honest and open debate.

Filed Under: intellectual honesty, think tanks

The Smear Campaign Against Larry Lessig And Free Culture

from the getting-nasty dept

You may recall that I've had my run-ins in the past with the incredibly misnamed Progress & Freedom Foundation. While I tend to think that Adam Theirer does okay work for them, almost every other report that comes out of the "think tank" seems highly questionable. We haven't heard much from them lately on intellectual property rights -- perhaps since two of their most outspoken folks on that topic (Patrick Ross and James DeLong) moved on. However, it looks like they've found someone new to drum up ridiculous arguments on intellectual property issues. If you don't recall, PFF is the group that has claimed that fair use harms innovation, that net neutrality is theft, and that open spectrum harms innovation (obviously WiFi was a huge problem). The most amazing thing to me, though, is that the PFF positions itself as a "libertarian" "free markets" think tank that thinks there should be less government regulation. But... anything having to do with intellectual property or spectrum, and suddenly all those libertarian statements go out the window.

Given all of that history, it's still rather amazing to read its newly released report on how the "Free Culture" movement, as explained by Larry Lessig, is really a "quasi-socialist" movement. Reading the full paper, you get a sense of how Washington DC works. It's a pure smear job that takes Lessig quotes out of context for ultimate impact and fills the rest with ad hominem and totally unsupported attacks. I certainly don't agree with everything that Lessig has to say -- and I particularly disagree with some of his policy recommendations. But there's simply no way to read Lessig's work and come to the conclusions in this paper if you are being intellectually honest. You can disagree with his conclusions. You can disagree with his reasoning -- but to paint what he has to say as a celebration of communism or socialism is simply a smear tactic and a political hack attack.

What becomes clear as you read the attack is that the author, Tom Sydnor, simply read through Lessig's works in search of sentences that could be taken out of context in order to paint Lessig as a secret socialist/communist. It's hard to see how that's "scholarship." It's not worth refuting each and every statement here, but we'll give a few simple examples. First, Sydnor claims that Lessig "demonizes" property owners. Actually, Sydnor claims that Lessig "literally demonizes property owners." Unless Lessig is turning property owners into demons, then I'd have to say that Sydnor doesn't understand what "literally" means. But, more to the point, this is a rhetorical trick by Sydnor, which is the basis of nearly his entire paper, where he repeatedly assumes that intellectual property is no different than tangible property. This is a fabrication. There is no reason to ignore the very real differences between the two unless you're trying to unfairly and dishonestly paint someone as supporting something they have not.

While making fun of Lessig (Sydnor snidely accuses Lessig of "name calling" before referring to Lessig as a "hypocritical demagogue" -- kettle, pot, etc.), Sydnor points out that Lessig "analogizes property rights to the pesticide DDT." If you're playing along in the home game, Sydnor is pulling this from page 129 in Lessig's book Free Culture. Lessig's actual point, which is quite valid and interesting is that DDT was originally designed to serve a good purpose, but it was only later that it was realized that it had negative unintended consequences. This isn't "demonizing property rights" as Sydnor implies. It's merely pointing out that even those with the best of intentions (the makers of DDT or the creators of copyright law) may not realize the negative consequences of their actions, and how those negative consequences may outweigh the positive consequences.

"No one set out to destroy the environment. Paul Muller certainly did not aim to harm any birds. But the effort to solve one set of problems produced another set which, in the view of some, was far worse than the problems that were originally attacked. Or more accurately, the problems DDT caused were worse than the problems it solved, at least when considering the other, more environmentally friendly ways to solve the problems that DDT was meant to solve."

If someone can explain how that's somehow demonizing property rights, I've got a job for you as a paid shill in DC. Instead, it's making a valid point that isn't demonizing anything -- most certainly not property rights. You can go through the rest of Sydnor's piece, and each and every time you'll notice he does one of two things: he conflates copyright with tangible property or he takes statements out of context to prove his point. He's also not beyond ridiculous hyperbole. In pointing to a rather reasonable quote from Lessig about why we should be interested in seeing if other systems can provide better outcomes, Sydnor brushes off all other systems of copyright by claiming:

"But during the last century, humanity conducted many vast experimental investigations of the relative merits of these "different property systems and the freedoms each allowed." Those experiments were run by well-intended people who sincerely believed that replacing systems of private property with "different systems" would improve the material and spiritual well-being of humanity. During those experiments, millions were murdered and billions were impoverished and enslaved.

Hyperbole much, Tom? Sydnor, once again, is equating copyright to tangible property (missing the irony that copyright -- a government granted monopoly -- seems a lot more closely aligned with the centralized governments of the former socialist nations than a system that relies on the free market). He then cuts off any questions about looking for a more reasonable system than copyright (which is a monopoly right, not a property right) by suggesting that any other system leads to "millions murdered" and "billions impoverished and enslaved." It's quite a leap. If there was any left, this paper destroys any credibility on pretty much anything coming out of PFF these days. It's the worst kind of political smear tactic.

Filed Under: free culture, larry lessig, politics, smear campaign, think tanks, tom sydnor
Companies: progress and freedom foundation