Disqus - Latest Comments for binarybits

Re: “Limited and Temporary?”

Tim Lee — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:28:20 -0000

They might be able to, although it would be a little bit tricky to replicate the conditions that led to the Google settlement. But the more important question is why should the AAAP and the Authors' Guild get to decide who gets to index the millions of orphan works that weren't written by their members? I don't think that's an outcome to celebrate even if it doesn't create a literal monopoly.

Re: How Many Competitors Is Enough?

Tim Lee — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 16:45:08 -0000

AT&T pretty clearly enjoyed a monopoly, enforced by the government. For several decades the FCC specifically prohibited anyone from offering competing long distance service, for example.

Re: Are these cell phone jammers available for personal use in cinemas?

Tim Lee — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:40:12 -0000

Care to elaborate on this?

Re: Media Deconsolidation (Part 24): I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

Tim Lee — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:22:34 -0000

Adam, I think it's important to remember that when cars replaced horses, the buggy manufacturers didn't all become car manufacturers. Most of them simply went out of business. The reason wasn't that the people running the buggy industry were incompetent or short-sighted, it was simply that buggy companies, as institutions, were not well-suited for manufacturing automobiles.

I suspect the same is true of a lot of "old media" institutions. The optimal media organization in the 20th century was huge and monolithic. Because printing and distribution were centralized and had massive economies of scale, it made sense to have newspapers with hundreds of reporters and thousands of support staff. Now, with the means of distribution radically decentralized, that organizational scheme just doesn't make sense any more. The optimal size for the typical media organization is an order of magnitude smaller than it was last century. And so organizations that were organized around reporting staffs in the hundreds are going to face relentless pressure to downsize. Some of them will disappear entirely. Some of them will undergo radical reorganizations and emerge from bankruptcy as dramatically smaller, leaner organizations. And some may successfully navigate the transition.

But it's a mistake to equate the health of last century's dominant media firms with the health of journalism as an enterprise. The collapse of big companies like the Tribune Company doesn't necessarily mean there will be fewer professional reporters in the future. Rather, what we're likely to see—what we're seeing already—is a proliferation of new business models for news gathering and dissemination. A big chunk of my income over the last year has come from online news sources like Ars Technica and Techdirt. Ars recently hired Julian as a full-time reporter and editor. And I've got numerous friends working for other web-based publications with a dizzying array of business models and editorial.

Now, this is admittedly disconcerting if you're used to a world in which a single organization like the New York Times was in charge of dispatching reporters to collect "all the news that's fit to print." And of course it's wrenching for those reporters who worked at a major newspaper and are now facing layoffs.

But in fact, there's every reason to think that the forces of spontaneous order will work here as well as it does in other markets. If there are readers who want to read about something, chances are there will also be people who want to write about it. If there's a large number of readers interested in a given subject, someone will find a way to make a living writing about that subject. Markets and spontaneous order work.

I can't tell you exactly how any particular sector of the news business will work just as I can't tell you exactly which farmers will grow the food you'll eat next year. But I'm pretty darn sure that thanks to the magic of spontaneous order, there will be food on the shelves when you go to the grocery store. And by the same token, I'm pretty confident that when you fire up your browser next year, there will continue to be plenty of high quality news and entertainment available.

Re: The Lesson of Rod Blagojevich: We Need Better Government!

Tim Lee — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:12:57 -0000

Will, I think you're being too hard on Horwitz. Obviously, given that the government is going to perform a certain task, we should prefer that it do so more rather than less effectively. And obviously at the margin, there there are reforms that can enhance the performance of governments. I don't take Horwitz to be denying this simple and obvious point. Rather, his point is that given that government officials often do behave this way (and it's indisputable that for every Blogojevich and Stevens who blatantly betray the public trust there are a dozen others who do so more subtly and are not caught) we should be skeptical about giving governments new powers that they didn't previously enjoy. We should not, say, give the executive branch unfettered authority to hand out tens of billions of dollars to banks, or to micromanage the auto industry.

I think Munger overstates the case a bit, and does come across as denying that government can ever be made to work better or worse. But surely you'll agree that making government work well is a lot harder than most non-libertarians acknowledge, and that incidents like this one serve as a useful reality check for those who romanticize the workings of government and the public-spiritedness of public servants.

Re: PFF Amicus Brief in Key First Amendment Case: Limits on Audience Size are Unconstitutional

Tim Lee — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 23:14:39 -0000

Looks like a great brief. I hope the DC Circuit listens.

Re: The Most Important Tech Policy Books of 2008

Tim Lee — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 16:28:02 -0000

Great post Adam, and thanks for the links.

Re: More on Copyright Enforcement and Surveillance

Tim Lee — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 19:57:19 -0000

I start a new post because I think I have something to say that would be of interest to people who didn't follow the entire previous comment thread. I didn't really view it as a response to Tom at all. You'll notice that I don't mention his name at all in this post. Rather, I thought Timon's comment was worth highlighting and commenting on in its own right.

And I do, in fact, use categories and dividers. I think we have a bit of a difference of opinion about how long posts should be before they get divided, but (for example) you'll notice that the post I linked to above has a divider. I don't use tags because those are a relatively recent addition to the site and I just haven't yet gotten into the habit of using them yet.

Re: More on Copyright Enforcement and Surveillance

Tim Lee — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 14:49:16 -0000

Tom, you started your first comment with "your characterizations of my beliefs and those of others at PFF are too obviously wrong to require any response," but couldn't be bothered to elaborate on how I mis-characterized your views. Then you proceeded to knock down a variety of straw men of my views. For example, you imputed to me the view that "we might not need copyrights because the costs and risks inherent in the private production of all major expression could be cross-subsidized in ways that would make them seem "free" to Internet users," which is nowhere close to a fair summary of my views on copyright.

You continue this pattern with your latest comment, bizarrely attributing to me the view that "private property rights are now a threat to liberty because bilateral, consentual, market exchange requires means of identifying persons, and any such means will inevitably turn the Internet into a “panopticon” of pervasive government surveillance." How you derived that conclusion from what I wrote is a mystery to me.

Now look, I'm not the best writer in the world, so when someone interprets my writing in a way I don't expect, I normally take that as a sign that my writing wasn't clear. But you misread peoples' writing so frequently and egregiously that it's hard to escape the conclusion that you're not trying very hard to represent peoples' views accurately. So you can understand why I'm reluctant to invest a lot of time trying to clarify my views.

Re: What Will It Take to Stop File Sharing?

Tim Lee — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:23:55 -0000

Ryan is exactly right. If the ISP has information that allows it to definitely identify the person in question, it should be required to divulge the information after the proper legal process. I took Tom to be making the stronger claim that ISPs have a legal obligation to architect their networks so that they would always have the ability to identify the user responsible for particular network traffic. And he seemed to be saying that if the network owner doesn't do that, then the network owner itself should be liable for the crime. So if someone goes into a coffee shop and downloads kiddie porn, the FBI would hold the coffee shop owner responsible if they couldn't catch the downloader. That seems crazy to me. If Tom is not saying that then maybe you can straighten me out on exactly what he is saying.

Re: My debate with USA Today about new study on media & kids

Tim Lee — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 11:34:15 -0000

Congrats Adam.

Re: Nothing New, of Course

Tim Lee — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 09:47:28 -0000

I think the idea is that girls are more likely to say yes to boys who say no.

Re: I Only Sleep With Cosmotarians

Tim Lee — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:23:37 -0000

Great post Will.

Re: Lessig’s call for a “simple blanket license” in Remix

Tim Lee — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:09:18 -0000

Great post Adam.

Re: Nemertes “Internet Interrupted” study

Tim Lee — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:25:15 -0000

Maybe I need to read the study, but I don't understand what "demand will outstrip capacity" means. Demand and capacity are both sensitive to price, and the Internet has always been subject to congestion during periods of peak usage. So how would an Internet in which demand has "outstripped capacity" look different from the Internet we've got now?

Re: Why Be an Internet Optimist?

Tim Lee — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:40:39 -0000

Yeah, i definitely agree that there can be too little central planning as well as too much. However, I do think that once an open platform becomes dominant in a particular market, it's extremely unlikely to get displaced by a closed platform.

Re: Net Neutrality, Free Speech, and Tim Lee’s New Paper

Tim Lee — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:50:17 -0000

Thanks for the plug Adam. And I definitely agree that it's important to remember that the First Amendment is directed at the government, not private firms.

Re: Book Review: Blown to Bits by Abelson, Ledeen, & Lewis

Tim Lee — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:46:41 -0000

The authors have a strongly-worded chapter on copyright that generally argues for relaxing copyright protections. Interestingly, however, (unless I am missing something) I notice they don’t offer their book for free download on their site. I’m always intrigued by copyright critics who refuse to put their own content online. Apparently, it’s another case of ‘copying is good for me, but not for thee.’

Adam, this criticism doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Aside from Boldrin and Levin, hardly anyone advocates the abolition of copyright. What a lot of people are opposed to (i haven't read the book but I suspect this describes them) is the ever-more-draconian penalties for consumers and ever-broader scope of copyright protection. There's nothing remotely inconsistent about advocating that copyright be kept within its traditional limits while take advantage of copyright to protect one's own works.

Now, it might be inconsistent if the authors encouraged their publishers to start suing people who shared copies of their books on BitTorrent. But as far as I know they haven't done that.

Re: I Find Myself Agreeing with My Own Assumptions More Often Than Not

Tim Lee — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:35:32 -0000

Jeffrey and Pedro, I agree that Will could stand to be a little bit less glib, but I'm hard pressed to find any specifics in Cohn's piece worth responding to. His argument appears to be (1) the collapse of the Big Three would create hardships for those firms' employees, shareholders, and suppliers and (2) these firms may have been dysfunctional in the past, but they're in the process of turning things around.

Point (1) is undoubtedly true, but if we intervened in every bankruptcy that created a hardship for someone, no firm would ever go out of business and we'd wind up in a state of crony capitalist stagnation. Yes, a Detroit collapse would create hardship for more people than the average bankruptcy, but bailing them out will cost significantly more as well.

I'm not an expert on the auto industry, but point (2) strikes me as almost certainly nonsense. Every management team facing bankruptcy has a nice story about how if they can just raise more capital they'll be able to turn things around. Once in a while that's true, but usually it's not. Again, there's no reason to think that the Big Three's turnaround story is any more believable than those of dozens of smaller firms that will go bankrupt in the coming months without any prospect of a government bailout.

So which of Cohn's arguments, specifically, does Will need to respond to, and what would constitute a satisfactory response? Obviously, a Big Three collapse would be a bad thing. Squandering $25 billion would also be a bad thing. I don't see anything in Cohn's piece that helps us understand which of these things would be worse, which makes it a pretty underwhelming argument.

Re: Network Neutrality and Transaction Costs

Tim Lee — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:56:11 -0000

OK, I stand corrected. I quoted one prominent network engineer who found end-to-end prioritization impractical.

I think you're choosing a hyper-technical meaning of "network neutrality" that doesn't accurately reflect the concerns of actual network neutrality advocates. I don't entirely blame you for this, since they seem to have difficulty agreeing among themselves about what they mean, but I also don't think you're likely to convince anyone by throwing up an impenetrable wall of technical jargon.

Re: Network Neutrality and Transaction Costs

Tim Lee — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:05:58 -0000

I'm not sure what point you're making here. As I said in my paper, DiffServ is a e2e-friendly way to do packet prioritization. My guess is that it's not going to be practical to implement DiffServ on the public Internet, but the argument of my paper doesn't depend on that.

Re: Network Neutrality and Transaction Costs

Tim Lee — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:59:43 -0000

I think it's a lot of nitpicking and little bit of disagreement about the technical feasibility of providing performance guarantees on a network as large and heterogenous as the the Internet.

As far as the nitpicking goes, if you examine the Internet with a powerful enough microscope, you'll find stuff that could be plausibly described as non-neutral routing behavior. It's true, for example, that routers employ a variety of low-level optimization techniques that don't quite measure up to the ideal of completely neutral routing. However, I think this is missing the forest for the trees. Throughout its history, what has made TCP/IP different from other networks has been that it has been more decentralized and offered end users fewer guarantees than competing networks. Many partisans for other networks regarded this as a weakness, but of course it worked out pretty well.

As Richard would know if he read my paper carefully, my advocacy of end-to-end isn't a dogmatic opposition to any sort of routing optimization, nor am I even opposed, in principle to network owners offering prioritized services, although I'm skeptical that will work very well. Rather, I think the fundamental question is who will be in control: users or network owners. I think that any prioritization scheme that gets implemented should respect the end-to-end principle in the sense that the prioritization levels should be set by end users, rather than networks themselves trying to calculate the appropriate priority level using techniques like DPI.

I give a couple of quotes from prominent network engineers who don't believe that end-to-end prioritization if feasible on a network the size of the Internet. Richard apparently disagrees with them. I'm not an expert on network architecture, so I'm not going to make a strong statement either way on that, but at a minimum I think we can say that a lot of people have talked about adding prioritization to TCP/IP networks and we have yet to see anyone deploy it at Internet scales.

Re: The ICC and Network Neutrality

Tim Lee — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:14:20 -0000

In this particular case we have a very strong and specific historical precedent for success of this type of regulation

You're talking about Carterfone? I think it's important to keep in mind the context. Carterfone was a great policy victory, but it was a great policy victory because the previous policy was so terrible. AT&T, remember, had a government-guaranteed monopoly in the telephone market, and didn't allow you to attach anything to the network that it didn't own. This had been the law for decades. So yes, going from that environment of legally-mandated monopoly to a system of regulated competition is a big improvement.

One reason that Carterfone worked so well is that the telephone industry had been basically static for the preceding decades. Because disruptive innovation had previously been completely illegal, there was no need to worry that Carterfone would stifle it. Because the previous system was so bad, Carterfone was virtually all upside and no downside.

This is nothing like the modern Internet industry. As a practical matter, you can attach almost anything you want to most major residential broadband networks in the United States. Some things are formally banned by the providers' terms of service, but these restrictions are rarely enforced.

And unlike the telephone network of the 1960s and 1970s, today's Internet marketplace continues to evolve rapidly. A decade ago, there was no broadband service to speak of. Five years ago, wireless Internet access was outrageously expensive and too slow to be useful. We have no idea what the market for Internet access will look like a decade from now. The Carterfone-era FCC had the luxury of regulating in an environment where few unexpected changes were likely to occur. Today's FCC would be regulating in an environment where changes are a virtual certainty.

Also, it seems to me that you're engaging in a bit of cherry-picking here. The FCC screwed up the telecom market for the bulk of the 20th Century. For a couple of decades from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, they made some good decisions. If you can claim those two decades as evidence that the FCC can get things right, then I can cite the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, early 1960s, and much of the last decade as examples of how the FCC can get things wrong. Certainly we can all hope that network neutrality regulations turn out like Carterfone rather than the 1930s, but I wouldn't put my money on it.

Re: Tim Lee on Net Neut: “The Durable Internet”

Tim Lee — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:46:15 -0000

I don't have any beef with a end-to-end-friendly, two-tiered network like the one you describe other than being skeptical that it could be made to work on a network with a billion people. My sense is that some NN advocates (including Tim Wu) feel the same way.

A big part of the problem, of course, is that network neutrality means different things to different people who advocate it. But at least some NN advocates mean something like end-to-end, and for clarity I chose to use that definition.

Re: Tim Lee on Net Neut: “The Durable Internet”

Tim Lee — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:11:28 -0000

There is no inconsistency at all between an architecture where end systems negotiate flow rates with each other and service levels from the network itself.

I can't parse this sentence.