Category: Culture

Dept. of Commerce Creates Board of Inevitability

Yesterday, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker announced the official launch of the Digital Economy Board of Advisors, presenting seventeen volunteer professionals described in a press release as a “diverse group.”  And while it’s true that this diversity does represent the full spectrum from tech industry power players (YouTube & ATT) to tech industry startups (Lyft & Handy), Secretary Pritzker did not see fit to make room at the table for even one individual representing the core copyright industries.  It’s an unfortunate omission, not only for the more than five million people who work in the creative sectors, but for the country as a whole. After all, it is the creative workers who have leading-edge experience with some of the pitfalls of the so-called digital economy, so maybe there’s something to be learned by having one or two representative voices in the room.

Granted the digital revolution is already reaching beyond the Internet of Content into the Internet of Things, but Content is still the reason the Web grew the way it did, and Content is still one of this country’s biggest employers and biggest exports.  The number-one user of bandwidth worldwide is Netflix, and each of those programs we so easily stream and binge-watch represents hundreds of jobs—jobs that are threatened by another big user of bandwidth as an estimated 24% of all Internet traffic is directed at criminal sites hosting infringed movies, TV, books, video games, etc.

When technologist Jaron Lanier described the creative industries as the “canary in the coal mine” of the digital economy, it was among the more prophetic statements most people ignored.  Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has alluded to the possibility of “uncertain work” for most people within a decade.  We read accounts of college-educated millennials trying to navigate the instability of what we now call the “gig economy”, which directly affects marriage and birth rates, which directly affects housing and quite a few other major sectors.  So, it is dismaying to note that Secretary Pritzker seems to have filled her board with several digital economy cheerleaders but almost no representatives from industries that employ large numbers of people who are being told to “adapt” to the new economy, which in some cases is outright stealing from the “old” economy.

I know YouTube is very sparkly, but the platform with a billion viewers and about $4 billion in revenue is still not profitable, employs fewer than a thousand workers, and is exclusively a vehicle for advertising, the value of which can only decrease in an economy that doesn’t grow sustainable jobs where consumers can afford competitive choices.  It is disconcerting to think that the Commerce Secretary may not consider the cannibalistic nature of the digital economy if she is uninterested in hearing from some of those who are being eaten.  As many expert observers have noted, the technological transformation this time is not necessarily a case of creative destruction so much as it may be one of destructive destruction.  Certainly, this continues to be true for the core copyright industries.  As noted in a recent post, when Google directs users to an illegal platform for watching a movie, that’s not commerce; it’s the opposite of commerce.

Historically, democrats are pro union, pro labor, pro civil rights. As such, the Obama administration should take note of the way in which the major Silicon Valley companies have been antagonistic toward intellectual property rights as there is a direct philosophical line from disregarding one individual’s copyright (or patent) to disregarding millions of individuals’ labor rights. But I fear the Obama administration, of which I approve in many ways, has drunk a bit too much Silicon Kool-Aid.  From the number of former Google execs working in the administration to the appointment of Eric Schmidt as head of a new DoD advisory board, and now the composition of this board at Commerce, it’s hard not to feel a sense of inevitability—that one industry’s world view is quickly becoming national policy.  Not only is that no more desirable than excessive influence from oil or banking or any other traditional industry, but the Silicon Valley crowd—although they do have some cool and audacious ideas—is also amok with zealots and egomaniacs who’ve made personal billions on businesses that are neither profitable nor job-creating.  To the contrary, many of them are job-destroying, which leads to the question as to whether or not the digital economy is an economy at all.  Surely, the fact that digital technology will have a profound effect on commerce is inevitable, but how we choose to manage it should not be.

Why Does Google Love Piracy?

In yesterday’s post, I referred to the Android-based service called Google Now, which is about as close as your mobile device comes (so far) to reading your mind and anticipating your wants and needs.  By gathering data from contacts, emails, destinations visited, searches made, etc. the algorithms applied by the Now service essentially learn a user’s interests and then prompts him with what Google calls Cards, containing information or recommendations that may be either general or timely.  As Andy at TorrentFreak reports, “Google Now and its ‘Card’ notifications often pop up at the most opportune times, offering advice about things that haven’t yet happened in a users [sic] life – but are about to.”

As stated yesterday, I cannot personally imagine the benefits of this type of service outweighing the utterly invasive ickiness of it, and Andy also acknowledges that Google Now may be getting too close for comfort for many users.  But the headline reason TF was citing the service is that one of their regular readers noted that Google Now had recognized his interest in the character Deadpool and so delivered a Card recommending that he can view the recently-released feature film on a major torrent site. Andy writes, “Obviously there isn’t a team at Google hand-crafting Google Cards designed to promote unauthorized torrents. However, this does appear to show that Google’s algorithms are smart enough to put together interesting advice based on multiple and diverse information sources.”

Right.  Google surely is not “hand-crafting” Cards to promote piracy; but as usual, it isn’t making any effort to mitigate it either.  I know. I get it.  If the user shows an interest in Deadpool and also regularly visits torrent sites, Google’s algorithm is going to cross-reference these data and somewhat blindly produce the result described.  But that doesn’t mean the search giant doesn’t have the capability to limit or even stop themselves from pushing infringing sites like mints at the drug store register.  We know they have this capability.  In fact, I bet a user could read dozens of articles about human trafficking all day long without ever once receiving a Google Card suggesting where he can buy a slave.  (Please let me be right about this.)

Google is apparently addicted to pushing mass copyright infringement at every opportunity.  The difference between a search yielding legal and informative results about Deadpool and a search yielding a list of infringing sites offering the film hinges on whether or not you put the word “watch” in front of the title.  And even if nobody cared about the fact that this multi-billion dollar company is effectively pushing content theft, it also happens to be offering really crappy search service. I mean heaven forbid a user who isn’t attuned to the darker aspects of the Web simply wants information about a movie, and Google has decided that if he uses the word “watch” in his query, he gets to be vulnerable to links that are increasingly loaded with malware.  That’s cracker-jack service from the biggest search engine in the world.  But Google Now takes the problem a step further.  Rather than the user explicitly searching for information, and then navigating around useless and predatory results, Google Now can actually push a recommendation that is not only illegal, but potentially hazardous to the user.

More broadly, what does this story say about the larger promise of these platforms to create new opportunities for commerce and entrepreneurism?  Because an interest in a hot new film like Deadpool is an opportunity to drive a consumer to comics, merchandise, fan sites, or (call me crazy) any number of legal platforms to watch the movie! So, any prompt that would send the consumer to a torrent site is pure opportunity cost for the legitimate market.  Considering how leading-edge applications like Google Now really are, it seems like a one hell of a precedent for the company to set given all their pretensions to be great innovators.  Then again, this is SOP for Google, isn’t it?

Apple v FBI Doesn’t Address the Real Challenge

In a story that appeared Monday in The Guardian, writer Danny Yadron projects a hypothetical, but not technically unrealistic, future scenario in which we imagine our driverless car hijacks a run to the grocery store, transporting us instead to a police station because face-recognition software resulted in our being wanted for questioning in an investigation.  The eerie itself, Yadron reports, comes from engineer and former US government privacy policy consultant  Ashkan Soltani, who warns that this kind of circumstance could become reality if Apple loses its fight with the FBI over whether or not it must write code to circumvent the security system of San Bernardino terrorist Sayed Farook’s iPhone.

Of course, it is not farfetched to anticipate new forms of abuse in our increasingly networked lives, and it is prudent to seek remedies in policy and caselaw precedent that may preempt such scenarios; but I’m not sure that a ruling one way or another in the Apple case would be quite so prophetic as some observers suggest.  In fact, assuming we do become increasingly networked and adapt to the holistic Internet of Things as effortlessly and rapidly as the technologists expect us to, the matter of protecting civil liberties in this future society seems increasingly paradoxical. After all, government agencies are supposed to be our hedge against the excesses of private enterprise that might invade our privacy or run afoul of anti-trust restrictions; or government agencies are meant to protect us from criminal abuse of the same systems. But do we simultaneously expect private enterprise or “white hat” hackers to protect us from the overreach of government?

Yadron’s article addresses several aspects of this challenge, citing competing points of view from the policy, law-enforcement, and technology sectors.  And there are no easy answers.  For one thing, the current Apple case involving the cell phone of a known terrorist and a warrant issued by court order may be too specific to beg the broader question as to who controls the code that runs our day-to-day lives.  As of yesterday morning, the FBI announced that they may be able to crack the iPhone without Apple’s help; but even if the presently-suspended legal case were to proceed, Yadron notes that the court could rule in the FBI’s favor in this one extraordinary instance while remaining silent on the much larger question.

My own assumption is that, with regard to cases involving law enforcement, the public is still served by the courts and due process and that new legislation may not be necessary to adapt to new technology. For instance, as dramatic as the futuristic arrest by driverless car scenario may sound, it would be an illegal detention according to existing statute, at least the way Soltani imagines it.  But if similar automation were one day used to capture a wanted criminal based on evidence and an arrest warrant, due process would not necessarily suffer just because the arrest would be partly effected via code. Particularly as we anticipate an inevitable increase in automated law enforcement practices, if we cannot continue to invest faith and power in judicial oversight, we’re basically hosed.

With regard to living day-to-day in a networked society, though, we probably have to imagine scenarios more subtle than the automated arrest by our own robot vehicles—like undetectable invasions that track habits and behaviors, all organized into data that could be used to manipulate or determine opportunities for jobs, education, healthcare, insurance, credit, and so on.  The opportunities these encroachments provide for mischief by corporate, criminal, or government entities are indeed new territory—much more so it seems than the Apple/FBI case—and could easily demand new legislation.

Yadron quotes science fiction writer Bruce Bethke, who gives examples like your cellphone notifying your health insurance provider when you enter a tobacco shop. Users of Google Now on their Android phones have opted into a “service” that cross-references search, GMail content, location, etc. to anticipate their wants and needs and then provides suggestions via  Cards.  Why anyone finds this more helpful than creepy is a mystery to me. All I imagine is Montag’s doe-eyed wife, subservient to the system in Fahrenheit 451, when I contemplate the capacity for this technology to push behaviors, including political or social beliefs. Even at its most benign, it just sounds annoying, like they should have called it Google Nag instead of Google Now.

Meanwhile, we should expect to see a growing market for anti-surveillance products and services for what can only become an increasingly paranoid world in which we are voluntarily spying on ourselves.  As AlterNet reports, English designer Adam Harvey is making wardrobe that will shield against thermal imaging, and he’s demonstrating makeup techniques that will confound face-recognition software. Such efforts are endorsed by organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight for the Future because the presumed abusers of surveillance technology will be government agencies, but what about the more subtle private-enterprise promises of the networked society?

Will we live in “smart” homes enjoying their many conveniences but always sure to wear our cloaking PJs?   Will we need to buy and vigilantly update an array of countermeasures to protect our privacy inside our own walls because now they really do have ears?  As we interact with our own homes and vehicles and with one another, we will constantly be sending data to somebody’s servers somewhere.  We are already doing this, though not as holistically as the Internet of Things implies.  How do we write legislation that protects against corporate, government, or criminal abuse of these data and systems?  Or more immediately, whom can we expect to represent civil liberties in this context?

Because I think organizations like EFF and Fight for the Future are often haggling over small potatoes while getting nowhere near the larger question.  These digital rights activists—who are dependent upon Silicon Valley support by the way—make a lot of noise about our “right” to jailbreak these disposable, hand-held devices—something very few of us will ever bother to do—without coming close to having the real discussion about whether or not public agency oversight will be able to protect consumers in a fully-networked future.  When too much of the emphasis on anti-surveillance assumes “government” will be the only abuser, we forget that there is a profit motive in all this monitoring by private enterprise.  Meanwhile, as Google’s presence in Washington increases considerably, are legislators and executive branch officials getting advice from Google on how to protect us from Google?  Because one way or another, we seem to be voluntarily becoming a surveillance society, and I wonder if there will ultimately be an opt out button.