Tag: cyber policy

On Cyber Policy, Biden Should Make a Fresh Start

As the Biden administration seeks to restore normalcy in American governance—from constitutional legality to ordinary decency to an actual response to the COVID crisis—it is little surprise to see officials from the Obama administration return to Washington. But as we emerge from the political and emotional rubble, the new administration should recognize and reject one of the major errors made by its Democratic predecessor—a seemingly technophilic friendship with Big Tech that placed Google in particular at the heart of the executive branch.

President Biden stated in his inaugural address that we must reject the assault on truth that has galvanized cult-like beliefs among too much of the electorate, and which exploded at the Capitol on January 6th. Amen. But in order to effectively address the unprecedented role the internet has played in the transmission of conspiracy theories and other toxic content, the Biden administration must understand the relationship between the dire outcomes we have witnessed and Big Tech’s influence on public policy—namely antitrust law, privacy law, and copyright enforcement.

By carving out its own exceptions within these and other legal frameworks, the major internet companies have for too long shirked their responsibilities as corporate citizens, and the new administration should make every effort to begin with a blank slate vis-à-vis cyber policy and not reopen the revolving door that once facilitated contact between Google and the White House.

In 2016, Vox reported that the Obama White House had more interaction with Google lobbyists than those representing any other industry. In 2017, the Campaign for Accountability published a report identifying extensive Google funding of academic papers “tied to specific issues that Google sought to influence,” of which two-thirds reportedly did not disclose Google’s backing. We cannot return to this paradigm in which Big Tech writes its own rules of the game. We need to hit the reset button on the whole conversation.

Silicon Valley’s historic positions on antitrust, privacy, patent and copyright enforcement, and more recently on disinformation and anti-harassment initiatives have something in common. To many of us, they look like familiar guardrails of societal norms, but the tech industry has often characterized these as obstacles to the frictionless flow of data—i.e. their bottom line. Let’s be clear. By the time Facebook, Twitter, Google et al finally began to remove radicalizing misinformation and propaganda from their platforms, they
had already earned billions monetizing that same content right up to the point when it became untenable from a PR perspective.

The New Administration Should Listen to American Artists

Songwriters, for instance, had good reason to raise concern last week about reports that the DOJ might rehire Renata Hesse as Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust. In 2016, Hesse determined that rather than end the age-of-radio licensing regime that eviscerates songwriter royalties in the streaming market, she proposed aggravating matters by ending “fractional licensing,” for works with multiple authors—in essence using her antitrust authority against the Davids instead of the Goliaths in the room.

Similarly, as of last night, it appears the administration has tapped Gene Kimmelman for the antitrust role, and again, this rings alarm bells. Kimmelman was formerly CEO of PublicKnowledge, a Google-funded organization that rarely advocates a position incompatible with Big Tech’s interests. And as author and monopolist critic Matthew Stoller noted in a tweet: “Kimmelman is generally a consumer welfare advocate, and he supported the DOJ under Obama suing book publishers on behalf of Amazon because supporting Amazon’s monopoly would lower consumer prices. It’s possible he has rethought his approach.”

Tech millionaires are not the people who need support from the Biden administration. The creators do—the people whose works we recognize mean more than ever in a time of crisis and isolation. While the EU has much more forcefully addressed Google and others’ non-competitive practices, figures like Hesse and Kimmelman have both advocated ways to exacerbate creators’ already weakened bargaining position in the 21st century market. That is the opposite direction we need to go—especially when a global health crisis has revealed 1) how profoundly dependent we are upon the arts; and 2) how economically precarious artists are in the digital age.

Big Tech did not cause the pandemic or the consequent shutdown of many sources of artists’ revenues—from live theater to film shoots to classroom teaching. And admittedly, those companies get some of the credit for helping to build the infrastructure that gives us access to music, shows, movies, etc. when we are all stuck at home. But on a much more profound level, Big Tech practices and policy agendas obliterated the source of revenue that might otherwise help sustain many creators in a time of crisis:  sales of works at fair-market prices, backed by strong copyright enforcement and anti-piracy initiatives. Efforts in this regard gained little purchase in the Obama years, especially once Google flooded the zone with lobbyists beginning in early 2012.

As many have discussed in the past, policymakers can learn a great deal from the creative community. Musical artists were the proverbial canaries in the coal mine we called the digital revolution, and from the moment citizens were sold the premise that copyrights were outdated, it was a short logical hop to the argument that permission itself was outdated. And so, the floodgates opened until the romanticism of the internet as wild west eventually looked too much like the real wild west—feral, lawless, and violent. Of the many things that need restoring in Washington, showing the major internet companies more deference than scrutiny should not be on that list.

The Biden Administration Should Avoid Past Mistakes on Cyber Policy

As thoughts turn to transition and, with any luck, healing divisions, the Biden-Harris administration should avoid any temptation to repeat mistakes made by the Obama administration with regard to cyber policy. I admire Barack Obama for many reasons, but the fact remains that his administration was too cozy with Silicon Valley, and this was understandable, if not entirely reasonable or prescient.

Let’s face it, in those days, Obama was hardly alone in staring Googley-eyed at the shiny objects bestowed upon us by the magic innovation factories in Northern California. Wall Street was ebullient. The press was eager to parrot the virtues of “free speech and innovation” in between scholarly sounding chats with billionaire whiz kids. And the public generally seemed to accept the narrative that the internet was super-charging democracy worldwide and should, therefore, be left to self-regulate—or at least to the illusion that it was self-regulating. So, of course Barack Obama, the first post-Boomer president, the guy who famously wanted to keep his Blackberry when he entered the White House, was a tech-geek.

But President Biden will inherit a very different America—one chagrined by having its dirtiest laundry displayed across every screen—a nation that has to confront deep divisions and the painful acknowledgement that we are not even on the same page with regard to the most classical principles in American civics. Or perhaps more frustratingly, we may be more on the same page than we think, but we will never know it because forces beyond our control are deepening our apparent divisions of which Trump is both a symptom and a cause. Without a doubt, one of those forces is the internet.

The Biden administration has announced that it will “Establish a new Task Force on Online Harassment and Abuse to focus on the connection between mass shootings, online harassment, extremism, and violence against women.”

A good start. The next administration must take a more critical, more skeptical look at how toxic some of the flaws in our cyber policy truly are. As my friend Neil Turkewitz writes, “For far too long, we have been operating under a myth of neutrality, and excused malfeasance as a cost of liberty. Not only is the myth wrong, but the costs have principally fallen on the most vulnerable members of the community.”

But although the Financial Times predicts that Silicon Valley cannot expect the kind of relationship it had with the Obama administration, it also notes a number of potentially uncomfortable allies, including that former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt is “being talked about to lead a new technology industry task force.” I hope the Biden-Harris administration will take note that this chickens-minding-the-foxes approach to cyber policy played a significant role in fostering the very divisions Mr. Biden says he is determined to heal.

Real Policy Reform vs. Rhetoric

There has been a lot of noise in congressional committees about Section 230 vis-à-vis claims of censorship and political bias—allegations that are not only unfounded but are acts of legislative malfeasance toward those American citizens who are actually harmed by over broad interpretations of Section 230. Just like a deadly virus, online harassment can reach anyone anywhere; it knows no party loyalty.

Most acutely, women and girls have been victimized to the point of suicide by various forms of online harassment. Non-consensual pornography, now enhanced by the technology called “deepfakes,” enables individuals with limited technical skills and no morals to harass their victims across any distance. Job loss, destruction of relationships, PTSD, and physical assaults have all resulted from online harassment. It is long past time for the White House and Congress to jointly confront the fact that laissez-faire management by online providers has failed and that there is ample justification for dramatically rethinking the “neutral platform” narrative that has driven public policy to date. As scholar Mary Anne Franks, in her book Cult of the Constitution writes:

Extending liability beyond direct actors can be justified on both fairness and public policy grounds. First, it is only fair that people who benefit from the illicit actions of others should be held partly accountable for the harm they cause. Second, third-party liability creates incentives for powerful intermediaries to engage in proactive steps to discourage unlawful conduct before it happens, and to respond quickly and effectively when it does.

In case anyone is looking for a model of what bipartisan cooperation on cyber policy looks like, the IP Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee in its hearings on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act would be instructive. Like Section 230, DMCA Section 512 provides platforms with a specific type of liability shield, but because the subject of copyright enforcement is not so easily politicized along party lines, Chairman Tillis and Ranking Member Coons have been conducting the same conversation. Consequently, debate about the DMCA is driven by substantive policy discussion, as it should be, not by members of either party generating sound bites that have nothing to do with serving any citizen’s real interests.

While it may be naïve even to hope for bipartisanship in the near future, there can be no question that the ball is in the Republican leadership’s court. Either members of that party, acting in good faith, will lay down the weapons of misinformation and extraordinary divisiveness, or they will double-down on what we now call Trumpism, and America will remain in this murky, tense détente indefinitely. But as healing often begins with small steps, it seems reasonable to ask the government of 2021 to coalesce around the agenda implied by President-Elect Biden’s Online Task Force. The goal to limit the role of cyberspace in fostering harassment, incitement of violence, and mass shootings should not be the least bit controversial.

Promoting Progress in the Digital Age

progress

Over the past three years since the internet industry first had to respond to the so-called “Techlash,” various comments on the theme that “the internet didn’t turn out like we expected” have generally shared one common flaw—a failure to acknowledge that the expectation itself was folly.  Whether parties are debating the amount of moderation that should or should not be done by a platform like Facebook; or whether breaking up the internet giants to foster competition would ameliorate the negative effects; or whether curtailing liability shields and treating platforms like publishers would do the trick, the big lightbulb that has not dimmed nearly enough is the original assumption that more people expressing, sharing, posting more stuff could only benefit the world.  All evidence points to the contrary.

When I started this blog in the Summer of 2012, I was partly motivated to advocate artists’ rights (copyrights) against the agenda of Silicon Valley, but I was also skeptical that the underlying assumption justifying the abrogation of those rights—that the information age was fulfilling its promise—was true in any meaningful way.  I asked at the outset whether the internet, as it was shaped since the 90s, was in fact empowering our better angels and ushering in a second Enlightenment grounded in science; or whether it was more effectively aggravating our worst instincts and undermining the pillars of republican democracy.  

In this context, I use the word science in its broadest sense to encompass the principle of a politics rooted in knowledge and reason, and this expansive reading is roughly how we have interpreted Madison and Pinckney’s use of the word science in writing the constitutional clause that gave Congress the authority to adopt copyright law.  This is why the tech-utopian assumption that the internet would bring about the aforementioned second Enlightenment is directly tied to the anti-copyright agenda. 

What authors of works see as the protection of their rights, the digital-age copyright critics characterized as barriers to access, rent-seeking mechanisms, and corporate gatekeeping, all of which results in what they call “artificial scarcity” of expressive and informative works.  Hence the critic’s logic that “free” digital distribution inherently abridges—if it does not simply obliterate—the original purpose of adopting copyright as an incentive to produce and distribute works of science.   

Bizarrely, this utopian narrative persists despite the fact that the United States has now arrived at an existential crossroads.  Mired in what some observers have gravely termed a “cold civil war,” we are officially a nation divided and sub-divided into separate realities; and relatedly, our so-called “age of information” is witnessing an unprecedented volume of brain-drain at the highest levels of government and public service.  While the owners of the major platforms double down on their idealistic talking points, the real world increasingly resembles the worst corners of cyberspace, complete with mob-like assaults on expertise, professionalism, and patriotism for the sake of what can only be described as the cult of Trump.  

In the space of two years, the Republican Party has abandoned its own core principles, sloughing off actual conservatives, and even going so far as to faithlessly attack the characters of career service professionals who have risked their lives for American interests.  And all because they are afraid of being the targets of a presidential tweet.  “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth,” Lincoln wrote to Congress in 1862.  So, is it really conceivable that a century and a half since the Civil War, the party that used to call itself “the party of Lincoln” will allow the Republic to falter because an illiterate mean-girl wearing a tinfoil crown has a Twitter account?  Talk about going out with a whimper.

It is presently unavoidable to blame the GOP for this particular moment of history-altering fecklessness but also worth remembering that thanks in no small part to social media, my friends on the left helped loosen the bolts on many of the same girders this administration is now dismantling.  It may be shocking to watch Members of Congress disrespect public servants like Lt. Col. Vindman, Dr. Hill, or Ambassador Tayor, but it was not very long ago (2014) that, for example, Naval War College professor Tom Nichols, wrote for the decidedly-conservative Federalist, “I fear we are witnessing the ‘death of expertise’: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.”

To a great extent, Nichols seemed to be addressing a progressive-leaning constituency of netizens who, just like many latent Trump supporters, dismissed authority, expertise, and experience as “elitist.”  And they still do.  So let’s not pretend the GOP is alone in amplifying and weaponizing internet conspiracy theories like the “deep state.”  Mainstream media, the intelligence community, the military—even the U.S. Copyright Office!—have all been generically maligned as “the government” by disparate constituencies—as if the government did not already comprise thousands of people just like Vindman, Hill, and Taylor. 

By contrast, all that ebullient swooning a few years ago over data-dumpers like Assange, spraying their cans of sunlight, was naïvely perceived as leaking truth to power.  But what that illusion of access really achieved was an erosion of faith in the same professionals now having their patriotism questioned for political gain.  Likewise, bloviators like Reps. Jordan and Nunes may be the most prominent figures calling the mainstream media “puppets” and “enemies,” but let’s be real: the word mainstream as a pejorative has been used across the political spectrum to justify dismissing any career journalist who reports something that some constituency doesn’t want to hear. 

Suffice to say, the battlefield was well-softened for armies of disinformation trolls to start what former State Department official Richard Stengel calls a full-scale information war we are not winning:  

“Governments, nonstate actors and terrorists are creating their own narratives that have nothing to do with reality,” Stengel writes. “These false narratives undermine our democracy and the ability of free people to make intelligent choices. The disinformationists are aided by the big-platform companies who benefit as much from the sharing of the false as from the true. The bad guys use all the same behavioral and information tools supplied by Facebook, Google and Twitter. Just as Nike buys your information to sell you sneakers, the Russians bought your information to persuade you that America is a mess.”

Having dutifully fulfilled the trolls’ prophecy—because America is certainly a mess now—it is a pretty harsh referendum on the information age to watch the GOP respond to clear evidence that the President of the United States abused his office, asserting a combination of internet conspiracy theory and the eccentric proposal that Trump is too incompetent to break the law (see Sen. Graham comments).  That’s one hell of a rationale to pitch to the American people about their president, but it is astoundingly effective thanks to the “democratization of information.” 

So, no, the second Enlightenment did not happen. Science is now a choose-your-own-adventure game you can play on your mobile device, and the “illusion of agency”* provided by social media is being moderated by some over-caffeinated, professional rat-fucker in St. Petersburg.  All that being the case, perhaps the tech-industry activists who still insist that copyright is a gremlin sabotaging the promise of the internet, might find some better targets for their censure than the authors and artists of the world.

*All credit to Neil Turkewitz for this expression.

Unicorn illustration by julos.