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Schneier: We Need a Better Way of Regulating New Technologies (schneier.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, when a Brazilian judge shut down WhatsApp, it affected roughly half of the country's ~200 million residents. It's not the first time — or the second, or the third — that WhatsApp has faced legal pressure, and Bruce Schneier says it's clear evidence of a "massive power struggle" between internet companies and traditional companies. Central to this struggle is the inability of our lawmakers to quickly and effectively regulate new technologies. He says, "Traditionally, new technologies were adopted slowly over decades. There was time for people to figure them out, and for their social repercussions to percolate through society. Legislatures and courts had time to figure out rules for these technologies and how they should integrate into the existing legal structures. ... This isn't a simple matter of needing government to get out of the way and let companies battle in the marketplace. ... We need a better way of regulating new technologies. That's going to require bridging the gap between technologists and policymakers. Each needs to understand the other — not enough to be experts in each other's fields but enough to engage in meaningful conversations and debates. That's also going to require laws that are agile and written to be as technologically invariant as possible."
That's a bit disingenuous. The motto of the "disruption" crowd is explicitly 'better to have your lawyers fight for dismissal than ask for permission', particularly when it comes to the structure of laws and regulations that have been put in place to protect the general population from damage and exploitation. How about a commitment by the technology-pushers to obey the law to start with?
sPh
Most of the people who are in power and makes laws are too old to even begin to comprehend how things work and how much they are a part of modern society.
We'd just have pre-breakup AT&T combine with MPAA and RIAA in lobbying the government to "regulate" the internet or cell technology.
Do you really want that?
Adding "on a mobile device" shouldn't require additional laws be made.
That is the architecture of the Internet:
Dumb 'pipes' (routers) with any application you can think of and build at the edges (hosts).
New things are always on the horizon
With technology we can now create a platform to uphold the people's will. We no longer need public servants to carry it out for us. These people can now return to more meaningful positions in the private sector. Thank you for your service but your positions are no longer necessary.
...it's a feature.
Let the market decide, and let regulation catch up later (if ever).
We don't need "better" ways to regulate new technologies, we need smaller government that doesn't feel the need to stick its tentacles into every orifice of the body politic.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
We don't need new ways to regulate what consenting adults do with each other, or the agreements they make between each other. We need better ways to regulate the busy-bodies that seek to control everything for their own best interests.
Do I hear
We Need a Better Way to Protect Established Players and Corrupt Governments
?
Letter To Iran
Instead they should aim to simplify the whole thing and we'd more easily tell how it applies to new technologies.
If Math proceeded like Law, to determine if 269 camels are more than 231 camels, we'd have to determine whether the law that compares horses can be applied to camels, or alternatively try to generalize from a bunch of past rulings where it was established that, say, 148 camels were more than 111 camels.
This is a fallacy.
No matter what approach is taken, there will always be groups dissatisfied with the results.
Laws are generally reactionary. Just laws are created because entities see injustice and push for statutes to curb those injustices. For injustices to be acknowledged they have to happen, in order to happen, the population or a subset must gain experience with the particular concept or technology or action. To gain experience, if it's a technology, it has to be allowed to exist and to see how it's used, and potentially abused, and often, actual abuse might already run afoul of existing law anyway. When the laws are finally created as a reaction, some people get angry because their abusive actions are curtained. Others get angry because in order to curtail the abusive actions of others, their nonabusive actions must also be affected.
Some regulations are proactionary, being drafted and put into effect before abuses are documented. Persons wishing to use a technology affected by such regulations get upset because they're being prohibited from doing something that they feel that they should be allowed to do. It could be that what they feel should be legal is actually victimizing others, or they might have a poor understanding of the law, or they could even be right in that what they're being prohibited-from is going too far. Either way, they're angry.
Then you have the condition where something newish is starting to show signs of abuse, and regulations and/or law is put into effect in a minor way that serves to remind participants that they could be subject to regulation or rules, and they get upset. Some don't understand that they might be violating the rights of others or violating the rules that exist to protect all parties involved. Things like Uber versus taxis and how taxi regulations came to be. Things like how RC aircraft are coming under increasing regulation. Things like software that shares files in less-direct means. These are all technology changes that can be abused, and also can have legitimate benefits without abuse, but people get very, very passionate when their designs are questioned, even if they're ignorant of the law or the effects of their actions or choices.
There is no magic bullet. Someone will always be upset.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Translation? Censorship.
I hope out hope that "new technology" will make it impossible.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I think it's somewhat telling that the example was WhatsApp. Even if we stretch the idea of "new technology" to include a chat service, it's just that: a chat service. It's a product that literally cannot affect anyone unless they consent by instructing their device to accept these messages. What regulation could possibly be necessary?
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
The problem is that we keep electing lawyers to do systems engineering. Lawyers are the end users of the law and our legal system is a classic example of letting the end users control the design. Though really they're little more than celebrities these days and the actual work is being done by unelected third parties.
The whole story is crooked and the TFA begs the question of how to make regulation faster?
Let me summarize...
Brazil Telecom: Really expensive voice calls
2 Million Customers: Discover VOIP application
Brazil Telecom: Lobbies to ban application
2 Million Customers: Switch to new VOIP application
Brazil Telecom: We need faster regulation! Because whack-a-mole works!
Clipping the wings of WhatsApp very neatly solves two problems for the Powers That Be(tm): it protects a de facto, if not de jure, monopoly on the one hand, and enforces censorship on the other. Only a chump would think that the judge issued this order merely because WhatsApp didn't play bureaucratic ball. The PTB feel a threat to their entrenched power, and have employed the judiciary to strike out at the rebels.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Day-um, grand dad.
You kicked his ass so bad his unborn great-grandkid won't ever be able to sit!
We need to regulate moron judges instead.
I don't remember the phone system ever shut down, even when thousands of kidnappers anonymously called their victim's loved ones for money.
Nor the postal system when people sent anonymous hatemail or ransom notes.
That's also going to require laws that are agile and written to be as technologically invariant as possible."
"Agile" laws are invariably going to product badly written laws. It's beyond stupid to expect lawmakers to adopt a software development method to writing laws.
This isn't a simple matter of needing government to get out of the way and let companies battle in the marketplace.
Yes it some ways it could perhaps ought to be exactly that. You can't regulate that which you can't control and perhaps some things where there is very very broad public agreement about them.
Either the Internet gets less global (I think this might be the best answers) or it will do what its always done and route around the damage. As Joe Public does not see what is so wrong about an app, well they will go elsewhere to get it and you will only produce more scoff laws.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
How about, in the US at least, Congress brings back the Office for Technology Assessment so maybe, just maybe, our elected officials wouldn't have to "figure it out" but be able to ask a whole group of people who's job is to explain these kinds of things? I still can't believe that in 1995, the arguable year of the WWW explosion, the OTA was nixed.
While I am a lot more digital libertarian than Schneier, I tend to agree with him on this. Social Media corporations are not going to reign-in their data collection abuses on their own, instead they will weasel into official status so it is no longer possible to avoid their clutches. Not unless, we the people, write some laws disallowing this and that and threaten to send the worst abusers to the federal PMITAP.
The ability for an unlicensed hobbyist to program arbitrary software on their home computer == "unregulated technology".
The real problem with the WhatsApp affair is that it was even possible for the judge to shut it down. The Internet was invented as a decentralized system, and it would be extremely disruptive to shut it down for the whole country. But all these new technologies are designed for asymmetric computing, where the thing you have is only a terminal into someone else's computer.
Yeah, I know, there are technical reasons of battery life and network connectivity, why mobiles are not full peers on the Internet. Still, new applications should be designed so you can choose where it is hosted, even on your own home computer, not some centralized system that can be shut down.
Have a nice time.
Problem one would be for him to Google "Technology"
WhatsApp is a product.
The world is over-regulated. If we let free market principles work we wouldn't need to regulate nearly as much as we do. For instance the cable industry argued that we needed a monopoly to make cable profitable and worthwhile to install. We didn't. The industry basically blackmailed communities into giving monopoly status to attract them to install cable lines in the 1980s. We shouldn't have done that as it gave companies an unfair market position and has resulted in near zero real competition. If we had stayed out and let any company run cable as would occur in a true free market we wouldn't be in the mess we are in today where there are at best 1 or 2 choices. However what we see now is that we have to pass even more regulation to foster "competition". In reality though it's only half true. We have competition in many European countries through this regulation only within the sphere of support, services, etc. The core product is still managed by one entity (ie the physical infrastructure) and there is still no competition there. Then we have to steal money from individuals through the use of violence (taxes) to fund fiber roll-outs because well, we screwed up in the 1990s by not attaching strings to the funds we gave the industry to do the deployments and thus they didn't do the deployments. I think we're succeeding in some places (New Hampshire) with the new publicly funded deployments.. maybe. But it is on a smaller scale. More towns and regional doings. Not federal. And lets not forget that since there is a monopoly or duopoly it's almost impossible for any competitor to enter the market as the monopoly and duopoly have an unfair early mover advantage.
Yes, in a perfect world, you would have technologists (whose motivation is a close variation of "design stuff that will benefit all people, make society safer and allow us all to reap the benefits of technology") and politicians (whose motivation is a close variation of "partake in an informed debate which leads to the drafting of laws and statutes that provide protection for all individuals and allow the evolution of society into a more enlightened state") getting to better know how to communicate effectively with the other, so that technologists and politicians can better understand the technology of today, how it will be used by the people of today, and how the peoples' best interests can be served by drafting new laws or amending existing ones. :/
However, in the world we have, the technologists almost always haven't got the slightest clue how the technology of today will be used in the next 5 minutes, and most of them are more interested in making money for themselves than they are in "benefiting all people". Similarly, most politicians (and I refer mainly to the politicians in the US and Europe now, but I am sure that a depressingly high percentage of them world-wide would fit this description) are primarily interested in keeping themselves in office to safeguard their own place on the gravy train, and are only interested in "change" or "progress" until that message gets them into office, at which point they become a drop-in for the one they replaced.
So the goal for politicians, unfortunately, seems to be the maintenance of the existing status quo. If one of them gets voted out of office (being replaced by, as mentioned before, one with a vested interest in not rocking the boat), they typically get a job as a lobbyist or back-room power broker, with even more incentive to maintain the existing status quo - they are now earning more money, and probably have more personal influence than they had when serving as a politician, as well as less public oversight or need to campaign for re-election. To these people, technology is not something they need to understand (they have experts for that, earning quite a bit less than they do) - technology is something they need to control.
"Ah", you say "technology is not something that you can control, because many different people developing and driving technology in all sorts of different ways!", and this is true. But behind the politicians at their pig trough/gravy train, there are the lobbyists financed by wealthy business and industrial influences. If those individuals or small companies driving technology are being too much of a potentially disruptive nature, then one of the larger industrial players can either buy the company or hire a few strategic people from them to halt or slow the development, engage in litigation, or various other practices to control the smaller player.
Any individual, whether technologist or politician, who seems to be too much of a danger to the stability of the current setup can be sidelined - the technologist through acquisition or competition, the politician by not giving them any oxygen of publicity.
Time for me to go and make a new tinfoil hat... I sat on the old one while writing this and broke it
Nor can they write effective policy documents.
Any technology that even slightly threatened the new would be shut down and tied up in red tape for whatever amount of time it took for the upstart companies to die. Skype, gone. Drudge, gone. Youtube, gone. Netflix, gone. Ebay, gone. Paypal, gone. Cellphones, gone. mp3 players, gone. Amazon, gone. Online grocery ordering, gone.
Look at Uber. Local taxi companies are proving which cities have corrupt city councils and which don't.
There is a thread that unites many on the left with the establishment on the right, and with the crony capitalists who adopt whatever politics make them money - the tendency to see something that spooks them and immediately say "there ought to be a law!" This is the root of all totalitarianism and the enabler of the crushers of freedom.
The US was founded on the premise that God created each individual and gave each individual dignity, rights, and responsibilities, and that individuals come together and lend a very limited and specific bit of those rights and responsibilities to government. By this reasoning, government cannot, by definition, have any power not lent to it by the people, and the people themselves retain all rights not specifically granted to the government. The Constitution itself explicitly says as much. Another result of this idea is that the government is NOT empowered to make law after law governing any aspect of a person's life - the government must be able to show that it has been granted authority to make a law in the area involved (something the US Supreme Court perverted in the 1930s when it started allowing everything to be classified as "interstate commerce" thereby enabling FDR to regulate everything).
The idea that anything somebody finds worrisome or troubling should automatically be regulated in some fashion is fundamentally contrary to the American system, though admittedly not antithetical to the systems of many other places. It should be rejected by free people everywhere in favor of the much better idea: freedom and liberty.
An awful lot of 'regulation of technology' is really the State 'regulating its citizens' - that is, by an attempt to restrict good encryption, or encryption without backdoors.
Close, but if you have followed the money all these screams for regulation are coming from the old established technology companies that are being displaced, rarely from the consumer. For example, wireless companies love the excessive profit margins on text messages, each one is like 99.999% pure profit as text messages cost the wireless companies nothing to handle. Now along comes a competitor that charges 10% of what the wireless companies charge for the same service, the wireless companies do not want to actually compete in a market, so they scream for "regulation" to protect their antique business model. It would be like the buggy whip companies of the 1900's having regulations imposed where each automobile was required to have a buggy whip as part of its required safety equipment.
"Central to this struggle is the inability of our lawmakers to quickly and effectively regulate new technologies."
That inability is what keeps new technology useful, cheap, and powerful. As soon as the lawmakers catch up, they manage to screw it up.
Censorship is not what a government should be concerning itself about.
The problem isn't that government moves too slow, the problem is that government is doing the wrong moves.
Banning the sharing of non-copyrighted information is wrong.
Banning an app is wrong if it doesn't do anything harmful.
(^Some countries have very restrictive laws about what information people are allowed to send,
about not showing bare skin and other such lame religious inspired laws.^)