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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."
Even as a pretty adamant liberal I recognize that a lot of lawmaking is the result of regulatory capture. Whenever a large commercial entity sits in an entrenched potion and siphons up money because regulations raise barriers to entry, we have a problem. Progress stagnates. Money gets wasted.
Disruptive businesses have a place. Sure they may skirt the law in new and interesting ways but they force industries to churn and change. The courts eventually settle matters. Luckily, law-making is an old institution that runs at a slow pace so disruption happens before regulatory capture can take hold.
Ride-share is a perfect example. Yes, Uber is obviously exploiting worker law loopholes and are likely exploiting their employees. Yes, they're skirting taxi law that's necessary to protect riders.
But on the flip side taxi institutions are some of the most abusive and exploitative examples of corrupt regulatory capture one could imagine. As a customer you pay way too fucking much for shitty service. Taxi drivers get shitty compensation for their work, face stifling fees, and work for companies that have obvious corrupt ties to local authorities that locked out competition.
The taxi institution NEEDED to be shakes down and broken. Mobile internet opened up a new type of service better than traditional taxi. On the upside the genie is out of the bottle. The public loves it. Uber likely won't go away now.
When the dust settles we'll likely see employment protection for Uber/lyft/whatever drivers, better service for customers, re-born taxi institutions forced to update in order to compete. Everyone will win, except the people who wanted to maintain the (awful) status quo.
See also: The hotel industry and the new internet-enabled room sharing services turning it upside down.
Remind me again what corporations created the Internet and the world wide web.
Glancing through the Wikipedia discussion of ARPANET, I see MIT, RAND Corporation, BBN Technologies, System Development Corporation, UC at Berkeley, Honeywell, Stanford Research Institute International, UC Santa Barbara, University of Utah, DEC, and Scientific Data Systems.
After the commercialization of the internet and the advent of the world wide web, almost every active business and non profit corporation has been a contributor in various ways through buying bandwidth, providing services or information online, or more substantially through providing important infrastructure or inventing new uses, etc.
Uber is a good example. The existing options for transport were:
public bus service - fixed route, infrequent times (1 hour or 2 hours + delay due to traffic), may require walking some distance
company shuttle service - fixed route, frequent times, may require walking some distance
taxi service - point-to-point route, requires 60/30 minutes notice, expensive - The waiting time depends on city licensing and demand. Somewhere like London, you can simply hail a taxi, and it will stop. In the Bay Area, you would have to wait 30 minutes.
private car - point to point route, no minute notice, requires maintenance of car, fast travel time, no time notice
walking/cycling - slow travel time, practically impossible if only route is via freeway/motorway, no time notice
Uber offers point-to-point route service without having to wait 30 minutes. The city could fix this problem by licensing more taxi cab drivers, but that was block by the incumbents.
Another example was internet telephone calls vs. traditional voice calls on the mobile networks. With these networks regular voice communication piggybacks over a data service, which allowed the phone company to bill by distance as a value-added feature. Using the internet feature of a smartphone allows the user to bypass this billing system and communicate directly regardless of distance. The phone companies then try and charge for Skype minutes.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
on a computer that filled a room and whose user interface had moving parts which could physically injure the careless.
OK, I must know. Exposed tape reels from before the cool vacuum chamber tape drives? Carelessly designed card punch or printer paper output path?
OK. In my youth (early 70s) I worked on a computer in which the logic was all carried in the doors. They swung open and, being full of vacuum tubes, probably weighed in at around 100 Kg. Get hit in the head by one of these and you might wake up next week (or you might not).
To turn on the computer, you had to open the door (see above as a risk to others), reach past the exposed + and - 100 VDC buses, grasp the rubber grip on the drum memory drive shaft with your right had and spin the drum. Then you immediately turned on the power (remember the exposed power buses) with the left hand. If you didn't spin the drive, the electric motor generated too much torque for the system to handle and you got to spend a half hour replacing the sheared pin in the link between the motor and the drive shaft. See how many ways you can get hurt just turning the monster on.
If you find this hard to believe, visit either the Smithsonian in D.C. or the Computer History Museum in Mt. View, CA and looked at the Bendix (or CDC) G15 computer from the 1950s. Both had G15s on exhibit last I knew.
This is just the case of one small computer from the dark ages. You could also look up the IBM Photostore (which stored high density data on film) or the Datacell (both IBM and CDC made similar ones) for examples of computer hardware that could seriously hurt you. And these don't touch the more common risks from IBM Hollerith card hardware.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired