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Economist Lester Thurow Calls for Internet Regulat
Richard Finney writes "Reuters is reporting that Lester Thurow, a noted economist, says "I don't think there is any example (of self-regulation) that has ever worked, unless government is standing behind it with a club" in a Yahoo! news story. His comments come in response to the Global Business Dialog on Electronic Commerce's comments on self-regulation of the Internet."
Note that this is (ba-dum-bump) yet another "self-regulation" effort. The companies' goal here is simply to head off legislation such as privacy laws, consumer protections and minimum standards for security of customer data, although they do seem to have mentioned porn regulation as well.
*sigh* Why does everything have to be regulated? Why can't we have even one little island of freedom in this world?
---Joe Merlino gnupg public key ID: 1E91EBAF
Well, it was only a matter of time before this happenned. Fortunately, nothing really happenned over there. It was another round of blather, yabber, and bullshit aimed at staving off the other inevitability: government (mis)regulation.
The MIT professor, for the most part, is correct. Unless the governments of the world, on their own or in conjunction with others, make a credible threat to the many corporations that make money off online commerce then nothing substantial will be done. Why? Because it's cheaper and easier to let it fly as things are, which translates into more money into corporate coffers and that means a greater profit margin.
Wow. This sounds a lot like the Anti-Trust Debate of 19th Century America. The more things change...
"A god outgrown immediately becomes a life-destroying demon."- Joseph Campbell, "The Hero With a Thousand Faces"
Are there any organizations that lobby the US government for the kind of freedoms that many Slashdot readers support? I would be willing to contribute money to support an organization that was fighting the US privacy, encryption, censorship, and other policies if I could find an organization with a good track record on these topics.
Some people are afraid that this self-regulation (under threat of government regulation) will be very effective in doing everything the government would have wanted...
This is not the first time that he has come up with oddball stuff to make the news. Please just let this one go -- relying on Lester for real opinions is like relying on that spam chain mail that you got about the Good Times virus for real system security info.
let's regulate Economists to pay for Internet development! $100 for every wrong prediction and $500 for every confusing prediction -- plus sales tax!
And read Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand (contains several essays by Alan Greenspan) for why antitrust and other government interference is a Very Bad Idea.
---Brian Stretch
The American Civil Liberties Union: http://www.aclu.org
Its alot more than just internet stuff, but they support the things you listed.
Also, try http://www.epic.org
This sig is false.
Lester Thurow is a deranged lunatic who likes to hear himself talk.
He's been so discredited WRT stock market and interest rates that even Leftists don't listen to him anymore.
In 95 he loudly complained that Greenspan was being to tight with the money supply by his low interest rates, and he (greenspan) NEEDS to raise interest rates to save the stock market.
Remember in 92 when he proclaimed the immediate necessity of imposing a $4.50/gallon gas tax in order to "save the economy" (!)? His reasoning was "because Europe does it" (his words)!
His basic premise is that government needs to control EVERYTHING and every method that government uses to achieve this is fine with him.
Unlike Marxists, he considers Government control the ends instead of the means.
He's one of the intellectual forces behind the concept in government that 'you' are not responsible for your actions and 'we' need to force 'you' to behave 'properly'
he's skeptical about the 'self-regulation' because he wants government control of everything.
Does that sound fundamentally evil to you?
I will second your motion. Lester Thurow has a predisposition for press visibility and idiocy. Several years on CBS 60 Minutes , the (former?) dean of the MIT School of Management asserted that the United States needed an industrial strategy that would mimic the "greatness" of West Germany. This statement was ironic insofar as it was issued by someone from a school of business. Les, have you ever heard of Rumelt's uncertain imitability? When you see Lester.... rm -R Lester.*
Although it is probably too easy to dismiss anything the man publishes as tantamount to spam, I do think identifying Thurow as "one of the most respected economic thinkers" in the nation is sloppy or --at best-- flattering journalism. Thurow has been widely criticized in the past for some of his work, especially some of his very popular and scientifically mediocre pro-environment books. I think we should remember that no economist could possibly speak for the entire profession, and Thurow would get even fewer votes than some if that job were given by ballot.
Everything I've heard or read from Thurow indicates that he has essentially one agenda: anti-corporatism. Once upon a time, he was a brilliant economist. In recent times, he has become pretty boring and one dimensional.
"We don't need goverment", said the e-mail of the man who sent in out on a government developed internet, who never had a serious childhood disease because of government mandated inocculations, who got a government loan to go to state supported college, who got through grad school with his wife working for the state, whose mother is on social security, who is defended by the U.S. Army. "We don't need government."
Third and move to close. I had more than enough of him when I was in B-School and had to suffer through endless diatribes from guest lecturers who really should have known better about "Why the US needs a MITI equivalent." He was one of the major public voices behind stuff like that. That sort of genteel socialism didn't do the UK any good and only worked in Japan and Germany because of national industrial cultures that had been in progress since Bismark and the Meiji (sp?) Restoration and rock bottom bond rates, NOT MITI and the West German equivalent. Boy, I hadn't realized how long it had been since I had seen his name and how little I missed seeing it.
Going to Lester Thurow for a comment on self-regulation is like having Clinton define propriety - you're getting a strongly biased position, not a judgement. A major emphasis of his career has always been to justify and support governmental control of...well, everything. You have to be suspicious of an economist who claims that wealth can't be created, only divvied up differently (his best-known book is called "The Zero-Sum Game"). There's an enormous bug in that reasoning!
_________________
Oh, INTERCOURSE the penguin! (Python tribute, not Linux knock)
Every time I hear a rumor about Internet regulation, I have to laugh. How can a group of companies and governments regulate a world wide (excuse the pun) phenomenon? This is very similar to Internet Decency laws. Who is going to police the entire Internet? The Internet will always remain free in some way. There will always be illegal things on the net like warez, copyrighted MP3s, etc. It is impossible to prevent.
The only way regulation could work is if every government in the entire world was on board. Once you have one little government that is not regulated, all the sites will move there. I just hope the governments and companies of the world are smart enough not to waste billions of dollars trying to do the impossible.
-- soldack
More Yahoo! News - Thurow sees U.S. recession after tech-driven boom at http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/990914/1j.html
excerpt: Thurow said there was a ``dark side'' to America's technologically driven economic force -- productivity growth was slow and the mean wages of the American male had fallen.
It strikes me that governments are not the most eminently suitable entities you could pick to regulate what people say. Pretty much any regulation of the Internet is bad. Whether governments or corporations do it is not very important, although corporations are probably more likely to do a bad job. Governments (e.g. China, Singapore, U.S., Britain, Germany, France) have not exactly shown themselves to be shining examples of Liberty Showing the Way.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
It always interests me to see how countries think that the Internet doesn't regulate itself. Countries have their own rules and the Internet has theirs, which are slightly more liberal, but much more universal. Take, for example, USENET, a prime example of self-regulation if there ever was one. Groups have charters. Group members take their gripes to ISPs and uplinks if problems occur. If there's too much spam coming from a site, a UDP can be put in place. None of these events happen with the help of government. For the most part, binary pictures of naked teens stay in their respective groups and news servers decide whether to carry them.
The Web has its own form of self-regulation, and it involves linking. If people deem a site of not being worthy, they don't link to it, plain and simple. Porn and violence sites are allowed under the same free speech principles which govern America, but in a much 'freer' context.
Where the conflict lies is when boundaries cross, just like when countries' rules contradict each other. Who is right where? A Canadian was convicted in Texas of murder and sentenced to death. Canada said it was unfair. Texas told the Canadians to go screw themselves? Who's right? Both? Neither? I say, it happened in Texas, let Texas take care of it. Same holds true for the Internet. If it happens there, let the self-regulation take care of it, but if it crosses boundaries (ie. bomb plans get printed and then get confiscated or porn gets saved and then gets discovered), let the parties involved take care of it.
In essence, everyone self-governs themselves in a democratic society, and the Internet is just a democracy with no central governing body.
Thurow can't come up with a single example of successfully implemented self-regulation without government coercion? How about the MPAA ratings system? The Comics Code Authority? That's just right off the top of my head. (There may have been blustery grandstanding politicians weighing in before those examples were instituted, but any club the gov't may have been carrying would've rung pretty hollow if they'd tried to use it. In this instance, the government has no club at all. What are they going to do, drive all e-business out of the country to Cayman Islands subsidiaries?) So right there he's full of shit. You could even argue that any industry that's ever implemented an "industry standard" of any kind has adopted a self-regulatory mechanism of sorts.
Furthermore, the Internet isn't a single industry, and attempts to draw parallels between a group of related companies policing themselves and a vague association (the annoyingly-acronymed GDBe) trying to police everyone else are inapt. I think the most that would result from the GDBe's efforts is maybe some kind of "Good Housekeeping" seal of approval for e-commerce sites that adhere to certain privacy/consumer protection/etc. guidelines, and possibly some beneficial anti-governmental intrusion lobbying. So Thurow may have a point, although not the one he thought.
Can there be no freedom in this world? Will humanity forever be trounced by facist state bastards on one hand and greedy corporate assholes on the other?
"NO-RULES INTERNET MAKES CONTROL DIFFICULT"
That about says it all. I'm just about tired of this facist shit. Free Speech takes a back seat to eCommerce? What the hell is this? Incredible! Why do people babble on and on about consumer rights? What ever the fuck happened to citizens rights?
Kind of a shock seeing this guy is from MIT, the same place Stallman and Noam Chomsky are (does anyone else ever wonder if they know each other?).
support gun control: take guns from cops
So obviously we need a haven for justice, freedom and liberty, where the rest of the world can try to pursue their dreams of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We regulate things in this country for safety purposes. But if this jerk wants to start a Nazi party, then do it else where. Sure the government controls the airwaves, but i'm against that too. If you don't like it, then don't watch/listen to it. you can change the channel/web page/radio station, unless your fingers are broken.
Perhaps what this country needs is a re-evaluation of its beliefs. we need to get rid of those money grubbing politicians who think they are in touch. They only come see what you want when they need too.
ELECT JEDILUKE for California State Senate!
Elect a computer geek for the state of computer geeks. Have your ideas expressed. Have your thoughts be a loud thorn in the side of the state!
hehe its a thought. lates
JediLuke
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
Even Atlas Shrugged conceded the need for government at some level or another. You will note that the companies moving to Colorado still had one - it ran law courts and a police department.
So sure, we should have a government, and we probably need an army. Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with current targets of Internet regulation. So far, I have yet to be convinced that any of it is in the best interest of Internet users.
D
----
Thurow throws around metaphors like --"Think of the United States as a giant corporation, a General Motors, say." Then he tells his readers to imagine this giant corporation competing with other ones--Toyota, say.
But of course, as Krugman points out, this is an utter nonsense metaphor. Countries and economies don't go out of business, as companies do, they don't have anything like the same variables, and in fact the entire metaphor of international economic competition is misleading and worthless.
All of this is by way of saying that Thurow is by no means respected by real economists; he is a classic interventionist political meddler, as far as they are concerned. So it's not surprising to hear this kind of suggestion coming out of him.
\
Get the crypto, Unix, build a business on it, and offer Net access to your employees without snooping.
Oh and forget about the damned office you don't need one.
I'd like to see these punks compete with that.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
First of all, what everyone else said about Thurow. He is NOT a credible source.
Secondly, what ALL attempts to regulate the Internet in any way, shape, or form ignore is one simple yet important principle: The interplay between laws, traditions, and customs.
To clarify what I mean by this, I'm using roughly the same definitions Isaac Bonewits uses in his writing: A law is something that is written down, that a group is supposed to obey, and if the law is disobeyed, various "punishments" can be meted out by members of the group. Traditions are "how things are done," and they may or may not be written down, but there is no *formal* penalty for breaking them (though there is more often than not an informal one). Customs are common behaviors within a group that develop of their own accord, and they tend to be relatively (though not entirely) flexible.
In my experience, of the three, traditions are actually the strongest regulator of behavior. The law against under-21 folks drinking doesn't do much to curb the tradition of college frat parties, which are largely attended by those who are under 21. There are a lot of silly, stupid, and essentially unenforceable laws on the books -- remember "I Can't Drive 55?" What about laws against consensual sodomy? What about the supreme silliness of outlawing the hemp plant?
The point of this little rant of mine is that governments and corporations can pass all the laws and "regulations" they like, but they aren't going to get anywhere. Aside from a few cases that will be prosecuted to "make an example out of," I expect enforcement to be lax and most people to disregard whatever ends up put together.
Why? Simple. The most important tradition here on the Net is that freedom of information must be maintained at all costs. And we've developed plenty of ways to fight back against those who would try to break that tradition -- everything from black-background web pages up to and including cracking the "bad guy's" system. (Remember the "Department of Injustice" page?)
This is not to say that I won't fight against any attempt to impose these irrelevant laws -- I'd hate to be, or know, an "example," and I don't think anyone should have to go through that.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
What we do need is are laws on the fair use of personal information requred to complete a transaction. Such a thing would not cover only the internet. Europe is futher along than the US, but more is needed.
There is too much of a risk when rich corporations can compile a jacket on consumers built from all transaction made with any rich peer. Too much room for abuse, too little room for personal defense, and no avenue for recourse.
As we are, there is no such thing as a "free market": the government subsidizes many industries. In theory, there is, but in practice, the free market amount to corporations getting handouts from the state. The collusion between government and corporation, from both parties, is intense. If the government were to stop it's "meddling", and if companies were not allowed to raid thrid world nations for slave labor, many industries would collapse.
support gun control: take guns from cops
Every advocate of increased government control or regulation believes that his plan is the one that government will implement. This is true regardless of whether we are talking about health care, gun control or internet filtering. What advocates of moral and economic fascism like Lester don't understand is that the internet isn't really chaos; it is potentially 5 billion plans, each one carefully regulated by its owner, according to his own ideas. Thus self regulation always works, by definition; it simply doesn't always work exactly the way the people used to wielding power want it to work. Of course this angers them, and they respond in typical fashion; strangling the greatest boon mankind has ever known, murdering it in its infancy. Before it is strong enough to fight back.
The problem isn't self regulation; we cannot concede to them the moral high ground. We must make these people call it what it is. If they want to change what we choose to say, we can't let them call it a free choice, and we can't let them still call the net free. We have to make them admit that they are trying to stifle us, processing our thoughts like so many parrots, weeding out that which they don't approve of. And we must make them say it loudly, in so many words. Write it one hundred times. No American lawmaker will dare touch us if we make them tell the truth about what they are doing. If we let them deceive themselves and their constituents, I am afraid the Internet as we know it will soon be dead.
Scudder
"The Soviet Union could have worked, if only they could have had microchips implanted in their brains."
Arthur C. Clarke, 3001
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
I don't see any obvious connection between programs such as Head Start and encryption regulations beyond facile "nanny state" comparisons. And you're forgeting that one of our biggest government programs, education, has always been justified by the supposition that democracy requires an educated electorate.
When Jefferson said "Those who would have security over liberty deserve neither", I strongly doubt that he assumed they were mutually exclusive goals.
...disciplining the ronkeys since 3/2000...
As he said, he dosen't think there is any example (of self-regulation) that has ever worked. Who regulates these governments, themselves? If its the populace, they don't have much of a club.
Lester is really an amazing person, in that he is actually an expert at being wrong. He shares with Paul Ehrlich the mind-boggling trait of being wrong more consistently than most experts are right. It seems to me that someone could get a reputation as a great economist by simply reading everything he writes and publishing the opposite as quickly as possible.
I don't understand why ALL of these US based politicians don't get that the INTERNET is an international, uncontrolled network of computers.. I can, right now, create a new network called TCharronNET and declare it Internet Law free, as it's NOT the internet.
Technically speaking, the INTERNET doesn't even exist! It's a network of networks all talking to each other. You simply can't regulate something like that.
Internet law is like Arizona setting local laws to govern the high seas.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
"Those who would have security over liberty deserve neither." -Thomas Jefferson
Didn't Ben Franklin say that?
(It is one of my favorite quotes.)
Anyway, while for the most part I'm against government regulation (Censorship) of the internet, and internet taxes and such, I do think that consumer protection and privacy laws might be a "good thing." If a company posts their customers' credit card numbers, or something equally boneheaded, they should be held responsible.
Furthermore, I think that Corporate regulation (censorship) of the internet is more likely to happen, which is just part of the reason I use a loal ISP. (I wouldn't want an ISP that didn't give me shell account.)
Well, it's true; they (Thurow and the Munich Putsch Gang) think it's their Internet to do with as they wish, and here they are making sure it's a safe place to sell stuff. This isn't what the net is for; it's an ok adjunct to disseminating information but it certainly isn't the net's reason for being.
I think they can be sent a message that it is =not= their Internet. There may have to be an Internet shutdown day to drive home the point.
"We don't need so damned much government", said the e-mail of the man who never had a serious disease because of vaccines and medicines developed by brilliant scientists who weren't afraid to challenge conventional ideas. He was sitting at a tiny laptop computer, a technological marvel, with a processor developed by engineers at Intel inc. and an OS developed by ruthless egoists with names like Linus and Alan Cox; people who could easily have developed the internet on their own. He chose to buy a Pentium because the Celeron chip was faster and cheaper than any competitor and he chose Linux because it was the best there was. His next computer would be an Athlon, however, because he didn't like the way Intel did business; they finally had viable competition.
His wife called him from her new digital phone, and asked him to lunch. He accepted of course; being the lead engineer at an aerospace company was hard work, and she only had lunch free once a month. While he was waiting for at the restaurant her he emailed his mother, a teacher at a Lutheran school just south of St. Louis, to tell her that he was flying home that weekend in his old Cessna 152. The Cessna was fine when he bought it in 1982, but he was going to buy a Dassault in January; since their aircraft were subject to fewer FAA regulation-induced design flaws, they handily outperformed anything designed in America. It was cheaper, too, even though he had to pay a grotesque import tax. His mother would be happy to see him, since his father was in Mexico building a new processor plant for Motorola. The old one, in Tyler, Texas, was being shut down; they couldn't afford to pay the inflated union wages.
The FDA was dragging its feet approving a new medicine his company developed, one that promised to cure the common cold; a rival company who made cough drops had produced a study showing that rats died when fed nothing but his medicine for a month. Because of this, he had a red card meeting with two of his most promising employees that afternoon. He would advise them to go back to school; he even considered sponsoring them himself, since he knew they would never come back if he fired them now. However, taxes were due in April, and he was in the highest bracket; he couldn't afford to spare 50K when his taxes were taking three times that. They would have to fend for themselves. Of course, there was always unemployment. They would probably end up in an under-funded government or university cancer lab; maybe an HMO would pick them up.
While waiting for his wife, he saw an interesting article on your Rights Online. Since its initiation in September of 1999, it had become a focal point for Internet Freedom groups; he was often terrified by what he read, but he maintained a morbid fascination. According to the article, President Bush was contemplating signing the Internet Prohibition Treaty, which would make the International War On Pornography official, and sign over control of all US networks found to be serving pornographic of otherwise dangerous or offensive materiel to the United Nations Internet Extension(UNIX). "Only 30 percent of the sites online will even be affected." A spokesman for the White House claimed. "If people would just self-regulate themselves, we wouldn't have this problem."
"Too much damned government." He wrote. "Too much damned government."
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
First, it was Ben Franklin that said that. Second, the problem is not with a centralized government, it's with a centralized administration of that government. Try deTocqueville's "Democracy in America", an *excellent* book, and very prescient.
"Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin,
Yeah, but it still serves a great purpose. By making alcohol a "forbidden fruit" it encourages idiots under 21 to get drunk whenever possible, and drink themselves to death on their 21st birthday. It weeds morons out of the gene pool. Brilliant law, I say.
Bah, if you were an Exxon or Dow shareholder, it wouldn't seem so silly.
Lester Thurow is one of the bowtie wearing Liberal whiners who complain about the economy while they sit around there Cambridge offices and enjoy the fruits of it.
Also, in all the times I've seen him go into the Au Bon Pain in Kendall Square, he's never once tip anyone behind the counter.
There is only one moral justifcation for government, the protection of private property rights. All other things should be considered outside its scope. Rand supported a limited government that would do exactly this. The following funtions should fall to government. Military, police, contract enforcement(although should be no restrictions placed on contracts), records of property ownership. There are likly a few more, but they are all of similar vein.
BTW, just because people do something with government support now != that they have to have government support to do it. It is HIGHLY inefficient to do things through government, plus to do so often is an infringement of an individuals rights.
NB, my support for a military in general does not mean that I support all of the policies that have been undertaken by the US military in the past.
Also, please look up the definition of "moral" before using it to accuse someone of "forcing their morality down my throat".
_________
Sometimes, when I'm feelin' bored, I like to take a necrotic equine and assault it physically.
Lester Thurow is soooo full of crap. In the eighties he wrote a book called _Zero-Sum Society_ that argued that there was only a finite amount of wealth in the world. If anyone gained, someone else would lose. Now, he's flogging his new book on creating wealth out of nothing at all. It's totally contradictory. We should just razz him.
"The net is like the wild wild west, except we're not the cowboys, we're the Indians."
--anonymous hacker
In the economics profession, sadly, LT has gained the nickname "Less-Than Thorough" for the quality of effort he puts into his economic writings these days.
Oh yeah, and the newspaper industry seems to get along fine with self-regulation.
jsm
The Libertarians have many interesting points, but they can't be described as being in favour of strict enforcement of the (actual, American) Bill of Rights, since this is fundamentally a statist document which provides for e.g. conscription in time of war.
Libertarians would also be no help to you in the face of "self-regulation" by the Bertelsmann Group, or in protecting your privacy from those who would spam you mercilessly. A Libertarian Internet would quite likely become a corporate monster, with no tolerance of opposing views. But since the censorship was imposed by the cable companies and ISPs, it wouldn't be "censorship", right?
Seriously, if you believe that only government censorship is bad (which is a defensible position; governments have amonopoly on legal use of force), then go for your life; be a Libertarian on this.
If, on the other hand, you think that making it unreasonably costly for opposing views to be heard is also a form of de facto censorship, then the EFF or ACLU are likely to be more to your text.
Me? I take the position of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty on this;
(relevant extract below)
In respect to all persons but those whose pecuniary circumstances make them independent of the good will of other people, opinion, on this subject, is as efficacious as law; men might as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their bread. Those whose bread is already secured, and who desire no favors from men in power, or from bodies of men, or from the public, have nothing to fear from the open avowal of any opinions, but to be ill-thought of and illspoken of, and this it ought not to require a very heroic mould to enable them to bear. There is no room for any appeal ad misericordiam in behalf of such persons. But though we do not now inflict so much evil on those who think differently from us, as it was formerly our custom to do, it may be that we do ourselves as much evil as ever by our treatment of them.
jsm
I'd be very careful of Cato -- they tend to be fair-weather friends. They have put out some very good libertarian material, but recently appear to have reinvented themselves as corporate flacks pure and simple -- very keen on Social Security privatisation, and on putting out some absolutely awful pseudo-economics to make their case[1]
I for one would not trust Cato to stand firm if IBM, Microsoft, Bertelsmann and AOL came up with a "voluntary" self-censoring system. Particularly not if there was the sniff of a grant to Cato involved.
jsm
[1]For those who care about Cato's economics: their projections seem to assume that GDP will grow at 1%/year while stocks return 7%/year for twenty years -- does 1% economic growth usually coincide with bull markets?
- world
series?In 95 he loudly complained that Greenspan was being to tight with the money supply by his low interest rates, and he (greenspan) NEEDS to raise interest rates to save the stock market.
I have no knowledge of what Thurow did or didn't say, but this comment doesn't make sense. Low interest rates are a "loose money" policy, not a tight money. It seems much more likely to me that Thurow (as a knee-jerk expansionist Keynesian) would have been calling for lower interest rates rather than higher in 1995, in which case he got what he wanted, and was right on the money. In any case, nobody would ever call higher interest rates good for the stock market.
Thurow is in fact bloody awful, but it is extremely unfair to lambast economists for not being able to predict the stock market. There's a lot of economic theory on why the market is unpredictable, but think about it this way -- how do you know that there aren't loads of economists around who can predict perfectly, but aren't telling you?
jsm
On the other hand, and taking into account Thurow's actual comments (which I've now had time to read), you don't seem to be in disagreement with him on this matter.
If the government "regulates" the Internet to the extent of not allowing companies to pass on information about you for marketing or other purposes, then it is arguably enforcing your property rights in your name and other valuable information about you.
And if this is the limit of Thurow's proposal, it's hard not to agree with him that we can't trust "self-regulation" on this one -- we want the means to sue people who expropriate our valuable personal information.
jsm
The Institute for Justice is worth checking out at http://www.ij.org . They provide legal aid to people who are fighting for free speech, free enterprise and such, and are less compromised than the ACLU.
I play Nerd-Folk!
If I saw that article on Slashdot I'd have wanted to moderate it down as flamebait. It dismisses four economists as "mice" and their writings as "mouse dung". Yeah, real intelligent debate.
I think Thurow is probably correct in his evaluation of self-regulation, except that it can also be backed up by the big stick of effective minority protest (e.g. NC17 films in the USA).
In particular he is correct in saying that it won't work on the Net, which is why we should be supporting efforts to promote self-regulation instead of government regulation: it won't work, and we will be at status quo. Meantime our rulers will have time to get a clue about how the net works.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Where have I heard that before?
Fortunately, my M 14 is higher-tech than their club. So is the internet a bit beyond gubament's capacity to regulate it. Let's be damn sure to keep it that way.
Do you really trust the corporations who collect your personal information to decide how they're going to use it? I don't. From ordering items from Amazon.com, they know, and whoever they decide to tell knows, that I read Noam Chomsky, listen to Ground Zero, read Bruce Sterling, read Neal Stephenson .. now, I have no idea *what* Amazon.com does with that information, and I don't mean to imply that they are selling it to anyone. But the problem is, I don't know what they're doing with it, and have no way of knowing. Do I really trust corporations to decide what they're going to do with my personal information, when they have huge financial incentives to sell it to anyone who wants it? Not any more than I trust oil companies to write environmental legislation.