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An Entry from the Archives

The Cato Institute has just released its analysis of Howard Dean's "Plan for the Internet." This is one of the sloppiest pieces of thinking I've ever seen from an organization named after a Roman.

The author, Adam Thierer, begins by quoting from the Principles for an Internet Policy on the Dean site. He interprets "No one owns the Internet…. It is ours as citizens of this country and as inhabitants of this planet" as meaning " [G]overnment must treat the Internet as one giant collective resource and regulate accordingly." Wow. (For the record, here's the sentence he leaves out: "The Internet does not exist for the unique benefit of any group or economic interest." He omits it presumably because it implies that the Internet does have economic meaning, which works against the Birkenstocky impression he wants to convey.)

It gets much worse:

Dean's Internet platform contains the key elements and catch phrases of a more sophisticated master plan for cyberspace concocted by a group of academics and public officials who advocate a "commons" vision of collective Internet governance. Their agenda consists of a three-pronged strategy: (1) Infrastructure: They want telecom, cable, and broadband high-speed networks subject to collective rule via a heavy dose of open access regulation, structural separation or even outright public ownership. And they want the Internet to be treated as a collective asset subject to "democratic rule" through a variety of "nondiscrimination" mandates and other regulatory controls. (2) Spectrum: They want most of the electromagnetic wireless spectrum to be treated as one big commons with very limited exclusive property rights. (3) Intellectual property: They want to water down IP rights and greatly expand fair use rights and the public domain.

And what is the evidence that this is Dean's view? None is cited because none exists. The Dean campaign has not issued an Internet policy. So where does this "master plan" - with no master and no plan - come from? The next paragraph begins:

The triumvirate of FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, prolific Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, and the New America Foundation (NAF) think tank deserve special mention since their advocacy of a cyber-commons has been particularly vociferous.

The rest of the article explains Dean's Internet policy by assuming it's the same as the "triumvirate's". The only problem is that neither Copps nor Lessig have declared themselves supporters of Howard Dean. True, Lessig is on Dean's Net Advisory Net, but that explicitly does not imply that he backs Dean. And the New America Foundation does have two Deans on its Board of Directors, but one is dean of the London Business School and the other is a dean at Johns Hopkins.

So, leave aside the outrageous ascription of one person's beliefs to another without the slightest evidentiary gesture. The content of the article is equally poorly thought.

Are markets and property rights really antithetical to openness, ideas, expression, knowledge, culture, diversity, and democracy? History shows that the exact opposite is the case. Markets and property rights have served as the foundation for those virtues...

Fine, except the triumvirate (as far as I know) doesn't argue against markets and property rights. They argue for open markets and at least one of them — Larry the Good — has created a mechanism by which creators can maintain fine-grained control over their creations.

Thierer concludes, striking a faux reasonable note:

...Certainly there is a place for some commons within our society, but that society should be structured and governed by property rights. The commons crowd seems to reverse that equation by suggesting we need to carve out a little room for property rights in a world of collective rule. And that sort of thinking is downright dangerous, for if we allow ourselves to believe that collectivism is the central organizing principle of cyberspace, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. Treating the Internet, broadband networks, spectrum, and IP like socialized property will not lead to a cyber-nirvana but to a scarcity of those very things if the Dean-Copps-Lessig vision of cyberspace collectivism prevails.

Thierer acknowledges that the "commons crowd does not regard capitalism and markets as inherently evil or exploitative." But he misses the real point: The question isn't whether the Internet is socialized property or private property. The point is that the Internet isn't property. It's a protocol by which "content" is made accessible and communication is enabled. But, of course, Thierer sees property everywhere he looks: His complaint about the FCC's policy of licensing spectrum isn't that it needlessly concentrates power in a few hands but that spectrum ought to be property that can be owned, not just licensed. (Adam, here's a hint: This makes as much sense as suggesting that the government sell colors to companies...because spectrum is color. And here's another hint.)

Further, why is it that "society should be structured and governed by property rights"? Does the Cato Institute value property rights over individual freedom? Even if the Internet consisted of property — an arguable metaphoric reach — why on earth should we think that property comes first? Whatever happened to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

But Thierer is arguing against a strawperson in any case. None of the Triumvirate (AFAIK) advocates getting rid of copyright, for example. Larry certainly has consistently maintained that the control granted by copyright and Creative Commons licenses does indeed help to make for a responsive, vibrant market. Thierer knows this and acknowledges it at the beginning of the passage quoted above. But in the last sentence he ignores the sentence he just wrote, writing that the "commons crowd" advocates "socialized property." Except for the "socialized" and "property" part, that's exactly right.

What a load of crap. And it's too bad, because an honest reading of the Dean Internet Principles should be music to the ears of those who believe in liberty and free markets, the way conservatives used to.

Clay Shirky, in a msg to a mailing list, writes about the Cato Institute:

They have simply gone off the rails on the idea that there is no difference between collective action and merely aggregated individual action.

It would be fun to ask them their view of, say, standards bodies.

An excellent clarifying question...