Now I agree with Mr. Harper over at The Technology Liberation Front (TLF) when he observes that a ‘Do Not Track’ list isn’t really analogous to the ‘Do Not Call’ list. Targeted advertising is a practice which increases the efficiency of the voluntary exchange of your time/eyeballs for web content while telemarketing is a practice with a significant externality (your time/annoyance) that isn’t paid for by the advertiser. In short targeted advertising makes us better off while telemarketing makes us worse off.

I’m slightly sympathetic to the concern that some people have about advertising companies like doubleclick/google tracking their visits to third party websites. However, despite the ridiculous claim that because mozilla developers get advertising revenue (from google for the default search box) they would never do anything about this problem their are a fuckton of privacy and anonymity extensions for people to use. If people don’t even care enough to go install a browser extension or to convince the firefox people to include such a feature by default (like the popup blocker) then the intrinsic cost of the legislation outweighs these minor benefits. Worse, ignorant of the benefits they get from the practice many people are likely to sign up as the result of scary sound bites about “being watched.”

While I think some of the more extreme worries presented over at the TLF are unrealistic I do think the concept of a ‘Do Not Track’ list raises free speech concerns. While I think it’s surely within the scope of congressional power to require corporations to have privacy policies and abide by them or to impose liability for data breaches requiring someone to delete or avoid recording freely given information is more troublesome. Surely the government could not pass a law preventing any unauthorized individual from retaining financial data on members of congress, that would bar any journalistic inquiry into fraud charges against congressmen but you might think a rule that applied only to normal buisness records avoided these problems. However, I think the recent revelations about who is editing wikipedia, e.g., congressional staffers editting their patron’s page, are a clear example of how user tracking data can be necessary to speak on matters of public concern.

More generally the first ammendment, if it is to have any force, must be read to protect the creation of notes and collection of data. Hell, the creation of a note is itself an act of speech. Simply because you might have lots and lots of data now as a result of the information revolution can’t change that. If I as a blogger have first ammendment protection for announcing that so-and-so visited my blog or that someone with cookie blah-blah-blah did so it’s hard to see how I couldn’t also have first ammendment protection for conveying that information in bulk to someone like google.

Now I admit that the supreme court’s analysis of this issue might be significantly different. I do tend to be a bit of a free speech absolutist. However, regardless of legality I think it’s damn important for us to retain the right to record what happens to us or to objects we control and analyze or pass on that information. If that means people have to go to a bit of trouble to remain anonymous that’s a small price to pay for information freedom. Ultimately technology will erase the obscurity we’ve enjoyed for the last 100 years or so since we moved into cities the only question is do we get democratic access to the analyzed data and the right to use the same tools to monitor the government they use against use or do we adopt a hierarchical model where the government knows everything and the rest of us are barred from accumulating information in databases.

Go into a library and ask a librarian for a book on the Spanish civil war and she’ll probably recommend one or two. Go back and tell her those weren’t what you were looking for and she’ll recommend a few more. Unless the librarian’s patience wears out you can keep doing this for a long time and the better the librarian the longer she will be able to keep suggesting more books. It’s not a feature of the librarian that we have to walk all the way back over to the reference desk to ask for more recommendations. It would be strictly better if we could hit the next page button and get the next set of results.

Of course a real librarian would incorporate feedback from our reactions to the previous recommendations (yah this is closer but not quite what I was looking for) and this is an obvious direction for search engines to explore but it’s not clear it would be good for the majority of searches (the overhead of feedback might overwhelm the cost of scanning output or changing your search in most cases). However, it’s just idiotic to think that merely offering the user the change to look at more pages means google’s algorithm is broken.

The basic premise of email micropayments is that spam is the result of a mismatch between the (marginal) cost of sending an email and the harm of receiving a spam email. So the idea is that if we could charge a small fee (usually less than a penny) to send email it would deter spammers the same way the cost of snail mail keeps our mailboxes from overflowing with ads for viagra and kinky grandmas. Of course the low cost of sending an email is also one of the great benefits of the internet. If everything had to be physically mailed many useful mailing lists, e.g., linux kernel, wouldn’t exist. So most email micropayment schemes propose a whitelisting system so recipients can indicate they wish to receive email from some addresses even if it doesn’t have an attached payment.

Now the standard criticisms of email micropayments usually come in two flavors: that it amounts to a tax on speech/the internet, and that it creates the wrong incentives for ISPs. The first objection is really more of a slogan than a serious argument but at first blush the second seems more worrying. As the EFF fears might not mail hosts be lured by this additional cash flow to classify potentially legitimate mail as spam in the hope of extorting a payment? That does seem like a real danger with the existing micropayment schemes that combine traditional spam filtering with the option of purchasing your way out of it. It just doesn’t say anything about the adopting of an open standard for micropayments that discards every mail that isn’t whitelisted or ’stamped.’ The problems the EFF identifies only exists so long as users still primarily rely on the mail host’s spam filtering instead of whitelists.

My concern about micropayments is that they simply won’t work. The premise that spam exists because it is too cheap to send email sounds nice in theory but it’s not quite true. Sending spam is actually quite expensive for someone, it’s just not the person sending the spam. If a legitimate businesses tried sending real spam themselves their costs would quickly spiral out of control as ISPs refused to host them and they had to resort to more and more complex schemes to avoid blacklists. The real reason the spam problem continues to persist is the ability of spammers to push the costs of sending spam off onto individual computer users by using zombie bot nets to send spam.

But in any successful email micropayment scheme individual email users must have an easy way to make micropayments. If the system requires weird dongles or even repeated password entry it simply won’t fly but if it doesn’t there is nothing that prevents the zombified computer from sapping it’s owner’s account to pay for it’s spam. Apparently I’m not the first to [notice][schiener] this problem and their have even been papers written on efficiently implementing account spending limits to deal with this problem. Even so a cap on how much of your money your zombified computer can spend isn’t that helpful. Sure we may have reduced the absolute amount of spam sent but we’ve guaranteed that each message sent actually gets delivered and is probably more effective at generating a user response as well.

However, let’s just suppose that the zombie net problem is solved. Will we really get less junk mail? That’s not so clear. At the moment if you want to send out snail mail advertisements you have to pay at least 7 cents per delivery, about 30 times more than the quarter cent proposed for email micropayments yet we still receive plenty of junk in our normal mail boxes. Of course we don’t see that much junk mail from reputable companies in our inboxes at the moment but that is partially do to the fact that such a huge percentage of unsolicited email is a scam, or selling an illegal or disreputable product. By making email advertising a much more reputable, and hence profitable, venture the system will actually make buisnesses more willing to spend the quarter cent to send you an ad. Laws barring unsolicited email will likely be watered down in light of the working micropayment system and mail hosts may even collaborate with the legitimate businesses who now want to send you junk email.

So most likely email micropayments would reduce the total volume of spam while leaving the amount in our inboxes mostly unchanged. But even if it does work we will probably end up trading the emails about kinky grandmas for higher quality corporate advertisements from target. Frankly I kinda prefer the kinky grandmas. At least they are funny.

While some people are demanding the SEC punish Mr. Mackey the expert opinion I’ve seen suggests that there is nothing inherently unlawful about a CEO who posts anonymously:

For an executive to use a pseudonym to praise his company and stock “isn’t per se unlawful, but it’s dicey,” said Harvey Pitt, a former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman. Told of the Mackey posts, Mr. Pitt said, “It’s clear that he is trying to influence people’s views and the stock price, and if anything is inaccurate or selectively disclosed he would indeed be violating the law.” He added that “at a minimum, it’s bizarre and ill-advised, even if it isn’t illegal.”

Now I don’t know SEC regulations very well at all and I’ve been confused for a long time how they can be as far reaching as they are without coming into conflict with the first amendment but the idea that this sort of thing might be illegal just seems absurd and in clear tension with the first amendment¹. If Mackey had been posting carefully selected bits of verifiable information with the intent of manipulating the stock price that would be one thing but the frivolity and blatant partisanship in many of his posts makes it pretty clear he was just entertaining himself. Of course some commenters seem unwilling to believe that a CEO might have the same motivations for posted as Intel and AMD fanbois:

“For the head of one company to be using an alias to criticize another in a fairly prominent posting site seems to me not worthy of someone at that level of trust. What is he up to?” asked Buie Seawell, a professor of business ethics and legal studies at the University of Denver. “Any jerk can post anything on the Internet. But for the jerk to be the head of a corporation and to say he did it just for fun, that is just (baloney).”

I’m totally baffled why a CEO who posts anonymously is any less trustworthy than any of the other anonymous posters who frequent these boards. It seems the argument is that he must have been trying to manipulate the stock price but it isn’t like posting crap on the internet is something only us mortals can enjoy. In fact Mr. Mackey is well known for posting extensively on his official blog and one would think if his goal had been to influence stock prices he would have both used an effective anonymizing service (like Tor) and tried to appear less obviously partisan. So if we have little reason to suspect he was motivated by malicious intent what is the reason to distrust him?

Other commenters, while obviously outraged give even less explanation of what the grave sin Mr. Mackey committed.

Never mind the obvious regulation FD concerns: It’s just wrong! If a CEO wants to have his own blog on his own company’s website that is vetted by the company’s legal counsel — you won’t find any argument here.

To post on outside message boards, especially using an alias, not only shows poor judgment but strikes to the heart of a company’s culture and makes you wonder what else might not be quite right.

Once more the justification for infering that this is troublesome (circularly) rests on the assumption that it’s really bad. To be fair the poser probably takes the underlying problem with this behavior to be so obvious that it doesn’t need to be said but I just don’t see it. My best guess is the poster thinks it’s wrong because it puts the company at risk of regulatory action or perhaps the worry is that it harms the companies public image. But while financial types might get very worked up about this I can’t see shoppers changing the ir habits because they were assured that the CEO violated some non-intuitive cannon of business ethics so that leaves the worry about SEC regulation. Even though the above quote from a real expert suggests that he didn’t actually do anything illegal one might still fear this would encourage them to block the attempted takeover. However, according to the WSJ the big problem with the merger were the real life comments Mackey made to his board suggesting the merger would reduce competition. So if the accusation is that Mackey recklessly risked shareholder’s value the criticism should be focused on these totally conventional remarks rather than the anonymous internet postings.

Except for the amusing, but highly unlikely, theory that this criticism is an attempt by his rivals to respond in kind the only thing which seems to explain the disproportionate criticism Mackey is coming in for the anonymous postings compared to other, potentially unwise but relatively minor issues, is the non-traditional nature of his behavior. Still it’s entierly possible that I’m just missing something the buisness people think is obvious. If so hopefully this post will provoke them into explaining what makes his behavior so horrible. But whatever one might think of the prudential concerns of this sort of behavior I think it’s clear that the SEC ought not to be able to punish CEOs for these sorts of comments.

After all becoming a CEO doesn’t mean you fall into some sort of first amendment exception and the statements Mackey made in his posts were obviously his opinion and almost certainly not part of some intentional plan to manipulate the stock market. Surely we would not believe a law that let the government punish any blogger who remarked about a company whose stock he owned passed constitutional muster so what makes this situation different? After all the harm to the stock market is really the same whether or not this guy is a CEO or just a stock owner since he is posting anonymously. In fact posting anonymously actually reduced the potential for misinformation as people are much more likely to confuse a CEO’s opinion with factual claims than some random guy on the net. So unless we are prepared to say that a CEO doesn’t have the right to express his opinion about the company he runs and his competition without fear of punishment at all it shouldn’t be acceptable to punish Mackey in this case.

Now perhaps he just meant that given we outlaw internet banking it is important to shut down easy financial transactions with the companies. This seems to be a reasonable position. However, it’s an insoluble problem of our own creation. There are simply too many otherwise law-abiding US citizens who are and will continue to engage in internet gambling and their will always be offshore bank accounts and other means for them to do so. This flow of relatively innocuous money will disguise any genuinely criminal money being laundered or tax being evaded.

Of course we could easily eliminate the problem entirely by simply legalizing internet gambling for properly licensed companies. This would bring all those cash flows into a regulated system as well as allowing us to institute protections against problem gamblers, e.g., laws that require internet gambling entities to stop people from playing after they’ve lost too much money in a given time period or receive some sort of notification that this person is a problem gambler. Also it would bring us in line with the WTO guidelines.

But no, that would be far too rational for the US to ever do.

As you may already know google’s new toolbar (still in beta for FireFox) allows users to create custom search buttons, e.g., I could create a button that people could place on their toolbar to search the posts on this blog. Thankfully Google does not exercise any control over what buttons I can create or distribute to either but they (understandably if unfortunately) have an editorial policy about which buttons they will display in their online gallery. As this is the only place most people will look for buttons it in effect controls what sort of search buttons the general public is exposed to.

Much to my disappointment when I was thinking of creating a custom button to search asstr (text only sex stories) I discovered that the editorial guidelines seem to exclude any such search button from google’s gallery. Though I am disgusted by policies that treat sexuality as some kind of unclean shameful thing I can appreciate the justification for it in horribly puritanical country like ours. It is the editorial policy on other subjects like, drugs, prostitution, copyright law and smoking that really bothers me. Despite my deep uncomfortability with content based favoritism in this sort of situation I would even accept an editorial policy which just declared certain topics off limits for buttons. For instance if the editorial policy simply said no buttons about drugs or prostitution I wouldn’t be happy with the policy but I could live with it. However, I find it totally unacceptable for Google to have editorial policies that ban only one side of the argument on controversial issues.

For instance consider this sampling of their editorial guidelines.

Buttons and/or the sites they link to may not promote drugs or drug paraphernalia. This includes drug accessories, illegal drugs, and herbal drugs such as salvia and magic mushrooms. … Buttons and/or the sites they link to may not promote beer or hard alcohol. … Buttons and/or the sites they link to may not promote hacking or cracking. For example, sites must not provide instructions or equipment to illegally access or tamper with software, servers, websites, cell phones, or other communications or content delivery systems or devices. … Buttons and/or the sites they link to may not promote certain weapons, such as firearms, ammunition, balisongs, butterfly knives, and brass knuckles … Buttons and/or the sites they link to may not promote tobacco or tobacco-related products. … Buttons and/or the sites they link to may not promote prostitution. … Buttons and/or the sites they link to may not promote illegal content.

The plain language of these guidelines would seem to allow the brady campaign to add a custom search button for their site to google’s button gallery but not the nra. Similarly the DEA would apparently be allowed to post a button facilitating access to anti-drug (pro drug war) propaganda while a NORML button making pro legalization information convenient, a erowid button providing drug information (important to avoid overdoses) or even a UDV button giving information on their (totally legal) religious use of Ayahuasca would be denied from google’s button gallery. Arguably even a site that merely advocated legalizing prostitution to reduce violence against women would run afoul of these guidelines while the opposite position would not. Heck, technically a site arguing for breaking copyright laws as a form of civil disobedience would run afoul of these guidelines.

I still am inclined to give Google the benefit of the doubt and assume that guidelines like the one against cracking/hacking will not be used to stop buttons helping people figure out how to liberate their own phones from corporate locks or play their music on a different portable player. While most of the other conditions disturbingly make no distinction between legal and illegal situations (e.g. prostitution in Nevada) this condition might be read to only apply to illegal hacking/cracking. However, in light of the other language in these guidelines I am worried.

Certainly Google has the right to put up whatever restrictions it wants on content that it will display on it’s pages and it would be wrong to call whatever guidelines they choose censorship. Nothing prevents Google from deciding that only pro-life and not pro-choice search buttons would be allowed. Absent the FEC they could only allow buttons made to search pro-republican sites and not democratic ones. People whose buttons aren’t accepted in the gallery can go distribute them on other websites. But just like a policy that accepted only pro-republican buttons into the gallery by handicapping one side of the debate, especially the less popular side, the full public debate is stunted. Even worse appearing to favor one side over another on controversial issues imperils people’s trust in Google as an unbiased provider of search results. Sure conditions like this may be common on many forums and sites around the web but unlike your generic website Google, like the news media before them, has a responsibility to not only present the information in an unbiased fashion but also avoid even the appearance of stacking the deck in one side’s favor.

I suspect and hope that this policy was just an oversight on google’s part (or a horribly bad misunderstanding on mine) and when they read the similar message I posted in the button developers group it will be rewritten in a more neutral fashion. While I might prefer that membership in the button gallery might be determined solely by usefulness/estimated popularity I’m not demanding the impossible. I understand that I will probably always have to look to third party sites for buttons to search sexual content but at the very least Google can make the playing field fair and put both sides of these controversial issues on a similar footing (let them both have buttons or neither).

What the fuck? It’s just a website people what is all the fuss. If you don’t like it don’t use it, even try and convince other people that it isn’t that reliable (though some experiments have been done in this regard and disappointed the critics) but there is no reason to be outraged some people got together and wrote down a bunch of facts on their web page. I’ve always thought those suggestions that people had some vested interest in reserving information to the elite (the type of people who go look it up in musty libraries) but maybe I should reconsider that opinion.

Ridiculous as I find these protests I guess I should say a few words about why they are in error. Basically all the complaints focus around the accuracy of wikipedia (fanned by recent events). Importantly these anti-wikipedia zealots aren’t complaining just because wikipedia occasionally has errors or makes mistakes. If this was their position the entire web would be the subject of their ire. Rather the protest is that wikipedia doesn’t take enough responsibility for their content and that somehow their place as a widely consulted web reference is somehow “unearned” or unfair.

While I do think that wikipedia could improve its moderation model and it is too idealistic about openness the critics I mention are not offering constructive suggestions to make a valuable project even better they are actually critical that an openly editable encyclopedia exists at all. Their defense for complaining about a free resource is that by calling itself an encyclopedia this website somehow becomes responsible for meeting the same standard encyclopedia does. This is also the argument made against wikipedia’s BBS like libel protection.

The idea that a mere title could carry with it that level of expectation or those moral responsibilities is just absurd. I mean would the onion suddenly be in the wrong if they had been titled West Valley News. Besides the site is not encyclopedia.com it is wikipedia.com and just as one should have a lot different expectations from a place called fakepedia.com so too should one have different expectations for a wiki encyclopedia. The essential feature differentiating wikipedia from a normal encyclopedia is in the name. What more could you want?

The difference between wikipedia and a normal encyclopedia is readily apparent with a quick visit to any page, perhaps a few deeply confused people don’t realize this but some people think theonion is a real paper too. The real reason so many people trust what wikipedia says is because it is so frequently right. If wikipedia had the same layout and name but most of its information was false it would never have gotten popular (they don’t even advertise). What works up these critics is that the general accuracy of wikipedia makes many people (perhaps wrongly) put great trust in the site but the idea that a webpage suddenly becomes morally (or legally) suspect because it usually gets things right is pretty absurd.

Wikipedia is a free resource which goes to every reasonable effort to inform people how it works. Unlike a commercial product they have no responsibility to be whatever their ‘customers’ want them to be so long as they don’t misrepresent what they are. Essentially the critics are mad about the way people use and trust wikipedia but can’t get away with telling people they can’t read or believe something so instead they attack the website. Their position might be obscured by the arguments but basically it amounts to the absurd position that it is wrong for people to get together and create a freely editable website which aims to have the same content as an encyclopedia.