I'll Have Another Hit of Hope and Change, Please

So it's been, hoo boy, over a year since I posted anything here. I'm once again going to try to get in the habit, and I figure I should start out with something strong. So here's an amazing presentation by Larry Lessig that provides a useful primer on the topics of broadband policy, cybersecurity, and copyright, then bends all three of these topics into a larger point about America's political process. It is very much worth the time to watch.



It's almost an hour long, but I think it stops 20 minutes too soon. He never answers the question of, well, what do we do now? I see that he's promoting a website for Fix Congress First. They appear to have a well-thought-out public campaign financing bill. But is that really the answer? Is there any real possibility this can get passed? (My guess: no.) Could it stand up to Supreme Court review? (Probably not, unless one or more of the conservative justices keels over while the Democrats still hold the White House.) If it did become law, would it solve the problem? That's hard to say, but at least it would be a huge improvement.

In any case, this seems like a hard thing to do as an insurgency. Lessig hits the crux of the problem when he notes that people commonly react that of course the powerful business interests run everything--it's always been like that! Certainly there has always been a certain amount of influence-trading in Washington D.C., but I have a hard time believing that it has always been like this. Nonetheless, I think the tendency among the public to believe that this is the way it always has been and always will be, until the end of time, amen, may present an insurmountable barrier for the popular uprising approach to political reform.

What I'm trying to say, in a long-winded way, is that my one source of crushing disappointment with the Obama administration has been its complete unwillingness to confront any powerful business interest. There were many things I admired about candidate Obama, but highest among them was his apparent dedication to changing Washington and improving the political process. I had hoped it would be the administration, rather than Lessig and his merry band of outlaws, spearheading the movement for political reform. I had hoped that he would confront entrenched interests and use his platform to show how badly they had served the public in the past and how directly their current interests conflicted with the public interest. None of this has happened.

Obama prevented a depression, passed landmark health care legislation and financial reform, and has done a lot of other good things. But he has done nothing in the realm of political process reform. Lessig is right that the FCC totally rolled over on the broadband plan. And Greenwald is right the administration only made it past the entrenched interests on health care reform by buying them out. And something not so different just played out on the banking regulations. It is honestly shocking to me how fearful this administration has been of entrenched business interests. Given the populist mood in the country, I should think the White House would relish a good fight with an unpopular industry (like the banks, or the health insurance companies, or Comcast). That, frankly, is the sort of press they need. But instead, when they get even a whiff of a fight like that coming, they turn tail and head for cover.

I don't know what to conclude. The Obama administration having been a letdown on this, I don't see any viable path towards political process reform in the near future. Between that and the new requirement for a super-majority to pass anything in the Senate (fodder for another blog post), the federal government has truly reached a new level of dysfunction. Despite Obama's legislative successes of the past couple years, I am deeply dismayed about the prospects of the federal government competently addressing any of the major challenges that will come its way over the next 10+ years. We are in a bad way to be sure.

Lessig on Technology Policy

Here, in just over 15 minutes, Larry Lessig says basically everything I've ever tried to say about telecom policy on the blog (in the context of a critique of John McCain's tech platform). Take a look, it's well worth the time:



Also, for a number of weeks I've been meaning to post a link to this ars technica article on customer-owned fiber. Projects like this, or like Utah's UTOPIA seem to present the best way forward for the domestic telecom market.

Lessig Takes on the Political Process

After spending the past decade redefining the academic landscape on intellectual property rights and driving forward the debate on law and technology, Larry Lessig has decided to move on to something new. His new project: to figure out why our political process doesn't work and try to fix it.

In Lessig's most reknowned case, Eldred v. Ashcroft, he argued to the Supreme Court that it made no sense for Congress to retroactively extend the duration of copyrights for works already in existence. You can't provide incentives, he argued, for someone to do something they've already done. He was, of course, absolutely right, but the Supreme Court decided it was Congress's call to make, not theirs. So now Lessig has turned his attention back to Congress, to figure out why it would create policy so obviously wrong. Lessig writes:

The answer is a kind of corruption of the political process. Or better, a "corruption" of the political process. I don't mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean "corruption" in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can't even get an issue as simple and clear as term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.

More recently Lessig has been one of the key advocates for net neutrality, where much the same forces are at work. He notes that "our government can't understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding." So Lessig has decided to dedicate his next decade to trying to crack this problem.

Obviously it's a big problem, and, as Lessig acknowledges, he's hardly the first person to take it on. But I'm excited to see him try. While Lessig has largely won the battle on copyrights and technology as far as the academic debate goes, his work there has had few tangible results in our legal framework. This seems the obvious next step. If he can accomplish half as much in his new endeavor as he did in law and technology, it will be a great win for us all. I wish him the best of luck.

A Sunstein Teaser

While Larry Lessig is out on vacation, he's left Cass Sunstein in charge of his blog (until the beginning of next week). Sunstein has been discussing his follow-up to Republic.com, looking at aggregation of information on the Internet in various forms (wikis, open source, etc.) and contrasting these forms of aggregation with Hayek's market pricing theories. He has also discussed the Chicago Judges Project and The Wisdom of Crowds. I look forward to seeing the rest of his posts.

The Larry Lessig Boys Choir Story

Wow. Like Sleepers, but for real...

Blog-o-riffic!

Larry Lessig posted a notice on his blog of a brand new blog that he helped set up, featuring weekly discussions between two University of Chicago professors: 7th Circuit judge Richard Posner, and Nobel prize-winning economist Gary Becker. This week's inaugural topic: preventive war.

Just Visiting

I was checking in on Larry Lessig's blog and noticed that a couple weeks ago he had Judge Posner guest blogging for him. He obviously really got into it. There are interesting posts on topics ranging from IP law to the 9/11 report and bioterrorism to global warming to The Matrix. I haven't nearly had time to read through it yet, but it looks like good stuff.

Checking Out Creative Commons

I've noticed a number of times that Larry Lessig is always pimping for Creative Commons on his blog, and have always thought 'hmm, that must be a good thing.' Only recently did I have the brilliant idea to actually check it out and see what was there. So I poked around a bit and found one of their content aggregators, Magnatune. Magnatune (slogan: We Are Not Evil) has music from a good number groups/individuals which can be streamed in mp3 form for free and can be purchased for download at a cost of $5-$18 (your choice). So far I've managed to get completely hooked on music by a guy named Wade Williamson. Cool stuff.

Winning The Geek Vote

Howard Dean continues to impress. Today on his blog Dean took a few steps to establish his tech policy. He announced that he had assembled an advisory group of tech gurus, including our friend Larry Lessig. He released a statement of principles for the internet (vague, but promising). And he released as open source some community building software that his staff and supporters have worked on. These actions were duly noted on slashdot. One sharp /. poster pointed out that Howard Dean's web site runs on FreeBSD (an open source operating system), Wesley Clark's site is on Linux, but George W. Bush runs on Windows 2000. Those geeks don't miss much.

Article: Lessig As Presidential Moderator

This past week, Dennis Kucinich followed Howard Dean as a guest writer on Larry Lessig's blog. I think he did a good job with his posts. I was most impressed by the one regarding John Gilmore (founder of the EFF) and his airport experiences. Where Dean's stuff looked more or less like he could have cross-posted the same material anywhere, Kucinich clearly took the time to at least poke around Lessig's site and see what it's about. And his comments on the GPL reveal surprising cluefulness as well. It's too bad he hasn't been able to generate the same sort of buzz that Dean has..

Article: It's That Time Again

The Presidential primary season is starting to heat up. There was a story today on /. regarding Lawrence Lessig having Howard Dean guest host his blog while he's gone on vacation. That is an endorsement that scores big points with me. Also I found a link to this web opinion survey which matches up your political opinions with the stated positions of the 2004 candidates. I was a 100% match with the green party. After that, Howard Dean edged out Kucinich by one point. However, after reading through each of their position pages, I think I favor Kucinich a bit over Dean. I was particularly impressed by this quote: "Among the first actions of a Kucinich Administration will be withdrawal from NAFTA and the WTO—to be replaced by fair trade agreements." Of course, by all reports Kucinich is likely going to get his ass handed to him. But it can't hurt to support him until that happens..