Author: Ramsi Woodcock

Categories
Antitrust Monopolization Regulation

Fairly Balanced

Ben Smith must be congratulated for writing one of the few accounts in the Times of the battle between Big News and Big Tech even to acknowledge that there are two players in this fight, and that both are pursuing their own private interests, not necessarily the public interest.

Smith gets it right when he observes that: “The battle between [tech] platforms and publishers is . . . an old-fashioned political brawl between powerful industries.” Contrast that to “To Take Down Big Tech, They First Need to Reinvent the Law,” the headline of a story that appeared in the Times last summer, and you see why there is cause to celebrate this tick back in the direction of balanced journalism.

Of course, there’s still a long way for the Times to go before it stops using its bully pulpit to advance the industry’s own narrow pecuniary interests, and starts giving its readers a complete picture of what’s at stake in the battle between the media industry and Facebook, Google, and Amazon.

Smith follows a popular playbook in the press’s attempts to drum up political support for smashing its tech rivals: lionizing those who help them. No doubt this is the first time that Australian competition regulator Rod Sims has been called a “pugnacious 69-year-old” defending the public against “railroads, ports, and phone companies.”

And no doubt American regulators get the message: take the media’s side and the media will talk you up too.

But Smith really does deserve kudos for trying to be balanced. After all, he comes out and says it: “politicians remain eager to please the press that covers them.”

And: “[T]he power of the press, even nowadays, makes it a formidable political force. Rupert Murdoch’s bare-knuckled News Corp . . . has long led the fight to claw back revenue from the tech giants, and hostility to Google bleeds through the pages of The Times of London and Fox News’s airwaves.”

Of course, the same hostility “fairly bleeds” through the pages of the The New York Times as well. But it would be asking too much for the Times itself to acknowledge that.

I do wish though that Smith would drop a link when he goes on to observe that “much of the American media rejects the idea that it is crusading in its pages to support its publishers’ business agenda.” Last I checked, no one of any prominence had even called out the media for the brazen, self-interested, savaging of big tech that has been running above the fold in newspapers across the country for several years now.

Much less have I read a rejection of such criticism authored by any editorial page anywhere. The press is still a long way away from coming clean to its readers about this issue. All the more reason to thank Smith for finally acknowledging that there is a conflict of interest.

You also have to admire this bit of very journalistic commentary-through-juxtaposition in Smith’s piece: “Facebook, after taking a huge public beating for its role amplifying misinformation . . . has moved to give publishers what they want: money, mostly . . . . writing checks in the seven figures to publishers.” You’d have to be a very dull reader indeed not to see “shakedown” blinking here in red, all caps.

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But I haven’t said a word yet about the actual subject matter of Smith’s piece.

It’s this: the media industry has been arguing that Google and Facebook should pay newspapers for the links to news stories that Google provides on its search engine and that Facebook users spend endless hours sharing and discussing on Facebook. And the industry has made some headway in convincing government regulators in Australia and France to mandate such payments.

But is there a good argument for making Google and Facebook pay? Although there have been attempts to spin the problem of compensation into a copyright question — is a snippet of text from a news article included in a Google search result subject to copyright by newspapers? — the basic argument is that Google and Facebook would be a lot less valuable to their users if there were no journalism out on the internet for Google to help users find and for Facebook to help users share.

It follows that newspapers are contributing value to Google and Facebook, and should therefore receive compensation for that value.

The trouble with this argument is that there is no general rule that anyone who receives value from someone else should pay compensation for it. Imagine if you had to pay every pretty face you encountered on the street for the pleasure you take in a glance. There’s no doubt that Google and Facebook would be a lot less useful if there were no world for Google to reproduce in search results or for Facebook users to discuss on Facebook. That doesn’t mean that Google and Facebook should be made to pay all of their revenues out to the whole world in exchange for the value the whole world contributes to Google and Facebook’s websites.

The rule that policymakers actually do follow is to try wherever possible to ensure that those who produce value are paid enough to cover their costs of producing that value. That’s not at all the same as requiring full compensation for all the value producers confer on others.

That is, the basic rule on when to recognize a right to payment–otherwise known as a property right–is that producers of value should have enough of a right to payment to cover their costs. Because that is enough to ensure that they have the resources necessary to continue to produce the valuable things that they make. But beyond that, no one has, or should have, a right to payment simply in virtue of having conferred value on others.

Otherwise, no one could get any enjoyment out of the works of others! If a firm creates $10 of value for you, you would then be required to pay $10 of value back to the firm, for a net gain of zero. Clearly, a rule that value conferred must give rise to compensation simply because value has been conferred is unworkable.

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The newspaper industry may be wrong to argue that value conferred gives rise to a right to payment. But the industry does, however, have a good case that at present it is not receiving even enough compensation to pay its costs of production, which suggests at least that it should have a right to more compensation from someone. Local newspapers across the country are shuttering. And the big papers that remain have had to sacrifice care and balance in their reporting in order to attract readers and protect their bottom lines. While the industry still takes in enough revenue to produce news, it no longer takes in enough to produce news of optimal quality.

But it is far from obvious that Google and Facebook should be the institutions to pay the costs of better journalism. True, those two companies now earn the advertising revenues that once sustained the media industry. But that’s because Google and Facebook distribute advertising better than do newspapers, not because Google and Facebook have used monopoly power to strike down more-innovative newspaper rivals.

And anyway the vulnerability of the newspaper industry to competition from Google and Facebook–two companies that don’t, actually, produce any news of their own–points to a deeper problem that can’t be solved by forcing these firms to subsidize the newspaper industry: that the market in which the media industry generates its revenues isn’t actually the market for news.

It’s the market for advertising.

That has always been a huge problem for newspapers, because a newspaper’s core mission is to tell the truth, whereas advertising’s core mission is to manipulate consumers into buying products they would not buy otherwise, and the more so in the information age. It makes no sense to fund an industry devoted to arming the public against manipulation–political and otherwise–through the distribution of commercial attempts to manipulate the public.

Which is why addressing the current jeopardy of journalism by tying newspapers back into advertising revenue streams, generated now through the medium of Google and Facebook, would represent a lost opportunity–to wean the newspaper industry off of dirty money.

What governments should be doing to save journalism is to set up direct government subsidies for newspapers, the way many Western European countries, and Britain, have long subsidized television news through a dedicated tax.

Detractors of this approach warn that government support could compromise journalistic independence. But here’s the thing: if Congress rides to the industry’s rescue by passing legislation advocated by the News Media Alliance that would allow the industry to negotiate compensation from Google and Facebook, that too would be a government subsidy. Few are under any illusions about that fact, not least the journalists who are currently busy rewarding friendly politicians with positive news coverage. A hostile President, or Congress, won’t think twice about demanding good press in exchange for support for such legislation. Indeed, that’s exactly what politicians who are backing the legislation are already getting in exchange.

If we’re getting government-subsidized media either way, we should at least get it without the advertising, and the additional layer of conflicts with commercial interests that entails.

Of course when, as Smith reports in a different piece, “[t]he most heated debate in places where . . . nonprofit news executives gather . . . is whether it’s ever safe or ethical to take government funding,” not whether it’s safe or ethical to take money from corporate interests in exchange for running corporate propaganda, there seems to be little hope for this approach.

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Smith writes that the war between Big News and Big Tech is not just about private interests but also about “economic principle.” He’s right that the newspaper industry has tried to cast itself as the nation’s last line of defense against monopolization of the economy by the tech giants. But this craven and profoundly disingenuous appeal to the public interest was belied from the start by the industry’s advocacy of legislation that would allow newspapers to cartelize in violation of the antitrust laws in order to negotiate payments from the tech giants.

Demanding a cut of a monopolist’s profits is not the modus operandi of an industry committed to competitive markets. A News Corp. executive’s quip to Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s capitulation to modest payments–“what took you so long?”–says it all.

Of course, newspapers have also pressed for breakup of the tech giants, which is more like what one would expect from genuine antimonopoly advocates. But that, like all the bad press newspapers have heaped on Big Tech over the past few years, has just been about maintaining a bargaining position, the stick required to scare Google and Facebook into opening their wallets.

Once Big Tech does cut in the newspapers, don’t hold your breath waiting for the newspaper industry to continue the crusade for greater competition in America.

Categories
Civilization Regulation

Read It in the Sands

Anyone still skeptical about the usefulness of regulation as a general matter ought to consider the contrast between archaeology and treasure hunting. By which I mean, the triumphs of Twentieth Century state-sponsored archaeology and the failure of the preceding millennia of free-market treasure hunting.

Categories
Miscellany

War on Credit

When people are not trusted, their words, I notice, merely drift about without force in themselves and without inspiring confidence in others. But when people are known to have a respect for the truth, their words are just as powerful as other people’s force in securing any object at which they aim. If they want to bring anyone to a proper sense of his position, I know that threats from them have just as much of a sobering effect as actual punishment inflicted by others. And if people of this sort make promises, they gain their ends just as successfully as others who pay out money on the spot. Think of your own case. How much did you pay us before you gained our alliance? You know that you paid nothing at all. No, we trusted you and believed you would be true to your word, and so you raised a great army to march with you and gain you an empire worth not only the thirty talents, which our men think they should be paid, but many times as much. First of all, then, it is this feeling that you can be trusted–the thing which won you your kingdom–which is being bartered away for this sum of money.

Xenophon, The Persian Expedition 341-42 (Rex Warner trans., Penguin Books 1972).
Categories
Annals of American Decline Meta

On Mastering a Profession

The Federal Trade Commission Building.

I always did wonder how we lost the glory of Main Justice. Or the Federal Trade Commission. I should have known that, as with all things in modern life, the reason can be found in some stray bit of official text: “The design must flow from the architectural profession to the government. And not vice versa.” It will be fun to watch the AIA try to argue that anyone–anyone–except card-carrying members thereof actually likes the profession’s contemporary output. To read “Benjamin Forgey, the former architecture critic for The Washington Post,” pointing to I.M. Pei’s addition of a “triangular design influenced by modernist thought” to John Russell Pope’s Roman-Pantheon-inspired National Gallery of Art is to get a premonition of just how badly this is going to go for them. Of course, I’d rather not have the next federal building look like Trump Tower. But are the greatest examples of contemporary academic architecture any better? Is Dancing House really better? It’s not all that hard imagining that he might have designed it.

But this, to choose an example of beautiful architecture at random, is better. And would be covered by the executive order.

Categories
Coincidence

A Self-Endorsement?

The two candidates endorsed by The New York Times for president also happen to be the two most likely to advance the press’s antitrust campaign against Big Tech. One more than the other, to be sure. Just saying.

Categories
Antitrust Monopolization

More on the Warren Platform Fallacy

I have argued elsewhere that Elizabeth Warren’s proposed rule that firms not be allowed to compete on their own platforms makes no sense because a platform is just a production input, and all firms must own at least some of their inputs in order to exist. Does your company own its own office computers? Then it competes on its own platform.

But even when a company doesn’t compete on its own platform, the company will often have exactly the same incentive to favor some platform users over others that Warren seems to want to eliminate through her proposed rule.

Consider a shopping mall. The owner of the mall will not typically own any of the stores that lease space in the mall. So the mall owner doesn’t compete on its own platform. (At least not on the mall platform, but certainly on others. The mall owner doubtless owns a few computers.)

But even so, the mall owner does still have an incentive to favor some of its lessees over others, just as the owner would have an incentive to favor its own stores over those of competitors if the owner were to integrate downstream into retail and compete on its own platform. Suppose, for example, that the mall owner has a history of being able to negotiate more favorable lease terms from one restaurant in the mall than from another. The mall owner might then have an incentive not to renew the lease of the other restaurant, in order to make way for expansion of the first.

The lesson here is that whether a platform owner competes on its own platform or not, the owner will have a financial interest in all of the firms that do compete on the owner’s platform (because they all must pay the owner for access), and that interest is unlikely to be equal across all competitors on the platform. Indeed, a platform owner’s financial interest in a particularly profitable client is no different in effect than a platform owner’s financial interest in a business that the owner owns.

If we are not troubled by the fact that a platform owner that does not compete on its own platform will regularly use its power to pick winners–which is just was a mall owner does when it refuses to renew the lease of one shop, but continues that of another–then we should not be troubled by the fact that a platform owner that does compete on its own platform will sometimes favor its own businesses over those of competitors.

It seems fairly clear that what really bothers Warren is not that as a general matter platforms have an incentive to pick winners, whether themselves or others, on their own platforms, but rather that some specific platforms, like Amazon, may not be wielding that power wisely, or perhaps have so much power that government oversight of their decisionmaking is appropriate.

But the solution to that problem is not to gin up a broad general principle, like the one that no firm should be able to compete on its own platform, and then let that principle loose to wreak havoc across the economy. The solution is to empower a regulatory agency to supervise the platform in question, and decide, in light of the specifics of that particular business, whether intervention to supervise the platform’s choices is warranted.

That’s what the FCC did forever with respect to AT&T, back when AT&T was the nation’s only telecommunications platform. And that’s what can be done with Amazon, or other tech giants, to address concerns about possible arbitrary use of platform power.

Categories
Miscellany

The Capital Snub

My colleague Brian Frye launches an eloquent attack on the norm against plagiarism (Jot here). But his real target, I think, is the academic ego, and I wonder whether deflating it doesn’t require stronger, rather than weaker, norms.

Economic systems generate value by creating incentives for people to undertake productive activity. In market economies, we do that by giving firms property rights in what they produce. That ensures that firms that produce what consumers want can insist upon payment, and those payments in turn serve as the means by which consumers reward good behavior and ultimately dictate what the economy should produce.

The system falls apart, however, if the signals consumers send to firms through their purchase decisions don’t get routed properly to those who are best able to respond to them. If consumers want more grapes and less tonic, then grape producers need to get the “produce grapes” signal and tonic producers need to get the “stop producing tonic signal.” If tonic producers get the “produce grapes” signal, then more grapes won’t be produced and the system will fail.

The anti-plagiarism norm is just another approach to achieving proper routing of incentive signals, one that is optimized for the production of ideas in which the academic community engages. Academia creates incentives for scholars to produce work that is useful to the community by rewarding influence, rather than mere fact of making something that others are willing to acquire and read, as the market might do. Scholars who generate ideas that other scholars find useful, in the sense that other scholars see fit to discuss the ideas or build upon them, receive promotions and appointments at the most prestigious institutions.

In order for this system to function, faculty promotion and hiring committees must be able to measure influence. They do that by counting citations–the number of times that other scholars have referred to a particular scholar’s work–and by evaluating placement, meaning the prestige of the journals or academic presses in or with which the scholar publishes work. Influence implies originality; a scholar who uses another work to influence a third party merely serves as a conduit for the influence of the other author. Because editors select texts for publication based on originality, placement measures the promise of influence. The editor’s decision to publish at once signals the editor’s belief that the work should exert influence and helps the work toward that end, by giving the work a prominent display.

The anti-plagiarism norm facilitates the measurement of influence, by making it easier for promotion and hiring committees accurately to count instances in which the work of one scholar has been relied upon by other scholars. It also makes it easier for journal editors to determine what part of a scholar’s work is original and what part not. A scholar who scrupulously cites to the work of others whenever the scholar has relied upon it enables committees evaluating those other scholars to observe that the first scholar has been influenced by them. And a scholar who scrupulously cites to the work of others also enables editors to determine quickly the extent of the scholar’s own original contribution to the field. Eliminating the anti-plagiarism norm would make citation counts and placements less accurate measures of influence.

Which is why plagiarism makes scholars so angry. Every failure to cite causes the metrics upon which committees measure influence to diverge from actual influence, with the result that influence, the very end of scholarship (in the sense that truth in science is measured by acceptance), is not rewarded.

I’m tempted to add here that plagiarism makes academics angry because it’s theft. But plagiarism isn’t theft, because academics don’t own ideas, as Brian rightly points out, and the incentives system academics employ is in any case not a market-based incentives system. Plagiarism is only like theft, and gives rise to anger that is only like the anger aroused by theft, in the sense that plagiarism subverts the academic incentive system in the same way that theft subverts the market’s incentive system. A consequence of theft is that you are deprived of what you deserve, because you worked to produce it, or to generate the money you needed to buy it. And that makes you angry. A consequence of plagiarism is that you are deprived of the promotion or job that you deserve, because you generated sufficient influence to merit the promotion or appointment. And that makes you similarly angry.

So plagiarism is like theft, but still remains its own separate kind of transgression. Indeed, I’d hazard that plagiarism is a more dangerous offense, more likely to elicit a cruel response from its victim, than mere theft, because plagiarism is in the mode of a snub. To snub is to ignore, shun, count out. It inflicts a social wound, in contrast to theft’s harm to property. Social wounds cut deeper.

Although Brian at points acknowledges the limits of the property metaphor, at other points he embraces it. He writes that “academics want to own ideas. Copyright is useless to them, because it can’t protect what they want to own. So they create plagiarism norms that give them what they want, when copyright can’t provide.”

But academics don’t want to own their ideas. Indeed, they give them away for free. They do, however, want credit for them toward promotion and hiring, and perhaps in the eyes of posterity, which is why they decry plagiarism. The anti-plagiarism norm does not erect a property system, but it does facilitate a more accurate accounting of the performance of scholars.

One way to test this incentives account would be to see whether scholars tend to object more to plagiarism in academic work than to plagiarism in media that promotion and hiring committees, or academic peers more generally, do not usually consult.

I suspect that they do. If a high school student plagiarizes my scholarly work for a term paper that only a high school teacher will ever read, I am unlikely to become angry. I might even be flattered that my work has percolated so far. But if a scholar plagiarizes my work in an academic publication, I will be angry. The reason the high schooler gets off is that the value of my influence on him to promotion and hiring committees is zero.

Now, the student’s high school teacher might well object to the student’s plagiarism. But that is consistent with my incentives account. Because the plagiarism undermines the classroom incentives system, even if it does not undermine the academic incentives system. To induce students to do original work, the high school teacher must be able to identify original work, and reward it. Plagiarism undermines the high school teacher’s ability to do that.

The incentives theory also explains why ghostwriting often does not run afoul of the plagiarism norm. The anti-plagiarism norm comes into play only where non-market-based reward systems are concerned. When the only rewards desired or received are through the market, plagiarism is not needed for proper routing of incentives, because the market handles that. So for example the ghostwriting of autobiographies or romance novels raises no hackles because the nominal authors are not going to win any writing awards, or generate any esteem as serious literary figures. These books are written for profit. Nothing more.

But I’m sure that a winner of a Pulitzer or Nobel who relies on ghostwriting would come in for serious censure. Because those awards are about creating incentives for authors to engage in original, influential writing. An author who gets the award despite not having made such contributions takes the award from someone who did make real contributions, and thereby subverts the incentives system.

It’s no use arguing in response that the incentives theory doesn’t fit because a ghostwriter has by definition voluntarily renounced any claim to recognition, and indeed may well be content to create great works without any non-financial incentives whatsoever. Because there must be someone else out there, some other author, who has produced great original work, and who did it in hope of receiving the award. That other author will not get the award because it has gone instead to the undeserving employers of the ghostwriter. So an incentive will still have been lost, routed incorrectly.

I cannot therefore agree with Brian that the differential treatment of ghostwriting suggests that “plagiarism is a crime only when it harms the economic interests of authors, but is fine when it benefits them.” Plagiarism is a crime when rewards are doled out based on influence, but not, as in the case of most ghostwriting, when rewards are doled out only based on consumer demand. In that latter case, the market system is at play, and the goal is to reward those who bring products to market that consumers like best. Unless consumers care how the product is produced, and for most ghostwritten work they don’t, copyright is all that’s needed to ensure that those who bring what consumers want to market get rewarded for doing it.

(Occasionally consumers do partake of the cult of authorship and demand that authors not be ghostwriters, in which case a failure to disclose ghostwriting feels, to the consumer, like fraud. This, I suspect, is the origin of the mistaken notion that the anti-plagiarism norm is really an anti-fraud norm. As Brian rightly points out, plagiarism is actually rarely about protecting the reader as a general matter. It is instead, as I have been arguing here, about ensuring that authors are properly rewarded for influence in those communities, such as academia, in which influence is valued.)

The incentives theory also explains why there is no plagiarism norm in court filings. Lawyers, like academics, do strive to influence others through their work, but lawyers’ targets for influence are judges. And judges make clear enough, to the clients who dole out rewards to lawyers, whether their lawyers are influential, by ruling for or against. You don’t need to count cites here, just wins.

Brian asks: “Can I consent to plagiarism? Or rather, do academic plagiarism norms permit me to consent to plagiarism? If not, why not?” The answer, he points out, is of course no. But I do not fully understand his argument that the reason for this “no” is that the anti-plagiarism norm amounts to “cartel rules.”

Academia is not an idea cartel. Cartels restrict output, and thereby drive up price. But academics don’t restrict the output of their ideas in order to extract a higher price from those who buy them. Academics give their ideas away for free. Scholars don’t agree not to publish papers, for example, until the public, or university administrators, consent to pay more for those ideas.

One might argue that universities use common hiring standards artificially to restrict the number of academics they hire, and that this in turn restricts the supply of ideas, since it is difficult for those not employed in academia to find time to produce and disseminate ideas. But universities do not sell their faculties’ ideas. Students pay for teaching. They don’t pay for research. To the extent that there is a hiring cartel (and I don’t think there is), it profits by rationing teaching, not scholarship, which makes the cartel analogy unsuitable to a discussion of the anti-plagiarism norm.

If what Brian means by cartel rules, however, is only that the anti-plagiarism norm is a rule by which a community structures a system of incentives for its members, then I am in agreement. And this does explain why neither Brian nor anyone else can authorize others to plagiarize his work. While many authors do get angry when the norm is violated, the norm is there ultimately to benefit the community, not any one member thereof. Promotion and hiring committees want not only to know that Brian wrote his article attacking the anti-plagiarism norm, but, even if Brian does not care to receive a reward for it, also to know that whoever plagiarized the article did not write it, and therefore should not receive a reward. Only then can the committee ensure that the incentives that it doles out are not wasted.

I am also unsure why Brian calls the anti-plagiarism norm a “tax imposed on junior scholars.” I take his point that because senior scholars have a larger oeuvre, juniors may spend more time citing seniors than seniors spend citing juniors. But it does not follow that juniors spend more time citing overall than do seniors, unless we assume that seniors have more original ideas than do juniors. Seniors will also spend time citing each other, and juniors and seniors both cite the dead, as Brian observers. Indeed, as Brian also observers, all works stand on the shoulders of a very large group of giants. So large, in fact, that the few living giants upon whom juniors may stand surely constitute a negligible part of the whole. Everyone should be doing a lot of citing. And the anti-plagiarism norm helpfully ensures that they do.

What comes across very clearly in Brian’s article is contempt for academic egotism. In my favorite passage, he writes:

I will be blunt. Scholarship is rarely–if ever–original. At best, it is occasionally pithy enough to be quotable, or thoughtful enough to be worth a citation. Even on those rare occasions when a scholarly work actually introduces a novel idea, scholars do not and should not own those ideas, not even to the limited extent of a right to compel attribution. We should be humble. Scholarship is the gift we provide to each other and the public. More often than not, it is a gift better loved by the giver than the recipient. Attribution is also a gift. We should accept it graciously and thankfully when provided. But we should never demand it, or expect others to demand it on our behalf. After all, good scholars copy, but great scholars steal.

Fair enough. And I tend to agree with Brian’s argument elsewhere in the paper that the anti-plagiarism norm is vague in ways that sometimes lead to gross injustice for well-meaning authors. Oliver Sacks’s essays, The Fallibility of Memory and The Creative Self, speak powerfully to the way copying can often not only be unintentional, but an essential part of the creative process, which goes as well to Brian’s point that “great scholars steal.” Sacks writes:

Webster’s defines “plagiarize” as “to steal and pass off as one’s own the ideas or words of another; use . . . without crediting the source . . . to commit literary theft; present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.” There is a considerable overlap between this definition and that of cryptomnesia, and the essential difference is this: plagiarism, as commonly understood and reprobated, is conscious and intentional, whereas cryptomnesia is neither. Perhaps the term “cryptomnesia” needs to be better known, for though one may speak of “unconscious plagiarism,” the very word “plagiarism” is so morally charged, so suggestive of crime and deceit, that it retains a sting even if it is unconscious.”

Oliver Sacks, The Fallibility of Memory, in The River of Consciousness 101, 108-09 (2017).

And:

What is at issue is not the fact of “borrowing” or “imitating,” of being “derivative,” being “influenced,” but what one does with what is borrowed or imitated or derived; how deeply one assimilates it, takes it into oneself, compounds it with one’s own experiences and thoughts and feelings, places it in relation to oneself, and expresses it in a new way, one’s own.

Oliver Sacks, The Creative Self, in The River of Consciousness 129, 142 (2017).

Sacks goes on to reproduce a speech given by Mark Twain at the 70th birthday of Oliver Wendell Homes, father of the Supreme Court Justice, and a well-known physician and poet in his day.

Twain said:

Oliver Wendell Holmes [was] the first great literary man I ever stole any thing from–and that is how I came to write to him and he to me. When my first book was new, a friend of mine said to me, “The dedication is very neat.” Yes, I said, I though it was. My friend said, “I always admired it, even before I saw it in The Innocents Abroad.”

I naturally said, “What do you mean” Where did you ever see it before?”

“Well, I saw it first some years ago as Doctor Holmes’s dedication to his Songs in Many Keys.”

Of course, my first impulse was to pare this man’s remains for burial, but upon reflection I said I would reprieve him for a moment or two and give him a chance to prove his assertion if he could: We stepped into a book-store, and he did prove it. I had really stolen that dedication, almost word for word . . . .

Well, of course, I wrote to Doctor Holmes and told him I hadn’t meant to steal, and he wrote back and said in the kindest way that it was all right and no harm done; and added that he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in reading and hearing, imagining that they were original with ourselves.

He stated a truth, and did it in such a pleasant way . . . that I was rather glad I had committed the crime, for the sake of the letter. I afterwards called on him and told him to make perfectly free with any ideas of mine that struck him as being good protoplasm for poetry. He could see by that that there wasn’t anything mean about me; so we got along right from the start.

Oliver Sacks, The Fallibility of Memory, in The River of Consciousness 101, 111-112 (2017).

Moral censure is useful against the intentional plagiarist. But I suspect that in many, many cases, intent is lacking, and what is required is only a good-natured acknowledgement that the author either didn’t read enough before putting pen to paper, or read too much, combined with ex post attribution, to keep the incentives system properly triaged. Brian is right to call out the intemperance and “mob rule” that characterize many plagiarism events.

One hopes, in fact, that technology will make the anti-plagiarism norm obsolete before too long. One can imagine an AI-super-charged version of Turnitin that provides scholars–and in particular promotion and hiring committees–with accurate measures of a scholar’s influence without anyone needing to cite the scholar’s work. The program would comb through the sum total of human intellectual output, identify unique ideas, and trace their influence. We wouldn’t need to acknowledge each other’s work anymore; the computer would keep track of that.

Whether that comes to be or not, I can’t help wondering whether the solution to the problem of big egos that vexes Brian isn’t to have more academic policing, not less. If the system is promoting and rewarding people who don’t deserve their egos because they don’t do original work, that can only be because those people are not doing a good job of attribution themselves, and the system is failing to call them out for it. The problem may not be that they are recycling others’ work, but that they are simply failing to make themselves fully aware of what has come before. The solution is to strengthen the plagiarism-related norm that quality scholarship must reflect deep research.

Not long ago, I had the privilege of chatting with an eminent historian. What struck me was the importance that he placed on reading, and reading deeply, in his chosen subjects. Of course, as a historian, he meant reading not just in secondary sources, but primary sources as well. “How can you write a book about X,” he seemed to say, “if you haven’t dug into the private, unpublished, papers of Y? How can you presume to know everything that’s been thought about this subject before you have done that?” Legal scholars can’t always go that far, but my sense is that often they could go much further than they do.

Legal scholars don’t, because the academic police aren’t on the beat.

But they should be.

Categories
Antitrust Monopolization

When the Food Section Gets Bigness, but the Business Section Doesn’t

It’s a good thing that The New York Times’ Food department hasn’t gotten the small-is-beautiful memo.

On the same day that the paper ran another flawed installment in its crusade against bigness, this time targeting Google for bringing competition to wireless-speaker-maker Sonos, the Times’ food section ran a paean to behemoths of the restaurant business–chains like IHOP and Applebee’s–that highlights many of the reasons why size is often a good thing, both for workers and consumers.

Sonos

Let’s start with the Times’s wrongheaded defense of Sonos.

As the paper did in an earlier defense of cloud-computing startup Elastic, the Times here continues to confuse harm to competitors with harm to competition. Google, the paper suggests, is competing unfairly with Sonos, by “flooding the market with cheap speakers that [Google] subsidize[s] because [the speakers] are not merely conduits for music, like Sonos’s devices, but rather another way to sell goods, show ads and collect data.”

The Times is talking about Home, Google’s answer to Amazon’s Echo, which includes a high-definition speaker that plays music, but also provides access to Assistant, Google’s AI-powered virtual assistant, which allows users to run internet searches, buy products, order food, and do much more by conversing with the speaker system.

The Times weeps that Sonos can’t turn a profit selling its speakers–which only play music–for less than $200, whereas Google sells Home for $50. The implication is that Google is engaged in predatory pricing–sales of products below their cost of production–for purposes of driving competitors from the market. That’s always possible in an abstract sense, and would be an antitrust violation if some other criteria were also met.

But there’s an obvious alternative explanation staring the Times in the face, one that doesn’t involve anticompetitive conduct: that Google isn’t in the market to sell speakers, Google is in the market to sell virtual assistants that also happen to play music.

And when you count up all the different ways Google is able to generate revenue from its product, including commissions Google earns on goods purchased through Home, revenues Google generates from selling ad-targeting services using the data generated by Home, and, of course the $50 purchase price of a Home unit itself, those revenues probably cover Google’s costs, including the cost of making the speakers that go into Home.

We don’t say that a hotel that offers guests free breakfast is engaged in predatory pricing designed to drive the local Starbucks out of business, even though a breakfast price of $0 is definitely below the cost of making the breakfast. Because the hotel is not selling breakfasts. The hotel is selling a package, and the hotel includes the cost of the breakfast in the price the hotel charges for the room. If the local Starbucks wants to compete, then either Howard Schultz needs to get into the hospitality business, or Starbucks needs to offer better coffee than the hotel. (Have you ever skipped out on a free breakfast to go somewhere better? I have.)

The same goes for Sonos. To beat Google, Sonos can try to field its own virtual assistant. Admittedly unlikely, but not a reason to condemn Google, for reasons to be discussed in a moment. Or Sonos can build better speakers than the ones Google bundles with Home, speakers that are enough better to make music lovers willing to choose them over, or in addition to, Home.

The Times makes much of the fact that Google may have used information Google collected from its partnership with Sonos to copy Sonos’s speakers. But as I have emphasized in relation to other reporting by the Times, copying is good for competition, not bad, and is certainly no antitrust violation. If Google copies Sonos’s speakers, making Google’s own as good as Sonos’s, that will have the competitive result of preventing Sonos from leveraging the superiority of its products to charge monopoly prices for them.

Of course, we want innovators to reap some rewards for innovating, which is why the patent laws prevent copying for a limited period of time. Sonos is suing Google for patent infringement, and if Google has infringed, then the court will award Sonos lost profits, as it should. But such patent litigation is about enabling firms to preserve the legislatively-sanctioned monopoly that is a patent on a desirable product. Patent litigation is not about preserving competition.

The Times also makes much of the fact that Sonos’s CEO confessed to being frightened about suing Google, because Google might respond by terminating a partnership with Sonos that allows Sonos owners to use their Sonos speakers, in lieu of Home, to communicate with Google’s Assistant.

But that’s just business. If Sonos postponed suing Google for patent infringement because Sonos wanted to continue to be able to have access to consumers wishing to buy virtual assistants, rather than just speakers, then Sonos was effectively licensing its speaker patents to Google at a price equal to the extra profits that Sonos was generating from the virtual assistant business. If Sonos is asserting its patents now, that means that Sonos thinks it can make more from court-ordered licensing than from the informal exchange of access to its technologies for access to Google’s Assistant.

Standing behind the Times’s article is the unspoken assumption that without the ability to offer access to virtual assistants through its speakers, Sonos is doomed, regardless how good its speakers may be, because consumers don’t care enough about great speakers to be willing to buy them in lieu of, or in addition to, speakers bundled with a virtual assistant, such as Google Home. That may be true, and sad for Sonos, but the ultimate cause must be that Sonos is simply less technically savvy than Google.

Google invested in the search and AI it needed to produce a virtual assistant. Sonos didn’t. True, Sonos may have pioneered wireless speaker technology that Google was not able to match without licensing that technology (informally so far, perhaps formally, under court order, in future) from Sonos. But Sonos could have taken the same tack against Google, reverse-engineering Google’s search algorithms and Assistant AI to create its own virtual assistant. If Sonos wasn’t able to do that, because it would have required too much time and money, then that’s evidence that what Google has achieved in search and AI is much more of a technological advance than are Sonos’s speakers.

Which takes us back to the basic point that to the extent that Sonos is failing to compete effectively against Google it’s because Google is doing a better job than Sonos at giving consumers what they want, not because Google is restraining competition. Once again, the Times has mistaken a textbook case of effective competition for an example of monopoly.

It’s also worth noting that Google has not actually yet retaliated by cutting Sonos off from access to Assistant, no doubt because Google recognizes that Sonos is better at making speakers than is Google, and Google can build its virtual assistant market share by reaching consumers who care about getting great speakers through Sonos.

That, too, is how markets are supposed to work. If Google can make its product better by combining it with rival technology, Google will do that. The fact that Sonos might not be able to survive without Google but Google can survive without Sonos means that Google can drive a hard bargain with Sonos and absorb most of the gains from trade. But Google can’t drive such a hard bargain as to make Sonos unwilling to go on, because then Google will lose the customers it can only get through Sonos.

That means that Sonos will not turn into the next tech giant. But with 1,500 employees and a billion dollars in annual sales (which the Times rather humorously tries to downplay as “a nice little business”), Sonos is doing just fine, even with the short end of the stick. We don’t all get to be the next tech fairy tale. (And if Google does pull the plug on its partnership with Sonos, the company can always compete to supply its speaker technology to Google for incorporation into Home. Indeed, Sonos’s patent suit may be a prelude to a transition into that new business model.)

The Times’ piece on Sonos is also a sobering reminder of the extent to which the paper’s business pages have become a mouthpiece for writers’ self-interested war on Google, Facebook, and Amazon, three companies that writers see as having tanked their earnings in recent years, as I have argued in depth elsewhere.

It’s not just the rhetoric that belongs more comfortably in a polemic than a news feature (Sonos is “under the thumb of Big Tech,” according to the Times). It’s also the sourcing.

The Times tells us that “congressional staff members have discussed [Sonos CEO Patrick Spence’s] testifying to the House antitrust subcommittee soon about his company’s issues with them,” but fails to mention that those hearings have been convened by a Congressman who is simultaneously sponsoring legislation pushed by the News Media Alliance, an industry trade group, that would give newspapers an exemption from the antitrust laws. The Times also quotes an employee of the Open Markets Institute describing Sonos’s fear of Google as “real,” without revealing that Open Markets is run by a journalist with ties to an organization that advocates on behalf of writers. More on both connections here.

But do you think that the Times would care to ask an actual antitrust law scholar whether Google’s conduct is anticompetitive? Nuh-uh. The article couldn’t have been written more critically of Google if Open Markets, or the House antitrust subcommittee, had authored the article itself and issued it as a press release.

IHOP

Thank goodness neither Google, Facebook, nor Amazon is in the restaurant business. Because in that case it would be hard to imagine the Times publishing Priya Krishna’s recent love letter to massive chain restaurants, “Current Job: Award-Winning Chef. Education: University of IHOP.”

According to Krishna’s piece in the Times:

Chain restaurants are often accused of a sterile uniformity and a lack of attention to quality ingredients, nutrition and the environment. But for anyone trying to enter the restaurant business, they have particular attractions: formalized training, efficient operations, predictable schedules and corporate policies that claim to discourage the kind of abuses that have come to light in the #MeToo era. The pay is sometimes better than at independent restaurants, and the Affordable Care Act requires companies with 50 or more full-time employees to provide health insurance.

The article highlights several “acclaimed chefs [at independent restaurants] who prize the lessons they learned . . . in the scaled-up, streamlined world of chain restaurants,” from the influential chef who eats at Waffle House to Jacques Pepin, who spent ten years working at Howard Johnson’s.

Chain restaurants provide workplaces that are, it turns out, less heirarchical than independent restaurants. Because egalitarianism is more efficient. At Applebee’s, for example, there isn’t “a strict heirarchy . . . because the kitchen [isn’t] centered on a chef, as in many independent restaurants. ‘There is this understanding that every person is important to making the restaurant run smoothly . . . Nobody thought the dishwasher was a lower status than them.'”

According to the article, “[s]everal chefs point to rigorous customer-service standards of the chains where they worked. ‘It was pretty much that the customer is always right,'” said one chef, who observed to the Times that “[i]t’s a level of hospitality he doesn’t always see in fine-dining restaurants.”

Another chef reported having had to “make sacrifices: lower pay, or forgoing pay while training” when she moved to working at independent restaurants.

She also had to put up with abuse. The article quotes her as recalling that when it took her too long to run food to a table at an independent restaurant, “‘the chef threw a potato and it hit me in the head. . . . That kind of stuff doesn’t happen in a chain restaurants [sic] because of corporate structure. You tend to be treated more fairly.'”

Shortly after reading this article, I went to a small family-run butcher’s shop to get a thinly-sliced cut of meat that my wife needed for a dish she was preparing. The slicing machine was in a back room into which a small internal window had been cut. I could just make out through the glare that the butcher was handling the meat with his bare hands.

I didn’t complain, but I did make my next stop a Kroger’s, the largest grocery store chain in the world. Economics teaches that if this firm were a monopoly, it should have lower quality standards than firms on the competitive fringe, like the family-owned butcher shop I had just left. I went to the meat section and asked for the same cut. The slicing machines were all directly behind the counter, in full view of customers. And the first thing the butcher did was to put on some gloves. True, he wasn’t as friendly as the folks in the family store. But when I got home, I gave only the cuts from Kroger’s to my wife. Big is not always bad.

Small businesses are a good thing, in my view, but only when they are actually better than big businesses. Thousands of independent restaurants survive, particularly in the luxury space, despite treating their labor less well than do the chains, because they provide a shot at top-chef fame for employees and a unique dining experience for customers that chains haven’t yet been able to match. The success of independent coffee shops in resisting Starbucks by taking coffee connoisseurship to another level is also a great example.

But when a smaller firm fields a product that isn’t better than what its rival has to offer, when a firm tries to sell speakers to consumers who would rather buy speakers-plus-virtual-assistants, the solution is not to try to use the antitrust laws to shelter the smaller firm.

The solution is to let the company up its game, or clear out.

Categories
Antitrust

The Times’ Elastic Conception of Monopoly

Pressure groups, too, used ideological symbols for selfish ends, sometimes to mask operations that were completely at variance with the professed ideals. [That] made it difficult to follow the struggle, define positions, and identify the participants.

Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly 36 (Fordham Univ. Press 1995) (1966).

As I have been arguing for some time now, the press’s antitrust crusade against Amazon, Google, and Facebook is about protecting competitors, not competition. The press is only really interested in protecting two groups of competitors in particular, newspapers and publishers, the firms that give a livelihood to the writers who have created this crusade.

But movements grow through the building of coalitions, and writers have worked feverishly to sell their crusade as protection for all competitors of Amazon, Google, and Facebook, and not just those that hire writers in particular. The result has been a series of articles about small businesses and startups that have felt competitive pressures from the three tech giants.

The most recent of these illustrates beautifully writers’ failure to understand that harm to competitors, whether writers or anyone else, is not the same thing as harm to competition.

“Prime Leverage: How Amazon Wields Power in the Technology World,” which appeared in The New York Times, tells the story of Elastic, a cloud-computing startup that introduced an innovative search tool that Amazon at the time did not offer. What happened next is exactly what you would expect of a healthy, competitive market. But the Times finds it all very sinister.

When Amazon saw that Elastic had created a superior product, Amazon did what competitors are supposed to do in competitive markets. Amazon copied the product as best it could, and introduced its own version into the market.

Copying, so far from being evidence of monopolization, is actually the market economy’s principle defense against monopolization. When a firm introduces a superior product, the firm in effect takes consumers hostage, because consumers face only inferior products as alternative purchase options. That allows the innovative firm to charge consumers a monopoly price for the superior product.

Copying naturally limits the innovator’s monopoly power. As competitors copy or even improve upon the innovator’s product, consumers start to enjoy an increasing number of alternatives of equal or superior quality, and the prices the innovator is able to charge for the product fall.

Amazon’s move to copy Elastic’s product limited Elastic’s pricing power, preventing the company from charging monopoly prices for the tool. No doubt that made Elastic’s founders very sad. Tech startup culture has accustomed startup founders to the expectation that they will be able to generate monopoly profits from their innovations, and become fabulously wealthy as a result.

But as progressives have been arguing for a long time now, such out-sized profits are neither necessary incentives to induce entrepreneurs to innovate, nor fair. The presence of large incumbents in startup markets who are able to compete away monopoly profits quickly is good for the economy, and the distribution of wealth. Note that to win the competition with Elastic, Amazon can’t charge monopoly prices for its version of Elastic’s search tool, so neither Amazon nor Elastic generate monopoly profits from this technology. Consumers are the principal beneficiaries of Amazon’s ability to copy competitors’ products quickly and effectively.

Now, one might worry that Amazon’s copying of Elastic’s product might ultimately harm competition by driving prices so low that Elastic is not able to recoup its costs of innovating, effectively sending a signal to the market that innovation no longer pays because Amazon will steal the fruits.

But this concern isn’t about the presence of excessive monopoly power–Amazon’s or anyone else’s–but rather a concern about excessive competition. Indeed, it’s a concern about the ability of innovators to capture the benefits they confer on the economy despite competitive pressures.

If an innovation is too easy to copy, then the innovator will enjoy only a very short period of exclusivity in the market, and may not be able to recoup its development costs before competition sets in and prices fall to modest levels. The law handles this problem by creating intellectual property rights, which allow innovators to enjoy legally-guaranteed exclusivity for a set period of time or under certain circumstances. Elastic clearly was not able to patent its search tool, and Amazon was clearly able to invent around any trade secret or copyright protections enjoyed by Elastic.

What this all means is that the intellectual property laws don’t view Elastic’s tool as the kind of innovation that needs extra legal protection from copying. From the law’s perspective, Elastic will do just fine on its own, thanks to the low cost of developing new software tools and the advantages in brand recognition and follow-on innovation that Elastic enjoys from being a first mover with respect to this technology.

That is just what seems to have actually happened in Elastic’s case. Although the first paragraphs of the Times article lead the reader to expect news of Elastic’s bankruptcy by the end of the story, the paper is forced eventually to admit that “Elastic . . . went public last year and now has 1,600 employees,” up from 100 when Amazon first copied its tool. So Elastic didn’t need intellectual property protection to earn enough from its innovations to thrive, despite competition from Amazon. (The article informs us that Amazon did violate Elastic’s trademark by giving its tool the same name as Elastic’s. Trademark law will provide Elastic with compensation, in the form of lost profits, for that infringement.)

This is exactly how you want competition to function. New firms enter markets by introducing innovative products, and competition from incumbents struggling to catch up prevents the new firms from growing into monopolies themselves, but at the same time does not drive them out of the market.

The story of Elastic is a story of healthy competition that benefits society as a whole, but not, of course, Elastic, which would much rather have faced no competition from Amazon at all. The Times notes that startups refer to Amazon as engaging in “strip mining” when the firm copies the products of competitors. Of course, every firm would prefer that competitors never be allowed to copy their products, because that would give every firm a permanent monopoly in the technologies that the firm innovates. To the startup entrepreneur who wants an easy path to tech riches, all competition is “strip mining.”

But preventing copying is not good for America. That the Times would seem to be promoting this sort of innovation-based monopolization, despite the paper’s advocacy of antitrust enforcement against Amazon, reflects the contradictions inherent in any attempt to use the antitrust laws to protect competitors rather than competition. Protecting competitors means giving them monopolies. Protecting competition, by contrast, means leaving competitors to sink or swim.

There are more contradictions. The Times seems, for example, not to realize that the fact that Amazon dominates cloud computing must surely have resulted in more protection, and less competition, for Elastic, than Elastic would have enjoyed in a less concentrated market. The less concentrated the market, the greater the number of firms in a position to copy an innovation, and the more severe the resulting price competition is likely to be.

Because Elastic’s only competitor was Amazon, the market was a duopoly, and duopoly market pricing can be much closer to the highs of monopoly pricing than to the lows of competitive pricing. That might explain why Elastic was able to recoup its development costs, grow exponentially, and successfully go public despite Amazon’s sale of an essentially identical product to that offered by Elastic.

The Times also suggests that the fact that Amazon both owns the cloud servers used by most internet firms, including Elastic, and also competes in the market to provide software services for use on those servers, is inherently anticompetitive. The notion that firms should not be allowed to compete on their own platforms is probably the most embarrassing and superficial effusion of the press’s crusade against Amazon, Google, and Facebook.

For all businesses are nothing more than collections of platforms, from the vast majority of which every business excludes competitors (think of office space). To prohibit competition on one’s own platform is to prohibit productive activity entirely. The fact that Amazon has decided to throw open its cloud servers–which the firm initially developed exclusively for its own use–to competitors is an act of great pro-competitiveness, not the opposite.

That Amazon may have used information about Elastic’s tool that Amazon could only have generated from its administration of the servers that Elastic used to run the tool is hardly anticompetitive. To the contrary, that allowed Amazon to accelerate the copying process and introduce competition into the market for that tool more quickly than the company might otherwise have been able to do. If that is too much competition for Elastic, then the intellectual property laws can be changed to provide software tools with more protection than they receive today. The fact that Elastic did not succumb to this competition, but thrived, suggests, however, that more intellectual property protection–more monopoly for Elastic–would not be appropriate.

One problem with the press’s crusade against Amazon, Google, and Facebook has been a failure to recognize that these companies’ size makes them more efficient, and that breaking them up would therefore result in a net loss for society. From this perspective, the press is calling for more competition where competition would not be a good thing. But in the Times’s defense of Elastic, there is something quite different: the promotion of monopoly–saving Elastic from competition from Amazon–where competition would be more appropriate.

The only way to understand the press’s adherence to these inconsistent positions–promoting competition here, monopoly there–is as a desire to have the antitrust laws pick winners and losers in the market according to the press’s own particular set of special interests and political preferences.

Is the press aware that it is ultimately trying to do that?

You bet.

Categories
Civilization Miscellany

An Internet of Steles

kairinfo4u, Wadi Hammamat: Dynasty 11, Mentuhotep IV, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. kairinfo4u writes: “In the ‘Middle Kingdom’ Nebtawyre Mentuhotep IV sent a large expedition in Year 2 of his reign to quarry bekhen-stone for the King’s sarcophagus. We are told by Vizier Amenemhat how a gazelle gave birth on the block they had chosen, an auspicious omen which greatly encouraged the workforce of 10,000 men. Another of Vizier Amenemhat’s texts records the wonder of rain, a flash flood that produced a well of clear water.”

[H]e engraved on a stone the whole story.

The Epic of Gilgamesh 61 (N. K. Sanders trans., Penguin Books 1960).

Bronze age rulers erected steles so that their words would endure. We do that today with blockchain.

Almost everything we know about ancient Egypt, for example, even the name “Ramses,” comes to us from steles and other inscribed stones dug out of the sand as many as 5000 years after pharaohs ordered them carved. Inscriptions in stone endure because stone is difficult to work. Hard to destroy; harder to recarve in ways that do not betray the fact that recarving has taken place. When the pharaohs made a record in monumental stone, they made public records the authenticity of which could be verified, even by scholars working millennia hence.

But that’s just what blockchain does for the internet. Blockchain inscribes information onto computer memory in a manner that, like a stone carving, is very difficult to change.

Making the information stored in computer memory permanent is not easy, because computer memory is engineered for rapid change. Computers record data by rearranging the electrons adhering to the physical material of a disk, tape, or chip. Changing the data therefore requires no more than an application of electricity.

The ease with which data can be changed in computer memory is the source of computing’s power, driving the cost of communication almost to zero. In the millennia following the carving of the first steles, which are very costly to create, civilization succeeded at finding increasingly inexpensive methods of recording information. But even the most inexpensive methods devised, such as paper, still required costly manipulation of matter on a macro scale–the application of inks–to be useful. Computer memory outdid all alternatives by requiring only manipulation of the utterly insubstantial electron.

But with the reduction in costs came impermanence. You, or a hacker, could change your data without leaving a trace of what came before. Indeed, without anybody being able to say for sure whether your data had been changed at all.

Blockchain tries to solve the problem of data impermanence, while preserving all of the advantages of electronic computing and communication, by storing data in an encrypted format. Changes to the data not made using the proper format can immediately be detected by readers. So merely changing the data electronically, while just as easy as it has always been, won’t fool readers, who can see that the changes don’t conform to the standard.

Indeed, the fact that blockchain solves the impermanence problem without changing the basic ease of storing data with electrons means that blockchain allows computers to continue to communicate quickly and cheaply. Data endures because it has been tied to encryption cyphers, not because it has been tied to the physical world, as in the case of a pharaoh’s steles.

A different approach to the problem of internet permanence would be to rig up a computer system in which robots would store data by automatically carving the data onto stone tablets. That too would solve the permanence problem. Anyone who wanted to verify the data could inspect the stone tablets to ensure that they had not been altered, just as archeologists inspect ancient steles today. But having computers write data to steles would make it difficult to copy and transfer that data even when the data has not been altered. Blockchain captures the unalterability of stone inscriptions without suffering from limits on communicability associated with the use of stone as a medium.

But why exactly does encryption breed permanence? Can’t you just crack the code and change the data in a way that respects the encryption format and therefore is not detectable by others? The answer is no because cracking codes is hard, requiring powerful computers, lots of electricity to run them, and time. Just as effectively rechiseling a stone inscription requires expertise, energy, and time. So blockchain uses encryption to restore the permanence in data that the information age destroyed.

With one important difference. Blockchain is an effective check on the undetected rewriting of data, as are steles, but, unlike steles, blockchain is no check on destruction of data, in the sense that blockchain makes deleting data from computer systems no harder to do than before. That is the price blockchain pays for allowing users to continue to communicate quickly with each other. Blockchain sits on top of the electron-based storage systems of computers, making it very hard to change the data undetected, but no harder to destroy the data on those systems. An electric shock will still suffice for that.

So the pharaohs still have something on computers, at least with respect to preventing data destruction, rather than just the alteration of data. (Of course, unlike data stored on steles, internet data is stored in multiple locations, forcing the destroyer to travel to be effective.)

Blockchain is so much an artifact of information technology that it could not be useful without that technology. The basic blockchain concept of using encryption to prevent alteration of data has been around forever. People wrote in code in the 16th century as much to keep their words secret as to ensure that what they did write could not be altered imperceptibly. But encoding and decoding are expensive and time intensive, even when you have the key to the code, and are not trying to crack it. Blockchain is feasible on a large scale only because users can rely on computers to determine whether data conforms to the required format. Thus information technology, despite feeding on impermanence, also enables a new kind of permanence.

The tearing down of constraints, so feted in our technological age, is not always a good thing. Nature is constraint. Technology, in mastering nature, removes constraint. But a lack of constraint is chaos, the opposite of civilization. One way to retain constraint is through law, but that has proven a feeble method. The only alternative is therefore to use technology to build artificial constraints back into nature, albeit in ways that are more suitable to our needs than natural constraints once were. Blockchain is an installment in that enterprise.

(I thank Thibault Schrepel and Sam Weinstein for piquing my interest in blockchain.)