I see that as a feature rather than a bug though. Spam is a problem in large part because the cost of sending it is extremely low, much lower per mail for the spammer than the cost to the recipient in wasted time. If someone has some information that they want to share that they believe will be of value to others then an up-front investment is a measure of how valuable they really think it will be. If the primary value of sharing the information is the pleasure of hearing the sound of your own voice (as seems to be the case for a significant percentage of the Internet) or as an attempt to steal other people’s time for personal profit (as in the case of spam) then I think a higher barrier to entry is a good thing.
It seems to me that filtering out information that I don’t want is at least as big a problem on the Internet as finding information I do want.
If someone has some information that they want to share that they believe will be of value to others then an up-front investment is a measure of how valuable they really think it will be.
People already have to spend time and effort to provide the information, which constitutes a concrete investment indicating how valuable they think it is. Many also pay for web hosting. Why would additional costs in money serve any purpose other than to introduce a selection bias in favor of people who have more money?
Also, it wouldn’t help with spam at all and I have no idea why you think it would.
If different types of traffic can be given differing priorities or charged at different rates then I think creative solutions to the spam problems are more likely to be discovered. If some kind of blanket legislation is introduced prohibiting any kind of differentiation between types of traffic then I’m inclined to think we will see less optimal allocation of resources. Even differentiating between high-bandwidth/high-latency usage like movie downloads vs. medium-bandwidth/low-latency usage like online gaming will be restricted. I have no faith in lawmakers to craft legislation that will not hamper future technological innovations.
If different types of traffic can be given differing priorities or charged at different rates then I think creative solutions to the spam problems are more likely to be discovered.
You may recall that net neutrality is currently being debated, there is no current legal barrier to adjusting priorities for types of traffic. Spam has been a problem for quite a while now and no such solutions have been found.
The general rule of thumb when it comes to “creative solutions to the spam problem” is “it won’t work”.
I don’t think it’s true to say that no creative solutions to spam have been found. Spam filters are probably the most successful real world example of applying Bayesian techniques. The battle against spam is an ongoing struggle—we have solutions now to the original problems but the spammers keep evolving new attacks. Legislation will tend to reduce the options of the anti-spammers who have to follow the law and give an advantage to the spammers who ignore it.
Any legislation will limit options and hamper innovation and technological progress. That’s what legislation invariably does in all fields.
I don’t think it’s true to say that no creative solutions to spam have been found.
Bayesian filtering at the user end is the only exception to the rule of thumb I’m aware of. The only other anti-spam actions I’ve heard of with any success are distinctly non-creative variations on cutting the hydra’s heads off, such as blocking individual spam sources.
Any legislation will limit options and hamper innovation and technological progress. That’s what legislation invariably does in all fields.
“Invariably”? Do you have any evidence for this assertion?
Legislation can increase one groups’ options by taking away options from another group. It can’t globally increase options. Legislation is just rules about what actions are permitted and what actions are not permitted so it can’t create new options, it can only take them away or trade them off between different groups. Fewer options means reducing the space of allowed innovations and so hampers techological progress. If you want evidence I direct you to the field of economics.
As I said in another comment this discussion is straying into general politics territory and I’m not sure I want to start down that road. We still haven’t decided as a community how to deal with that particular mindkiller.
You’ve defined “options” in a manner that is zero-sum at best and serves mostly to beg the question raised. Even so, consider: what about government uniquely allows it to limit options? Imagine one man owns 90% of the property in a town and uses his influence to financially ruin anyone who does something he doesn’t like, limiting their potential options (a net negative). A government steps in and forbids him from this behavior, thereby limiting his options but restoring everyone else in the town’s options (a net positive).
You could of course define only physical force, or threat thereof, as limiting options, but even in that case a state-run police force is clearly restoring more options than it removes.
As I said in another comment this discussion is straying into general politics territory and I’m not sure I want to start down that road. We still haven’t decided as a community how to deal with that particular mindkiller.
Agreed, and I wouldn’t have gotten into it on anything but an Open Thread (wherein it seems relatively harmless).
what about government uniquely allows it to limit options?
A monopoly on the use of force.
A government steps in and forbids him from this behavior, thereby limiting his options but restoring everyone else in the town’s options (a net positive).
Assuming the validity of the example for the sake of argument, this kind of situation is what I meant when I said that legislation can only move options from one group to another. The example I had in mind was anti-discrimination laws—the government removes the option from an employer to discriminate on the basis of race/sex/religion and thus increases the options available to the employee who was discriminated against. That’s one of the best cases I can think of for the argument that the change is a net positive but I don’t think it’s a watertight case.
In the case of legislation limiting economic activity I think it’s hard to argue that reducing options can ever be an encouragement to innovation and technological progress, although it can potentially redirect it in politically favoured directions. The only economically sound arguments for legislation I’ve seen stem from attempts to internalize negative externalities and while in theory such legislation can be justified, real world examples are often less clearly beneficial.
Agreed, and I wouldn’t have gotten into it on anything but an Open Thread (wherein it seems relatively harmless).
As long as it stays civil it should be harmless, political discussions have a tendency to rapidly degenerate though...
In the case of legislation limiting economic activity I think it’s hard to argue that reducing options can ever be an encouragement to innovation and technological progress, although it can potentially redirect it in politically favoured directions.
Hmmm… spending tax money to directly fund basic research doesn’t count? (If you have to, assume that the people whose money was taxed would have spent it on something generally unrelated to technological progress—say, tobacco cultivation and consumption.)
In theory, eliminating or discouraging options that result in not creating progress should result in more progress...
It would count as an example of redirecting innovation and technological progress in politically favoured directions. I would argue that very little money is spent on something unrelated to technological progress—all industries, the tobacco industry included, drive technological progress in their pursuit of greater profits. The technologies that get developed will tend to be technologies that help satisfy the public’s actual wants and needs rather than those that the political class thinks are more important or those that have the best lobbyists.
I figured you would claim that—please justify it. How does my (contrived, but not impossible) scenario not result in a global net negative in terms of options available? How is someone exercising non-physical power and influence to limit someone else’s options different from physical force in terms of practical end results?
Also note that property rights are backed by threat of force from the state. Does the existence of property rights constitute a net loss in options for society and, if so, would it be better to repeal them?
How does my (contrived, but not impossible) scenario not result in a global net negative in terms of options available?
I didn’t originally claim that governments alone have the power to limit options. My original claim was that legislation cannot globally increase available options. What is unique about states (unique in practice if not in theory) is that their geographical scope and monopoly on the use of force gives them vastly greater power to limit options than other entities, power that they have a strong inclination to exercise at every opportunity. I’m not aware of any individuals in history who have had anything approaching the power of a modern state to restrict the options of others without using physical force. It is much easier for the victim in your example to move to another town than it is for most people to escape the reach of states.
I stand by the claim that legislation can only reduce or redistribute options and not create them. I also believe that states are far more capable of meaningfully restricting options than individuals so long as they maintain a monopoly on the use of force. I never intended to imply a claim that non-state actors cannot also restrict options, and can sometimes do so without the use of force and I’m not going to try and defend that straw man.
Does the existence of property rights constitute a net loss in options for society and, if so, would it be better to repeal them?
I believe societies work better with property rights (though I have serious doubts about intellectual property rights being a net benefit). I believe the benefit comes from reducing the number of occasions when conflicts of interest can only be resolved by resorting to violence. If everyone can agree to a framework in advance for resolving disputes without violence then there is a net benefit to be gained. I think it is unclear whether this results in a net loss in options for society since the greater prosperity property rights make possible leads to new options that may not have existed before. Certainly individuals lose options in the short term but a rational agent may make that choice in order to reap the perceived future benefits. For individuals it`s akin to a hedging strategy—giving up some potential gains (stealing from others) in order to reduce the risk of catastrophic losses (being killed by others).
If you want to pursue a similar argument to justify net neutrality legislation (or any piece of proposed new legislation) then I believe you’d need to make a case that the introduction of such legislation would lead to such an improvement in prosperity that it would more than make up for the lost opportunities it prevents. I think that is a difficult case to make for most legislation.
My original claim was that legislation cannot globally increase available options.
Well, no, because you’ve defined options such that a global increase appears to be essentially impossible.
I’m not aware of any individuals in history who have had anything approaching the power of a modern state to restrict the options of others without using physical force.
A large, modern, state such as the USA federal government, yes. Beyond that, a large corporation has more power to restrict people than, say, a small township’s government, including that it’s easier to move to a new town than escape a global corporation. There are a lot more ways to coerce people than physical force; bribery is pretty effective, too.
I never intended to imply a claim that non-state actors cannot also restrict options, and can sometimes do so without the use of force and I’m not going to try and defend that straw man.
So you do agree that by intervening with force to prevent a non-state actor from restricting options, the state can increase global options vs. non-interference?
I believe the benefit comes from reducing the number of occasions when conflicts of interest can only be resolved by resorting to violence. If everyone can agree to a framework in advance for resolving disputes without violence then there is a net benefit to be gained.
Governmental actions, including enforcing property rights, are in the end backed up with threat of violence, as always. You’ve not removed the violence inherent in the system, merely hidden it.
I think it is unclear whether this results in a net loss in options for society since the greater prosperity property rights make possible leads to new options that may not have existed before.
Of course it restricts options—there’s nothing you can do in a society with property rights that wouldn’t also be possible in a society without property rights, it’s just less likely to occur without government-imposed restrictions.
Ergo, an example wherein government acting to reduce individual options has causally lead to a greater chance of success and more innovation.
Furthermore, your defense of property rights is pretty much exactly the same logic that defends any government intervention at all. You’ve drawn an arbitrary line, and the fact that plenty of societies far on the wrong side of your line have prospered suggests that it isn’t immediately obvious that your placement of the line is the correct one.
If you want to pursue a similar argument to justify net neutrality legislation (or any piece of proposed new legislation) then I believe you’d need to make a case that the introduction of such legislation would lead to such an improvement in prosperity that it would more than make up for the lost opportunities it prevents. I think that is a difficult case to make for most legislation.
The arguments in favor of net neutrality are well known, and persuasive mostly because:
The telecom market is not a free market in any conceivable way
The telecom companies have a history of not doing a good job
At least one company has floated trial balloons about exactly the sort of absurdity that net neutrality is intended to prevent
The stuff it intends to prevent is antithetical to the design of the internet and pretty objectively bad for anyone who isn’t a bloated, inefficient telecom monopolist, and there’s evidence that the chance of it happening is nontrivial; ergo, the burden of proof is substantially shifted to those arguing that the negative side-effects (e.g., collateral damage to legitimate packet QOS) are bad enough to be not worth it. I’ve yet to see any persuasive arguments along these lines, especially from informed, respected people in the technology field.
The only reason I can see to oppose net neutrality is a (in my opinion, unjustifiably) large prior probability for the proposition “legislation X is ipso facto bad” for all X.
you’ve defined options such that a global increase appears to be essentially impossible.
I don’t believe I’ve defined options in any particularly unusual way. What specifically do you take issue with? There is a sense in which options can globally increase—economic growth and technological progress can globally increase options (giving people the option to do things that were not possible before). Institutions that tend to encourage such progress within a society are valuable. Legislation that limits options requires very compelling evidence that it will encourage such progress to be justified in my opinion—when in doubt, err on the side of not restricting options would be my default position.
Beyond that, a large corporation has more power to restrict people than, say, a small township’s government, including that it’s easier to move to a new town than escape a global corporation. There are a lot more ways to coerce people than physical force; bribery is pretty effective, too.
Bribery is not coercion, it’s an economic exchange. It differs from other economic exchanges in that it generally involves a non state actor exchanging money or other goods for favourable treatment under the coercive powers of a representative of the state. I can not think of an example of being restricted by a corporation except when they have acted in concert with the state and have had the backing of the state’s threat of force. I don’t really know what you mean by ‘escaping’ a global corporation—what kind of escape do you have in mind beyond terminating a contract?
So you do agree that by intervening with force to prevent a non-state actor from restricting options, the state can increase global options vs. non-interference?
If a state intervenes with force to prevent the use of force by a non-state actor (the police intervening in a mugging for example) then it is creating an environment that is more conducive to productive economic activity and so allows for a global increase in options. I think the set of actions a non state actor can take to reduce options that do not involve force that the state can beneficially interfere in is either empty or very small though. I’m also not convinced that a state is the only institution that can play this beneficial role, though there are limited historical examples of alternatives.
You’ve drawn an arbitrary line, and the fact that plenty of societies far on the wrong side of your line have prospered suggests that it isn’t immediately obvious that your placement of the line is the correct one.
I’d disagree that the line is arbitrary. It’s certainly less arbitrary than the standard generally applied when deciding what laws to pass. It’s not immediately obvious that it’s the right place it’s true. That’s why I consider the large amount of evidence that demonstrate greater economic growth and prosperity in societies that are closer to the line to be one of the key insights from modern economics.
Ironically the argument you are making here is almost exactly a mirror image of my argument against net-neutrality legislation. The fact that the Internet exists as it does without any current legislation suggests that it isn’t immediately obvious that your desire to move the line is the correct one. There seems to me to be little evidence that would suggest that in this one special case legislation would be beneficial to outweigh the large amounts of evidence that restrictive legislation is generally a net negative and a barrier to innovation.
This addresses the “options” point but not the “hamper innovation” point. The obvious (but arguable) counter-example to the “hamper innovation” point is patent law, in which the government legislates a property right into existence and gives it to an inventor in exchange for the details of an invention.
ETA: Patent law is said to foster* innovation in two ways—it protects an inventor’s investment of time and energy, and it encourages inventors to make details public, which allows others to build on the work. These others can then patent their own work and obtain licenses to use the previously patented components.
* phrasing weakened after reading reply. Was: “Patent law fosters innovation...”
True, patent law is intended to promote innovation. There’s quite a lot of evidence that it has the opposite effect but I agree it’s not immediately obvious that it doesn’t work and there is not yet a consensus that it is a failure. The standard argument you give in favour of patent law is at least superficially plausible.
I let automatic programs filter most of my spam, and the small trickle that gets through seems a small price to pay for the fact that I can have my creative projects on the Internet for free, without having to pay a premium to eliminate a special opportunity cost for potential readers. According to my stats, they are not utterly valueless wastes of space—I have some people who are willing to invest time in viewing my content—but I don’t doubt for a moment that I’d lose most, if not all, of my audience if they were obliged money (that didn’t even make its way to me, the creator of the content).
People drop or refrain from picking up new sites over very little provocation—I stopped reading Dr. McNinja when I started using an RSS feed instead of bookmarks to read my webcomics. Dr. McNinja didn’t become more inconvenient to read when I made this switch; I could have kept the bookmark—it simply didn’t get more convenient along with everything else. I didn’t care about it quite enough to keep it on my radar when it would have taken ten seconds of conscious effort three times a week—not even money and the hassle of providing money over the Internet. I can’t think of any (individual) website that I would pay even a trivial extra amount of money to visit.
The situation you describe is the one that currently exists without any net neutrality legislation though.
I’m suspicious of net neutrality because it uses the threat of imagined or potential future problems to push for more legislation and more government involvement in a market that seems to have worked pretty well without significant regulation so far. This is a general tactic for pushing increased government involvement in many different areas.
The actions that have so far been taken that would be prohibited by net-neutrality legislation mostly seem to be about throttling bittorrent traffic. I’d much rather see a focus on eliminating existing government sponsored monopolies in the provision of broadband access and allow the market to sort out the allocation of bandwidth. I am very doubtful that any kind of legislation will produce an optimal allocation of resources.
The fact that something seems to have worked pretty well without significant regulation so far could mean that it will continue to do so, or it could mean that it’s been lucky and taking no new precautions will cause it to stop working pretty well. I don’t have any antivirus software on my Mac; if more people start finding it an appealing challenge to infect Macs with viruses, though, it would be stupid for me to assume that this will be safe forever. More companies are starting to show interest in behaviors that will lead to biased net access. Regulation will almost certainly not yield optimal allocation of resources; it will, however, prevent certain kinds of abuses and inequalities.
I guess this comes down to politics ultimately. I have more faith that good solutions will be worked out by negotiation between the competing interests (Google tends to counter-balance the cable companies, consumers have options even though they tend to be limited by government sponsored monopolies for broadband provision) than by congress being captured by whoever has the most powerful lobbyists at the time the laws are passed. I take the fact that things are ok at the moment as reasonable evidence that a good solution is possible without legislation. Certainly bad solutions are possible both with and without legislation, I just tend to think they are much more likely with legislation than without.
This may or may not have to do with the fact that I am not paid by the hour. My stipend depends on grading papers and doing adequately in school, but if I can accomplish that in ten hours a week, I don’t get paid any less than if I accomplish it in forty. Time I spend on Less Wrong isn’t time I could be spending earning money, because I have enough on my plate that getting an outside job would be foolish of me.
Also, one cent is not just one cent here. If my computer had a coin slot, I’d probably drop in a penny for lifetime access to Less Wrong. But spending time (not happily) wrestling with the transaction itself, and running the risk that something will go wrong and the access to the site won’t come immediately after the penny has departed from my end, and wasting brainpower trying to decide whether the site is worth a penny when for all I know it could be gone next week or deteriorate tremendously in quality—that would be too big an intrusion, and that’s what it looks like when you have to pay for website access.
Additionally, coughing up any amount of money just to access a site sets up an incentive structure I don’t care for. If people tolerate a pricetag for the main contents of websites—not just extra things like bonus or premium content, or physical objects from Cafépress, or donations as gratitude or charity—then there is less reason not to attach a pricetag. I visit more than enough different websites (thanks to Stumbleupon) to make a difference in my budget over the course of a month if I had to pay a penny each to see them all.
In a nutshell: I can’t trade time alone directly for money; I can’t trade cash alone directly for website access; and I do not wish to universalize the maxim that paying for website access would endorse.
I see that as a feature rather than a bug though. Spam is a problem in large part because the cost of sending it is extremely low, much lower per mail for the spammer than the cost to the recipient in wasted time. If someone has some information that they want to share that they believe will be of value to others then an up-front investment is a measure of how valuable they really think it will be. If the primary value of sharing the information is the pleasure of hearing the sound of your own voice (as seems to be the case for a significant percentage of the Internet) or as an attempt to steal other people’s time for personal profit (as in the case of spam) then I think a higher barrier to entry is a good thing.
It seems to me that filtering out information that I don’t want is at least as big a problem on the Internet as finding information I do want.
People already have to spend time and effort to provide the information, which constitutes a concrete investment indicating how valuable they think it is. Many also pay for web hosting. Why would additional costs in money serve any purpose other than to introduce a selection bias in favor of people who have more money?
Also, it wouldn’t help with spam at all and I have no idea why you think it would.
If different types of traffic can be given differing priorities or charged at different rates then I think creative solutions to the spam problems are more likely to be discovered. If some kind of blanket legislation is introduced prohibiting any kind of differentiation between types of traffic then I’m inclined to think we will see less optimal allocation of resources. Even differentiating between high-bandwidth/high-latency usage like movie downloads vs. medium-bandwidth/low-latency usage like online gaming will be restricted. I have no faith in lawmakers to craft legislation that will not hamper future technological innovations.
You may recall that net neutrality is currently being debated, there is no current legal barrier to adjusting priorities for types of traffic. Spam has been a problem for quite a while now and no such solutions have been found.
The general rule of thumb when it comes to “creative solutions to the spam problem” is “it won’t work”.
I don’t think it’s true to say that no creative solutions to spam have been found. Spam filters are probably the most successful real world example of applying Bayesian techniques. The battle against spam is an ongoing struggle—we have solutions now to the original problems but the spammers keep evolving new attacks. Legislation will tend to reduce the options of the anti-spammers who have to follow the law and give an advantage to the spammers who ignore it.
Any legislation will limit options and hamper innovation and technological progress. That’s what legislation invariably does in all fields.
Bayesian filtering at the user end is the only exception to the rule of thumb I’m aware of. The only other anti-spam actions I’ve heard of with any success are distinctly non-creative variations on cutting the hydra’s heads off, such as blocking individual spam sources.
“Invariably”? Do you have any evidence for this assertion?
Legislation can increase one groups’ options by taking away options from another group. It can’t globally increase options. Legislation is just rules about what actions are permitted and what actions are not permitted so it can’t create new options, it can only take them away or trade them off between different groups. Fewer options means reducing the space of allowed innovations and so hampers techological progress. If you want evidence I direct you to the field of economics.
As I said in another comment this discussion is straying into general politics territory and I’m not sure I want to start down that road. We still haven’t decided as a community how to deal with that particular mindkiller.
You’ve defined “options” in a manner that is zero-sum at best and serves mostly to beg the question raised. Even so, consider: what about government uniquely allows it to limit options? Imagine one man owns 90% of the property in a town and uses his influence to financially ruin anyone who does something he doesn’t like, limiting their potential options (a net negative). A government steps in and forbids him from this behavior, thereby limiting his options but restoring everyone else in the town’s options (a net positive).
You could of course define only physical force, or threat thereof, as limiting options, but even in that case a state-run police force is clearly restoring more options than it removes.
Agreed, and I wouldn’t have gotten into it on anything but an Open Thread (wherein it seems relatively harmless).
A monopoly on the use of force.
Assuming the validity of the example for the sake of argument, this kind of situation is what I meant when I said that legislation can only move options from one group to another. The example I had in mind was anti-discrimination laws—the government removes the option from an employer to discriminate on the basis of race/sex/religion and thus increases the options available to the employee who was discriminated against. That’s one of the best cases I can think of for the argument that the change is a net positive but I don’t think it’s a watertight case.
In the case of legislation limiting economic activity I think it’s hard to argue that reducing options can ever be an encouragement to innovation and technological progress, although it can potentially redirect it in politically favoured directions. The only economically sound arguments for legislation I’ve seen stem from attempts to internalize negative externalities and while in theory such legislation can be justified, real world examples are often less clearly beneficial.
As long as it stays civil it should be harmless, political discussions have a tendency to rapidly degenerate though...
Hmmm… spending tax money to directly fund basic research doesn’t count? (If you have to, assume that the people whose money was taxed would have spent it on something generally unrelated to technological progress—say, tobacco cultivation and consumption.)
In theory, eliminating or discouraging options that result in not creating progress should result in more progress...
It would count as an example of redirecting innovation and technological progress in politically favoured directions. I would argue that very little money is spent on something unrelated to technological progress—all industries, the tobacco industry included, drive technological progress in their pursuit of greater profits. The technologies that get developed will tend to be technologies that help satisfy the public’s actual wants and needs rather than those that the political class thinks are more important or those that have the best lobbyists.
I figured you would claim that—please justify it. How does my (contrived, but not impossible) scenario not result in a global net negative in terms of options available? How is someone exercising non-physical power and influence to limit someone else’s options different from physical force in terms of practical end results?
Also note that property rights are backed by threat of force from the state. Does the existence of property rights constitute a net loss in options for society and, if so, would it be better to repeal them?
I didn’t originally claim that governments alone have the power to limit options. My original claim was that legislation cannot globally increase available options. What is unique about states (unique in practice if not in theory) is that their geographical scope and monopoly on the use of force gives them vastly greater power to limit options than other entities, power that they have a strong inclination to exercise at every opportunity. I’m not aware of any individuals in history who have had anything approaching the power of a modern state to restrict the options of others without using physical force. It is much easier for the victim in your example to move to another town than it is for most people to escape the reach of states.
I stand by the claim that legislation can only reduce or redistribute options and not create them. I also believe that states are far more capable of meaningfully restricting options than individuals so long as they maintain a monopoly on the use of force. I never intended to imply a claim that non-state actors cannot also restrict options, and can sometimes do so without the use of force and I’m not going to try and defend that straw man.
I believe societies work better with property rights (though I have serious doubts about intellectual property rights being a net benefit). I believe the benefit comes from reducing the number of occasions when conflicts of interest can only be resolved by resorting to violence. If everyone can agree to a framework in advance for resolving disputes without violence then there is a net benefit to be gained. I think it is unclear whether this results in a net loss in options for society since the greater prosperity property rights make possible leads to new options that may not have existed before. Certainly individuals lose options in the short term but a rational agent may make that choice in order to reap the perceived future benefits. For individuals it`s akin to a hedging strategy—giving up some potential gains (stealing from others) in order to reduce the risk of catastrophic losses (being killed by others).
If you want to pursue a similar argument to justify net neutrality legislation (or any piece of proposed new legislation) then I believe you’d need to make a case that the introduction of such legislation would lead to such an improvement in prosperity that it would more than make up for the lost opportunities it prevents. I think that is a difficult case to make for most legislation.
Well, no, because you’ve defined options such that a global increase appears to be essentially impossible.
A large, modern, state such as the USA federal government, yes. Beyond that, a large corporation has more power to restrict people than, say, a small township’s government, including that it’s easier to move to a new town than escape a global corporation. There are a lot more ways to coerce people than physical force; bribery is pretty effective, too.
So you do agree that by intervening with force to prevent a non-state actor from restricting options, the state can increase global options vs. non-interference?
Governmental actions, including enforcing property rights, are in the end backed up with threat of violence, as always. You’ve not removed the violence inherent in the system, merely hidden it.
Of course it restricts options—there’s nothing you can do in a society with property rights that wouldn’t also be possible in a society without property rights, it’s just less likely to occur without government-imposed restrictions.
Ergo, an example wherein government acting to reduce individual options has causally lead to a greater chance of success and more innovation.
Furthermore, your defense of property rights is pretty much exactly the same logic that defends any government intervention at all. You’ve drawn an arbitrary line, and the fact that plenty of societies far on the wrong side of your line have prospered suggests that it isn’t immediately obvious that your placement of the line is the correct one.
The arguments in favor of net neutrality are well known, and persuasive mostly because:
The telecom market is not a free market in any conceivable way
The telecom companies have a history of not doing a good job
At least one company has floated trial balloons about exactly the sort of absurdity that net neutrality is intended to prevent
The stuff it intends to prevent is antithetical to the design of the internet and pretty objectively bad for anyone who isn’t a bloated, inefficient telecom monopolist, and there’s evidence that the chance of it happening is nontrivial; ergo, the burden of proof is substantially shifted to those arguing that the negative side-effects (e.g., collateral damage to legitimate packet QOS) are bad enough to be not worth it. I’ve yet to see any persuasive arguments along these lines, especially from informed, respected people in the technology field.
The only reason I can see to oppose net neutrality is a (in my opinion, unjustifiably) large prior probability for the proposition “legislation X is ipso facto bad” for all X.
I don’t believe I’ve defined options in any particularly unusual way. What specifically do you take issue with? There is a sense in which options can globally increase—economic growth and technological progress can globally increase options (giving people the option to do things that were not possible before). Institutions that tend to encourage such progress within a society are valuable. Legislation that limits options requires very compelling evidence that it will encourage such progress to be justified in my opinion—when in doubt, err on the side of not restricting options would be my default position.
Bribery is not coercion, it’s an economic exchange. It differs from other economic exchanges in that it generally involves a non state actor exchanging money or other goods for favourable treatment under the coercive powers of a representative of the state. I can not think of an example of being restricted by a corporation except when they have acted in concert with the state and have had the backing of the state’s threat of force. I don’t really know what you mean by ‘escaping’ a global corporation—what kind of escape do you have in mind beyond terminating a contract?
If a state intervenes with force to prevent the use of force by a non-state actor (the police intervening in a mugging for example) then it is creating an environment that is more conducive to productive economic activity and so allows for a global increase in options. I think the set of actions a non state actor can take to reduce options that do not involve force that the state can beneficially interfere in is either empty or very small though. I’m also not convinced that a state is the only institution that can play this beneficial role, though there are limited historical examples of alternatives.
I’d disagree that the line is arbitrary. It’s certainly less arbitrary than the standard generally applied when deciding what laws to pass. It’s not immediately obvious that it’s the right place it’s true. That’s why I consider the large amount of evidence that demonstrate greater economic growth and prosperity in societies that are closer to the line to be one of the key insights from modern economics.
Ironically the argument you are making here is almost exactly a mirror image of my argument against net-neutrality legislation. The fact that the Internet exists as it does without any current legislation suggests that it isn’t immediately obvious that your desire to move the line is the correct one. There seems to me to be little evidence that would suggest that in this one special case legislation would be beneficial to outweigh the large amounts of evidence that restrictive legislation is generally a net negative and a barrier to innovation.
This addresses the “options” point but not the “hamper innovation” point. The obvious (but arguable) counter-example to the “hamper innovation” point is patent law, in which the government legislates a property right into existence and gives it to an inventor in exchange for the details of an invention.
ETA: Patent law is said to foster* innovation in two ways—it protects an inventor’s investment of time and energy, and it encourages inventors to make details public, which allows others to build on the work. These others can then patent their own work and obtain licenses to use the previously patented components.
* phrasing weakened after reading reply. Was: “Patent law fosters innovation...”
True, patent law is intended to promote innovation. There’s quite a lot of evidence that it has the opposite effect but I agree it’s not immediately obvious that it doesn’t work and there is not yet a consensus that it is a failure. The standard argument you give in favour of patent law is at least superficially plausible.
I let automatic programs filter most of my spam, and the small trickle that gets through seems a small price to pay for the fact that I can have my creative projects on the Internet for free, without having to pay a premium to eliminate a special opportunity cost for potential readers. According to my stats, they are not utterly valueless wastes of space—I have some people who are willing to invest time in viewing my content—but I don’t doubt for a moment that I’d lose most, if not all, of my audience if they were obliged money (that didn’t even make its way to me, the creator of the content).
People drop or refrain from picking up new sites over very little provocation—I stopped reading Dr. McNinja when I started using an RSS feed instead of bookmarks to read my webcomics. Dr. McNinja didn’t become more inconvenient to read when I made this switch; I could have kept the bookmark—it simply didn’t get more convenient along with everything else. I didn’t care about it quite enough to keep it on my radar when it would have taken ten seconds of conscious effort three times a week—not even money and the hassle of providing money over the Internet. I can’t think of any (individual) website that I would pay even a trivial extra amount of money to visit.
The situation you describe is the one that currently exists without any net neutrality legislation though.
I’m suspicious of net neutrality because it uses the threat of imagined or potential future problems to push for more legislation and more government involvement in a market that seems to have worked pretty well without significant regulation so far. This is a general tactic for pushing increased government involvement in many different areas.
The actions that have so far been taken that would be prohibited by net-neutrality legislation mostly seem to be about throttling bittorrent traffic. I’d much rather see a focus on eliminating existing government sponsored monopolies in the provision of broadband access and allow the market to sort out the allocation of bandwidth. I am very doubtful that any kind of legislation will produce an optimal allocation of resources.
The fact that something seems to have worked pretty well without significant regulation so far could mean that it will continue to do so, or it could mean that it’s been lucky and taking no new precautions will cause it to stop working pretty well. I don’t have any antivirus software on my Mac; if more people start finding it an appealing challenge to infect Macs with viruses, though, it would be stupid for me to assume that this will be safe forever. More companies are starting to show interest in behaviors that will lead to biased net access. Regulation will almost certainly not yield optimal allocation of resources; it will, however, prevent certain kinds of abuses and inequalities.
I guess this comes down to politics ultimately. I have more faith that good solutions will be worked out by negotiation between the competing interests (Google tends to counter-balance the cable companies, consumers have options even though they tend to be limited by government sponsored monopolies for broadband provision) than by congress being captured by whoever has the most powerful lobbyists at the time the laws are passed. I take the fact that things are ok at the moment as reasonable evidence that a good solution is possible without legislation. Certainly bad solutions are possible both with and without legislation, I just tend to think they are much more likely with legislation than without.
I must have misread, lifetime access to lesswrong isn’t worth one cent, but you’ll voluntarily spend hours of time on it?
This may or may not have to do with the fact that I am not paid by the hour. My stipend depends on grading papers and doing adequately in school, but if I can accomplish that in ten hours a week, I don’t get paid any less than if I accomplish it in forty. Time I spend on Less Wrong isn’t time I could be spending earning money, because I have enough on my plate that getting an outside job would be foolish of me.
Also, one cent is not just one cent here. If my computer had a coin slot, I’d probably drop in a penny for lifetime access to Less Wrong. But spending time (not happily) wrestling with the transaction itself, and running the risk that something will go wrong and the access to the site won’t come immediately after the penny has departed from my end, and wasting brainpower trying to decide whether the site is worth a penny when for all I know it could be gone next week or deteriorate tremendously in quality—that would be too big an intrusion, and that’s what it looks like when you have to pay for website access.
Additionally, coughing up any amount of money just to access a site sets up an incentive structure I don’t care for. If people tolerate a pricetag for the main contents of websites—not just extra things like bonus or premium content, or physical objects from Cafépress, or donations as gratitude or charity—then there is less reason not to attach a pricetag. I visit more than enough different websites (thanks to Stumbleupon) to make a difference in my budget over the course of a month if I had to pay a penny each to see them all.
In a nutshell: I can’t trade time alone directly for money; I can’t trade cash alone directly for website access; and I do not wish to universalize the maxim that paying for website access would endorse.