Henry

Austan Goolsbee writes in the _NYT_ that France’s efforts to make iTunes inter-operable with non-Apple music players is a bad idea.

bq. In iTunes War, France Has Met the Enemy. Perhaps It Is France.

bq. … The legislature paid no mind to such analysis and seems not to have considered innovation at all. Therein lies the danger. Apple largely created the online market for legal music. The record labels’ own attempts flopped embarrassingly. Until iTunes, virtually no one paid for online music. Since then, iTunes has sold more than one billion songs. Its success comes largely from two crucial innovations. First, Apple’s music store is simple and works extremely well with the iPod. Find the music. Click “Buy It.” Drag the files onto the iPod icon. That’s it. Experiences with other players and music stores are far more complicated. Further, iTunes keeps getting better. Apple has added video capability, celebrity play lists, exclusive music, the ability to convert home movies into iPod format, and many other features — all free. Second, iTunes has lots of music. Largely because of the innovative iTunes FairPlay copy protection and digital rights management software, Apple persuaded major record labels to let them sell much of their best content online. The combination of simplicity and variety proved a huge winner. … If the French gave away the codes, Apple would lose much of its rationale for improving iTunes. … Opening the codes threatens that link. Apple would need to pay for iTunes features with profits from iTunes itself. Prices would rise. Innovation would slow. Even worse, sharing the codes could make it easier for hackers to unravel Apple’s FairPlay software. Without strong copy protection, labels would not supply as much new music.

The issue is moot – it appears that the French proposal has been very substantially weakened – but I’m not convinced by Goolsbee’s underlying claims. There seem to be two elements to Goolsbee’s arguments. First he makes a claim about the need to protect Apple’s quasi-monopoly in order to protect innovation. There’s a reasonable argument to be made here, but as far as I’m aware, economists have very considerable difficulty in coming up with convincing arguments about the appropriate level of protection necessary to encourage innovation. Even if you buy the basic claim, it’s hard to come up with a convincing rationale for the claim that Apple’s protections are just right for encouraging innovation, and that a weakening of those protections mightn’t have salutary effects. Indeed, there’s a plausible economic case for skepticism about the value of intellectual property protection _tout court_: see the discussion in Benkler’s _Wealth of Networks_.

Second, Goolsbee claims that sharing codes would make it easier for hackers to break FairPlay. This seems to me to be even less convincing. As best as I can tell, the main reason why hackers aren’t interested in breaking FairPlay isn’t because it would be difficult, but because it’s unnecessary. There is a very well known security hole in Apple’s system – you can burn your music to an unprotected CD, and then make mp3s, Ogg Vorbis files or whatever to your heart’s content. Hence, I suspect, the abandonment of PyMusique and other efforts to circumvent Apple’s controls – there’s no point to them.

All this said, I think that there’s a plausible rationale to support Apple’s power, but it doesn’t flow from mainstream economics or from the purported virtues of DRM. It comes instead from Galbraith’s idea of countervailing powers. As the FT reported yesterday, Apple seems to have done what antitrust authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have failed dismally to do – to make it more difficult for record companies to collude in setting prices and reap the ensuing oligopoly profits. It’s forced the record labels to commoditize albums by selling them at a price which is considerably lower than the price that the record companies would prefer – given sagging sales of CDs, the labels have had little choice but to accede to Apple’s terms. None of this is to say that Apple may not abuse its position in the future – but for the moment at least, it appears to be having a valuable chastening effect.

Interesting post from Dave Sifry at Technorati: according to Technorati’s (admittedly imperfect) data set, English is no longer the number one language in the blogosphere. Japanese is.

bq. Something that may come as a surprise (at least to the English-speaking world) is that English isn’t the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn’t even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore. Another interesting finding is that the Chinese blogosphere, which grew significantly in 2004 and 2005 (launches of MSN Spaces in Chinese, Bokee.com saw a peak of 25% of all posts in Chinese in November 2005) seems to be slowing down somewhat this year.

!http://www.henryfarrell.net/sifry.png!

I know absolutely nothing about the Japanese blogosphere apart from occasional bits and pieces from Joi Ito's blog. Any readers able to enlighten me?

Crooks and Liars has the video of Colbert at the White House Press Correspondents’ Dinner.

John Kenneth Galbraith died yesterday. I spent several weeks earlier this year reading the Parker biography which I enjoyed (although it was surely a little prolix). He comes across as having been a surprisingly patrician character for someone who grew up in a small town in rural Canada – he enjoyed hugger-muggering with the powerful, and according to his biographer never once changed a nappy for any of his several children. But for all that, he was prepared to risk serious damage to his career in pursuit of truth, issuing, for example, a quite damning indictment of the Allied bombing of civilian targets in Japan when he was director of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and might have been expected to toe the official line. He also showed himself entirely willing to break with political friends when he thought they were in the wrong. Whether he was a first rate economist or not (and he may very well have been; Brad DeLong for one has suggested that his contribution has been sorely under-rated), he was surely an absolutely first rate public intellectual, and genuinely witty to boot (Dan is fond of quoting his dictum that “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. “) Someone who will be missed.

(Incidentally, there is one rather peculiar claim in the _NYT_ obituary: that

bq. Mr. Galbraith argued that technology mandated long-term contracts to diminish high-stakes uncertainty. He said companies used advertising to induce consumers to buy things they had never dreamed they needed. Other economists, like Gary S. Becker and George J. Stigler, both Nobel Prize winners, countered with proofs showing that advertising is essentially informative rather than manipulative.

“Proofs showing” only works here for restricted notions of ‘proofs,’ and decidedly odd notions of ‘showing.’)

Jon’s post below reminds me that I’ve been meaning to link to the Kennedy School’s Program on Networked Governance which co-sponsored a talk I gave last week. A very interesting program, bringing together traditional concerns of social scientists with some of the new arguments about network topology etc. This is also probably a good time to mention that we’re going to be running a Crooked Timber seminar on Yochai Benkler’s new book in a week or two – the book has a lot to say about networks, governance and much else besides. Previously, these seminars haven’t been announced in advance – but it seems to me to make sense to provide some advance warning this time, for those who would like to participate in comments, and want to read the book first. The book is available to read online here under a Creative Commons license. It is quite long though, so those who want to save their eyesight can purchase the hardcopy version from Powells (yer union-friendly store) here or Amazon here. I’m hoping to introduce another innovation to this seminar, which is to link selectively from the seminar to posts on other blogs that seriously get involved in the conversation (I will be somewhat selective in this – but hope to include a diverse set of points of view on the book and what it says).

Via Locus I see that John Crowley now has a Livejournal. Crowley’s novel _Little Big_ is a masterpiece. I keep three or four copies around the house so that I always have a spare to press on visitors. It’s astonishingly good – and if you don’t believe me, ask Michael Dirda of the Washington Post (who thinks it’s a candidate for best American novel of the last thirty years), Harold Bloom (his favourite novel: point blank) or James Hynes:

bq. I’ve read _Little, Big_ four times now, and wept shamelessly each time over those last, extraordinary fifty pages, and over the years have purchased and given away fifteen copies of it (when I could find it–it is inconsistently in print). When “You’ll love this” isn’t recommendation enough, I have proceeded to claim (as I’m claiming here) that Little, Big is an Important American Novel that bears comparison to such works as _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ and Nabokov’s _Ada_.

Worth blogrolling (how many genuinely great writers are out there in the blogosphere?), and more to the point, worth buying his books (esp. _Little Big_; I also loved his recent chapbook, “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines”).

Kevin Drum complains that

bq. I’ve been trying to understand this whole “net neutrality” thing and I’ve failed utterly. I just can’t figure out the underlying issues.

Duncan Black tells him not to be an idiot. But Kevin has a point – the network neutrality debate isn’t quite the no-brainer that it might seem to be at first. There are different kinds of discrimination that might occur, some of which are straightforward to regulate, some not so straightforward. See further, Ed Felten’s two part primer on the topic, and his two follow up posts on the topic, which provide by far the most accessible overview of the underlying technical issues that I’ve read. One very interesting argument which emerges from Felten’s series of posts is his suggestion that a move away from network neutrality might have damaging consequences for the _sociological_ underpinnings of cooperation over resource sharing.

bq. [endpoint computers] deduce that the network is congested. So they will re-send the dropped packet, but in response to the probable congestion they will slow down the rate at which they transmit data. Once enough packets are dropped, and enough computers … One interesting aspect of this system is that it is voluntary — the system relies on endpoint computers to slow down when they see congestion, but nothing forces them to do so. … there is an incentive to defect from this deal. Suppose that you defect — when your packets are dropped you keep on sending packets as fast as you can … By ignoring the congestion signals you are getting more than your fair share of the network. … Despite the incentive to defect, most people keep the deal by using networking software that slows down as expected in response to congestion. … there is a sort of social contract … One of the reasons users comply, I think, is a sense of fairness. If I believe that the burdens of congestion control fall pretty equally on everybody, at least in the long run, then it seems fair to me to slow down my own transmissions when my turn comes. … But now suppose that the network starts singling out some people and dropping their packets first. … the incentive for those machines and applications to stick to the social contract and do their share to control congestion, will weaken. Will this lead to a wave of defections that destroys the Net? Probably not, but I can’t be sure. … We should also listen to the broader lesson of this analysis. If the network discriminates, users and applications will react by changing their behavior. Discrimination will have secondary effects, and we had better think carefully about what they will be.

This seems to me to make sound sociological sense – one of the reasons that the system works as well as it does at the moment is because there’s a set of norms governing behaviour, and a sense that the costs of obeying these norms are, to use Robert Sugden’s terminology, cross-cutting so that they fall on everyone equally in the long run (Sugden has an apposite analysis of norms governing which car crosses a one lane bridge first). If we undermine the basic sense of rough equality in burden sharing, we’re likely going to weaken (and possibly destroy) these norms. There’s a general (and in this case, I believe entirely sound) sense that network neutrality has worked to date, and that we shouldn’t try to fix it. Felten’s analysis helps us move beyond this intuition to a more coherent analysis of what the costs of regulatory change might be.

Update: Duncan replies here, saying “Henry says I’m wrong to think this net neutrality issue is a no-brainer and then proceeds to outline one of the many reasons it is, in fact, a no-brainer.” This misses the point I was trying to make. Even assuming that you agree that network neutrality is a good and wonderful principle of regulation, it’s not clear how best to regulate so as to make sure that it’s achieved in practice. Felten makes this clear in his discussion of the tricky ways that telcos might undermine network neutrality through apparently neutral technical decisions. This makes for complicated regulatory problems. Two pertinent examples. First, the DoJ action against Microsoft – I suspect that most people other than the hacks and the Chicago school true believers now accept that Microsoft was a bloated and abusive monopoly – but that’s the easy part. Figuring out how to regulate it successfully is considerably harder; there aren’t any very obvious solutions (my preferred solution would have been the Zittrain one but it would have turned the copyright system upside down). Second, efforts to unbundle the local loop in Europe – i.e. to allow new entrants to compete effectively with dominant telcos in providing broadband. This was great in principle – but in practice proved more or less impossible to implement (the dominant telcos proved adept at exploiting loopholes in the regulation to hobble their competitors). Finally, the whole point of the Felten argument that I quoted from is that the effects on exchange of information on the Internet _aren’t_ a no-brainer. We can predict that changing the status quo will have consequences for actors’ behaviour, and we can make a good guess that the consequences will be negative. But without working through these consequences carefully, we don’t know what’s likely to happen. The Felten argument happens to accord with my intuitions on this – but my (and others’) intuitions have been known to be wrong on the past, which is why working through the arguments is important. And Felten’s argument was surely non-obvious to me before I read it – perhaps because I’m an idiot too. None of this detracts from the fact that the legislation under discussion is almost certainly a revolting give-away to lobbyists – but the underlying issues involved make for complicated debates and complications of implementation.

Two opinions on wikis last weekend.

From the former editor of _Encyclopedia Britannica_, quoted in the Economist (sub required).

bq. Contrast that with the joyful reaction of Wikipedia’s detractors to Brian Chase, the dodgy biographer (whose article was literally one in a million). Somebody who reads Wikipedia is “rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom,” says Mr McHenry, Britannica’s former editor. “It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.”

From an aside in John Clute's review of Theodora Goss’s new book of short stories.

bq. It is something that may derive from the tendency of mutants to emit blog gas, for the net culture they live in has no internal or external censors, no _captaining_ of the unsorted untested wikipedian utterances of the gawping soul, no place for the buck to stop.

[click to continue…]

Complete the following sentence.

bq. The dismissal of Ms. McCarthy provided fresh evidence of the Bush administration’s determination to (…) leaks of classified information.

a. abuse
b. manipulate
c. hypocritically punish others for
d. stanch

The correct answer here is a, b or c. Unless you’re David Johnston and Scott Shane of the _New York Times_. In which case, apparently, it’s d.

Via reader Joe, Ben and Jerry’s have done more than Winston Churchill ever did; they’ve apologized for the Black and Tans.

bq. DUBLIN – Ice cream makers Ben & Jerry’s have apologized for causing offense by calling a new flavor “Black & Tan” — the nickname of a notoriously violent British militia that operated during Ireland’s war of independence. The ice cream, available only in the United States, is based on an ale and stout drink of the same name. “Any reference on our part to the British Army unit was absolutely unintentional and no ill-will was ever intended,” said a Ben & Jerry’s spokesman. “Ben & Jerry’s was built on the philosophies of peace and love,” he added.

David Glenn has another article of topical interest today; the best write-up so far of the recent twists and turns in _l’affaire Lott_.

bq. Last week Mr. Lott filed a defamation lawsuit against Steven D. Levitt, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago … Mr. Lott charges that in the book and in private e-mail messages, Mr. Levitt spread lies about the quality and integrity of Mr. Lott’s work (The Chronicle, April 13). Much will hinge on exactly what Mr. Levitt meant by the words “replicate” and “peer refereed.” … Mr. Lott’s lawsuit comes at a time when Mr. Levitt is riding high; Freakonomics has sold more than one million copies. Mr. Lott, meanwhile, is in transition; on April 3, one week before he filed the lawsuit, he abruptly left his position as a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where he had worked since 2001. He did not answer The Chronicle’s inquiries about where he would go next. A representative of the institute declined to characterize the reasons for Mr. Lott’s departure, citing a policy against discussing personnel matters. …”The term ‘replicate’ has an objective and factual meaning in the world of academic research and scholarship,” the lawsuit reads. “When Levitt and Dubner allege that ‘other scholars have tried to replicate his results,’ the clear and unambiguous meaning is that ‘other scholars’ have analyzed the identical data that Lott analyzed and analyzed it the way Lott did in order to determine whether they can reach the same result.” … It is far from clear, however, that “replicate” is in fact consistently used by social scientists in the way Mr. Lott and Mr. Moody say it is used.

There’s also a second allegation that Levitt, in a private email, said that a special issue edited by Lott wasn’t peer-reviewed – but it’s hard for me to imagine how this allegation could be libellous. And on the question of the meaning of replication – I’ve always understood it in the wider, more ambiguous sense that Levitt appears to have been using it in. That said, I’m a political scientist (one of the economists quoted in the _Chronicle_ piece says that political scientists and economists use the term in different ways). I’d be astonished if this ever gets to trial, but if by some bizarre chance it does, it should make for some entertaining arguments about the nuances of the social science lexicon.

Tim Lambert, naturally, has more, here, here, and here.

Also in the Chronicle, an interesting article on controversies swirling around Jack Anderson’s archives, which have been donated to GWU. Kevin Drum said last month that the AIPAC case was likely to be used as a weapon against leakers. Now we have this.

bq. During his life and career as a muckraking journalist in Washington, Jack Anderson cultivated secret sources throughout the halls of government — sources who passed on information that allowed Anderson to investigate and write about Watergate, CIA assassination schemes, and countless scandals. His syndicated column, Washington Merry-Go-Round, earned him the enmity of the corrupt and powerful — so much so that during the Watergate years, associates of Nixon had discussed assassinating the columnist. … His archive, some 200 boxes now being held by George Washington University’s library, could be a trove of information about state secrets, dirty dealings, political maneuverings, and old-fashioned investigative journalism, open for historians and up-and-coming reporters to see. But the government wants to see the documents before anyone else. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation have told university officials and members of the Anderson family that they want to go through the archive, and that agents will remove any item they deem confidential or top secret. … The FBI eventually told Kevin Anderson that the investigation centered on Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, two former officials with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who have been charged with receiving and distributing national defense information. …Kevin Anderson doubts that his father gathered information related to the Aipac case. He points out that his father had Parkinson’s disease for the last 15 years of his life and that he had done his best muckraking in the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s.

David Glenn has an article in the _Chronicle_ about Carol Darr, and the howls of outrage she provokes among both left wing and right wing bloggers.

bq. There is not much love lost between the liberal activists who blog at Daily Kos and their conservative counterparts at RedState.org. One entry at Daily Kos last month was titled “RedState Runs From Their Own Idiocy.” The same week, a commenter at RedState wrote, “I don’t visit Kos, because I am not enamored with wading through sewage.” Last spring, however, the two blogs found a common enemy: a “clueless embarrassment” (in the words of Daily Kos) who was peddling a “cheesecloth-flimsy” argument (RedState). The object of their ire was Carol C. Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet, which is affiliated with George Washington University. Someone in her position, the bloggers believed, ought to be an enthusiastic defender of online politicking in all its forms. Instead she was urging the Federal Election Commission — where she had worked as a staff lawyer in the 1970s — to bring certain kinds of blogging under the umbrella of campaign-finance law.

Carol is a colleague of mine, and I’ve been getting increasingly pissed off at the abuse she’s receiving from prominent bloggers. It’s not Carol who’s the clueless embarrasment here. Take, as Exhibit One, this post by Adam B at Daily Kos, which Duncan Black approvingly linked to last week. For Adam B and Duncan, the argument that blogs are going to make Swiftboating easier is a version of “the Commies sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids, [and] they’re going to take over our blogs.” Come off it. I don’t seriously believe that Duncan wasn’t paying attention to the ways in which right wing blogs served as amplifiers for the original Swiftboating exercise (a feat afterwards celebrated in the Weekly Standard). And if you don’t think that there are going to be John Thune style astroturf blogs galore in the ’06 and ’08 elections, then God bless your naivete. Carol’s making a legitimate argument which is highly uncomfortable for bloggers – that blogs, as they exist today, are wide open to abuse, and specifically to becoming channels for the systematic spread of disinformation. It deserves a hearing – and a more serious response than puerile name-calling and appeals to the numinous self-correcting power of the blogosphere.

Update: I’ve received several comments along the lines of “you are being dishonest because Atrios is attacking hypocrites who say that bloggers should be regulated but not the mainstream press.” This doesn’t fly, since that has never been Carol’s position; in the piece linked to above, she makes that explicit. If someone can find a public statement where she says something different, I’ll happily eat crow. I’ve also changed the above link as the old link had stopped working.

Update 2: See here for a transcript of Carol Darr’s symposium at the _Chronicle_ and here and here for responses from Atrios and Adam Bonin respectively. I should also say at this point that my original post was much snarkier than it should have been – while I stand by the basic claim that Carol Darr doesn’t deserve some of the nasty things that have been said about her – I used more intemperate language than I should have. For which, apologies.

I don’t have much more to say about the Mearsheimer/Walt controversy, but I do want to point readers to this blogpost by Jacob Levy, who has resumed occasional blogging at his old Blogspot account. Jacob’s critique seems to me to have Mearsheimer and Walt dead to rights – while I don’t believe that Mearsheimer and Walt are guilty of anti-Semitism, I do think that their argument is fundamentally flawed, as Jacob illustrates at length.

The core of the paper’s difficulty has little to do with Israel or Jews and a great deal to do with its core purpose. M&W are committed to the neorealist view that powerful states act in their security interest. They’re also, independently, committed to opposition to the Iraq War and to what they see as U.S. overreach in the Middle East; they think that the U.S. does not effectively pursue its security interests in the region. So there’s a puzzle, an anomaly– of their own making. If you are both committed to a predictive theory and committed to an interpretation of a particular case by which it falsifies your theory, then there’s a puzzle for your views, but not yet a puzzle about the world. They proceed to address this puzzle with a slippery– I do not say sloppy– ambiguity between explanatory and evaluative claims.

bq. The mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest to bring it about.

This is, I think, the worst paragraph of political science I’ve read in many years. The best, most-justified policies don’t automatically spring into being at the end of the policy-making process. An all-things-considered judgment that X is the best policy is essentially irrelevant to one’s ability to predict whether or not X will be adopted. … The snarky way to put it is: M&W treat their say-so about strategic and moral considerations as if it was naturally entitled to such overwhelming political deference that the fact that the polity hasn’t accepted their say-so is deeply anomalous. The probably-fairer way to put it is: M&W proceed as if the political system has some very strong natural tendency to reach true beliefs and justified policies about strategy and morality– such a strong tendency that, if it fails in some case, there must be an unusual explanation, such as an unusually intense and effective Lobby that includes people willing to deliberately place the interests of a foreign power over that of their own country, and that includes powerful politicians, media figures, and so on who can make their preferred policies come about.

NB – comments that veer into general discussion of the Israel/Palestine debate will be ruthlessly expunged as soon as I see them.