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The New Ambiguity of "Open Government"

February 29, 2012 by

David Robinson and I have just released a draft paper—The New Ambiguity of “Open Government”—that describes, and tries to help solve, a key problem in recent discussions around online transparency. As the paper explains, the phrase “open government” has become ambiguous in a way that makes life harder for both advocates and policymakers, by combining the politics of transparency with the technologies of open data. We propose using new terminology that is politically neutral: the word adaptable to describe desirable features of data (and the word inert to describe their absence), separately from descriptions of the governments that use these technologies.

Clearer language will serve everyone well, and we hope this paper will spark a conversation among those who focus on civic transparency and innovation. Thanks to Justin Grimes and Josh Tauberer, for their helpful insight and discussions as we drafted this paper.

Download the full paper here.

Abstract:

“Open government” used to carry a hard political edge: it referred to politically sensitive disclosures of government information. The phrase was first used in the 1950s, in the debates leading up to passage of the Freedom of Information Act. But over the last few years, that traditional meaning has blurred, and has shifted toward technology.

Open technologies involve sharing data over the Internet, and all kinds of governments can use them, for all kinds of reasons. Recent public policies have stretched the label “open government” to reach any public sector use of these technologies. Thus, “open government data” might refer to data that makes the government as a whole more open (that is, more transparent), but might equally well refer to politically neutral public sector disclosures that are easy to reuse, but that may have nothing to do with public accountability. Today a regime can call itself “open” if it builds the right kind of web site—even if it does not become more accountable or transparent. This shift in vocabulary makes it harder for policymakers and activists to articulate clear priorities and make cogent demands.

This essay proposes a more useful way for participants on all sides to frame the debate: We separate the politics of open government from the technologies of open data. Technology can make public information more adaptable, empowering third parties to contribute in exciting new ways across many aspects of civic life. But technological enhancements will not resolve debates about the best priorities for civic life, and enhancements to government services are no substitute for public accountability.

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PrivAds: Behavioral Advertising without Tracking

October 12, 2009 by

There’s an interesting new paper out of Stanford and NYU, about a system called “PrivAds” that tries to provide behavioral advertising on web sites, without having a central server gather detailed information about user behavior. If the paper’s approach turns out to work, it could have an important impact on the debate about online advertising and privacy.

Advertisers have obvious reasons to show you ads that match your interests. You can benefit too, if you see ads that are relevant to your needs, rather than ones you don’t care about. The problem, as I argued in my Congressional testimony, comes when sites track your activities, and build up detailed files on you, in order to do the targeting.

PrivAds tries to solve this problem by providing behavioral advertising without having any server track you. The idea is that your own browser will track you, and analyze your online activities to build a model of your interests, but your browser won’t reveal this information to anyone else. When a site wants to show you an interest-based ad, your browser will choose the ad from a portfolio of ads offered by the ad service.

The tricky part is how your browser can do all of this without incidentally leaking your activities to the server. For example, the ad agency needs to know how many times each ad was shown. How can you report this to the ad service without revealing which ads you saw? PrivAds offers a solution based on fancy cryptography, so that the ad agency can aggregate reports from many users, without being able to see the users’ individual reports. Similarly, every interaction between your browser and the outside must be engineered carefully so that behavioral advertising can occur but the browser doesn’t telegraph your actions.

It’s not clear at this point whether the PrivAds approach will work, in the sense of protecting privacy without reducing the effectiveness of ad targeting. It’s clear, though, that PrivAds is asking an important question.

If the PrivAds approach succeeds, demonstrating that behavioral advertising does not require tracking, this doesn’t mean that companies will stop wanting to track you — but it does mean that they won’t be able to use advertising as an excuse to track you.

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Fascinating New Blog: ComputationalLegalStudies.com

April 3, 2009 by

I was inspired to post the essay I discussed in the prior post by the debut of the best new law blog I have seen in a long time, Computational Legal Studies, featuring the work of Daniel Katz and Michael Bommarito, both graduate students in the University of Michigan’s political science department.

Every single blog they have posted has caused me to smack my head once for not having thought of the idea first, and a second time for not having their datasets and skillz. Their visualization of who has gotten TARP funds and how they’re connected to legislators deserves to be printed on posters and hung up in newsrooms across the country (not to mention in offices on Capitol Hill). They’ve also shown good taste by building a bridge to this blog, linking favorably back to the great CITP work led by David Robinson on government openness.

I will have more to say about Dan and Mike’s new blog in the weeks and months to come, but for now it is enough to welcome them to the blogosphere.

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Does Your House Need a Tail?

November 25, 2008 by

Thus far, the debate over broadband deployment has generally been between those who believe that private telecom incumbents should be in charge of planning, financing and building next-generation broadband infrastructure, and those who advocate a larger role for government in the deployment of broadband infrastructure. These proposals include municipal-owned networks and a variety of subsidies and mandates at the federal level for incumbents to deploy faster broadband.

Tim Wu and Derek Slater have a great new paper out that approaches the problem from a different perspective: that broadband deployments could be planned and financed not by government or private industry, but by consumers themselves. That might sound like a crazy idea at first blush, but Wu and Slater do a great job of explaining how it might work. The key idea is “condominium fiber,” an arrangement in which a number of neighboring households pool their resources to install fiber to all the homes in their neighborhoods. Once constructed, each home would own its own fiber strand, while the shared costs of maintaining the “trunk” cable from the individual homes to a central switching location would be managed in the same way that condominium and homeowners’ associations currently manage the shared areas of condos and gated communities. Indeed, in many cases the developer of a new condominium tower or planned community could lay fiber along with water and power lines, and the fiber would be just one of the shared resources that would be managed collectively by the homeowners.

If that sounds strange, it’s important to remember that there are plenty of examples where things that were formerly rented became owned. For example, fifty years ago in the United States no one owned a telephone. The phone was owned by Ma Bell and if yours broke they’d come and install a new one. But that changed, and now people own their phones and the wiring inside their homes, with your phone company owning the cable outside the home. One way to think about Slater and Wu’s “homes with tails” concept is that it’s just shifting that line of demarcation again. Under their proposal, you’d own the wiring inside your home and the line from you to your broadband provider.

Why would someone want to do such a thing? The biggest advantage, from my perspective, is that it could solve the thorny problem of limited competition in the “last mile” of broadband deployment. Right now, most customers have two options for high-speed Internet access. Getting more options using the traditional, centralized investment model is going to be extremely difficult because it costs a lot to deploy new infrastructure all the way to customers’ homes. But if customers “brought their own” fiber, then the barrier to entry would be much lower. New providers would simply need to bring a single strand of fiber to a neighborhood’s centralized point of presence in order to offer service to all customers in that neighborhood. So it would be much easier to imagine a world in which customers had numerous options to choose from.

The challenge is solving the chicken-and-egg problem: customer owned fiber won’t be attractive until there are several providers to choose from, but it doesn’t make sense for new firms to enter this market until there are a significant number of neighborhoods with customer-owned fiber. Wu and Slater suggest several ways this chicken-and-egg problem might be overcome, but I think it will remain a formidable challenge. My guess is that at least at the outset, the customer-owned model will work best in new residential construction projects, where the costs of deploying fiber will be very low (because they’ll already be digging trenches for power and water).

But the beauty of their model is that unlike a lot of other plans to encourage broadband deployment, this isn’t an all-or-nothing choice. We don’t have to convince an entire nation, state, or even city to sign onto a concept like this. All you need is a neighborhood with a few dozen early-adopting consumers and an ISP willing to serve them. Virtually every cutting-edge technology is taken up by a small number of early adopters (who pay high prices for the privilege of being the first with a new technology) before it spreads to the general public, and the same model is likely to apply to customer-owned fiber. If the concept is viable, someone will figure out how to make it work, and their example will be duplicated elsewhere. So I don’t know if customer-owned fiber is the wave of the future, but I do hope that people start experimenting with it.

You can check out their paper here. You can also check out an article I wrote for Ars Technica this summer that is based on conversations with Slater, Wu, and other pioneers in this area.

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Newspapers' Problem: Trouble Targeting Ads

June 30, 2008 by

Richard Posner has written a characteristically thoughtful blog entry about the uncertain future of newspapers. He renders widespread journalistic concern about the unwieldy character of newspapers into the crisp economic language of “bundling”:

Bundling is efficient if the cost to the consumer of the bundled products that he doesn’t want is less than the cost saving from bundling. A particular newspaper reader might want just the sports section and the classified ads, but if for example delivery costs are high, the price of separate sports and classified-ad “newspapers” might exceed that of a newspaper that contained both those and other sections as well, even though this reader was not interested in the other sections.

With the Internet’s dramatic reductions in distribution costs, the gains from bundling are decreased, and readers are less likely to prefer bundled products. I agree with Posner that this is an important insight about the behavior of readers, but would argue that reader behavior is only a secondary problem for newspapers. The product that newspaper publishers sell—the dominant source of their revenues—is not newspapers, but audiences.

Toward the end of his post, Posner acknowledges that papers have trouble selling ads because it has gotten easier to reach niche audiences. That seems to me to be the real story: Even if newspapers had undiminished audiences today, they’d still be struggling because, on a per capita basis, they are a much clumsier way of reaching readers. There are some populations, such as the elderly and people who are too poor to get online, who may be reachable through newspapers and unreachable through online ads. But the fact that today’s elderly are disproportionately offline is an artifact of the Internet’s novelty (they didn’t grow up with it), not a persistent feature of the marektplace. Posner acknoweldges that the preference of today’s young for online sources “will not change as they get older,” but goes on to suggest incongruously that printed papers might plausibly survive as “a retirement service, like Elderhostel.” I’m currently 26, and if I make it to 80, I very strongly doubt I’ll be subscribing to printed papers. More to the point, my increasing age over time doesn’t imply a growing preference for print; if anything, age is anticorrelated with change in one’s daily habits.

As for the claim that poor or disadvantaged communities are more easily reached offline than on, it still faces the objection that television is a much more efficient way of reaching large audiences than newsprint. There’s also the question of how much revenue can realistically be generated by building an audience of people defined by their relatively low level of purchasing power. If newsprint does survive at all, I might expect to see it as a nonprofit service directed at the least advantaged. Then again, if C. K. Prahalad is correct that businesses have neglected a “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” that can be gathered by aggregating the small purchases of large numbers of poor people, we may yet see papers survive in the developing world. The greater relative importance of cell phones there, as opposed to larger screens, could augur favorably for the survival of newsprint. But phones in the developing world are advancing quickly, and may yet emerge as a better-than-newsprint way of reading the news.

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