August 2008

After giving testimony at a Congressional hearing on Competition on the Internet, I began to wonder–has anyone done an intellectual history tracing the origins of worries about the power of search engines and other intermediaries? Helen Nissenbaum and Lucas Introna published an extraordinarily prescient paper on “why the politics of search engines matters” at the turn of the millennium. Alejandro Diaz’s 2005 thesis Through the Google Goggles is remarkably sapient. Siva Vaidhyanathan authored a terrific cultural critique of Google Library in the Chronicle of Higher Education well before many others worried about it, and his book The Googlization of Everything is eagerly anticipated. At first their voices were only joined by a few in the academy. But now worries about intermediary power are starting to gain some critical mass, as the following items demonstrate:

Read More »Dominant Intermediaries’ Future: Monopoly + Responsibility

The plaintiffs in the ongoing AutoAdmit defamation litigation in Connecticut have obtained the real identities of some of the previously pseudonymous individual defendants, according to Wired.  Wired’s story includes comments by Ann Bartow (South Carolina and Feminist Law Profs) and Dan Solove (GWU and Concurring Opinions) on the harms and remedies associated with hateful anonymous online speech.  Here is Dan’s partly tongue-in-cheek comment:

Since libel lawsuits are mostly about clearing one’s name, Solove finds himself lamenting the lost ritual of duels, which he describes as an elaborate nonjudicial way of settling disputes that rarely actually got to the shooting phase.

“We don’t have any middle-ground dispute resolution processes in society anymore, and courts aren’t a good way to vindicate these non-monetary harms,” Solove says. “I think we need something else.”

That sent me running to an early piece of legal scholarship by Larry Lessig, The Regulation of Social Meaning, 62 U. Chi. L. Rev. 943 (1995), which uses duels (among other things) to illustrate the interrelated dynamism of social practices and social meaning.  What follows is the complete text of Lessig’s discussion of duels, without footnotes.  Dueling obviously isn’t the solution to the AutoAdmit problem and related problems of online harassment and bullying.  But the dueling suggestion gets at something important, which is designing ways to bring attacker and victim into some kind of guarded proximity.  The Internet simultaneously closes and expands social distance, and I think that the conduct and harms evident in the AutoAdmit situation are at least indirectly related to that phenomenon:

Read More »Is Dueling the Answer? Thoughts on AutoAdmit