September 2009

[Commentary] Sceptics often ask of new government programmes: if it is so worthwhile, why is the private sector not doing it already? A similar question can be asked of companies claiming to be acting for the general good: if the public needs it, why is the government not doing it already? Google's plan to digitize all of the world's 168m books needs to be examined in this light.

Since 2004, the search-engine corporation has scanned about 5m titles, many of them under copyright. A comprehensive digital library could obviously generate a lot of revenue (although it is not yet fully obvious how). Last year, Google negotiated a long and complicated "settlement" with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, which had been suing it. Google would keep just over a third of revenues generated by these online books, with the remainder going to a non-profit book-rights registry run by publishers' and authors' representatives. The registry would seek out the authors of "orphaned" books - those under copyright but out of print - and distribute royalties to them. Google agreed to pay $125m to fund the registry. Neither privacy nor competition is the main reason for skepticism about the Google books settlement. The problem is that the arrangement is a usurpation. It is a false analogy to compare Google Books, as some defenders of the settlement do, to Amazon's Kindle system of e-books. Authors and publishers participate in Kindle by granting Amazon permission to publish in that format. Google's system would dispense with such permission. It is thus a change in the regime of property rights. The settlement authorizes a large corporation to manage the rights of authors it cannot locate, and to justify itself with vague invocations of our cultural heritage. Maybe our society is evolving in that direction anyway. The past century was an era in which people ceded rights to government in exchange for what they saw as a more efficient allocation of resources. Maybe publics are now willing to make the same trade with the private sector. Maybe we are headed back to the era of government-created monopolies such as the British East India Company and the Dutch VOC. But, if such a monopoly is to be created, government must create it explicitly and not permit interested parties in a private lawsuit just to divvy up the spoils.

Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which "going to college" means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive. The real force for change is the market: Online classes are just cheaper to produce. Community colleges and for-profit education entrepreneurs are already experimenting with dorm-free, commute-free options. Distance-learning technology will keep improving. Innovators have yet to tap the potential of the aggregator to change the way students earn a degree, making the education business today look like the news biz circa 1999. And as major universities offer some core courses online, we'll see a cultural shift toward acceptance of what is still, in some circles, a "University of Phoenix" joke. This doesn't just mean a different way of learning: The funding of academic research, the culture of the academy and the institution of tenure are all threatened.

Attempts to censor the Internet are spreading to Southeast Asia as governments turn to coercion and intimidation to rein in online criticism. Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam lack the kind of technology and financial resources that China and some other large countries use to police the Internet. The Southeast Asian nations are using other methods -- also seen in China -- to tamp down criticism, including arresting some bloggers and individuals posting contentious views online. That is distressing free-speech advocates who had hoped that Southeast Asia -- until recently a region where Internet use was relatively unfettered -- would become a model of open debate in the developing world as its economies modernize.

Since the 1940s, at least on paper, New York City has restricted, or banned outright, the placement of billboards along its highways. But because of haphazard enforcement and what a federal judge described as "subterfuge" and willful lawbreaking by sign companies, the rise of the billboards — some even on city property — went on unchecked. By the time the judge, Paul A. Crotty of Federal District Court in Manhattan, issued a decision in the spring that upheld the city's right to regulate the billboards and excoriated it for not doing so sooner, no one could even say for sure which of the more than 600 highway billboards had the right to be there. Billboard companies, which have earned far more from advertisers over the years than they have paid in fines, have appealed the ruling.