Reason.org has just posted my commentary on the five reasons why Federal Trade Commission’s proposals to regulate the collection and use of consumer information on the Web will do more harm than good.
As I note, the digital economy runs on information. Any regulations that impede the collection and processing of any information will affect its efficiency. Given the overall success of the Web and the popularity of search and social media, there’s every reason to believe that consumers have been able to balance their demand for content, entertainment and information services with the privacy policies these services have.
But there’s more to it than that. Technology simply doesn’t lend itself to the top-down mandates. Notions of privacy are highly subjective. Online, there is an adaptive dynamic constantly at work. Certainly web sites have pushed the boundaries of privacy sometimes. But only when the boundaries are tested do we find out where the consensus lies.
Legislative and regulatory directives pre-empt experimentation. Consumer needs are best addressed when best practices are allowed to bubble up through trial-and-error. When the economic and functional development of European Web media, which labors under the sweeping top-down European Union Privacy Directive, is contrasted with the dynamism of the U.S. Web media sector which has been relatively free of privacy regulation – the difference is profound.
An analysis of the web advertising market undertaken by researchers at the University of Toronto found that after the Privacy Directive was passed, online advertising effectiveness decreased on average by around 65 percent in Europe relative to the rest of the world. Even when the researchers controlled for possible differences in ad responsiveness and between Europeans and Americans, this disparity manifested itself. The authors go on to conclude that these findings will have a “striking impact” on the $8 billion spent each year on digital advertising: namely that European sites will see far less ad revenue than counterparts outside Europe.
Other points I explore in the commentary are:
- How free services go away and paywalls go up
- How consumers push back when they perceive that their privacy is being violated
- How Web advertising lives or dies by the willingness of consumers to participate
- How greater information availability is a social good
The full commentary can be found here.