As more than one person noted while the discussion was going on, however, the former spy (who is now reportedly in hiding in Hong Kong) left a number of significant questions unanswered — perhaps in part because the newspaper is holding that information back for future stories, which Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald has promised will contain further revelations.

Some unanswered questions remain

In the Q&A session, Snowden talked about why he chose to reveal certain information to journalists in Hong Kong about hacking attempts against Chinese targets, discussed alleged discrepancies related to his reported salary, and argued that “being called a traitor by (former vice-president) Dick Cheney is the highest honor that you can give an American.” But the former CIA staffer also avoided certain questions or talked around them without giving specific responses. Here are a few things he didn’t say:

Why he chose to go to Hong Kong: Asked by Greenwald why he chose Hong Kong as a place to hide, Snowden said that the U.S. government had “destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home, openly declaring me guilty of treason” — but he didn’t really answer the question. There have been conspiracy theories about alleged collusion with the Chinese government (which Snowden denied later in the discussion) and also some theories about the upside of choosing Hong Kong.

Whether he made copies of the documents: Greenwald also asked whether Snowden had made any copies of the NSA documents he provided to the Guardian, and if so whether he gave them to a number of different people for safekeeping, or stored them somewhere else — so that they would be available if something happened to him. But Snowden didn’t answer the question.

What exactly “direct access” means: Circa editor-in-chief and former Reuters social-media editor Anthony De Rosa asked Snowden to define what “direct access” means — a term that is used in the NSA documents describing the PRISM program, and something that technology companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo have repeatedly denied they provide. Snowden would only say that “more detail on how direct NSA’s accesses are is coming.”

Whether agents can listen to phone calls: De Rosa also asked whether NSA agents could listen to the content of domestic phone calls without a warrant — as opposed to simply collecting and filtering the “metadata” around those calls, such as the location and length of time they take to complete. There have been allegations that the NSA is able to listen to specific phone calls without a warrant, but Snowden didn’t say whether this is true or not.

What will happen to him next: Snowden didn’t talk much about what he plans to do now, except to say that he had no plans to reveal secret information to the Chinese government in return for political asylum. He talked about looking towards Iceland as a potential destination before he leaked the information, but said that country was far too susceptible to U.S. government pressure to hand him over to the authorities. And he said the U.S. was “worth dying for.”

Was the Q&A too heavily mediated?

Snowden’s discussion was criticized by some for being more of a PR exercise than anything that actually provided much information: ProPublica editor Scott Klein said that the Q&A was “handled like a Russian gymnast’s press conference,” while journalism professor Jeff Jarvis said he felt the discussion was “heavy on rhetoric and light on specifics.” Journalist Tom Watson said that the Q&A was a “journalistic farce” and accused the Guardian of “selling a story rather than telling a story.”

I've seen scripted Presidential "town halls" that were less Potemkin Village-like than this so-called #askSnowden "chat" – c'mon @Guardian!—
Tom Watson (@tomwatson) June 17, 2013

There’s no question that the Snowden Q&A seemed a little rehearsed, and his answers appeared to have been edited in some places (Guardian US editor Janine Gibson said there were “some very old skool processes happening to make this readable”). I think the discussion would have been more interesting if it had been completely unmediated — the way Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” features are — but despite the lapses, it’s still remarkable that someone like Snowden is talking at all.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Lightspring

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But the Internet Age has ushered in a more sophisticated — and notably — passive form of surveillance, and it’s that technique that the government is using in its PRISM program.

And it raises the question: If a piece of information has been collected but has never actually been seen by the human eye, is it considered surveillance?

It sounds like a terrible lateral thinking puzzle or a zen metaphor, akin to whether or not sounds are heard when a tree falls. But the government’s embrace of data mining and similar activities, ostensibly spurred by the Bush Administration post-9/11 and the law enforcement-expanding Patriot Act, has erupted in the last week’s NSA surveillance scandal. Data mining is happening all around us, and when the government gets involved, the implications become much more visible and politcally explosive.

We experience data mining every day as we interact with the web, particularly when it comes to ad targeting and “custom” content on places like Facebook and Google. It’s the reason why you’ll see ads for new washing machines the moment you email your best friend about yours being on the fritz, and it’s why you see your sister’s information on your Newsfeed more often than that of your coworker’s old roommate. Algorithms detecting patterns are like the rotisserie chickens of the internet: You can set it and forget it, and it’ll do the work for you.

But what might be the ethical concerns that arise when  ad-tech companies mine data become legal concerns when the government gets involved — simply because it isn’t using the data to sell things, but to potentially arrest people. In other words, the grey areas around data mining becomes starker, and the danger to constitutional rights becomes more apparent. The Fourth Amendment states the following:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This is all well and good, but what about data that isn’t necessarily being “searched” or “seized,” but rather filtered and stored? While the NSA has massive amounts of big data, more than could ever be individually seen by a single person (or even a team of people), that information is still there. And, even if someone isn’t doing anything “wrong,” the government can still check for patterns.

This undefined zone that has been pushed and pulled for the last 12 years is going to be the lasting legacy of the government’s struggles with the online world. And, much like one of those lateral thinking puzzles, it needs a lot more positing before we can come up with a good answer to it.

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The Securities and Exchange Commission, for instance, just announced it is updating its rules for social media. The rules may “fall short” but, overall, the SEC’s initiative is a welcome effort to adapt policies to emerging technologies. In other words, the government gets it. And not just for financial reporting — regulators are also updating rules to account for the impact of new technologies on everything from crowd-funding to video rentals to the Patent Office.

In light of such progress, why then is the government so often reviled by the tech community? To see what I mean, look at recent stories (and related comments) involving issues like online privacy, file-sharing or the sad death of internet activist Aaron Swartz. These situations, which may reflect poor choices by individual prosecutors or bureaucrats, have served to reinforce an article of faith for many tech enthusiasts: that the government is populated by people who are malicious and intellectually inferior to those who read sites like Reddit or Hacker News.

The same phenomenon can be detected in headlines like “It’s a Crime for 12-year-olds to Read the New York Times Online” or “Senate bill rewrite leds feds read your e-mail without warrants.” These are examples of tech writers using hyperbole to reinforce an us-versus-them narrative that their readers take as a given. This narrative in many ways resembles the world of comic book protagonists.

While the press and tech readers are right to be vigilant, the larger caricature of bungling government fools is neither fair nor responsible. For starters, the people who work at places like the SEC or the Justice Department are not schleps off the street who can barely use a computer; instead, they are often top-of-the-class graduates who accepted less money in favor of more fulfilling work. The agencies they work in can be dysfunctional — like many big corporations — but the people themselves are not.

There is an even larger problem of looking at the government through the fast-moving prism of the tech community. Namely, the government is not supposed to resemble the tech sector in the first place — pivoting, rapid adaptation and “move fast and break things” are fine qualities for a start-up, but they’re ill-suited as a method of governing a democracy.

Don’t forget that the country as a whole looks nothing like the tech sector. America is not disproportionately composed of affluent white and Asian males, but instead contains a far more diverse population with a multitude of interests and incomes. This is the lens through which policy choices should be viewed — not through cliches that pit tech geniuses against bungling bureaucrats.

(Image by saddako via Shutterstock)

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But, last year, Bryan Sivak, the CTO and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Department of Health and Human Services, was tapped to bring more Silicon Valley spirit to the massive department. (Prior to working in government, he founded a company that was acquired by Oracle). And it looks like his touch is starting to move the agency further along a startup-inspired track.

At the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin on Saturday, Sivak said he’s tried to promote a definition of innovation that gives people the “freedom to experiment.”

“I can teach you how to experiment. I can teach you how to develop a hypothesis. I can teach you how to define some tests that generate some metrics. I can teach you how to analyze those metrics to determine whether or not your test was successful and I can give you the freedom to execute some of these things,” he said. “This is something that’s critical for an entity like the federal government, which is very bureaucratic and structured and all the things we wish it wasn’t in a lot of cases.”

Sivak isn’t the first to bring lean startup theory to HHS. Sivak’s predecessor Todd Park, co-founder of health tech giants Athenahealth and Castlight and current CTO of the United States, drew on his tech chops to start opening up health data and transforming health care. But here a few of the more recent Silicon Valley-style programs at HHS.

Yammer-powered social networking

Getting 90,000 government employees to collaborate is obviously no easy task. But using Yammer, HHS employees across the department now have the opportunity to share ideas and reach out to people up and down the bureaucratic hierarchy through HHSConnect.  Since launching a few months ago, 10,000 of the department’s employees have used the platform with many using it actively, said Sivak.

Open coworking spaces

Like many startup CEOs, Sivak said he believes in the “serendipitous collisions” that happen between coworkers who work in open spaces. But in government cubicles, he said, “the only thing you’re going to collide with is air.”  To up the chances of serendipitous in-person collaboration, the department is creating “HHSLabs” – an open, modular, technologically-tricked out work space open to anyone in the agency.  It’s also opening its doors to health startup CEOs and other private sector visitors to DC who want a temporary place to work.

Internal crowdfunding for resources

To support entrepreneurial-minded people at HHS who come up with interesting ideas but need people with other skills or resources to get their projects off the ground, Sivak said they’ve created an internal crowdfunding-like site where people can solicit support. Called “HHSFairtrade,” people can post descriptions of their ideas and others across the department can commit needed resources or support. Like Kickstarter, the project only activates once it receives all of the commitments it needs to launch.

Seed funding for internal innovators

If it’s a little bit of cash that internal innovators need to test their ideas, Sivak said they can turn to “HHSIgnite.” The program gives department employees small amounts of money to try out new approaches. If the project can show returns in three to six months, he said, it can become a stronger candidate for allocated funds.

Opening the door to outside entrepreneurs

More technologists like Park and Sivak are bringing a startup mindset to the public sector, but Sivak knows that many of the country’s most innovative thinkers don’t live inside the Beltway. To tap into their ideas, he said, the department created “HHS Entrepreneurs,”a new program based on the HHS Innovation Fellows program launched last year. One track invites HHS employees to apply to be “internal entrepreneurs” who will work on special team and get extra networking, mentoring and professional development opportunities. But the other track is open to entrepreneurs around the country who would come to HHS to work with internal entrepreneurs for 6 to 12 months on “high risk, high reward” problems, Sivak said.

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President Obama, who was celebrated by some as the “first internet president” after taking office — thanks to his use of a BlackBerry, as well as various web-based open government initiatives — has showed even more flair for the web and social media in the past year or so, in part by hosting events such as the Twitter town hall in 2011 and a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” feature during the election campaign last fall, in which he took questions from users of the online community.

More open, or more controlling of the media?

While all of these tools and strategies make the president seem more approachable and human to some, however, to members of the traditional press it is part of an attempt by the Obama government to do an end-run around the media and get its message out directly without any fear of being challenged (although the traditional media seem to have had no problem covering up the existence of a drone base in Saudi Arabia when asked to do so). According to Politico:

“President Barack Obama is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House [and] the mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting).”

As the Politico piece notes, governments have always tried to engineer their own messages, whether through hokey PR stunts like Calvin Coolidge’s radio addresses or government-produced propaganda shown in movie theaters, or through friendly reporters who are willing to write uncritically — as many have accused writer Judith Miller of doing at the New York Times when she covered the build-up to the Iraq War. But social media provides so many more tools (and real-time ones) for governments to use.

Just as Elon Musk of Tesla used his blog — and some of the user data that his electric car produced during a New York Times review — to argue his case against the newspaper, the Obama government has almost as many tools (if not more) at its disposal as any of the media entities it used to rely on for coverage. It can produce and distribute news stories, audio interviews and video clips just as well as anyone, and media companies who have cut costs are always looking for free content. One photographer said the White House has “built its own content distribution network.”

The balance of power has shifted

As Politico describes it, the “balance of power between the White House and the press has tipped unmistakeably towards the government.” The Obama administration is said to be eschewing unscripted scrums in favor of orchestrated media campaigns like the Reddit AMA, which was widely criticized for not being as hard-hitting as a traditional interview (although I took issue with that description). Former Clinton-era press secretary Mike McCurry told Politico:

“The balance of power used to be much more in favor of the mainstream press [but now] the White House gets away with stuff I would never have dreamed of doing. When I talk to White House reporters now, they say it’s really tough to do business with people who don’t see the need to be cooperative.”

That word “cooperative” sums it up in a nutshell: in the past, governments had to cooperate with the media because they needed it to get their message out, just as companies like Tesla used to. But that’s not the case any more — or at least not as much as it used to be. The playing field has been leveled. Is that a good thing or a bad thing for democracy, or for society in general? Is more information better, even if it comes directly from the government?

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Picsfive and Flickr user jphilipg

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Charged with identifying more airwaves for commercial use, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) recommended last year that the private and public sector split time on government airwaves. The idea is that the DOD and other users were only using their spectrum at certain times and in certain places, so why not let carriers access those frequencies whenever and wherever they weren’t occupied by the feds?

Carriers traditionally like licenses they can call their own, and the industry initially responded to the deal with skepticism. In a blog post, AT&T still said it would rather see airwaves cleared entirely of government users and auctioned for commercial use but was amenable to the idea of sharing if clearing the airwaves was not possible.

“I want to emphasize that we continue to believe that clearing and reallocating is the best approach to freeing up much needed spectrum for commercial mobile broadband use,” AT&T Assistant VP Stacey Black wrote in the policy blog. “The existing exclusive licensing regime has resulted in billions of dollars in wireless infrastructure investment, enabling the U.S. to lead the way in the global mobile broadband marketplace. While clearing spectrum for exclusive commercial licensing must remain the top priority, when that is neither time nor cost effective, AT&T supports exploring sharing arrangements.”

Black hints at another possible obstacle to a shared spectrum plan: Congress. Lawmakers have counted on the billions raised in spectrum auctions to fill government coffers. Depending on how spectrum sharing was implemented it would either raise no money or far less than previous auctions.

Over the next few months, the three carriers and the DOD conduct trials and simulations of sharing scenarios at government installations. The results of those tests will be released in March.

Sprint was the only carrier in the Big 4 not on the list, but a Sprint spokesman told FierceWireless that the company works closely with the NTIA and will be following the tests closely.

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To put things in perspective, the British Broadcasting Corp. isn’t just a government-financed news outlet. It also happens to be one of the largest broadcasters and news agencies in the world, with almost 25,000 employees, and an annual budget — financed primarily by the “TV tax” that the British government levies on every television set owning household in the country — of more than $5 billion. Do we really need that kind of state-financed news entity in an age when journalism is everywhere? Couldn’t that amount of money be used in better ways, either to fund independent news entities or for some other purpose?

Dear everybody hating on the BBC. I have three words for you. American cable TV. Choose carefully :)

—
umair haque (@umairh) November 10, 2012

Does the BBC need to be restructured or dismantled?

The first bombshell to hit what Brits call “The Beeb” came when Jimmy Savile, host of a long-running entertainment show, was accused of having engaged in sexual abuse of children over a span of several decades. The state broadcaster’s show Newsnight had a piece prepared that detailed these allegations, but someone at the organization spiked the story. The director-general of the agency, Mark Thompson — who just became the new CEO of the New York Times Co. — has said he had no knowledge of the incident, but the decision has sparked a loss of confidence in the BBC’s ability to monitor itself.

Just weeks after this crisis, the broadcaster aired a Newsnight documentary about a separate case of sexual-abuse allegations, and identified a prominent MP Conservative, Lord McAlpine, as the perpetrator. Unfortunately for the BBC and everyone involved in the program, the victim later said that his attacker was not Lord McAlpine — and it turned out that the broadcaster had not actually confirmed that McAlpine was involved, nor had it approached the MP about the allegations. The BBC’s new director-general has stepped down after just 2 months in the job, and the agency’s director of news and the deputy director for news have also stepped aside. (Update: As a number of readers have pointed out, the program didn’t name Lord McAlpine but referred to a senior Conservative from the Thatcher era. At least one of the journalists who worked on the documentary identified the subject as McAlpine, however, and that information then spread through Twitter).

Much of the response to these events has focused on how the BBC needs to be restructured in some way: how the head of the news or editorial division should be separate from the head of the business side or the director-general’s office, etc. Former Guardian digital editor Emily Bell, now at Columbia University running the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, does a good job of retracing the steps that may have led to the BBC’s recent journalistic failures. And almost everyone notes that the Beeb is still trusted and in some cases even revered by the British people — but there are those who suggest otherwise:

When I first joined, the BBC was a community of passionate programme makers. Now a labyrinthine, largely unaccountable, bureaucracy. Tragic

—
Martin Hughes-Games (@MartinHGames) November 12, 2012

Do we need a single state-funded source of journalism?

But while the BBC’s decisions in both of these cases deserve all the investigation they are getting both from within the agency and from outside it, it’s worth asking whether the British government — and by extension the British populace — need to be financing a $5-billion organization to produce journalism. And if they do, what should that entity’s purpose be? A similar question could be asked in Australia and Canada, both of which have their own national versions of the BBC (the U.S. also helps subsidize National Public Radio and other public entities, although the majority of their revenue comes from donations).

As even a former chairman of the British broadcaster has pointed out, one of the biggest criticisms that can be made of a state-funded news outlet like the BBC is that it is being paid to compete with private broadcasters and news companies, many of which can barely afford to continue doing business at all, let alone match the vast revenue and resources of the Beeb. Along with its counterparts in Australia and Canada, the BBC has become a powerful force in online news, ranking just below outlets like the New York Times and CNN when it comes to overall audience.

Supporters argue that there is a place for an (allegedly) impartial source of journalism, one that will undertake the kinds of investigative projects that other outlets do not — and that would be a great rationale for the existence of a state-funded news entity, if that’s all the BBC and its counterparts did. But the reality is that they also produce a vast quantity of regular news and entertainment as well. Is that really something that residents of Britain need to subsidize with their taxes?

If governments want to fund the creation of news and journalism, maybe they would be better off finding some way to do that by financing independent entities, the way the Knight Foundation and other non-profit trusts do, instead of propping up anachronistic players like the BBC.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users zawtowers and R/DV/RS

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Coursera, which offers online-education courses, was recently hit with a regulatory freeze in Minnesota, because the rules for education-related businesses in that state require that they jump through a series of hoops, including filing for registration (and paying fees). The state later modified its views on the service after an uproar about these restrictions, but it is unlikely to be the only roadblock the company runs into as it tries to expand. The reality is that in any number of markets, from education to the hotel industry to broadcasting, regulations haven’t kept up with the evolution of the businesses they are supposed to be regulating.

Entrenched industries and regulators are fighting hard

Airbnb is in a similar position to the hotel industry: the application of social features — which allow owners of apartments, houses, trailers and even treehouses to easily find and connect with potential short-term renters — has changed the balance of power to the point where someone with a spare room has the ability to create a peer-powered business with virtually no overhead. That’s clearly a threat to the hotel business, which is using whatever political and regulatory connections it can to put limits on the company, even as its grows larger: Airbnb is rumored to be talking with Facebook investor Peter Thiel about a funding round that would value it at $2 billion.

It’s important to note that the social aspect of these services is crucial to their success. As I tried to describe in a recent post about using Airbnb, the social element isn’t just a nice addition — it is a key part of how it functions, and why the barriers to entry and transaction costs are lowered as a result. If I hadn’t been able to see that an owner was connected to a Facebook friend, I might never have used it (and they might never have accepted me as a renter). Designing this kind of socially-powered service is something I’m going to be talking about with Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference on November 5th.

Uber, the car-scheduling service, has been another prominent participant in this back-and-forth struggle with regulations and an entrenched industry — virtually everywhere the company has set up shop, from San Francisco to New York, it has run into a regulatory morass that is designed to protect the existing taxi and livery industry as much as it is intended to protect consumers. Although New York has been trying to fast-track changes that would make it easier to operate there, the SF-based company was recently forced to withdraw one version of its service.

The service has had problems in San Francisco as well, and is likely to run into similar issues anywhere there is an entrenched taxi industry that is trying to protect its historic market power and profit margins. In New York, for example, taxi “medallions” — which allow an owner to operate a cab business there — sell for $1 million each. That kind of industry isn’t going to appreciate a disruptor like Uber, and in New York in particular the taxi business is a big political player. In many ways, however, Uber is just the thin edge of a larger wedge: also coming are services like Hailo that use an Uber-style service model for the regular cab business.

Disruptive businesses as “regulatory hacks”

As New York-based venture investor Chris Dixon described it in a recent blog post, startups like Airbnb and Uber are “regulatory hacks,” in the sense that they are designed to do an end-run around existing industry regulations — in much the same way the early disruption in telecom was driven by startups which played fast-and-loose with the rules, and eventually forced regulatory change and became the norm. As Dixon puts it:

“Uber is being threatened by the taxi industry, Aereo by the TV broadcasting industry, and Airbnb by the hotel industry… Of course, regulations that truly protect the public interest are necessary. But many regulations are created by incumbents to protect their market position. To try new things, entrepreneurs need to find a back door. And when they succeed, it will all look obvious in retrospect. Today’s regulatory hack is tomorrow’s mainstream industry.”

The list of these kinds of companies is only continuing to grow: Kickstarter and Indiegogo have not only helped entrepreneurs raise millions of dollars outside the traditional financing industry, but they have also helped trigger changes to federal legislation around small-business funding — and have spawned their own offshoots as well, such as Kickstarter-style platforms that focus on specific niches like raising money for amateur athletes. Aereo may not be a typical startup, since it is backed by billionaire Barry Diller, but it is also aimed at disrupting a traditional business (broadcasting) that is tangled in red tape and controlled by an oligopoly.

There are dozens of other startups such as Lyft and SideCar and TaskRabbit that are trying to bring the peer-to-peer model of social business to different aspects of various industries — even custom manufacturing, where platforms like Etsy and others help creators monetize their services without having to go through the usual channels or middlemen. Regulatory restrictions can impede these kinds of solutions for awhile, or even cause one or two to fail, but the tide of which they are a part continues to advance.

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After giving a kind of whirlwind tour of the open-source movement in his talk, including the rise of Linux, Shirky devoted much of his discussion to Github — a kind of crowdsourced platform for maintaining code that Linux creator Linus Torvalds also created, which allows anyone to edit, to “fork” or create their own version, and to track the changes that others make. It’s not a big stretch to get from that idea to the idea of crowdsourcing legislation, which is what Shirky seems to have in mind, and there have already been some attempts at doing this via Github: for example, a German software developer has uploaded all of Germany’s laws to the platform so that citizens can recommend and track changes.

It’s an intriguing idea: that a simple software platform aimed at collaboration could change the way legislation is developed and implemented, much like the process that powers Wikipedia has created a crowdsourced encyclopedia that evolves and changes over time. But is it realistic? There were plenty of skeptics who said Wikipedia would never succeed, and yet it has an excellent track record when it comes to reliability, despite some hiccups in the process, such as the recent incident involving author Philip Roth. That said, however, there are also plenty of critics who believe that the “cabal” of editors who control the crowd-powered encyclopedia have too much authority.

Of course, some would argue that we’re already in that kind of situation with most governments anyway, and therefore Github couldn’t make things any worse. And Shirky is not the only one to make this argument: developer Abe Voelker has proposed a “Github for laws” that would take exactly the same approach to crafting and crowdsourcing legislation. There have also been some initial experiments with similar ideas — including Iceland’s new constitution and similar types of project in Finland and Ireland — which shows that others are also open to the concept.

One of the problems with applying a technical solution like Github to a massive cultural and political process like government, however, is that creating laws — even small ones — is very different from changing a piece of code so that Linux can duplicate Windows-style typefaces, or changing the Wikipedia entry on George Bush. And if even those kinds of prosaic examples can lead to the equivalent of a Linux or Wikipedia holy war, which in many cases they have, what hope do we have that politicians can actually use a similar process to change the way that government works? As Shirky suggests in his talk, there’s also a pretty entrenched bureaucracy that has become part of most governments and likely has no interest in relinquishing that control to the crowd.

In his book “Here Comes Everybody,” Shirky described the potentially massive impact of crowdsourcing and crowd-powered social change, and his admiration of Github seems to be part of an attempt to find tools that will help us deal with the tidal wave of human-driven collaboration. This is something we clearly need, so it’s worthwhile to start looking at solutions — and while Github may not be the answer, at this point just about anything is probably worth a shot.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Fabio Venni

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The impetus for this idea (which would levy a fee of two British pounds (about $3.20 US) on every internet account to create a government investment fund), is abundantly obvious: print-advertising revenue, which most general-interest papers rely on for the bulk of their income, has fallen off a rather large cliff over the past several years, and the rate of decline seems to be accelerating rather than slowing. Paywalls may be picking up some of the slack for a few providers, but they are not enough to fill the gap completely — and so companies are cutting back, and in the case of U.S. papers even shutting down print.

Journalism and newspapers are no longer synonymous

Editors like Leigh — and columnists like Roy Greenslade of the Guardian, who wholeheartedly supports the idea of an internet tax to subsidize print papers — are understandably concerned about the effect that this unprecedented industry decline is likely to have on journalism, which they argue serves a crucial public purpose and therefore can’t be left to the whims of the marketplace. Others in the U.S., including New York Times media writer David Carr, have raised similar concerns about the effect on cities such as New Orleans when their newspaper shrinks in size or stops printing, and can (theoretically at least) no longer hold politicians and other evil-doers to account in the way they always have. As Leigh puts it:

“When the day comes that the newspapers are forced to stop printing altogether, it will be a disaster for democracy. The lean pickings from web advertising on a free newspaper site will only pay for a fraction of the high-quality investigative journalism that commercial newspapers generate.”

There are a whole series of problems with the internet-tax idea, many of which journalist Allan Donald has summarized in a smart and funny post (which, as Chris Dixon points out, imitates a popular geek response to early spam-fighting ideas). Among his points are that such a plan “tries to support a fundamentally broken business model” and “users of the web will not put up with it.” As Paul Carr notes at Pando Daily, the idea of compensating or financing newspapers based on their readership and market share could also worsen some of the existing problems with digital media, since all it would do is encourage papers to boost their traffic by whatever means possible.

But one of the biggest flaws with the tax idea, as Charlie Beckett at the LSE points out, is that it is based on the principle that journalism — of the kind that is deserving of government funding — is synonymous with newspapers. Even if that was the case in the distant past, it clearly isn’t any more: such a plan would leave out a growing number of alternative providers, from non-profit entities like the Bureau of Investigative Journalism to smaller web-only media outlets (some would argue that the Guardian is also a non-profit, but not by design). And these kinds of alternative services and startups, many of whom are trying to reinvent journalism for a digital age, are arguably more deserving of funding than the large newspapers who already have giant market share.

Taxing internet users would do little to “save” journalism

The reality is that the internet-tax plan would do very little to help subsidize journalism that is in the public interest. Instead, it would be used to subsidize a failing business model, one that continues to be based primarily around a dying medium called print. How would that benefit society as a whole? I think Carr is right when he says the industry needs to be more creative in finding a range of small ideas and solutions to their problems, not depending on a massive publicly-funded bailout.

Some of the proponents of the internet-tax idea argue that it makes sense for Britain to take such measures, since a similar structure — namely, a government-imposed TV tax — is used to subsidize the BBC. But whether you believe that a tax on the purchase of a specific consumer product is the appropriate way to do such a thing (which I would argue it is not), creating a single government media outlet for public-service purposes is a very different thing from setting up a fund that would be used to prop up an entire industry.

American newspaper owners like Advance Publications — which has shut down a print paper in Michigan and cut back on printing in a number of other cities — have been criticized for their failure to negotiate the transition from print to digital well, and there is no question that their handling of the move and their digital replacements leaves a lot to be desired. But at least they, and other struggling newspaper chains such as the Journal Register Co. (which recently filed for bankruptcy for the second time) are trying to find a way towards a new model, not asking for governments to subsidize the existing one.

Saving — or rather, enhancing and expanding — journalism is a noble and worthwhile goal, and finding innovative solutions for doing so is a commendable idea. But taxing internet users to prop up a largely print-based newspaper industry is not the same thing. Not even close.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/iQoncept and Flickr user Zarko Drincic

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