European vs American regulation

An opinion piece in The Economist provides an elegant contrast between policy approaches on either side of the Atlantic. It notes that there's competition to set global regulatory standards, and that Europe seems to winning. For example, American multinationals that invest in meeting European standards may decide that lighter domestic regulation provides a competitive advantage to non-exporting rivals, and may push for stricted US policies. For global companies, it's simplest to be bound by the toughest regulations in your supply chain.

From Brussels rules OK: How the European Union is becoming the world's chief regulator, The Economist, Sep 20th 2007:

The American model turns on cost-benefit analysis, with regulators weighing the effects of new rules on jobs and growth, as well as testing the significance of any risks. Companies enjoy a presumption of innocence for their products: should this prove mistaken, punishment is provided by the market (and a barrage of lawsuits). The European model rests more on the “precautionary principle”, which underpins most environmental and health directives. This calls for pre-emptive action if scientists spot a credible hazard, even before the level of risk can be measured. Such a principle sparks many transatlantic disputes: over genetically modified organisms or climate change, for example.

In Europe corporate innocence is not assumed. Indeed, a vast slab of EU laws evaluating the safety of tens of thousands of chemicals, known as REACH, reverses the burden of proof, asking industry to demonstrate that substances are harmless. Some Eurocrats suggest that the philosophical gap reflects the American constitutional tradition that everything is allowed unless it is forbidden, against the Napoleonic tradition codifying what the state allows and banning everything else.

The oil industry collects 51 cents in federal subsidies for every gallon of ethanol it mixes with gas and sells as E10

BusinessWeek reports that oil companies are trying to stop the spread of E85, a fuel that is 85% ethanol and 15% gas (Big Oil's Big Stall On Ethanol, 1 Oct 2007).

Some academics claim that ethanol takes more energy to produce than it supplies. This is contested; but even a UC Davis study says the energy used to produce ethanol is about even with what it generates, and that cleaner emissions would be offset by the loss of pasture and rainforest to corn-growing.

There's also a nasty little problem with E85: drivers apparently lose about 25% in fuel economy with E85.

Gardening the Web

I believe that it’s productive to represent the internet/web as a complex human system, but that’s an abstract concept that’s hard to grasp. A metaphor that everyone’s familiar with can enliven this idea: The internet/web as a global collection of gardens, and making policy is like gardening.

Just like a garden, the internet/web has a life of its own, but can be shaped by human decisions. A garden is neither pure nature, nor pure culture; it’s nature put to the service of culture. The “nature” of the internet/web discourse is its technology and commerce, separate from the “culture” of politics and policy. Few would claim that the internet/web should be left entirely to a laissez faire markets; it is also a social good, and some intervention is needed to protect the public interest.

Before delving further into the analogy between gardening and making communications policy, here is a summary of the properties of complex systems which apply to both:

1. Hierarchy: systems consist of nested subsystems with linked dynamics at different scales
2. Holism: the whole has properties different from collection of separable parts
3. Self-Organization: systems organize themselves, and their characteristic structural and behavioral patterns are mainly a result of interaction between the subsystems
4. Surprise and Novelty: one cannot predict outcomes of interventions with any accuracy; ny given model under-represents the system
5. Robust Yet Fragile: a system is stable in a large variety of situations, but can break down unexpectedly

Just like the internet/web, there a many kinds of gardens. They vary in scale from window-sill planters to national forests, in governance from personal to public and commercial. Some objectives of gardening are utilitarian, and others aesthetic; some see gardens as primarily productive and others cultivate them for pleasure. Likewise, some see the internet/web as tool, and others as a source of meaning.

While most of the work in a garden is done automatically by the plants and other providers of ecosystem services, humans impose their desires regarding outcomes; similarly, internet/web innovation is driven by entrepreneurs and technologists according to their own agendas, though governments try to impose their will on the outcomes.

Just like the internet/web, managing a garden is often a futile matter; one can never know precisely how things will turn out. Plants that thrive in the garden next door inexplicably languish in yours. Plagues of pests and disease appear unexpectedly. Unexpected consequences abound. For example, people using imidacloprid to control grubs in their lawns may be causing the collapse of bee hives across North America (more).

Just like the internet/web, one can’t stop things coming over the fence from the neighbor’s garden. Birds, squirrels, slugs, and seeds don’t respect boundaries. A garden is embedded in a larger regional system, and its borders are porous. While every gardener can and should shape the garden to their preferences, there is a limit to their independence. The openness brings both plant-friendly bees and bird-chasing cats. Tension with neighbors is inevitable, but can be managed. There is management at many scales, from a gardener’s decision about what variety of tomato to plant for next year, to state-wide prohibitions on planting noxious weeds.

The old silos of traditional communications regulation are like formal gardens or regimented farming. Everything is neat and in its place. There is relatively little variety in the composition and output of the cultivation, and the managers are few and well-defined. Today’s internet/web is more like a patchwork of allotments and wilderness. Control is decentralized, and there is much more variety.

This description of the internet/web as a garden is of course incomplete – like any complex system, different perspectives of the internet will each reveal truths regarding that system that are neither entirely independent nor entirely compatible. The garden metaphor, built on the analogy of the internet/web as a complex system, captures a lot of the key dynamics. It fits with other place-based metaphors for the web (as a building, market, library, or public venue). There is a resonance with tool metaphors, since gardens are as a means to an end, whether pleasure or production. The link to the “internet as communications infrastructure” metaphor is less direct, but they don’t contradict each other.