Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [16]
But in gathering the information for its books, Lonely Planet needs to assure, both itself and its readers, that the reviews it is relying upon are trustworthy. And it strives to earn that trust with a very clear policy: “Why is our travel information the best in the world? It’s simple. Our authors are passionate, dedicated travelers. They don’t take freebies in exchange for positive coverage so you can be sure the advice you’re given is impartial.”
In all three of these cases, these private entities depend for their success upon the public trusting them. So they adopt rules that help them earn that trust. These rules alone, of course, are not enough. But they help. It is because of them that I have reason at least to give the institution the benefit of the doubt. Or, more important, it is because of these rules that I don’t automatically assume financial bias whenever I see something I don’t understand, or don’t agree with. These clear and strong rules cushion skepticism; they make trust possible because they give the public a reason to believe that the institution will act as it has signaled it would act.
These freedom-restricting rules, moreover, are self-imposed. Search results with integrity were a competitive advantage for Google. That’s part of why it made that choice. The same with Wikipedia: The Internet is filled with ad-driven information sites. Wikipedia’s choice gave it a competitive advantage over others, and a community advantage as it tried to attract authors. Likewise with Lonely Planet: It wants a brand people can trust, as a way to sell more books. It therefore restricts its freedom to better achieve its goals.
In none of these cases was government regulation necessary. In none of the cases did some professional body, such as the Bar Association or the AMA, need to intervene to force the companies to do what was “right.” “What was right” coincided perfectly with what was in the best interest of these entities. As Adam Smith famously said, they were “in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of [their] intention.”32
That’s not always true of course. Indeed, as we’ll see, pursuing self-interest alone, without the proper regulatory structure, is often fatal to the public interest. But here, private interests coincide with a public good. Government intervention was therefore not necessary.
I’m sure that with each of these entities, this freedom-restricting rule wasn’t obvious, at least at the time it was chosen. Just at the time Google launched in a big way, the biggest competitor was ad-driven Yahoo. At the time, I’m sure everyone thought the future of Internet search was simply Yellow Pages on steroids. Wikipedians fight all the time about whether the restriction on advertising is actually necessary. And I’m quite sure that the editors at Lonely Planet have at least thought about how much cheaper their production costs would be if the reviewers got comp’d meals and lodging. My claim with each is not that the choice was easy or obvious. It is instead that the choice was made with the belief that the choice, regardless of the cost, was in the long-term interests of that institution.
In each case, these institutions recognized that to preserve a public’s trust, they had to steel themselves against a public’s cynicism. They had to starve that cynicism by structuring themselves to block the obvious cynical inference that money in the wrong place creates. Not money. Money in the wrong place. If properly cabined, or properly insulated, money within an institution (Google, Wikipedia, Lonely Planet) can be fine. It is when it is in a place where, as we all recognize, it will or can or could cause even the most earnest compass to deviate that we should have a concern.
CHAPTER 3
1 + 1 =
There’s a frog at the center of a well-known metaphor about our inability to respond “to disasters that creep up on [us] a bit at a time.”1 The