GOVERNMENT DATA AND THE INVISIBLE HAND

Yale Journal of Law and Technology Volume 11 Issue 1 Yale Journal of Law and Technology Article 4 2009 GOVERNMENT DATA AND THE INVISIBLE HAND David Robinson Harlan Yu William P. Zeller Edward W. Felten Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjolt Part of the Computer Law Commons, Intellectual Property Law Commons, and the Science and Technology Law Commons Recommended Citation David Robinson, Harlan Yu, William P. Zeller & Edward W. Felten, GOVERNMENT DATA AND THE INVISIBLE HAND, 11 Yale J.L. & Tech (2009). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjolt/vol11/iss1/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Law and Technology by an authorized editor of Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact . Robinson et al.: GOVERNMENT DATA AND THE INVISIBLE HAND GOVERNMENT DATA AND THE INVISIBLE HAND David Robinson*, Harlan Yu* t , William P. Zeller*t, & Edward W. Felten*t," 11 YALE J.L. & TECH. 160 (2009) INTRODUCTION If President Barack Obama's new administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own Web sites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing Web sites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility. During the presidential campaign, all three major candidates indicated that they thought the federal government could make better use of the Internet. Barack Obama's platform went the furthest and explicitly endorsed "maling government data available online in universally accessible formats."1 Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, remarked that she wanted to see much more government information online. 2 John McCain's platform called 3 for a new Office of Electronic Government. But the situation to which these candidates were responding-the wide gap between the exciting uses of Internet technology by private parties, on the one hand, and the government's lagging technical infrastructure, on the other-is not new. A minefield of federal rules and a range of other factors, prevent government Web masters from keeping pace with the evergrowing potential of the Internet. In order for public data to benefit from the same innovation and dynamism that characterize private parties' use of the Internet, the federal government must reimagine its role as an information Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University. Department of Computer Science, Princeton University. Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. I Barack Obama and Joe Biden: Technology, http://www.barackobama.com/issues/technology/ (last visited Dec. 2, 2008). 2 Aeet the Press (NBC television broadcast Jan. 13, 2008), available at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22634967. 3 JohnMcCain.com: Technology, http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/ Issues/cbcd3a48-4bOe-4864-8bel-d04561 c132ea.htm (last visited Dec. 2, 2008). Published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 2009 1 Yale Journal of Law and Technology, Vol. 11 [2009], Iss. 1, Art. 4 https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjolt/vol11/iss1/4 2 Robinson et al.: GOVERNMENT DATA AND THE INVISIBLE HAND 11 Yale J.L. & Tech. 160 (2009) 2008-2009 provider. Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, it should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that "exposes" the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal Web sites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large. Our approach follows the engineering principle of separating data from interaction, which is commonly used in constructing Web sites. 4 Government must provide data, but we argue that Web sites that provide interactive access for the public can best be built by private parties. This approach is especially important given recent advances in interaction, which go far beyond merely offering data for viewing, to providing services such as advanced search, automated content analysis, crossindexing with other data sources, and data visualization tools. These tools are promising but it is far from obvious how best to combine them to maximize the public value of government data. Given this uncertainty, the best policy is not to hope government will choose the one best way, but to rely on private parties in a vibrant marketplace of engineering ideas to discover what works. 1. FEDERAL INTERNET PRESENCE: THE STATE OF PLAY The Internet's transformative political potential has been clear to astute nontechnical observers since at least the mid-1990s, but progress toward that transformation has been sporadic at best. In January of 1995, when the Republicans regained a Congressional majority, they launched THOMAS, a Web site that details every bill in Congress. 5 But by 2004, the site was so out of date that seven senators cosponsored a resolution to urge the 6 it. modernize to Congress Library of The Federal Communications Commission-the agency most closely involved in overseeing digital communications-has 4 Most sophisticated Web sites use separate software programs for data and interaction, for example storing data in a database such as MySQL, while interacting with the user via a Web server such as Apache. Many government Web sites already use such a separation internally. Government sites that currently separate these functions are already partway to the goal we espouse. 5 Library of Congress, About THOMAS, http://thomas.loc.gov/ home/abt thom.html (last visited Jan. 3, 2009). 6 S. Res. 360, 108th Cong. (2004) ("A resolution expressing the sense of the Senate that legislative information shall be publicly available through the Internet."). Published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 2009 3 Yale Journal of Law and Technology, Vol. 11 [2009], Iss. 1, Art. 4 GOVERNMENT DATA AND THE INVISIBLE HAND a Web site whose basic structure has remained unchanged since 2001. 7 Regular users of the system report that in order to obtain useful information, they must already know the docket number for the proceeding in which they (...truncated)