Wacky Rookie Wiki Idea or Regulation Writing Revolution?
Skip the rhetoric and go directly to the Wiki.
So just how much might this Internet thing change democracy? Well, to use tax day, April 15, as an excuse to paraphrase President Reagan, we’re paying for this democracy! So let’s find out.
I used to go to my travel agent who went to the airline who went back to the travel agent who went to me who went to the airline which flew me. And I used to go to the record store that went to the record label that went to the artist to get my music.
But now I go to my airline on its Web site and go to the airport and get flown. And I go to iTunes to sample and evaluate and buy music myself. Thanks to the Internet, I save time and money and get products and services that I like better.
So how about going directly to my government to get better regulated?
People elect Congress which writes laws that create departments and agencies that write regulations that control people. Can we cut out the middleman in these cases too and go directly to the source? Yes, I hear the screams of fear of direct democracy and all the lessons we learned over the years about the need for representative democracy. But aren’t constitutional principles and goals like property rights and facilitating interstate commerce supposed to protect us from “bad populist outcomes”?
So here’s a modest idea, at least compared to what the Internet has done to other huge swaths of the economy: let’s use the Internet to help the SEC consider its options to regulate short selling. They’ve already set out five flavors of potential regulation based on two general ideas. They want public comment. Let’s give them crowd sourced public comment.
It is true, as you’ll see from one of the links on the Wiki, that the SEC posts public comment it receives on its own Web site in static document format for the world to see. Would a unified globally crowd sourced comment also be useful? Potentially more useful than a collection of disjointed individual and special interest opinions?
There’s only one way to find out. Go to http://paulwilkinson.com/wiki and give it a try.
Paul, you are on the right path to ways to harness the Internet in the public square and new ways in which it can be used for regulation. Just as there is no there there on the Internet (http://tiny.cc/OxO8I ), do we need to "go to" the government for this? As our founders and Jean Jacques Rousseau realize, WE are the government. There may be elected officials, various branches and numerous agencies, but, at the end of the day, government receives its authority from US and can not exist nor have authority without US. So, could the SEC of the 21st Century, powered by wikis, XBRL and other engines, not become its own agency, removing the intermediary of government for its own regulation by the ultimate market arbiter, people?
Interesting. There has been talk over the years about the SEC becoming a self-financed agency like the Federal Reserve. This would have interesting consequences, including not needing to go to Congress annually for appropriations (in recent years, the SEC has run a profit for the government, sending the fees it collects to the Treasury. Congress then sends back only a fraction of those fees to the SEC).
As capital transitions from primarily money form to primarily knowledge form, the SEC will become more important relative to the monetary authority. Too important to be constrained by a clumsy 535-member board of directors? (House + Senate) Will it need the more customer-focused management mechanism that Internet technology supports?
As of now, you need a federally regulated exchange to provide for open access to the capital markets, but the self-regulatory mechanism underneath federal regulation has worked very well. (The most recent crisis emerged outside of the federal/SRO world in a regulatory netherworld that foreshadows what could happen if regulatory technology fails to keep up with market technology.) Perhaps the future is an SRO model constrained by radical transparency? Takes me back to the Wired article from February, the subject of a prior blog….