Conclusion

Summary

We conclude by considering four objections to our proposal that public policy should maintain and create informational norms.

First: we have done too little. We have only sketched how to create one informational norm. We agree, of course, that we have left a vast amount undone. We have, however, offered a model of how to create informational norms, and one can adapt that model to a wide range of cases in which the task is to maintain or create norms.

Second: we have not, in any detail, shown how to ensure that informational norms implement acceptable tradeoffs. We have done so only in one case, and, even there, we only considered fairness. Our answer again is to appeal to the model we have provided, which incorporates social and political processes to decide tradeoff questions. We see no substitute for that. Those processes generate the detail about how to make tradeoffs.