Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Like a lot of other Americans, I once had a big beef with the U.S. cable industry. Limited channel capacity and poor quality service were the primary reasons for my discontent. I remember the cable system my family subscribed to in the mid-1980s. It was like a Third World government operation at times. And I [...]
The family of a soldier killed in Iraq wants access to his e-mail. Yahoo! says no. Yahoo! is right. Their Terms of Service don’t allow them to give family access to an account after a user dies. Period. And there’s no “really sympathetic requester” exception. Stick to your guns, Yahoo!
Self-styled Internet lawyer Ira Rothken has gotten a settlement from software companies and retailers that should reform the shrink-wrap license conundrum. When the terms of a shrink-wrap license make the license enforceable upon opening the package and include a return policy you don’t accept, how do you decline the terms and return the product? If [...]
The Federal Trade Commission has issued regulations fleshing out the CAN-SPAM Act. Given the impotence of CAN-SPAM to reduce spam, this weighty document can be regarded as regulation without a reason. Indeed, if, like me, you don’t buy the Supreme Court’s commerial speech doctrine, this is not just regulation without a reason, this is speech [...]
Wow, check this out. Ed Felten of the “Freedom to Tinker” blog has written a new P2P program called “Tiny P2P” that is made up of just 15 lines of code! And no single line has more than 80 characters. How in the world is the industry gunna stop this one? Seriously, think about this. [...]
The state of Illinois wants to regulate the sale of video games to minors. I have written about this issue elsewhere, but in general, the problem with measures such as these is that it requires someone in government to define what constitutes “violent” or “sexually explicit” games. Thus, there will certainly be an element of [...]
For those of you who can’t imagine Christmas without a good dose of telecom policy, you should know about the Heartland Institute’s Telecom Reform Conference tomorrow and Saturday at the Hilton O’Hare. It promises to be a good one, with a focus on developments in the states. I’ll be there, speaking on a panel on [...]
The media seemed flummoxed yesterday on the FCC’s order on UNE’s. Certainly not an easy thing to digest, and a scan of headlines shows them all over the board. Typical of the dueling headlines: CBS Marketwatch’s “FCC ruling seen benefiting Bells; critics blast decision“, vs. Forbes’ “FCC Decision ‘Slight Negative’ For Baby Bells“. The substance [...]
Well it seems like UNE-P – that wonderfully hyphenated acronym that in non-telecom speak stands for “pure reselling” – is on its way out. Today’s FCC press release gave us a teaser of the rules that the Commission adopted for network unbundling “open access” mandates. While there was some small reform of access rules for [...]
The Washington Post reports that the MPAA is launching a legal campaign against three file-sharing networks, eDonkey, Direct Connect, and BitTorrent. The Post makes a pretty basic error: BitTorrent is not a company. This should have been obvious from its minimalist web site. They’re an open source project widely popular in the open source community. [...]
May 24, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
