Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Y’all should check out chapter 6 of the annual report of the Council of Economic Advisors, which is on Innovation and the Information Economy. The CEA issued the report this month, but I haven’t read much on it, other than a recent PFF blog posting. The report has a good discussion on contestability theory in [...]
Isn’t it great to see that there are so many people looking out for us? Maybe not. Maybe that’s why we call those folks busybodies. Leading lights of the technorati are calling a feature in Google’s new Toolbar a “strategic mistake” and a “bet the company decision.” Others, more simply, call it “evil” (well, he [...]
Digital rights management is technical term for digital packaging. It is also a digital contract. An article I published earlier this week talks about the future of digital content that draws from both property and contract law. We should not be scared by contract law’s growing role in copyright. Nor should we attempt to provide [...]
VoIP provider Vonage is up in arms about a certain telecom carrier apparently attempting to block customer access to their services. See this Washington Post article for the details. Before everyone runs to the FCC asking for broadband regulation, let me offer a few thoughts on this matter…
Last August I posted big rant about “Is DRM the Devil? The Debate over Digital Rights Management, Trusted Computing and Fair Use in Copyright Law.” In it, I mentioned a forthcoming Cato Institute study by Michael Einhorn and Bill Rosenblatt entitled, “Peer-to-Peer Networking and Digital Rights Management: How Market Tools Can Solve Copyright Problems.” Well, [...]
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing going on in the media and in Washington this week over the announced mergers of SBC-AT&T and Verizon-MCI. The Chicken Little crowd is out in force with their claims that the sky is going to fall on consumers should these mergers go forward. The problem here is that too [...]
Congress is voting this week on increasing penalties for indecency on the airwaves. Heritage has just released this paper on why its a bad idea. The conclusion: “Ultimately, the solution to offensive programming lies not with policymakers but with individual consumers and families. Parents and others unhappy with what they see on the television have [...]
On Capitol Hill and at the FCC’s headquarters in SW Washington, a debate is still going on as to whether cell phones are a substitute for old-fashioned landline service. But at American University in NW Washington that debate is just about over: the university has announced that there would be no landlines in dorm rooms [...]
The timing was eerily reminiscent of the SBC-AT&T merger announcement two weeks ago. A weekend of speculation and negotiation, followed by an early morning announcement of the merger. This time, the happy couple was Verizon and MCI, with MCI being purchased for $6.7 billion. Its still early to gauge the reaction, but so far the [...]
Is there an “e-waste” crisis? WIth tens of millions of PCs becoming obsolete each year, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing about where they (and other obsolete electronics) are going to end up. Under pressure from environmental groups, policymakers from Europe to California have passed (or are considering) laws to solve the supposed problem: ranging [...]
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.
