Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Here’s Patrick Ross’s take on today’s Cato conference: I wonder how some of the Cato fellows and alums in the audience felt, then, when twice Cato was welcomed into the fold as a copyfighter. Rep. Zoe Lofgren and the CEA’s Gary Shapiro both did so. Lofgren said she didn’t recall ever stepping foot into Cato [...]
The New Hampshire Senate Committee on Pubic and Municipal Affairs unanimously approved legislation to refuse the state’s participation in the REAL ID Act today. The bill passed the House with a large favorable vote and is scheduled for a full Senate vote within two weeks. Both the Manchester Union Leader and the Concord Monitor editorialized [...]
Yesterday, the CFI wrapped up its examination of the EC’s order to force Microsoft to remove 200 files from Windows to create the wildly unpopular Windows XPN. Now that the Court is done looking at the EC’s attempt to design software code, today everyone is focused on the issue of Microsoft’s intellectual property. Regulators have [...]
This is a quick reminder about two upcoming events: Tomorrow morning is Cato’s conference “Copyright Controversies: Freedom, Property, Content Creation, and the DMCA,” in which some of your favorite TLF bloggers–as well as yours truly–will be participating. If you’re in DC, you should come and ask me softball questions. If you’re outside the DC area, [...]
MoveOn.org. The Consumer Federation of America. Consumers Union. The list of members of the new SavetheInternet.com Coalition are a mostly unsurprising bunch. Mostly left-of-center, many of whom have never met a regulation they didn’t like. But then comes the Gun Owners of America. Whoa. As Cynthia Brumfield over at IPDemocracy put it “huh? how’d they [...]
Apropos Adam’s post about network neutrality and the first amendment, one of the cleverest things about the pro-network-neutrality campaign is the way they’ve been able to subtly portray themselves as defending the status quo against greedy telecom companies. We’re told that network neutrality is “the First Amendment of the Internet,” but “Internet provides like AT&T [...]
A new pro-Net neutrality coalition has formed called the “Save the Internet Coalition.” Hey, who can be against that? Well, I can. You see, this coalition’s idea of “saving the Internet” is premised on regulators doing the saving. The coalition proclaims that “Congress must include meaningful and enforceable network neutrality requirements” in whatever communications reform [...]
Next Tuesday, Nobel Laureate and George Mason Professor Vernon Smith and Prof. David Porter, both internationally renowned experts on the structure of auctions, will be speaking about their experiences helping craft the FCC wireless auctions. They will asses the auction system and discuss how auctions have affected the allocation of radio spectrum. Event deets: Tuesday, [...]
The Heartland Institute’s IT&T News has published my latest article on the DMCA: Intel, which manufactured the processors at the heart of the first PCs, encountered the same kind of unauthorized competition in its platform in the early 1990s. Several companies, including Advanced Micro Devices, began producing chips that could run software designed for Intel [...]
MikeT has a great post comparing the relative performance of Sun’s Java platform and Microsoft’s .NET platform: Microsoft has refused to open up the .NET platform to the same degree as Sun has, and while there is freedom to implement parts of the base specifications, the legal status of any alternative implementation is in limbo [...]
May 16, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
