Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
It appears that the US government is tip toeing toward reliquishing control of the Internet, and The Register explains in a long and intersting article. I thought these comments were particularly interesting: It was apparent from the carefully selected panel and audience members that the internet – despite its global reach – remains an English-speaking [...]
To wrap this series up, let me recap the reasons that platform monopolies are a bad idea: Advocates of platform monopoly rights argue that such rights increase the profitability of new platform creation, thereby encouraging more R&D spending and innovation. Technological systems are subject to “gains to interoperability,” analogous to the gains from trade. Firms [...]
I got a first-hand lesson in the pace of technological change when I was writing my paper on the DMCA. I wrote the first draft last July, went through Cato’s editing process from October to January, and then the paper was released in March. Between the initial writing of the paper and its publication 9 [...]
Don’t look now, but your VoIP service may be getting worse. According to a report released this week by Brix Networks, an Internet monitoring firm, VoIP quality measurably declined in the past 18 months. Specifically, it found that 20 percent of VoIP calls had “unacceptable” quality, as opposed to 15 percent a year and a [...]
Well, here we go again. Not satisfied with the prospect of merely regulating the broadcast television and radio airwaves, Congress is poised to again introduce legislation that would extend indecency regulations to cable and satellite television. Broadcasting & Cable magazine reports today that Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.) and Tom Osborne (R-Neb.) are introducing a bill, [...]
David Berlind elaborates on the sticky situation “Plays for Sure” vendors will find themselves in if Microsoft launches a device that isn’t Plays for Sure compliant: Short term, Microsoft will have something by the holidays that, from a specification point of view, compares tit-for-tat with one or two devices. But Sasse as well as his [...]
One of the most frequently asked questions in the net neutrality debate has been why big Internet companies like Google and Microsoft support regulation so strongly. If, as they say, an unregulated market would squeeze out the little guy, you’d think these big companies would be dead set against regulation. And if opponents are right, [...]
The Internet tax issue is not as hot and sexy as it was a few years back, but we can still give it a big KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid). Yesterday’s hearing of the Senate Finance Committee shows that there is still some thunderous passion over taxing the ‘Net. The hearing–consisting of two full panels [...]
Remember the digital TV subsidy? Last year, as part of the price for establishing a firm date for broadcasters to return their old (now) analog frequencies by 2009, making them available for new uses, Congress set up a program to subsidize converter boxes for those that don’t already have digital TV sets. More precisely, it [...]
On Sunday I offered one reason that platform monopolies might not stimulate as much innovation as the ideal case would suggest. Here’s another reason: R&D spending often has diminishing returns. The surplus generated by a successful new platform (DOS/Windows, x86, iTunes/iPod, etc) provides an enormous windfall to the company that creates it–a windfall that may [...]
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.
