Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Last Friday’s Cato Podcast was about the free Kareem movement, a campaign to secure the release of a young Egyptian blogger who was jailed for four years for the crime of criticizing Islam, his school, and the Egyptian authorities: The Free Kareem Coalition is an interfaith alliance of young bloggers and college students committed to [...]
Well, it’s been more than 48 hours since my last post blasting the Wu-Skype “wireless Net neutrality” proposal, so I’ve been itching to write another essay about my favorite subject du jour! Luckily, when I arrived home today, I found my monthly copy of PC World magazine in the mail–yes, I am a geek–and randomly [...]
Via Richard Bennett, Wonkette reports the following depressing statistics about the newspaper industry: Net income plunged 6.7%. Classified advertising dropped 22%. Overall ad revenue is down 8%. Circulation is down 2.9% — except for Sunday, which is down 3.2%. Operating income in the publishing division fell by 24%. Craigslist’s CEO says this is because U.S. [...]
Should the FCC enforce net neutrality rules? No, says Google’s top policy executive. According to Andrew McLaughlin, the firm’s global public policy head: “Cutting the FCC out of the picture would be a smart move.” The comments were made yesterday at the Tech Policy Summit in San Jose. As reported in Tech Daily and Communications [...]
I’ve got a lengthy analysis of Rick Boucher’s latest copyright reform legislation. Despite being titled the “FAIR USE Act,” and despite the fact that Boucher’s press release focuses on the harms of the DMCA, the bill itself would do little or nothing to remedy the problems created by the DMCA: If Boucher’s legislation passed, a [...]
On the podcast last week I mentioned that if Kevin Martin’s FCC approves the XM-Sirius merger, one of the conditions it could impose is that the new entity accept indecency regulation that satellite radio is not currently subject to. Adam called this “regulatory blackmail,” and now I’m seeing a pattern. The WSJ reports that Spanish-language [...]
The Pacific Research Institute just published a paper I coauthored on Municipal networks. The study, titled “Wi-Fi Waste: The Disaster of Municipal Communications Networks” reviewed 52 city-run telecom networks that compete in the cable, broadband, and telephone markets. The amount of deception and anti-competitive activity that we found in our sample was appalling and a [...]
Joe over at TechDirt today commented on my post yesterday about public television DTV worries. “James Gattuso,” he writes, “sees a possible sinister motive in the move” to get DTV converters distributed. Joe dismisses the idea that public television stations would try to keep the on-the-air viewers away from cable and satellite, where they may [...]
Yesterday I filed a public interest comment (PDF) in the FCC’s proceeding to create a national public safety broadband network in the 700 MHz band. Not coincidentally, so did Frontline Wireless, a new company started by former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt and former NTIA Administrator Janice Obuchowski among others. In their filing they propose a [...]
Jed Harris has a fantastic post about how peer production introduces a fissure between capitalists and entrepreneurs: Before widespread peer production, the entrepreneur’s and capitalist’s definitions of success were typically congruent, because growing a business required capital, and gaining access to capital required providing a competitive return. So classical profit was usually required to build [...]
February 13, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
