Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
The rag-tag army myth has made its return — this time in a front-page story in the Washington Post. In case you don’t remember, I wrote several times last year (here, here, and here) on the persistent myth that advocates of net neutrality were an outnumbered and outgunned “‘rag-tag” army fighting against the odds. The [...]
Openness–in our culture filled with feel-goodery and self congratulation openness is seen as a good thing–a trait that any liberal and modern person should hope to have. But is openness always the best policy? Google sure thinks so. It’s advocating that the 700 Mhz spectrum–soon to be freed up by the transition to digital TV–should [...]
Google’s Policy Blog today makes a succinct argument for why its purchase of DoubleClick should be approved. While I find their reasoning compelling and logical–in fact, I don’t think any justification should be necessary–I find it hard to be sympathetic to a plea for fairness when Google is asking DC to stack the deck in [...]
Last week, my side-project WashingtonWatch.com announced a content partnership with PR Newswire. Press release here. PR Newswire has taken a sitewide sponsorship of WashingtonWatch.com, and it will now distribute federal legislative updates from WashingtonWatch.com, giving the site even greater visibility to media and online audiences worldwide. It’s a terrific pairing: PR Newswire will have increased [...]
Smart comments on the death of newspapers from Ezra Klein: The heyday of newspapers had them operating amid a scarcity of information. The average citizen in Omaha, Tallahassee, or even Los Angeles simply couldn’t collect information from DC or Nairobi, couldn’t call up yesterday’s presidential speech, couldn’t choose from thousands of content sources and millions [...]
The REAL ID Act is, of course, still the law of the land. But with 17 states objecting to, or refusing to carry out, this federal surveillance mandate, its prospects for implementation look bleak indeed. Now, for a second time, the U.S. Senate has declined to prop up the failing policy of herding law-abiding Americans [...]
TLF contributors Adam Thierer and Braden Cox traveled to North Carolina to testify in opposition to age verification and parental consent regulations for social networking sites. Along with Tim Lee, they explain what’s wrong with such proposals.
I don’t know what’s worse: the fact that this guy decided to drive 1,300 miles (from Virginia to Texas) to burn down a guy’s house after the guy called him a “nerd” during an online flame war, or that along the way the moron posted photos online showing the welcome signs at several states’ borders [...]
With the death of the last year’s video franchising-Net neutrality bill, Democrats have now firmly taken the reins on telecommunications policy in Congress. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii., has legislation designed to map out the availability of broadband, or high-speed Internet connections, in the United States, and it passed out of committee on [...]
As Braden mentioned, we were both down in Raleigh, North Carolina this week testifying at a big hearing on mandatory age verification for social networking sites. It was quite a heated battle. The legislation, SB 132, was supported at the hearing by North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper, several of his staff attorneys, a couple [...]
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.
