Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
John McCain cuts an ad: Fox News sends him a nastygram Here’s a way Hillary Clinton can earn some geek brownie points at effectively no cost: As the networks who have promised to (effectively) deliver free presidential debates have shown (CNN, NBC, ABC), even when free, it is still worth it enough to at least [...]
In the heat of the Comcast Kerfuffle last week, Steve R. made some comments that I thought were important. In response to my “Market Meme” post, for example, he said: Regulatory intervention is the outgrowth of companies doing underhanded and unethical behavior on a consistent and long term basis. So if we don’t want regulation [...]
Has anyone actually found anything on the FCC’s website? If so, they should consider themselves lucky. Fcc.gov has long been a source of frustration for me as I constantly find myself going in cybercircles looking for the simplest of documents or information. Apparently, I’m not alone in my frustration — Mike Marcus — a former [...]
A few links to discussions of the current patent reform legislation: From Matt Buchanan’s Promote the Progress; cheaper iPods, fewer cures? Robert Armitage on how the courts have beaten Congress to the punch. And a quote from Robert Cresanti, now with Ocean Tomo: “[Ocean Tomo] will still proceed with the exchange (even if pending Congressional [...]
Forget blogs and podcasts. The Free State Foundation and the Institute for Policy Innovation are hosting a good old-fashioned teraspace policy conference this Tuesday, October 30 in Washington D.C. Titled the “Federal Unbundling Commission?” (you can do the acronym on your own), the theme of the half-day event is the FCC’s penchant for unbundling communications [...]
Wow. A brief 36 days is all it took New York Governor Eliot Spitzer (D) to abandon his stance on driver licensing and New Yorkers’ public safety. As I wrote at the time, Spitzer got it right when he announced that he would de-link driver licensing and immigration status because of the safety benefits to [...]
Just when you think the debate over media ownership regulation in this country can’t get any more absurd, along comes this letter from FCC Commissioner Michael Copps arguing that Rupert Murdoch’s deal for the Wall Street Journal should be blocked to somehow save the nation (especially those poor New Yorkers) from an evil media monopoly. [...]
Over at Ars, I have a new article pointing out that there’s probably an inverse relationship between the number of people on the government’s various terrorist-suspect lists (the GAO just reported that there are now 750,000 people on the largest “watch” list) and the effectiveness of those lists. There can’t be anywhere close to three-quarters [...]
Regulations.gov, the federal government’s centralized regulatory docketing system that I look at in my new transparency paper, recently won an award from Government Computer News for “combining vision and IT innovations with an attention to detail and a willingness to collaborate.” The result of that award-winning combination, however, is not impressing everyone. A few days [...]
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.
