Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Over the past year or so, many market-oriented critics of Google, like Scott Cleland and Richard Bennett, have criticized the company for aligning itself with Left-leaning causes and intellectuals. Lately, however, what I find interesting is how many leading leftist intellectuals and organizations have begun turning on the company and becoming far more critical of [...]
My good friend Jim Dunstan will be speaking to the “Games Gateway” meet-up group for the U.S. Mid-Atlantic Region on Dec. 2 at 6:30 pm about the legal issues affecting video game developers. Did you know that enabling gamers to talk via voice while in a virtual world may subject you to FCC regulations? Or [...]
Last week I discussed Barbara Esbin’s new PFF paper about the FCC’s absurd investigation into how the cable industry is transitioning analog customers over to digital. This is an essential transition is the cable industry is going to free up bandwidth to compete against telco-provided fiber offerings in the future. The faster the cable industry [...]
Incidentally, the bureaucratic dynamic I wrote about in my last post also explains why efforts to “reinvent government” to reduce “waste, fraud, and abuse” never work very well. The problem isn’t that there’s no waste, fraud or abuse, or even that these policies don’t succeed in rooting some of it out. Rather, the problem is [...]
Another great essay from Paul Graham: Checks on purchases [at large companies] will always be expensive, because the harder it is to sell something to you, the more it has to cost. And not merely linearly, either. If you’re hard enough to sell to, the people who are best at making things don’t want to [...]
Via Jeff Jonas, who oh-so-carefully assessed the treatment he received in Stephen Baker’s book The Numerati, I came across this NPR interview with Baker. In the latter part of the interview, Baker discusses pretty accurately Jonas’ dissent from the passion for predictive data mining in the national security world. That dissent was given expression in [...]
Important article in the New York Times yesterday in which Brian Stelter wondered if, in the wake of the Lori Drew verdict this week, “Is lying about one’s identity on the Internet now a crime?” It’s still unclear if the case will have such profound ramifications, but it has many quite worried. Stelter quotes occasional [...]
It’s sad that it even needs to be said, but Mike Masnick reminds us that if you’re writing about “Digital Socialism and the Tyranny of the Consumer” then you’re deeply, deeply confused. The “tyranny of the consumer” is the distinctive feature of free-market economies. And if we were going to label someone in the copyright [...]
Over on the Cato@Liberty blog, I’ve done a fairly lengthy write-up of the Google Flu Trends privacy issue. It’s an important problem that I think deserves a little more than dismissal. My conclusion: “The heart of the problem lies not with the current leader in search, or any other Internet innovator. The problem lies with [...]
Remember being in grade school when a classmate’s rabble rousing would ruin it for everybody, and the teacher would hold back the class from going to recess? The other students would moan and groan and justifiably feel that punishing the entire class for one person’s misdeeds was unfair. This is what I fear for the [...]
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.
