Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
In several of our previous podcasts (see episodes 34, 35,and 37), we’ve discussed what we’ve called the “Comcast Kerfuffle,” which was the controversy surrounding the steps Comcast took to manage BitTorrent traffic on its networks. Critics called it a violation of Net neutrality principles while Comcast and others called it sensible network management. This week [...]
The introduction below was originally written by Adam Thierer, but now that I (Adam Marcus) am a full-fledged TLF member, I have taken authorship. My PFF colleague Bret Swanson had a nice post here yesterday talking about the evolution of the debate over edge caching and network management (“Bandwidth, Storewidth, and Net Neutrality“), but I [...]
Jack Shafer, editor at large of Slate, is my favorite media pundit. Everything he does is worth reading, and his column this week is no different. It’s entitled “The Digital Slay-Ride: What’s killing newspapers is the same thing that killed the slide rule,” and in it he notes how “Hardly a day goes by, it [...]
Adam’s recent post on Free Press’s hysteria over media consolidation reminds me of the left’s general tendency to move the goalposts when it comes to market concentration in communications markets. Over the last quarter century, we’ve gone from a world in which there were honest-to-goodness monopolies in the telephone and cable markets to a “duopoly” [...]
The intrepid Chris Soghoian has turned up an important wrinkle in Google’s services. Google pulled his AdWords ad pointing out AT&T’s campaign contributions to an Indiana politician after AT&T lodged a trademark complaint about it. Trademark law is for preventing confusion about the source of goods and services. There is no possibility that Chris’ ad [...]
On the Google Public Policy Blog, Richard Whitt’s response to the recent Wall Street Journal article (of now considerable infamy) fails to mention one of the primary benefits of Google’s OpenEdge caching program. Whitt only mentions the following benefits: By bringing YouTube videos and other content physically closer to end users, site operators can improve [...]
The Washington Post reports today that Yahoo! has changed its data retention policy to anonymize user behavior information after 3 months, rather than its previous, much lengthier retention window of 13 months. This move by Yahoo! is likely in response to both consumer demand for greater privacy protection and pressure from government regulators both in [...]
Gov. Paterson unveiled the New York budget yesterday, and among the 137 proposed new and increased taxes is a new tax on digital products. An article in today’s New York Post quotes NetChoice opposing the Governor’s effort to tax music and creativity distributed through the Internet. New York’s approach is two-fold, broadening what is taxed [...]
[This represents a bit of a departure from the traditional format of my ongoing "Media Deconsolidiation Series," but you will see how it ties in...] So, some guy from the (Un)Free Press — the activist group that wants to regulate every facet of the media and broadband universe — has created a scary looking chart [...]
Man, I’d love to bring one of these mobile phone jamming devices into the movie theater with me. I’m getting tired of all the rude jackasses who don’t mute their phone, or even take calls, during the middle of movies. Of course, as this WSJ article notes, such devices violate FCC rules and would disrupt [...]
May 21, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
