Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Just before the New Year, Mike Masnick reported: It’s been well over five years since we first heard about a plan in Oregon to attach GPS devices to cars and tax drivers based on how much they drove and the idea hasn’t become any better in the intervening years… but apparently it’s still being pushed. Oregon’s governor is trying [...]
I just posted information about David Clark’s pending lecture on “The Internet Today and Tomorrow” on my blog, DrewClark.com, and further information is also available at the Information Economy Project web site at George Mason University School of Law. (I’m the Assistant Director at the Information Economy Project, which aims to bring the rigor of [...]
The new Whitehouse.gov went live shortly after Barack Obama became president yesterday. It has much of the look and feel of his transition Web site, Change.gov. Among the featured items on the homepage today (they will change regularly, of course) is the site itself and the new administration’s commitment to transparency. However, the actual terms [...]
It appears that the long legal saga of the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 (COPA) has finally come to a close. This morning, according to AP, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the government’s latest request to revive the law, which was stuck down as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment by lower courts [...]
Clearly, something must be done to counter the evil corporate cabal known as “the Cloud Elders” and the “Knights Doppler” who are behind the blatant pro-weather bias displayed daily on the Weather Channel. Perhaps a Fairness Doctrine for Weather Reporting? Thank God the hard-working folks at Fairness in Media unearthed this vicious anti-democratic conspiracy. Weather [...]
Three passages from Obama’s inaugural address stand out as important for the mix of technology policy issues covered here at the TLF. On technology policy (a non-trivial 5.4% of the address by word count): For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, [...]
The European Commission may order Microsoft to strip Internet Explorer from certain versions of Windows, according to a preliminary ruling against Microsoft stemming from a complaint brought by Opera. Opera claims that Microsoft is “abusing its dominant position” by bundling IE with Windows, and consequently denying consumers “genuine choice” among web browsers. If the European [...]
The WSJ reports that a study will be released tomorrow noting an 8% drop in total “paid search” revenues in 2008. Google’s Fourth Quarter results will be released Thursday. While this is clearly bad news for Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other companies that sell ads next to the results of their search engines, it’s also [...]
I was very interested to read Berin’s post about the Boxee, a device I had not heard about until today. I’ve been asking for years why there are no good video jukebox products on the market, so I’m always interested to see new entrants in the market. If Wikipedia is to be believed, Boxee is [...]
This ongoing series has explored the increasing ability of consumers to ”cut the cord” to traditional video distributors (cable, satellite, etc.) and instead receive a mix of “television” programming and other forms of video programming over the Internet. As I’ve argued, this change not only means lower monthly bills for those “early adopter” consumers who actually do “cut [...]
January 27, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
