Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Even an economy in shambles shall not sway the elevation to Federal Trade Commission chairmanship of Jon Leibowitz, an interventionist-minded commissioner who, like all planners, knows better than others how markets should be structured. In several important areas, his inclinations (judging from the cheers emanating from interest groups like PIRG and Center for Digital Democracy) [...]
There has been lots of talk on blogs recently about Cox Communications’ network management trial. Some see this as another nail in Network Neutrality’s coffin, while many users are just hoping for anything that will make their network connection faster.
According to a new connectivity scorecard created by Leonard Waverman of the London Business School, it’s not the pure size of connections that matter, er, it’s how we use our broadband that really matters. As a result, Americans are more “connected” than we think. We come out #1 (followed by Sweden and Denmark). The report [...]
This week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a California video game statute as unconstitutional, holding that it violated both the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the federal Constitution. The California law, which passed in October 2005 (A.B.1179), would have blocked the sale of “violent” video games to those under 18 and required [...]
It’s good to see Google and Microsoft playing nice (for once): Microsoft has licensed the Exchange ActiveSync protocol to several other mobile communications players, including Apple. Horacio Gutierrez, a top Microsoft intellectual property and licensing executive, said in a statement that Google’s licensing of the patents related to the protocol “is a clear acknowledgement of the [...]
Here at TLF we often worry about government encroachment on the latest and greatest technologies. It seems that federal regulators want to control everything that has to do with our beloved and still largely free Internet—how data moves around, whether or not we can encrypt it, how long it is stored, who owns it, and [...]
And so begins another fight over data retention. As Declan summarizes: Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police [...]
ICANN has just released a second draft of its Applicant Guidebook, which would guide the creation of new generic topmore generic top-level domains (gTLDs) such as .BLOG, .NYC or .BMW. As ICANN itself declared (PDF), “New gTLDs will bring about the biggest change in the Internet since its inception nearly 40 years ago.” PFF Adjunct Fellow [...]
My new article on “FCC v. Fox and the Future of the First Amendment” has just been published in the February 2009 edition of Engage, the journal of the Federalist Society. Here’s how it begins: On November 4th, 2008, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the potentially historic free speech case of Federal Communications [...]
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.
