Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
. . . or does he? Friday afternoon, the White House blog announced that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was posted online for public comment. This is good evidence that the President intends to honor his campaign promise to post legislation online and take public comment for five days before signing it. [...]
Adam Thierer and I have just released a new PFF paper entitled “Targeted Online Advertising: What’s the Harm & Where Are We Heading?” (PDF) about the FTC’s new “Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising.” Adam lampooned some of the attitudes at play in this debate in a great rant yesterday. But we give the FTC credit for resisting calls to abandon self-regulation, and for [...]
One of the biggest problems with the present copyright system is transaction costs, inhibiting Coasian bargaining. If I want to make a movie and have to get permission from dozens of different copyright owners, I may just give up – especially if I can’t locate some of them. (For more on the specific problem of [...]
Here’s some good background and analysis from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) about the history and constitutional issues surrounding the Fairness Doctrine. (Matt Lasar has a summary of it over at Ars). The report, authored by CRS legislative attorney Kathleen Ann Ruane, does a nice job of outlining why, given heightened Supreme Court scrutiny of [...]
A comment on the WashingtonWatch.com blog caught my eye in the moderation queue. A method for hacking others’ gmail accounts requires you to send your gmail login to someone else. Uh-huh. This is a good social hack on the devious yet dumb. (Needless to say, I didn’t approve it.) Need to hack gmail or google [...]
So, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released its revised “Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising” today and it’s bound to generate a lot of commentary from those privacy advocates who seem to believe that we can never go far enough in regulating the flow of information online or limiting commercial marketing. Berin Szoka and I [...]
Monday’s USA TODAY ran a long article discussing the tracking capabilities of the T-Mobile G1 smartphone, which is currently the only mobile device available that ships with Google’s Android operating system. I have a different take on the G1 phone, as I explain in a letter to the editor that appeared in today’s USA TODAY: [...]
Here’s Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation on the closed process being used to ram through the deficit-spending/economic stimulus bill: [I]t is not just Republicans who are being denied access to the bill. Reporters, bloggers, and the general public are being denied an opportunity to review one of the most important pieces of legislation sent [...]
Over the summer, I blogged about an FCC decision to ban Verizon’s practice of offering incentives to departing customers to get them to stay. Yesterday, the DC Circuit upheld that bad decision. When a customer of Verizon’s phone service decides to leave for a VOIP company, Verizon gets a notice that the number is being [...]
January 29, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
