Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I don’t get it. Technology journalist Robert X. Cringely, whose work I typically greatly admire, had a confusing editorial in the New York Times yesterday entitled “Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me” in which he makes what appear to me to be contradictory statements about the impact of the Google-Microsoft wars. Commenting on Google’s [...]
We often talk about the problem of having all 50 states impose different regulatory requirements on the Internet, with the most restrictive standard effectively applying to all Internet actors.Fortunately, in the U.S. such efforts can be stamped down either by invoking the “Dormant Commerce Clause” (DCC) in court or by passing ”preemptive federal regulation.” (Unfortunately, most [...]
At George Mason University a while back, I was treated to a preview of some economic research; this time, a paper studying whether or not consumers read the fine print. “Does Anyone Read the Fine Print? A Test of the Informed Minority Hypothesis Using Clickstream Data.” Authored by Yannis Bakos, Florencia Marotta-Wurgler, and David Trossen. [...]
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty turns 150 this year. Published in 1859, this slender manifesto for human liberty went on to become a classic of modern philosophy and political science. It remains a beautiful articulation of the core principles of human liberty and a just society. Anyone familiar with the book recognizes the importance of [...]
“Liberty upsets patterns.” That was one of the many lessons that the late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick taught us in his 1974 masterpiece “Anarchy, State, and Utopia.” What Nozick meant was that there is a fundamental tension between liberty and egalitarianism such that when people are left to their own devices, some forms of inequality [...]
Yesterday this list of 11 undocumented features of Google Chrome OS was posted on Woot!. It’s too funny not to share: Your family photos are accompanied by text ads for skin care and diet plans. Removes all Falun Gong references from your files. Every month, the hard drive is automatically defragged and investigated for anti-trust [...]
The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board has finally made the first big move toward building Recovery.gov. According to Federal Times: GSA announced last night that it has awarded a contract for the Recovery.gov redesign; the $18 million contract went to Smartronix, a Maryland-based IT firm. It beat out 58 other bidders. The first part of [...]
In an earlier post, I mentioned an important new online child safety task force report that has just been released from the “Point Smart. Click Safe.” Blue Ribbon Working Group. It’s a great report and I encourage you to read the whole thing. It was my great pleasure to serve on this task force, and [...]
Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson has an important new book out, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price.” He focuses on the economics of free services, building on the excellent analysis of thinkers like Mike Masnick (whose 2007 essay, “The Grand Unified Theory on The Economics of Free,” succinctly sums up the concept). Following up [...]
Over the July 4th weekend, websites in the United States and South Korea were under heavy assault. As the New York Times reported: The Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department Web sites were all down at varying points over the holiday weekend and into this week, The A.P. reported, citing officials [...]
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.
