Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Today’s Washington Post has a story entitled U.S. Web-Tracking Plan Stirs Privacy Fears. It’s about the reversal of an ill-conceived policy adopted nine years ago to limit the use of cookies on federal Web sites. In case you don’t already know this, a cookie is a short string of text that a server sends a [...]
You want privacy, do ya’? Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village
What Unites Advocates of Speech Controls & Privacy Regulation? [pdf] by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka The Progress & Freedom Foundation, Progress on Point No. 16.19 Anyone who has spent time following debates about speech and privacy regulation comes to recognize the striking parallels between these two policy arenas. In this paper we will highlight [...]
Microsoft and Yahoo’s proposed deal faces a tough antitrust gauntlet. In today’s The Seattle Times, Jonathan Hillel and I have an op-ed in which we argue that trustbusters should let the deal go through: MICROSOFT and Yahoo want to join forces in Internet search to better compete against Google. But first, they need the blessing [...]
I’ve spent a lot of time here deconstructing and criticizing the proposals set forth by the Free Press, the radical media “reformista” group founded by the prolific Marxist media theorist Robert McChesney. I have been trying to shine more light on their proposals and activities because I believe they are antithetical to freedom of speech [...]
Thanks to comments on my earlier post, Copyright Duration and the Mickey Mouse Curve, I’ve been encouraged to reflect on what would happen if, in fact, Steamboat Willie had fallen into the public domain. Could we then reuse Mickey Mouse, the star of that show, without facing any liability to the Walt Disney Company? I [...]
We’ve discussed extensively the controversy that recently erupted when Apple rejected Google Voice applications from the iPhone App Store. With the FCC sniffing around and tech pundits around the blogosphere weighing in on the merits of possible government intervention, it’s important to remember that jailbreaking an iPhone may be illegal under the Digital Millenium Copyright [...]
More restraint is in order when it comes to the Obama administrations intent to escalate “antitrust” enforcement against business and enterprise in America. A skeptical interpretation of antitrust’s realities—up to and including recent campaigns targeting Intel, Google, XM-Sirius; and earlier campaigns against Microsoft and the AOL Time Warner merger, as well as rejected mergers like [...]
Last year, my PFF colleague Adam Thierer asked whether State AGs + NCMEC = The Net’s New Regulators? Adam noted that NCMEC, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a private non-profit organization, was playing a law enforcement role in regulating child pornography—but without any clear mechanisms for ensuring its accountability and effectiveness. Adam’s [...]
The proliferation of Web 2.0 social media services has magnified the old problem of cyber-squatting: Every new service represents the possibility that someone else might claim your name, or your organization’s trademark, as a user name before you do! This problem is especially significant where user names correspond to vanity URLs, as with Twitter and, [...]
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.
