Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
The Economist magazine has just released an important feature article entitled, “Sex Laws: Unjust and Ineffective.” In an indirect way, the article makes a point that I have been trying to get across in my work on this issue: If you want to keep your kids safe from real sex offenders, we need to scrap [...]
We’ve written a lot lately about Microsoft’s efforts to reinvent itself, first rebranding its Live search engine as the Bing, and then partnering with Yahoo! to make Bing the search engine on Yahoo!’s still-impressive empire of content and services. But if Microsoft is going to beat Google in Search 3.0 and master shifts in the driving paradigms [...]
Five years ago, we started the TLF to report on—and hopefully help to reverse—this dangerous trend of over-regulation of the Internet, communications, media and high-technology in general. We’ve become a full-service technology policy blog that covers complete gamut of public policy issues affecting the future of the Internet and technology. Please join us as we [...]
Adam Thierer recruited me to contribute to what became the Technology Liberation Front way back in August 2004, when I was fresh out of college and working as a writer at the Cato Institute. My first post was about DRM (I was against it). I remember going back and forth with Adam about whether there [...]
One reason AT&T may not like Google Voice is that it allows you to send and receive text messages for free. This has led many to argue that SMS are free to the carriers and they are overcharging. Congress is considering getting involved. Most recently there’s this from David Pogue in the NY Times: The [...]
In the first entry of the Privacy Solution Series, Berin Szoka and Adam Thierer noted that the goal of the series is “to detail the many ‘technologies of evasion’ (i.e., empowerment or user ‘self-help’ tools) that allow web surfers to better protect their privacy online.” Before outlining a few more such tools, we wanted to step back and provide a brief overview of the need for, goals of, and future scope of this series.
Despite my frequent disagreements with his policy conclusions, Farhad Manjooo of Slate is one of the most gifted tech policy pundits around today and everything he writes is worth reading (and I whole-heartedly agreed with his recent article on the high-tech and antitrust). Alas, I find myself again disagreeing with him again today. In his [...]
Herewith another recent addition to my draft book, Intellectual Privilege: A Libertarian View of Copyright, (inspired, in part, by Berin Szoka’s recent claim, “I just don’t know what the right balance [for copyright] is! I’m glad there are others patient enough to try to figure it out. This is why we have economists and… yes, [...]
This video from a puppet maker in Australia has an interesting take on the fear-mongering that often drives public policy for Internet safety. The video does a good job of putting into perspective the real risk to kids of online predation. For instance, we often hear the scary statistic that “1 in 5 children are [...]
Maybe Obama should invite Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer over to the White House for a beer to settle the two companies’ differences! While he’s at it, Obama might want to invite Apple CEO Steve Jobs, too, since the common cause Apple and Google once made against Microsoft now seems to be [...]
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.
