Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I’ve been meaning to say something about this new paper by Renee Newman Knake of Michigan State University College of Law, which calls for a new paradigm to analyze, and then likely regulate, video game content. Knake’s paper is entitled, “From Research Conclusions to Real Change: Understanding the First Amendment’s (Non)Response to Negative Effects of [...]
There was some buzz earlier this year when the White House used the free, open-source Drupal content management platform for Recovery.gov. Now the administration’s marquee Web site Whitehouse.gov will be using it. The AP story linked just above does a good job of recounting the benefits of open source in this application: chiefly, low cost [...]
A large group of privacy advocacy groups and individuals sent a letter to the leadership of the House Homeland Security Committee today, suggesting that the role of Chief Privacy Officer at the Department of Homeland Security should be scrapped. The DHS CPO has shown an extraordinary disregard for the statutory obligations of her office and [...]
I very much enjoyed Dennis Baron’s new book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, and highly recommend you pick it up. Baron does a wonderful job exploring the history of techno-pessimism and the endless battles about the impact of new technologies on life and learning, something I have written about here before [...]
Just read this AP article that reported on a Tuesday hearing of the Ohio Supreme Court about an Ohio “harmful to minors” law. According to the article, the statute makes it illegal to distribute harmful material to minors through “direct communications by people who know or have reason to believe the recipient is a minor.” [...]
Pre-release rumors and press reports were making it sound like the Obama administration let Rep. Ed Markey draft the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to “Preserve the Free and Open Internet.” Maybe there was a last-minute change of plan. There were rumors and/or reports that the NPRM would contain a “viewpoint diversity” mandate and only [...]
by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer, Progress Snapshot 5.11 (PDF) Ten years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman lamented the “Business Community’s Suicidal Impulse:” the persistent propensity to persecute one’s competitors through regulation or the threat thereof. Friedman asked: “Is it really in the self-interest of Silicon Valley to set the government on Microsoft?” After [...]
We’ve talked here before about the dangers of a government-subsidized press as a way of “saving journalism.” But I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite as eloquent on the issue as Seth Lipsky’s editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled “All the News That’s Fit to Subsidize.” Mr. Lipsky is a member of the [...]
Two recent trends evidence the importance of targeted Internet advertising–more money going toward Internet ads, and fewer people that click on display banner ads. First, the good news is that Internet advertising is rebounding (or at least seeing a reversal in the the decline of ad $). Tough economic times has decreased ad dollars among [...]
This morning, I testified before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet about “Video Competition in a Digital Age.” The focus of the hearing was to “examine competition in the video programming marketplace, including access by multichannel video programming providers and consumers to programming both via television 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.
