Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
As you’ve no doubt heard, Washington D.C. is angling for a takeover of the . . . U.S. telecom industry?! That’s right: broadband, routers, switches, data centers, software apps, Web video, mobile phones, the Internet. As if its agenda weren’t full enough, the government is preparing a dramatic centralization of authority over our healthiest, most [...]
Another great column by the Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Crovitz, who is quickly becoming my favorite tech policy columnist. In today’s column, “Bloggers Mugged by Regulators,” he comments on the FTC’s new disclosure rules for bloggers, which I discussed here over the weekend. Crovitz focuses on the enforcement challenges associated with the new rules and [...]
Last month I wrote about the imminent release of raw stimulus spending data and said that the jury was still out on the Obama Administration’s transparency pledge. Well, we’re now pretty close to a verdict, and it’s not good. On Thursday, Recovery.gov added reports from the recipients of stimulus dollars–contractors and grantees explaining what money [...]
Three cheers for Randall Rothenberg, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) for having the guts to send this splendid open letter to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Jon Leibowitz about the agency’s new disclosure rules for bloggers. Rothenberg’s entertaining and brutally honest letter is a rarity for a trade association [...]
Wal-Mart is often cast as a villain by some labor unions, local politicians and small retailers, but for the average consumer Wal-Mart has been a savior: A relentless price-cutting machine that instantly changes the dynamics of every market it touches. Indeed, when Wal-Mart decides to jump into a sector by offering a new good or [...]
Adam Thierer has been named the new president of the Progress & Freedom Foundation. TLF readers don’t need to be told that he’s a tireless advocate for technology policies that preserve freedom and innovation. He was the driving force behind creation of this blog, for example, and he is a prodigious writer and commentator. Adam [...]
Hey people. You owe me. All of you. You owe me free broadband. I am entitled to it, after all. That seems to be where our current FCC is heading, anyway. And hey, Finland’s just done it, and the supposed Silicon Valley capitalists at TechCrunch are giddy with delight about it. We’re apparently all just [...]
A recent paper by J. Gregory Sidak and David J. Teece does a great job of explaining why, and how, antitrust enforcement should incorporate dynamic competition more explicitly.
This month marks the 50th anniversary of Ronald Coase’s seminal article, The Federal Communications Commission. Coase’s critique of the political allocation of radio spectrum, and his arguments for achieving efficient allocation by allowing the government to sell rights to the spectrum, has had a profound effect on the course of communications policy. While Coase’s ideas [...]
Last night, thanks to Craig’s List and a Web-enabled cell phone, I unloaded two extra tickets to tonight’s World Cup qualifying game between the U.S. and Costa Rica in under an hour. (8:00, ESPN2 “USA! USA! USA!”) Wanting to avoid the hassle of selling the tickets at RFK, I placed an ad on Craig’s List [...]
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.
