Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka Move over, health care reform, climate change, and the economy. Judging by White House visits by various government agency heads, the Obama administration instead appears preoccupied with the re-regulation of communications, media, and the Internet. The Administration has just released logs of all visitors to the White House and [...]
After over five years of blogging (since August 2004), 20+ TLF contributors have authored over 4,700 posts—creating an enormous repository of writing that provides free-market, market-oriented, skeptical, bottom-up, decentralist, cyber-libertarian, and/or Internet-exceptionalist perspectives on technology, communications, media and Internet news & policy. To make it easier to sort through all these posts, and find material [...]
The disabled have much to give thanks for this year—but contrary to common assumptions, it’s not for paternalistic government accessibility mandates, regulations or subsidies (see, for example, the FCC’s November 6 Broadband Accessibility workshop), but for the good ol’ fashioned private sector ingenuity that has made America great. Five broad categories of examples suggest how [...]
Perfect media equality is impossible. There has never been anything close to “equal outcomes” when it comes to the distribution or relative success of old media: books, magazines, music, movies, book, theater tickets, etc. A small handful of titles have always dominated, usually according to a classic “power law” or “80-20? distribution, with roughly 20% [...]
The Internet is massive. That’s the ‘no-duh’ statement of the year, right? But seriously, the sheer volume of transactions (both economic and non-economic) is simply staggering. Consider a few factoids to give you a flavor of just how much is going on out there: In 2006, Internet users in the United States viewed an average [...]
In a recent PFF paper I argued that “We Are Living in the Golden Age of Children’s Programming,” and showed how, despite incessant complaints by many policymakers: the overall market for family and children’s programming options continues to expand quite rapidly. Thirty years ago, families had a limited number of children’s television programming options at [...]
Former Google executive turned Obama administration deputy chief technology officer Andrew McLaughlin made some unfortunate comments at a law school technology conference last week equating private network management to government censorship as it is practiced in China. By many accounts, President Obama’s visit to China was unimpressive. It apparently included a press conference at which [...]
My PFF colleague Barbara Esbin has a great piece about why “FCC Could Mess Up Internet With ‘Net Neutrality’ Rules No One Needs” in a USNews point/counterpoint debate with Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Attack Access Project, who claims such rules “Would Keep the Web Free for Speech and Trade.” Here are her two best [...]
The Internet even makes it possible for me to find Larry the Cable Guy’s “The Story of the First Thanksgiving as Told by my Drunk Grandpa” in about 2 seconds.
Around this time last year, a relative 20 years my senior was asking me what I was writing about and I mentioned how I’d been collecting anecdotes and stats for what was becoming our “Cutting the Video Cord” series here. That series has documented how the Internet and new digital media options are displacing traditional [...]
May 21, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
