Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Why do (most) stores have walls? Because, obviously, walls are generally (at least in the developing world) a cost-effective technology for enforcing the value exchange that stores offer customers: products or services for customers’ cash. Open-air markets exist, but tend to be reserved for items cheap enough that the costs of theft fall below some [...]
I’m VERY impressed with my Droid, particularly its browser capabilities. I can even run the backend of WordPress inside the browser (“Look, Ma, no app!”) to blog! (The WPtoGo app helps, as there are a few things that don’t work quite perfectly inside the browser.) My Droid is a pretty darn good substitute for a [...]
A public policy collaborator and sparring partner wrote me just now, saying: “I don’t imagine you guys spend much time looking at media monopolies!” Think about it.
Oh my. So today, as part of its ongoing effort to look like the hip new regulatory agency on the block, the Federal Communications Commission decided to launch a MySpace page. Really. Big. Mistake. I mean, shouldn’t someone over there have known it would take about 2 milliseconds for various cranks to launch into profanity-laced [...]
Seems like everywhere I turn someone is gushing about their new Droid phone, including my TLF colleagues Berin Szoka, Braden Cox, and Ryan Radia, who all had great fun rubbing their new toys in my nose over the past couple of days. And why not, it’s a very cool little device. It makes my HTC [...]
by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer The latest call for “search neutrality” and “cloud neutrality” comes from Andrew Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota’s School of Mathematics & Digital Technology Center—and probably among the top ten most influential academics in Internet policy. In his latest Review of Network Economics article “Network Neutrality, Search Neutrality, and [...]
Mercury News Columnist Chris O’Brien warns Beware the hype around mergers! O’Brien catalogs the many failed that ultimately ended in divestitures in the tech sector in recent years citing data provided by PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Bryan McLaughlin, who estimated tha: in the third quarter, which ended in September, about 40 percent of the acquisition deals involved some [...]
Google has just announced its 2010 Fellowships, open to students 18+ (as of January 1st, 2010) eligible to work U.S. Among the participating organizations are three think tanks home to TLFers: The Progress & Freedom Foundation (Adam & I), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (Ryan Radia) and Cato (Jim Harper). Applications are due December 28th, 2009, [...]
Adam Thierer and I will be participating in two separate panels at the FTC’s December 7 “Exploring Privacy” workshop discussing, respectively, surveys & expectations and online behavioral advertising. Below is the cover letter I filed as part of my comments (PDF & Scribd), along with four past PFF publications and a working paper on the [...]
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.
Federal Agencies Can Easily Manage Settings on Their MySpace Page, but How Should They?
by Adam Thierer on November 13, 2009 · 3 comments
I got some feedback from readers about my post last night regarding the irony of the FCC’s newly-created MySpace page containing some rather vulgar user comments. I wondered if the agency would continue to allow such comments when the agency regulates similar words when they are uttered on broadcast TV or radio. A few people [...]