Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I’ve always generally agreed with the conventional wisdom about micropayments as a method of funding online content or services: Namely, they won’t work. Clay Shirky, Tim Lee, and many others have made the case that micropayments face numerous obstacles to widespread adoption. The primary issue seems to be the “mental transaction cost” problem: People don’t [...]
by James Dunstan & Berin Szoka* (PDF) Originally published in Forbes.com on December 17, 2009 As world leaders meet in Copenhagen to consider drastic carbon emission restrictions that could require large-scale de-industrialization, experts gathered last week just outside Washington, D.C. to discuss another environmental problem: Space junk.[1] Unlike with climate change, there’s no difference of [...]
In case you live under a digital rock (whaddyamean, you don’t check TechMeme hourly?), you have probably heard that EPIC filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission Thursday, alleging that Facebook’s revised privacy settings (and their implementation) constitute “unfair and deceptive trade practices” punishable under the FTC’s Section 5 statutory consumer protection authority. Specifically, EPIC demands, in addition [...]
So the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Intel yesterday charging the company with violations of Sect. 5 of the FTC Act (unfair or deceptive trade practices). What you may have missed yesterday, however, is the rather ironically timed announcement from the Obama administration that it is launching new policies to spur more manufacturing [...]
As we’ve noted here before in our ongoing series on “Problems in Public Utility Paradise,” municipal wi-fi experiments and local government fiber investments don’t have a very impressive track record. The Philadelphia experiment, which I have discussed here before many times, has been particularly instructive. As Dan P. Lee documented in this spectacular Philadelphia magazine [...]
The LA Times has come out swinging in a devastating editorial against Rep. Anna G. Eshoo’s (D-CA) Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, passed by the House on Tuesday. As Adam Thierer and I have discussed (here, here, and here), and as PFF’s Ken Ferree notes here, this silly paternalist law would require the FCC to issue rules that [...]
The National Broadband Plan outline discussed by FCC staff yesterday shows that good ideas supported by evidence eventually matter.
As I noted here a few days ago, the Federal Communications Commission held a workshop on Tuesday about “Speech, Democratic Engagement, and the Open Internet.” It was a shockingly one-sided affair with the deck being stacked almost entirely in favor of advocates of Net neutrality regulation. Worse yet, those advocates shamelessly made up spooky stories [...]
My friend Pablo Chavez, Managing Policy Counsel of Google, brings to my attention the fact that the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act (H.R. 3714) was pending before the House today, and I’m happy to note that it passed late this afternoon. The bill, which is co-sponsored by Reps. Schiff and Pence in the [...]
As I pointed out here before (see, “And so the Comcast-NBC Merger Hysteria Begins: Help Me Document It!“), every time a media merger is proposed we hear all sorts of silly Chicken Little predictions of impending doom as well as preposterous conspiracy theories about supposed nefarious schemes to take over the media universe and control [...]
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.
