Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
The European Commission today announced the settlement of its antitrust case against Microsoft concerning the inclusion of Internet Explorer in its operating system. In the settlement, Microsoft has agreed to offer a “browser ballot” in its Windows 7 operating system, which Adam Marcus and I commented on in November. It’s a relief to see that [...]
Watch this video. Then type “My choice for the winner” in the comments. Pass it on.
The headline strikes fear: “House Takes Steps to Boost Cybersecurity,” says the Washington Post. What boondoggle are they embarking on now? Cybersecurity is hundreds of different problems that should be handled by thousands of different actors. The federal government is in no position to “fix” cybersecurity, as I testified in the House Science Committee earlier [...]
Could dramatic increases in myopia (nearsightedness) be used as an excuse to tax e-mail and social networking?
At a public forum held today by the Federal Trade Commission on “Sizing Up Food Marketing and Childhood Obesity,” activists called on Congress to pass legislation that would heavily curtail food marketing to children, including: Rep. Jim Moran’s (D-VA) “Healthy Kids Act” (H.R. 4053) would direct the FTC to conduct a rulemaking and decide what kinds [...]
I’ve ranted in past blog posts about the inconvenience of Ticketmaster’s paperless tickets and have even called them the highway to ticket hell (a nod to AC/DC’s paperless tickets use). I’m in a ranting mood again today, particularly when I was thinking about how they’d frustrate a Christmas gift to my parents for a play [...]
Today I visited the Federal Communications Commission meeting room to attend a workshop on “Speech, Democratic Engagement, and the Open Internet.” Honestly, I think I was stuck in the Twilight Zone, because from what the speakers at this ridiculously one-sided panel had to say: (1) the First Amendment means something entirely different than what the [...]
Three months ago, when the DC Circuit struck down the FCC’s “Cable Cap”—which prevented any one cable company from serving more than 30% of US households out of fear that he larger cable companies would use their “gatekeeper” power to restrict programming—the New York Times bemoaned the decision: The problem with the cap is not [...]
ACT represents the interests of software companies, but today we’ve released a new paper trumpeting the virtues of hardware. We highlight how software developers and computer chip makers increasingly depend on one another for better products. This symbiotic hardware/software relationship is crucial for the sort of exponential innovation we’ve grown accustomed to in the IT [...]
I just finished Ken Auletta’s latest book, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, and I highly recommend it. Auletta is an amazingly gifted journalist and knows how put together a hell of good story. It helps in this case that he was granted unprecedented access to the Google team and their [...]
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.
