Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I’ve written before about my dislike of “the cloud.” The term implies that there aren’t specific actors doing specific things with data, which will tend to weaken people’s impression that they have rights and obligations when using or providing cloud services. We’re talking privacy problems. When “cloud” services fail, the results can be widespread and [...]
Northwestern Law Prof. James Speta has a new paper out that touches on many of the themes that Barbara Esbin, my colleague at The Progress & Freedom Foundation, has been covering in her excellent work explaining why the FCC doesn’t actually have have the vast, essentially unlimited authority over the Internet that it has asserted [...]
Third on the headlines today on TechMeme (perhaps the leading tech news aggregator) is this headline: “An Apology To Our Readers,” a heart-felt piece from TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington disclosing that a TechCrunch intern had, on at least two occasions, demanded computers from start-ups as compensation for writing favorable blog posts about them on the [...]
Over on the Cato@Liberty blog, I’ve written a piece grading the “high-value data sets” agencies released a few weeks ago on Data.gov. (Agencies are supposed to have “/open” sites up by tomorrow.) The results? Four As, four Bs, seven Cs, eighteen Ds, and eight Fs. Take a look!
Harvard Berkman Center professor Jonathan Zittrain has published another pessimistic, Steve-Jobs-is-Taking-Us-Straight-To-Cyber-Hell editorial building on the gloomy thesis he set forth in his 2008 book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. His latest piece appears in the Financial Times and it’s entitled, “A Fight over Freedom at Apple’s Core. Concerning the recent [...]
Today’s Online Safety Technical Working Group (OSTWG) meeting included some heated debate about whether online intermediaries should be doing more to assist law enforcement to help track down child predators and those producing and distributing child pornography. (It’s not clear whether or when NTIA will actually put the archived video or a transcript online at [...]
Here’s a rather disturbing article published by CNN today. Apparently, many “states mandate that newborns be tested for anywhere between 28 and 54 different conditions, and the DNA samples are stored in state labs for anywhere from three months to indefinitely, depending on the state.” I live in California and we did have our baby [...]
I testified this morning in the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet at a hearing titled, “An Examination of the Proposed Combination of Comcast and NBC Universal.” Among those testifying were Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian L. Roberts, and NBC Universal President and CEO Jeff Zucker. Down below I [...]
I’m at the OSTWG meeting today in DC, filling in for Adam, who’s busy testifying on the Hill about the Comcast/NBCU deal. I’m retweeting along with @LarryMagid and @DeclanM (Mccullagh) using the #OSTWG hashtag. Great discussion of online child safety, privacy, sexting and more! Webcast available here.
The Washington, D.C., fight over “net neutrality” in some ways only scratches the surface of what’s really at stake in the question of government regulation of Internet service providers’ treatment of online content. The downside of permitting FCC and Congressional authority over cyberspace “neutrality” is hard to overstate. A former colleague and friend, now at [...]
January 27, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
