Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
By Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka In a series of upcoming essays, we will be examining proposals being put forward today that would have the government play a greater role in sustaining struggling media enterprises, “saving journalism,” or promoting more “public interest” content. The reason we’re working up this multi-part series is because, with many [...]
Brilliant column from William Jackson on GCN.com debunking “cyberwar”: “The United States is fighting a cyberwar today and we are losing it,” former National Security Agency chief and national intelligence director Mike McConnell wrote in a recent op-ed column in the Washington Post. “It’s that simple.” It is neither simple nor true. Failure to distinguish [...]
What distinguishes pragmatic Internet optimists from their starry-eyed, pollyanna-ish optimist kin is the ability to recognize the real problems raised by technology. More than anything else, that means being able to appreciate great satire on the downsides of the Digital Revolution. Robert Lanham, author of The Hipster Handbook and other satirical classics, offers the definitive guide to [...]
David Burt, who runs the “GetParentalControls.org,” is one of America’s leading experts on parental control technologies, and he has just released the Parental Controls Product Guide: 2010 Edition. It’s an absolutely amazing resource for parents and academic researchers alike. I’ve spent a lot of time researching this marketplace and authored an ongoing report on Parental [...]
That’s basically what FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz told the Association of National Advertisers when he spoke to their “Advertising Law & Public Policy” conference last Thursday. As I noted last week, there’s intense pressure in Congress to pass a financial regulatory overhaul and, unfortunately, the version passed by the House in December—Rep. Barney Frank’s “Wall Street Reform [...]
Andrew Keen recently asked me to sit down and chat with him as part of a new series of video interviews he is conducting for Arts + Labs called “Keen on Media.” You can find the discussions with me here (or on Vimeo here). Keen asked me to talk about a wide variety of issues, [...]
NPR notes that we’re approaching a major milestone in the history of man’s relationship with machines: Nearly 200 years ago, workers in England took up arms against technology. Weavers protested the advent of mechanized looms with violence. Named for weaver Ned Lud, the Luddites feared machines would make hand weaving extinct. The people of Huddersfield [...]
Great op/ed in The Washington Post today: BY THE Federal Communications Commission’s own account, broadband use in the United States has exploded over the past decade: “Fueled primarily by private sector investment and innovation, the American broadband ecosystem has evolved rapidly. The number of Americans who have broadband at home has grown from eight million [...]
I don’t know what the context was, but still funny to hear Howard going off on the FCC … < p style=”text-align: center;”>
—all one paragraph of it—on the Cato@Liberty blog. The upshot: Their promise not to have a national ID database is almost certainly wrong. Sold as a simple quick-fix, it would take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build, encountering untold complexities beyond what we already know.
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.
