Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Julius Genachowski is in a hurry. He is arguing that the commission must act quickly to “restore the longstanding deregulatory—as opposed to ‘no-regulatory’ or ‘over-regulatory’—compact” that governed broadband Internet access services prior to a recent court decision. Such an approach is urgently needed to “restore the status quo,” he claims. If the Federal Communications Commission [...]
I’ve long been a fan of Danny Sullivan, who edits Search Engine Land, and probably knows more about search engines than anyone outside the companies that actually run them. But my respect for his wit, eloquence and perspective has reached new heights with his latest piece: The New York Times Algorithm & Why It Needs [...]
Sen. Amy Klobuchar just released a letter to Facebook demanding the site require “a prominent safety button or link on the profile pages of users under the age of 18″—akin to the so-called “panic button” app launched earlier this week by the UK’s Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP). She doesn’t seem to realize that this [...]
This week on the podcast, Catherine White, graduate student at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she is researching productive participatory discussion, talks about her thesis on the Noisy Idiot Dilemma. White explains the dilemma — how to foster productive online conversation when certain speakers exhibit noisy, unproductive, or unhelpful behavior — and discusses [...]
“Live by the sword, die by the sword.” “Play with fire and you might get burned.” Those are lines that sprung to my mind as I read this FT article noting how Google’s support for ‘net neutrality regulation has transmogrified into a push for “search neutrality.” Such regulation would be aimed directly at Google’s heart [...]
Earlier this year, while I was preparing this mega-filing to the Federal Communications Commission in its “Future of Media” proceeding, I read Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-open: A Free Press for a New Century, by Lee C. Bollinger, who is the president of Columbia University. I had planned on reviewing it since I try to review [...]
Adam and I have been pretty hard on the FTC’s current leadership for pushing to dramatically expand regulation of online data use with little thought to the impact on ad-supported media, while in the next breath opening the door to dramatic expansion of direct government support of media, and all the while seeking sweeping new regulatory [...]
The Second Circuit just threw out the FCC’s broadcast indecency rules—which had led to heavy fines for “fleeting expletives”—as ”unconstitutionally vague, creating a chilling effect that goes far beyond the fleeting expletives at issue here.” What’s ultimately most important about this decision is not what the court did, but what it said: The Constitutional framework that has [...]
Better late than never, I’ve finally given a close read to the Notice of Inquiry issued by the FCC on June 17th. (See my earlier comments, “FCC Votes for Reclassification, Dog Bites Man”.) In some sense there was no surprise to the contents; the Commission’s legal counsel and Chairman Julius Genachowski had both published comments [...]
[cross-posted from BigGovernment.com] In the battle over media and communications freedom, no group poses a more serious threat to a free and independent press than the insultingly misnamed regulatory activist group Free Press. Along with their founders, the prolific neo-Marxist media theorist Robert W. McChesney and Nation correspondent John Nichols, Free Press has engaged in [...]
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.
