Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Are you a tech policy geek who just can’t get enough Internet policy & cyberlaw books in your life? Alternatively, would you just like to hear two such geeks talk about some of the most important tech policy books out there so you don’t have to read them yourself?! Either way, you might want to [...]
I’ve just published a long analysis for CNET of the proposed legislative framework presented yesterday by Google and Verizon. The proposal has generated howls of anguish from the usual suspects (see quotes appearing in Cecilia Kang, “Silicon Valley criticizes Google-Verizon accord” in The Washington Post; Matthew Lasar’s “Google-Verizon NN Pact Riddled with Loopholes” on Ars [...]
The majority on the FCC seems hell-bent on establishing rural broadband subsidies as a perpetual entitlement program that will never “solve” the rural availability problem because the goalposts will keep moving.
This week on the podcast, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Member of the Icelandic Parliament for the Movement party, and one of the chief sponsors of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, discusses the initiative. She explains how it was crafted, who it would protect and how, and Wikileaks’ influence on it. Jónsdóttir specifically discusses the proposal’s impact on [...]
Reading the 2002 edited volume, From 0 to 1: An Authoritative History of Modern Computing, I came across an interesting history of the first software patent—a business history, as opposed to a legal history. I hadn’t seen this anywhere before, so I’ll recount it here. Luanne Johnson, president (now co-chair) of the Software History Center, [...]
The nice folks at the New York Times “Room for Debate” feature asked me and a group of bright lights to discuss the Verizon-Google agreement on network neutrality regulation, as it stood at various points in the day. Read the comments of Tim Wu, Lawrence Lessig, David Gelernter, Ed Felten, Jonathan Zittrain, and myself. Much [...]
Give up? Both have adopted highly unconventional names in their lifetimes. In Prince’s case, it was the adoption of a symbol to protest Warner Brothers’ artistic and financial control of his output. Following suit, H.R. 1586 has adopted the name, the “______Act of____,” apparently because of the haste with which the Senate wanted to pass [...]
There are few things I find more annoying in the Net neutrality wars than the silly assertion by groups like Free Press and other regulatory radicals that “Net neutrality is the Internet’s First Amendment.” It’s utter rubbish as I have documented here many times before. But now Sen. Al Franken is running around sputtering such [...]
I have a piece on Internet privacy in the Wall Street Journal today. It’s one side of a “debate” on Internet privacy and tracking. I say be careful what you give up if you thwart online tracking—personalization, free content, and other goodies may go by the wayside. My “opponent” is Nicholas Carr, whose identity and [...]
While on vacation last week, I finished up a few new cyber-policy books and one of them was Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake. The two men certainly possess the right qualifications for a review of the subject. Clarke [...]
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.
