Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
If you’re in the D.C. area, come join the fun next Monday, November 15th, as the Advisory Committee on Transparency kicks off with its first event: The Future of Earmark Transparency (2:00 p.m., 2203 Rayburn House Office Building). The Sunlight Foundation’s Daniel Schuman moderates a discussion that includes Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense [...]
Joseph Isenbergh, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, discusses his new essay about open versus closed operating systems, their respective marketing strategies, and their influence on the smartphone market. Isenbergh talks about early competition between Macintosh, with its closed operating system integrated with its PC hardware, and Microsoft, with its openly-licensed operating system that could be installed on any PC. He discusses the trade-off between open platforms that offer lots of consumer choice and the ostensible enhanced user experience created by bundling software with hardware. Isenbergh speculates about the future of the smartphone market, Apple’s iOS, and Google’s Android. He also comments on VHS versus Sony Betamax recording systems, tie-in strategies in wine-selling, and Blu-ray versus HD-DVD formats.
At BIGGOVERNMENT.com, Seton Motley takes the effort to regulate Internet service provision in the name of neutrality and stomps on it with both feet. If this were high school (and politics really sort of is), Net Neutrality would be sitting alone at lunch — shunned even by the members of the marching band and the [...]
The recent European Commission proposal to create a radical and likely near impossible-to-implement “right to be forgotten” provides an opportunity to do some thinking about how privacy norms should be established. In 1961, Italian liberal philosopher and lawyer Bruno Leoni published Freedom and the Law, an excellent, if dense, rumination on law and legislation, which, [...]
It’s appropriate that Kevin Kelly’s new book, What Technology Wants, was published in the same year as Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget. Although Kelly and Lanier are on opposite sides of the Internet optimist vs. pessimist divide, they come at the issue of technology’s impact on society in thoughtful, but at times quite [...]
A report in the U.K. Telegraph notes that the European Union is seeking to create a so-called “right to be forgotten” online, and has “drafted potential legislation that would include new, unprecedented privacy rights for citizens sharing personal data.” Details are sparse at this point, but according to this new 20-page European Commission document, “A [...]
I’m still digesting the transcript from Tuesday’s Supreme Court oral arguments in the important First Amendment video game case, Schwarzenegger v. EMA. [Full transcript is here.] I thought I would post just a couple of quick thoughts here. [Reminder: here is the amicus brief that Berin Szoka and I filed in the case, and here [...]
Anyone who knows me will attest to my status as an Apple fanboy. (I type this on my new 11″ MacBook Air, which I managed to resist purchasing for a full week after it was announced.) Hopefully they’ll also attest to my ability to put consumer preference aside when considering logical arguments because today I [...]
Last week’s episode of Econtalk featured Russ Roberts talking to Tom Hazlett about Apple vs. Google and open vs. closed business models. Tim Lee has already addressed some concerns about Russ and Tom’s treatment of the topic, which I won’t rehash here. But I did want to comment on this statement by Russ (at minute [...]
Tech issues don’t move the needle in national elections like yesterday’s, but below I’ll make some general observations, followed by a few on winners and losers in issue areas I cover. All in all, I think it’s a good election result. We’re back to divided government. The acute tension between the Republican House and Democratic [...]
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.
