Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Today comes news that Senator Kohl has sent a letter to the DOJ urging “careful review” of the proposed Google/ITA merger. Underlying his concerns (or rather the “concerns raised by a number of industry participants and consumer advocates that I believe warrant careful review”) is this: Many of ITA’s customers believe that access to ITA’s [...]
I love listening to podcasts, yet I’m increasingly disappointed with popular tech news podcasts like CNET’s Buzz Out Loud, which despite being staffed by tech journalists, consistently fail to grasp the basic economics of the Net. The latest case of this arose on Episode 1360 of “BOL,” which took on the recent dispute between Comcast [...]
[Cross-posted at Truth on the Market] Here we go again. The European Commission is after Google more formally than a few months ago (but not yet having issued a Statement of Objections). For background on the single-firm antitrust issues surrounding Google I modestly recommend my paper with Josh Wright, Google and the Limits of Antitrust: [...]
In the latest WikiLeaks data dump, around a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables were published online. “Cablegate,” as it is being called, has revealed some rather startling information. Among the tech-relevant secrets, the State Department tasked agents to collect DNA and other biometric information on foreigners of interest. Specifically, U.S. officials were told that in addition to [...]
Late last night, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski made explicit what he’d been hinting for weeks–that he was going to call for a vote in December on the agency’s long-running net neutrality proceedings. Today, the Chairman gave a speech outlining a new version of the rules he has circulated to fellow Commissioners, which will be voted [...]
Last June, when the FCC was careening towards issuing net neutrality rules on its own authority, even on the heels of a tongue-lashing from the DC Circuit in the Comcast decision (holding that the agency lacked authority to impose net neutrality principles on broadband as a deregulated Title I service), Charlie Kennedy (a giant of telecom [...]
Written with Jerry Ellig. Chairman Genachowski’s net neutrality announcement today was very short on details. What we learned is that the Chairman plans to buck Congress and the courts in a drive to regulate broadband. He is proceeding against the wishes of hundreds of members of Congress from both parties that have written the FCC [...]
This morning, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released its eagerly-awaited Preliminary FTC Staff Report on Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: A Proposed Framework for Businesses and Policymakers. As expected, the agency has generally endorsed an expanded regulatory regime to govern online data collection and advertising efforts in the name of protecting [...]
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.
