Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Here’s the first of two essays I’ve recently penned making “The Case for Internet Optimism.” This essay was included in the book, The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet (2011), which was edited by Berin Szoka and Adam Marcus of TechFreedom. In these essays, I identify two schools of Internet pessimism: [...]
My essay last week for Slate.com (the title I proposed is above, but it must have been too “punny” for the editors) generated a lot of feedback, for which I’m always grateful, even when it’s hostile and ad hominem. Which much of it was. The piece argues generally that when it comes to the Internet, [...]
You have to read all the way to the end to get exactly what the New York Times is getting at in its Sunday editorial, “Netizens Gain Some Privacy.” Congress should require all advertising and tracking companies to offer consumers the choice of whether they want to be followed online to receive tailored ads, and [...]
A headline in the USA Today earlier this week screamed, “Hello, Big Brother: Digital Sensors Are Watching Us.” It opens with an all too typical techno-panic tone, replete with tales of impending doom: Odds are you will be monitored today — many times over. Surveillance cameras at airports, subways, banks and other public venues are [...]
Have we technophiles utterly deluded ourselves? Worse, instead of enjoying an Age of Innovation, are we actually stuck in a technological Dark Age? One that explains our stagnating living standards and general economic “disarray”? This is the possibility economist Tyler Cowen (George Mason, Marginal Rev, Mercatus) raises in The Great Stagnation, a pithy and provocative [...]
In response to civil unrest, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. According to the blog post at the link just above, Egypt’s four main ISPs have cut off their connections to the outside world. Specifically, their “BGP routes were withdrawn.” The Border Gateway [...]
Data Privacy Day is January 28. And as Steve DelBianco writes at the NetChoice blog, now is an opportune time for it as Congress, the Commerce Department, and the Federal Trade Commission each have proposed new rights and rules for data privacy. To appreciate Data Privacy Day you must first ignore the Euro-babble description of [...]
(Follow the links for Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV.) In this final post on the FCC’s Dev. 23, 2010 Open Internet Report and Order, I’ll look briefly at the problematic legal foundation on which the FCC has built its new regulations on broadband Internet access. That discussion need only be brief [...]
Hosted by SMU’s Guildhall video game law graduate program, the Game::Business::Law summit is the leading conference in the field. Follow the discussion on the #GBL2011 hashtag. Here’s the make-up of my privacy panel: Moderator Professor Xuan-Thao Nguyen, SMU Dedman School of Law Speakers Jennifer Archie, Partner, Latham & Watkins LLP Andrew S. Ehmke, Partner, Haynes and [...]
Last week, it was my great honor to speak at the 2011 State of the Net 2011 event, where I participated in a panel discussion about the future of the online video marketplace. In an earlier essay, I mentioned how some of the discussion that day revolved around the Comcast-NBCU merger, which had just been [...]
May 22, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
