Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on March 2 entitled “Helping Law Enforcement Find Missing Children.” While this is just about the most popular topic for a hearing one could imagine, and I’m as much in favor of finding missing children as anyone, I’m a little concerned to see Sen. Klobuchar presiding over a hearing [...]
[Cross-posted at Truth on the Market] Antitrust investigators continue to see smoke rising around Apple and the App Store. From the WSJ: For starters, subscriptions must be sold through Apple’s App Store. For instance, a magazine that wants to publish its content on an iPad cannot include a link in an iPad app that would [...]
Writing over at Forbes, Bret Swanson notes that the progression of information technology history isn’t going so well for those Net pessimists who, not so long ago, predicted that the sky was set to fall on consumers and that digital innovation was dying. Specifically, Swanson addresses the theories set forth by cyberlaw professors Lessig, Zittrain, [...]
Newsweek has a great single-page spread on Who’s Eating Your Lunch? about the topsy-turvy tech sector, illustrating beautifully our argument that the relentless force of disruptive innovation is the best remedy for incumbent power: AOL has been forced to become a content company and team up with Huffington Post now that we all get our Internet [...]
Loyal readers know of my generally bullish, optimistic outlook regarding the Internet’s impact on society, economy, and even politics. On that last front, columnist Peggy Noonan has a nice piece in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled, “The Internet Helps Us Get Serious.” Serious about politics and political rhetoric, she means. Speaking about how politicians are [...]
Last year I was asked by the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to author a study on models for local online hubs or community web portals. This paper was one of several commissioned by the Knight Foundation to implement the 15 recommendations found in the [...]
That will be the subject of a Cato on Campus session this afternoon entitled: “The Internet and Social Media: Tools of Freedom or Tools of Oppression?” Watch live online at the link starting at 3:30 p.m., or attend in person. A reception follows. The delight that so many felt to see protesters in Iran using [...]
[UPDATE Feb. 2012: This little essay eventually led to an 80-page working paper, "Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle."] In this essay, I will suggest that (1) while “moral panics” and “techno-panics” are nothing new, their cycles seem to be accelerating as new communications and information networks and platforms [...]
ICANN has posted an official “GAC Indicative Scorecard” in advance of the Feb. 28 showdown in Brussels between the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) and the ICANN Board. The “scorecard” is intended to identify the areas where the small number of governmental officials who participate in GAC differ from the positions developed by ICANN’s open policy [...]
Congressman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) will kick off this event with remarks on the Net Neutrality order before TechFreedom Adjunct Fellow Larry Downes presents his analysis of the FCC’s recent Open Internet Report & Order (which he recently delivered as testimony to the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition & the Internet). A panel of leading experts will [...]
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.
