Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
So a few weeks ago I hit up Adam Thierer, who has done and is continuing to do great work on all things regulation, on some materials for a project I was working on regarding the precautionary principle in the digital space. Turns out Adam was in the middle of his own Digital Precautionary Principle [...]
Following AT&T’s announcement last month of its planned acquisition of T-Mobile USA, pundits and other oddsmakers have settled in for a long tour of duty. Speculation, much of it uninformed, is already clogging the media about the chances the $39 billion deal—larger even than last year’s merger of Comcast and NBC Universal—will be approved. Both [...]
News about the Epsilon breach has spread relatively slowly. The breach of data held by an email service provider is bad—no question—but it’s not terribly consequential. Emails aren’t generally kept private. But the Epsilon story may soon heat up. The presence of an email address on a list creates inferences about aspects of a person’s [...]
Yesterday the FBI effectively shut down three of the largest gambling sites online and indicted their executives. From a tech policy perspective, these events highlight how central intermediary control is to the regulation of the internet. Department of Justice lawyers were able to take down the sites using the same tools we’ve seen DHS use [...]
When legislation or regulation is what you rely on for privacy protection, your privacy protection relies on political consensus staying the same. When political consensus changes, your privacy can go away. Witness the Department of Education’s proposed change to FERPA regulations—the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act—to make more data about students available to more [...]
In the ongoing copyright debates, areas of common ground are seemingly few and far between. It’s easy to forget that not all approaches to combating copyright infringement are mired in controversy. One belief that unites many stakeholders across the spectrum is that more efforts are needed to educate Internet users about copyright. The Internet has [...]
While most folks have been obsessing over their income taxes the past few weeks, Jerry Brito and I have been obsessing about a non-tax: the universal service assessments on our phone bills. More specifically, the Federal Communications Commission has asked for comments on its plan to gradually turn the current phone subsidy program in high-cost [...]
Reputation oils the gears of many markets. People’s expressions of opinion about goods and services help establish the reputations of sellers and service providers. Knowing that they are the subject of reputation systems that they do not control, service providers do a better job on average than they otherwise would. Slacking off even once can [...]
Every lover of liberty and the Constitution should be offended by the moniker “Privacy Bill of Rights” appended to regulatory legislation Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ) introduced yesterday. As C|Net’s Declan McCullagh points out, the legislation exempts the federal government and law enforcement: [T]he measure applies only to companies and some nonprofit [...]
On Forbes this morning, I analyze the legislative and judicial challenges to last year’s FCC Open Internet rules, the so-called net neutrality order. Despite the urgency of Friday’s budget machinations, the House took time out to pass House Joint Resolution 37, which “disapproves” the FCC’s December rulemaking. If passed by the Senate and not vetoed [...]
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.
