Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
If you’re like me, you woke up at the crack of dawn today to maximize your enjoyment of World IPv6 Day. Don’t want to miss a minute! If you’re like me, you’ll also say untruthful things as a very dry form of sarcasm. I hope you got that. Whatever your interest in IPv6—learn more by [...]
The U.S. government doesn’t need to pick winners and losers and the last thing we should think about doing is messing up the Internet with inappropriate regulation. Amen, sister! The above quote comes from Victoria Espinel, the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator for the Office of Management and Budget (AKA the Copyright Czar), speaking at [...]
On May 26th, it was my great pleasure to participate in a panel discussion on “Growing Up with the Mobile Net,” which was co-sponsored by the Congressional Internet Caucus and Common Sense Media. It was a conversation about kids’ privacy, online safety, teen free speech rights, anonymity, and the possibility of expanding the Children’s Online [...]
Over at his blog, our old TLF colleague Tim Lee has been discussing the AT&T – T-Mobile merger and the ways libertarians should think about antitrust more generally. In his latest post, he pushes back against a brief comment I posted on a previous essay. You can head over to his site and read that [...]
Larry Downes, who writes for CNet, blogs at Forbes.com and the Technology Liberation Front, and is the author of several books, including most recently, The Laws of Disruption, discusses enforcement of intellectual property rights online. Downes talks about the Protect IP Act, a bill recently introduced into Congress that aims to curtail infringement of intellectual property rights online by so-called rogue websites. Downes argues that forcing intermediaries to blacklist domain names has the potential to “break the internet.” He discusses how the rogue website problem could better be addressed and how the proposed bill could be improved.
In my latest weekly Forbes column is entitled “The Internet Isn’t Killing Our Culture or Democracy” and it’s a short review of the new book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You, by MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser. As I note in my essay, Pariser’s book covers some very familiar ground already [...]
It might be tempting to laugh at France’s ban on words like “Facebook” and Twitter” in the media. France’s Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel recently ruled that specific references to these sites (in stories not about them) would violate a 1992 law banning “secret” advertising. The council was created in 1989 to ensure fairness in French [...]
Earlier this week, Adrian Chen wrote a great exclusive for Gawker about the online market for illicit drugs Silk Road. I strongly commend the piece to you. The site is only accessible via the anonymizing router network TOR, although it is viewable using tor2web. Transactions are made using bitcoins, the virtual digital currency I’ve previously [...]
[The following essay is a guest post from Dan Rothschild, Managing Director of the State and Local Policy Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.] As cell phone ownership has tripled in the United States over the last decade, policymakers have increasingly seen mobile devices as a cash cow. In some states, consumers [...]
Jim posted earlier today about the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference June 14th to 16th, which I’m very much looking forward to attending. If you’re in town for that, though, I’d like to bring to your attention two other related conferences being put on by the Center for Infrastructure Protection and Homeland Security at George [...]
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.
