Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Over at TIME.com Techland, I write about the newly introduced Stop Online Piracy Act and the renewed push for a “rogue website” law. At a moment when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is urging world governments to keep their hands off the Internet, creating a blacklist would send the wrong message. And not just to [...]
I just posted the following comment in response to Scott Cleland’s piece on Forbes: Why Anti-Piracy Legislation Will Become Law. Scott, have you read my colleague Larry Downes dissection of SOPA over on CNET? The problem isn’t that the bill is too hard on pirates, but that trying to punish piracy in such a crude and [...]
[Cross posted at Truthonthemarket.com] Tomorrow is the deadline for Eric Schmidt to send his replies to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s follow up questions from his appearance at a hearing on Google antitrust issues last month. At the hearing, not surprisingly, search neutrality was a hot topic, with representatives from the likes of Yelp and Nextag, as well [...]
For CNET today, I have a long analysis and commentary on the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” introduced last week in the House. The bill is advertised as the House’s version of the Senate’s Protect-IP Act, which was voted out of Committee in May. It’s very hard to find much positive to say about the House [...]
Yesterday, President Barack Obama announced two nominations to the Federal Communications Commission: Jessica Rosenworcel, replacing Democratic Commissioner Michael Copps, and Ajit Pai, replacing Republican Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker. The FCC faces a unique challenge: Because it regulates the communications industry, essentially every rule it issues implicates the free speech values at the heart of our [...]
On the podcast this week, Alisdair Gillespie, Professor of Criminal Law and Justice at De Montfort University in Leicester UK, discusses his new paper in the International Journal of Law and Information Technology, Restricting Access to the Internet by Sex Offenders. Gillespie discusses whether access to the Internet is a human right, and if so, when that right can be curtailed. He establishes that access to the Internet could be a negative right, then turns to how Internet access can be restricted in the case of sex offenders. Gillespie talks about different ways to prevent these offenders from using the Internet for ill, including complete restriction as well as technological tools similar to parental control software, and the difficulties that arise when trying to implement any one of these schemes.
On Wednesday, November 9th, the Mercatus Center will be hosting an event on “A New Framework for Broadband and the FCC.” It will take place at the Reserve Officers Association from 10:00am – 11:30am. At the event, telecom experts Raymond Gifford, Jeffrey Eisenach, and Howard Shelanski that will examine if a new framework might be [...]
I highly recommend this important new study on “Why Parents Help Their Children Lie to Facebook about Age: Unintended Consequences of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act” by danah boyd of New York University, Eszter Hargittai from Northwestern University, Jason Schultz from University of California, Berkeley, and John Palfrey from Harvard University. COPPA is a [...]
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.
