Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Tomorrow Sen. John McCain, along with five other Republican senators, plans to unveil a cybersecurity bill to rival the Lieberman-Collins bill that Majority Leader Harry Reid has said he plans to bring to the Senate floor without an official markup by committee. At a hearing earlier this month, Sen. McCain criticized the Lieberman-Collins bill for [...]
Sen. Carl Levin wants Facebook to pay an extra $3 billion in taxes on its Initial Public Offering (IPO). The Senator claims the Facebook IPO illustrates why we need to close what he calls the “stock-option loophole.” (He explains that “Stock options grants are the only kind of compensation where the tax code allows companies to [...]
Paying close attention to language can reveal what’s going on in the world around you. Note the simple but important differences between the phrases “open government” and “open government data.” In the former, the adjective “open” modifies the noun “government.” Hearing the phrase, one would rightly expect a government that’s more open. In the latter, [...]
Time Warner Cable (TWC) has announced it will once again attempt an experiment with usage-based pricing (UBP) for its broadband services. (News coverage here, here, and here.) The company gave UBP a shot a few years ago and some consumers, regulatory advocates, and lawmakers howled in protest. The radical activist group Free Press called for immediate [...]
Clay Johnson, co-founder of Blue State Digital and former director of Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation, discusses his new book, The Information Diet. According to Johnson, America’s diet of mass-produced unhealthy food has resulted in an obesity epidemic and we may be seeing the same thing when it comes to our media diet. He believes the problem is not too much information, rather it is the quality of information that people choose to consume. Johnson encourages more responsibility in choosing information intake, similar to what is required to make healthy food choices. He ends by outlining a plan of action and offers tips on consuming “healthy” information.
I’m pleased to report that the Mercatus Center at George Mason University has just released my huge new white paper, “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle.” I’ve been working on this paper for a long time and look forward to finding it a home in a law journal some [...]
Over at Forbes I have posted some thoughts on the new privacy framework (Consumer Data Privacy in a Networked World) that the Obama Administration released today. In my essay, “The Problem with Obama’s “Let’s Be More Like Europe” Privacy Plan,” I hammer home the same point I’ve made here before many times: Regulation is not [...]
The White House’s “Consumer Data Privacy in a Networked World” report outlines a revised framework for consumer privacy, proposes a “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights,” and calls on Congress to pass new legislation to regulate online businesses. The following statement can be attributed to Berin Szoka, President of TechFreedom, and Larry Downes, TechFreedom Senior Adjunct [...]
Congress freed up much-needed electromagnetic spectrum for mobile communications services Friday (H.R. 3630), but it set the stage for years of wasteful lobbying and litigating over whether regulators should be allowed to pick winners and losers among mobile service providers. The wireless industry has thrived in the near absence of any regulation since 1993. But [...]
Ceci c’est un meme. On Forbes today, I look at the phenomenon of memes in the legal and economic context, using my now notorious “Best Buy” post as an example. Along the way, I talk antitrust, copyright, trademark, network effects, Robert Metcalfe and Ronald Coase. It’s now been a month and a half since I [...]
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.
