Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Up until I began doing my reading for this fall’s Criminal Procedure: Investigation course, I largely bought the heroic Warren Court story of privacy and the Fourth Amendment. The story is simple: The Supreme Court, concerned only with helping businesses through decisions like Lochner, had left people unprotected from warrantless searches and seizures. In decisions like Olmstead v. United States (holding [...]
As if we needed another. Over at Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson points out that mandating balance leads to worse reporting.
We’ve spent a lot of time here at TLF talking about the sound economic arguments against net neutrality regulation. We argue that net neutrality regulation will result in worse consequences than leaving the internet relatively unregulated. But to me, the more important point is that net neutrality regulation is itself unjust. Why do I make [...]
Alternate title – Sec. 230: Not just good for the consequences any more! Since Sec. 230 has been a hot topic around here recently, I figured this would be a good time to fire up some controversy and cross-link to an old OpenMarket post. In it, I discuss the Principle of Intervening Action, a principle [...]
One of my favorite recurring themes here on TLF is the definitional dispute/clarification. We point out where a term has been used in many different ways and explain the positives and negatives of the various behaviors described by that term. I just did this with privacy. Of course, it is somewhat pointless to argue about [...]
In my last post, I touted an often-ignored benefit of targeted ads: that they directly enhance the browsing experience, compared to seeing dumb ads. This post argues that no one has a “right to her data” that ad-targeting takes away. “Privacy” is a word of many meanings. The best explanation of the myriad ways the [...]
We here at TLF have long been pointing out the benefits of targeted ads. But recently, we have focused on what I call the “supply-side” benefits – that targeted ads make free content possible by increasing the price advertisers are willing to pay for each pageview and therefore the amount of revenue content providers collect. [...]
I’ve spent the past couple of months interning for a large Silicon Valley technology company doing export compliance work. The company I’m working for does an enormous amount of its business overseas. And it exports, well, technology products, many of which are controlled. Laws ostensibly designed to prevent terrorism and proliferation in fact control way [...]
As I previously reported, the DC Circuit recently upheld a decision by the FCC to forbid customer retention practices used by Verizon to incentivize its customers to stay with the carrier rather than leaving for a VOIP provider. In the earlier post, I analyzed the bad economics of the FCC’s ban. In this post, as [...]
CNN reports: An Illinois sheriff filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against the owners of craigslist, accusing the popular national classified-ad Web site of knowingly promoting prostitution. The sheriff is upset that the site maintains a bulletin board system which is very lightly policed by its creators. It is little more than a forum for people [...]
February 13, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
