Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Have we technophiles utterly deluded ourselves? Worse, instead of enjoying an Age of Innovation, are we actually stuck in a technological Dark Age? One that explains our stagnating living standards and general economic “disarray”? This is the possibility economist Tyler Cowen (George Mason, Marginal Rev, Mercatus) raises in The Great Stagnation, a pithy and provocative [...]
See my new commentary at CircleID — “How to Manage Internet Abundance”: The Internet has two billion global users, and the developing world is just hitting its growth phase. Mobile data traffic is doubling every year, and soon all four billion mobile phones will access the Net. In 2008, according to a new UC-San Diego [...]
This morning, the Technology Committee of the New York City Council convened a large hearing on a resolution urging Congress to pass a robust Net Neutrality law. I was supposed to testify, but our narrowband transportation system prevented me from getting to New York. Here, however, is the testimony I prepared. It focuses on investment, [...]
As you’ve no doubt heard, Washington D.C. is angling for a takeover of the . . . U.S. telecom industry?! That’s right: broadband, routers, switches, data centers, software apps, Web video, mobile phones, the Internet. As if its agenda weren’t full enough, the government is preparing a dramatic centralization of authority over our healthiest, most [...]
In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, I address the once-again raging topic of “net neutrality” regulation of the Web. On September 21, new FCC chair Julius Genachowski proposed more formal neutrality regulations. Then on September 25, AT&T accused Google of violating the very neutrality rules the search company has sought for others. The gist of the complaint was [...]
Leviathan Spam Send the bits with lasers and chips See the bytes with LED lights Wireless, optical, bandwidth boom A flood of info, a global zoom Now comes Lessig Now comes Wu To tell us what we cannot do The Net, they say, Is under attack Stop! Before we can’t turn back They know best [...]
There are two key mistakes in the public policy arena that we don’t talk enough about. They are two apparently opposite sides of the same fallacious coin. Call the first fallacy “innovation blindness.” In this case, policy makers can’t see the way new technologies or ideas might affect, say, the future cost of health care, [...]
See my new Forbes.com commentary on the Microsoft-Yahoo search partnership: Ballmer appears now to get it. “The more searches, the more you learn,” he says. “Scale drives knowledge, which can turn around and drive innovation and relevance.” Microsoft decided in 2008 to build 20 new data centers at a cost of $1 billion each. This was [...]
Over the July 4 weekend, relatives and friends kept asking me: Which mobile phone should I buy? There are so many choices. I told them I love my iPhone, but all kinds of new devices from BlackBerries and Samsungs to Palm’s new Pre make strong showings, and the less well-known HTC, one of the biggest innovators [...]
The supposed top finding of a new report commissioned by the British telecom regulator Ofcom is that we won’t need any QoS (quality of service) or traffic management to accommodate next generation video services, which are driving Internet traffic at consistently high annual growth rates of between 50% and 60%. TelecomTV One headlined, “Much ado [...]
February 14, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
