Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Former TLF blogger Tim Lee returns with this guest post. Find him most of the time at the Bottom-Up blog. Thanks to Jim Harper for inviting me to return to TLF to offer some thoughts on the recent Adam Thierer-Tim Wu smackdown. I’ve recently finished finished reading The Master Switch, and I didn’t have have [...]
Adam Thierer recruited me to contribute to what became the Technology Liberation Front way back in August 2004, when I was fresh out of college and working as a writer at the Cato Institute. My first post was about DRM (I was against it). I remember going back and forth with Adam about whether there [...]
My friend Megan McArdle has a sharp post on the causes of the newspaper’s imminent demise: Journalism is not being brought low by excess supply of content; it’s being steadily eroded by insufficient demand for advertising pages. For most of history, most publications lost money, or at best broke even, on their subscription base, which [...]
There’s been a lot of criticism lately of Chris Anderson’s Free. Malcolm Gladwell didn’t like it. Matt Yglesias had a sharp and critical response, and here at TLF Cord offered a strongly negative take on the book. I haven’t read Free myself yet, but I think I know Anderson’s argument well enough to know the [...]
I wrote a piece about PACER last week, which Katherine Mangu-Ward at Reason was kind enough to link to from Hit and Run. In the comments to her post, a reader asked a reasonable question about the fees you pay to access PACER: “Are you buying the data or paying the court’s bandwidth costs?” Now [...]
I’m taking a course here at Princeton on IT Policy, taught by my advisor, Ed Felten. It’s been an interesting experience. I think it’s safe to say that I’ve spent more time thinking about the topics than the median member of the class, and the class has been an opportunity to re-acquaint myself with how [...]
Like Berin, I tend to think a lot of anti-Google hysteria is over the top. But I think one place where some criticism is warranted is over the impending Google Book Search settlement. Reader Andrew W points us to his recent post on the Google Book Search settlement: Google does not somehow become the exclusive [...]
Almost a year ago, I wrote about the newly-launched Seasteading Institute, which promises to break the cozy cartel of world governments by developing the technology required to found affordable autonomous communities on the open oceans. It’s an audacious plan, and I expressed some skepticism about whether it can be made to work. But the Institute, [...]
Yochai Benkler ponders the death of the newspaper: Critics of online media raise concerns about the ease with which gossip and unsubstantiated claims can be propagated on the Net. However, on the Net we have all learned to read with a grain of salt between our teeth, like Russians drinking tea through a sugar cube. [...]
TLF reader mwendy points me to this Eben Moglen paragraph, presumably as evidence of his anti-libertarian agenda: “…Moreover, there are now many organizations around the world which have earned literally billions of dollars by taking advantage of anarchist production. They have brought their own state of economic dependency on anarchist production to such a high [...]
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.
