Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
My most recent Forbes column is entitled, “We All Hate Advertising, But We Can’t Live Without It.” It’s my attempt to briefly (a) defend the role advertising has traditionally played in sustaining news, entertainment, and online service, and (b) discuss some possible alternatives to advertising that could be tapped if advertising starts failing us a [...]
Reason.org has just posted my commentary on the five reasons why Federal Trade Commission’s proposals to regulate the collection and use of consumer information on the Web will do more harm than good. As I note, the digital economy runs on information. Any regulations that impede the collection and processing of any information will affect [...]
Six months may not seem a great deal of time in the general business world, but in the Internet space it’s a lifetime as new websites, tools and features are introduced every day that change where and how users get and share information. The rise of Facebook is a great example: the social networking platform [...]
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 [...]
[Cross-posted at Reason.org] This week Google announced that it is grouping 60 of its Web services, such as Gmail, the Google+ social network, YouTube and Google Calendar, under a single privacy policy that would allow the company to share user data between any of those services. These changes will be effective March 1. Although we [...]
[Cross posted from TechFreedom] Today, the Digital Advertising Alliance, a group of leading digital ad agencies and online ad networks, unveiled a campaign to bring attention to AdChoices, its icon-based system allowing users to opt-out of behavioral advertising. The following statement can be attributed to Berin Szoka, President of TechFreedom: In the 1990s, Congress tried [...]
I thought Todd Zywicki, a senior scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, did a nice job on Judge Napolitano’s “Freedom Watch” show addressing the contentious question of whether government should be regulating food advertising in order to somehow make American kids healthier. Todd pointed out how the advertising guidelines currently being developed [...]
Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein had a terrific column yesterday (Human Knowledge, Brought to You By…) on one of my favorite subjects: how advertising is the great subsidizer of the press, media, content, and online services. Klein correctly notes that “our informational commons, or what we think of as our informational commons, is, for the [...]
[Cross-posted at Reason.org] One of the more critically praised films this year has been Shame, which has been in limited release around the country since December. Although it’s an independent production, the film is being distributed by 20th Century Fox, a major studio, and stars Michael Fassbender, an actor who appears to be in the [...]
I spoke at the MSU/Quello Center’s “Governance of Social Media” workshop on November 11. My talk runs 21 minutes and starts at 1:16:54 in this video. The Q&A begins at 1:41:00. My presentation follows below.
May 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.
