Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Do-Not-Track is not inconceivable itself. It’s like the word “inconceivable” in the movie The Princess Bride. I do not think it means what people think it means—how it is meant to work and how it is likely to offer poor results. Take Mike Swift’s reporting for MercuryNews.com on a study showing that online advertising companies [...]
My latest Forbes column notes how “Taxes On Talking Are On the Rise Across the U.S.” with levies on mobile phones and devices skyrocketing. I build my argument around data and arguments found in Dan Rothschild’s excellent recent Mercatus Center paper, which makes “The Case Against Taxing Cell Phone Subscribers,” as well as an important [...]
San Francisco, often the breeding ground for “interesting” public policy proposals, decided recently to back off its mandate the would have required retailers of cell phones to label them with radiation levels and pass out material explaining the level of SAR in each device (SAR= Specific Absorption Rate). This has not been done anywhere else [...]
I was pleased to see columnists George Will of The Washington Post and Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe take on the Internet sales tax issue in two smart recent essays. Will’s Post column (“Working Up a Tax Storm in Illinois“) and Jacoby’s piece,”There’s No Fairness in Taxing E-Sales,” are both worth a read. They [...]
Consumers are buying more and more stuff from online retailers located out-of-state, and state and local governments aren’t happy about it. States argue that this trend has shrunk their brick and mortar sales tax base, causing them to lose out on tax revenues. (While consumers in most states are required by law to annually remit [...]
So a few weeks ago I hit up Adam Thierer, who has done and is continuing to do great work on all things regulation, on some materials for a project I was working on regarding the precautionary principle in the digital space. Turns out Adam was in the middle of his own Digital Precautionary Principle [...]
Yesterday the FBI effectively shut down three of the largest gambling sites online and indicted their executives. From a tech policy perspective, these events highlight how central intermediary control is to the regulation of the internet. Department of Justice lawyers were able to take down the sites using the same tools we’ve seen DHS use [...]
Over at Neighborhood Effects, the Mercatus Center’s state and local policy blog, my colleague Dan Rothschild compares wireless taxes to sin taxes. His analysis is too good not to reprint here in large part: The purpose of taxes is to raise money for necessary governmental functions. To that end, economists frequently prescribe that rates be [...]
A Texas tax official estimates in this story that Texas loses an estimated $600 million in Internet sales taxes every year. Its part of a long-running debate about whether state governments should be able to collect taxes from out-of-state retailers who send goods into their jurisdictions. What happens with the $600 million depends on what [...]
[This guest post is by Joshua Wright (George Mason University) and Geoffrey Manne (International Center for Law & Economics), who blog regularly at Truth on the Market] We’ve been reading with interest a bit of a blog squabble between Tim Wu and Adam Thierer (see here and here) set off by Professor Wu’s WSJ column: [...]
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.
