Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Tim Lee responds to my last post on net neutrality by invoking one of my favorite economists, Friedrich Hayek. As a matter of logic, a perfectly price discriminating monopoly can be as efficient as a competitive industry, at least in a static sense, but Tim wonders if any firm can ever know enough to price [...]
A lot of people are talking about this New York Times article on net neutrality, which highlights the effect on Netflix of Comcast launching its own video platform on the Xbox that is exempt from Comcast’s bandwidth limitations. While this policy may indeed result in more customers for Comcast’s video services and fewer for Netflix’s in the short run, [...]
In the lead essay for the “Cato Unbound” symposium this month, I analyze recent political movements that have been aided by Internet-based communication by positing a set of questions, Activists played important roles in bringing down dictators in the Arab world, stopping the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in Congress and electing Barack Obama—just to [...]
The folks at the Concurring Opinions blog were kind enough to invite me to participate in a 2-day symposium they are holding about Brett Frischmann’s new book, Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources. In my review, I noted that it’s an important book that offers a comprehensive and highly accessible survey of the key [...]
There is a Senate Commerce Committee hearing today on online video, and our friends at Free Press, Consumers Union, Public Knowledge, and New America Foundation argue that it should be used to investigate ISP-imposed data caps. If data caps had a legitimate economic justification, they might be just a necessary annoyance. But they do not [...]
In this new Money Morning article, “The Antitrust Curse: What Apple Can Learn From Microsoft, IBM,” David Zeiler wonders whether the antitrust lawsuit filed against Apple and several book publishers by the U.S. Department of Justice last week could open the door to a broader case against Apple or, at a minimum, simply become a [...]
On CNET today, I have a longish post on the FCC’s continued machinations over LightSquared and Dish Networks respective efforts to use existing satellite spectrum to build terrestrial mobile broadband networks. Both companies plan to build 4G LTE networks; LightSquared has already spent $4 billion in build-out for its network, which it plans to offer [...]
The cover story of this week’s The New Republic is a review by Evgeny Morozov of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. In 10,000 words it is more illuminating about what made Steve Jobs tick than Isaacson’s 656 pages of warmed-over anecdotes and Wikipedia glosses. Morozov gets it right when he draws the connection between [...]
Cybersecurity is one of the issues that the President may touch upon tonight in his State of the Union speech, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said he is ready to move on comprehensive cybersecurity legislation soon. This all raises the question: what is the problem we’re trying to fix? In an important new [...]
In the ongoing debate over SOPA, PIPA, and rogue websites legislation, most commentators have focused on what Congress should and shouldn’t do to combat these sites. Less attention, however, has been paid to the underlying assumption that these rogue websites represent a public policy problem. While no one has defended websites that defraud consumers by [...]
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.
