Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
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 [...]
(Cross posted at reason.org) It’s rare when the entire Internet industry rises up with one voice. Perhaps that’s why the protest against the House of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act and its Senate counterpart, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), is getting so much attention. In policy circles, usually one segment of the online industry [...]
As if my earlier essay on why “We Need More Attack Ads in Political Campaigns” wasn’t incendiary enough, allow me to heap praise on this outstanding new oped by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen “In Defense of Big Money in Politics.” Few things get me more steamed than when Democrats and Republicans decry “big money” [...]
My latest weekly Forbes column asks, “Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short?” and it explores the dynamics that lead many parents and policymakers to perpetually write off younger generations. As the late journalism professor Margaret A. Blanchard once observed: “[P]arents and grandparents who lead the efforts to cleanse today’s society seem to forget [...]
I enjoyed this new piece by Matt Welch over at Reason about the uses and abuses of the “if we can put a man on the moon” metaphor. “There’s no escaping the moonshot in contemporary political discourse,” Welch notes. Indeed, in the field of technology policy, we hear the old “if we can put a [...]
I’ve never understood why so many people whine about “negative attack ads” during political campaign season. To me, attack ads are just about the only interesting thing that comes out of the early campaign / caucus period. Attack ads are usually chock-full of useful information about candidates and their positions and they typically provoke or [...]
On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee is slated to take up the misleadingly named Stop Online Piracy Act, an Internet censorship bill that will do little to actually stop piracy. In response to an outpouring of opposition from cybersecurity professionals, First Amendment scholars, technology entrepreneurs, and ordinary Internet users, the bill’s sponsors have cooked up [...]
Yes, we pretty much have. That’s the inescapable conclusion following the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic First Amendment decision in Brown v. EMA back in June, which struck down a California law governing the sale of “violent video games” to minors. By a 7-2 margin, the court held that video games have First Amendment protections on [...]
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.
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a controversial bill before the House of Representatives aimed at combating “rogue websites,” isn’t just about criminal, foreign-based sites that break U.S. intellectual property laws with impunity. Few dispute that these criminal websites that profit from large-scale counterfeiting and copyright infringement are a public policy problem. SOPA’s provisions, however, extend [...]
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.
