Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
While preparing my latest Forbes column, “Does the Internet Need a Global Regulator?” I collected some excellent resources. I figured I would just post all the links here since others might find them useful as we work our way up to the big U.N. International Telecommunication Union (ITU) World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in [...]
Friends of Internet freedom, I need your assistance. I think we need to develop a principled, pro-liberty blueprint for Internet policy going forward. Can you help me draw up five solid principles to guide that effort? No, wait, don’t worry about it… it has has already been done! As I noted in my latest weekly [...]
Over at TIME.com I write that we should keep a close eye on moves by Russia, China and other countries to move Internet governance to the UN: All this year, and culminating in December at the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai, the nations of the world will be negotiating a treaty to govern [...]
Rebecca MacKinnon’s new book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, is well-researched exploration of the forces driving Internet developments and policy across the globe today. She serves up an outstanding history of recent global protest movements and social revolutions and explores the role that Internet technologies and digital networks played in [...]
Over at TIME.com, I write that while Congress mulls an Internet blacklist in SOPA, there are efforts underway to reengineer parts of the Net to make communications more decentralized and censorship-proof. These include distributed and decentralized DNS systems, currencies, and social networks, as well as attempts to circumvent ISPs using mesh networking. It’s not a [...]
Here’s a sharp editorial from The Economist about Internet governance entitled, “In Praise of Chaos: Governments’ Attempts to Control the Internet Should be Resisted.” In the wake of the recent Internet Governance Forum meeting, many folks are once again debating the question of who rules the Net? Along with Wayne Crews, I edited a huge [...]
In a speech today before the Internet Governance Forum entitled “Taking Care of the Internet,” Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission, responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe, argued for “a globally coherent approach” to preserve “the global character of the Internet, and keep it from fragmenting.” That sounds good in theory but, [...]
Paul Vixie, a renowned Internet pioneer who runs the Internet Systems Consortium, has written an article in ACM Queue attacking “those who would unilaterally supplant or redraw the existing Internet resource governance or allocation systems.” The publication of this article is a sign of a growing, important debate around the reform of IP address registries [...]
The day many had expected is finally here. This Reuters headline says it all: Senators seek crackdown on “Bitcoin” currency. The main target of Sens. Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin is Silk Road–the online illicit drug bazaar run via the TOR network–but bitcoin, the currency of choice on Silk Road, is also in their sights. [...]
Last November, I penned an essay on these pages about the COICA legislation that had recently been approved unanimously by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. While I praised Congress’s efforts to tackle the problem of “rogue websites” — sites dedicated to trafficking in counterfeit goods and/or distributing copyright infringing content — I warned that the [...]
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.
