Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
On the podcast this week, Eric Frank, co-founder and president of Flat World Knowledge, the leading publisher of commercial, openly licensed college textbooks, discusses the company and its business model, which he compares to that of Red Hat. In the podcast Frank addresses moral hazards of the traditional college textbook publishing model, the company’s genesis, products [...]
On this week’s episode of the podcast, Clay Shirky, adjunct professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, discusses his new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Shirky talks about social and economic effects of Internet technologies and interrelated effects of social and technological networks. In this podcast he discusses social production, open [...]
Andrew Keen recently asked me to sit down and chat with him as part of a new series of video interviews he is conducting for Arts + Labs called “Keen on Media.” You can find the discussions with me here (or on Vimeo here). Keen asked me to talk about a wide variety of issues, [...]
I published an opinion piece today for CNET arguing against recent calls to reclassify broadband Internet as a “telecommunications service” under Title II of the Communications Act. The push to do so comes as supporters of the FCC’s proposed Net Neutrality rules fear that the agency’s authority to adopt them under its so-called “ancillary jurisdiction” [...]
The Treasury Department today announced that it would grant the State Department’s December request (see the Iran letter here) for a waiver from U.S. embargoes that would allow Iranians, Sudanese and Cubanese to download “free mass market software … necessary for the exchange of personal communications and/or sharing of information over the internet such as instant [...]
Tim Lee points to “The Toyota Recall and the Case for Open, Auditable Source Code.” Knowing how the technology in our cars work is not just a safety issue, but a privacy issue—and maybe even a tax issue.
Clearly many groups contend there’s a “crisis” in journalism, even to the extent of advocating government support of news organizations, despite the dangers inherent in the concept of government-funded ideas and their impact on critique and dissent. Georgetown is hosting a conference today called “The Crisis In Journalism: What should Government Do,” (at which Adam Thierer is speaking), with [...]
Of the many tech policy-related books I’ve read in recent years, I can’t recall ever being quite so torn over one of them as much as I have been about Jaron Lanier‘s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. There were moments while I was reading through it when I was thinking, “Yes, quite right!,” [...]
This looks like a good one to me. An ITIF event tomorrow called “Info-Communism:” A Progressive Path Forward or a Political and Intellectual Dead End? Overheated rhetoric around information policy and intellectual property damages the quality of the debate. In this paper, featured speaker and Syracuse University information studies professor Milton Mueller warns against pouring [...]
Noam Cohen has a great piece in The New York Times today, In Allowing Ad Blockers, a Test for Google, explaining how Google’s decision about allowing ad blocking extensions for the new beta version of its Chrome browser puts Google’s much-ballyhooed talk about openness to the test. So far, Google is passing, with two such extensions (AdThwart [...]
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.
