Larry’s taught technology law (Northwestern) and business (Chicago, UC-Berkeley) over the years and is currently a nonresident Fellow with the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society. He’s a terrifically nice guy, a great writer, and a welcome ally in the fight for cyber-freedom.
It is my great pleasure to welcome Steve Titch as a contributor to the Technology Liberation Front. Like me, Steve has some journalism blood in his background but came to find that think tank hours were much better (even if the pay isn’t)! He has been a telecom and IT policy analyst for the Reason Foundation since 2005 and you can find a collection of his past work with Reason here.
Previously he was a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute and managing editor of Heartland IT and Telecom News. He has published research reports and editorials on a wide array of issues that are of interest to TLF readers, including: municipal broadband, network neutrality, universal service and telecom taxes. We very much look forward to his contributions here.
After over five years of blogging (since August 2004), 20+ TLF contributors have authored over 4,700 posts—creating an enormous repository of writing that provides free-market, market-oriented, skeptical, bottom-up, decentralist, cyber-libertarian, and/or Internet-exceptionalist perspectives on technology, communications, media and Internet news & policy.
To make it easier to sort through all these posts, and find material relevant to your quirkiest interests, just add our new search plug-in to Firefox. Firefox users, click here and then click on “Technology Liberation Front.” Check the box to “start using it right away,” and our custom search engine (powered by Google) will appear immediately in the drop-down of search engines under your search box (without having to restart Firefox), like so:
You can change where our search engine appears by clicking on “managed search engines” at the bottom of the drop down (not shown here). Please let us know if you have any problems with the search engine, but it should work exactly the same way the search engine on the TLF itself works (near the top of column 2 just under the clenched fist graphic).
You can create your own search plug-ins, accessible through Mozilla’s database, here. The process should take just a few minutes.
P.S. Microsoft will let users add a custom search engine to Internet Explorer 7 & 8 here (instructions), but hasn’t made it easy for people like me to add the custom search engines to the IE Gallery so that other users can easily find and add the search engine with a single click.
Google has just announced its 2010 Fellowships, open to students 18+ (as of January 1st, 2010) eligible to work U.S. Among the participating organizations are three think tanks home to TLFers: The Progress & Freedom Foundation (Adam & I), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (Ryan Radia) and Cato (Jim Harper). Applications are due December 28th, 2009, so apply today to help us in the fight for real Internet freedom!
TLF friends, I have an announcement: Today the Mercatus Center at George Mason University is launching a new Technology Policy Program, which I will be directing. Perhaps more exciting for TLF readers, though, is that we’re also launching a new blog and podcast.
The new site is called Surprisingly Free, and it will focus on the intersection of technology, policy, and economics. We’ll feature commentary from Mercatus and GMU scholars, guest bloggers, and aggregated posts from other academics around the country.
The podcast is imaginatively called Surprisingly Free Conversations and it’s modeled after Russ Robert’s excellent Econtalk. The format is a weekly in-depth one-on-one conversation with a thinker or entrepreneur in the tech field. The first episode is up and features TLF veteran Tim Lee on bottom-up processes, innovation, and the future of news. Check it out, and please subscribe in iTunes.
We’re looking forward to engaging the tech policy discussion online from a law and econ academic perspective, and we hope you’ll join us for the ride. I look forward to your feedback!
Google today unveiled the Data Liberation Front, a team of engineers in Chicago dedicated to ensuring that Google build “liberated products”—ones that have “built in features that make it easy (and free) to remove your data from the product in the event that you’d like to take it elsewhere.” We’ve spent a lot of time here warning about the dangers of Googlephobia, but now that Google has brazenly appropriated the TLF’s unique mock-Communist iconography, we’re starting to think that Jeff Chester and Scott Cleland may be right: Maybe Google really is trying to take over the world!
But seriously… We heartily agree with our Data Liberation Front comrades that users should be fully empowered to switch from one service to another online. This kind of competition is clearly the best protection for consumers in the Digital Age. Making switching easy should assuage not just antitrust concerns, but also concerns about how much privacy or security each web service offers to its users, no matter how big its market share: If you don’t like what a service offers, just take your data and leave! Who needs the government micro-managing the Internet when users have that kind of control?
Viva la (Technology) Revolution!
P.S. In case you haven’t seen it the Monty Python video we’re all riffing on:
It’s my pleasure to welcome Julian Sanchez to the Technology Liberation Front as a regular contributor. Julian recently joined the Cato Institute as a Research Fellow and he previously spent time at Reason and Ars Technica, where he served as Washington Editor.
Although he won’t be spending all his time writing about technology policy issues at Cato, he will still be active on that front. With his impressive knowledge of digital technology and his formidable journalistic skills, Julian will make an excellent addition to our merry band of cyber-libertarian rebels here at the Tech Liberation Front.
You might have noticed that we’ve added a Tweetmeme button at the top of each TLF post showing how many times each post has been “retweeted” on Twitter. If you like a TLF post, please take a second to retweet it. Retweeting is an easy way to spread the TLF’s message that politicians should keep their hands off the ‘Net and everything else related to technology! Here are three ways you can help us with viral marketing the message of technology freedom:
If you’re already signed into Twitter, clicking the green “retweet” button will take you to Twitter with a retweet ready to go (“RT @techliberation <post title> <tinyurl>”). You just have to click “Update.”
You can make retweeting even easier—just one click!—by connecting your Twitter account with Tweetmeme. Just sign in to Tweetmeme with your Twitter log-in and select “Allow” to enable TweetMeme to automatically send your retweets to your Twitter account.
You can tweet your comments on our posts by logging in with your Twitter account or using a Disqus account (assuming you’ve linked Twitter to your Disqus Profile). Each tweeted comment will count as a retweet of the post.
If you click the gray tweetcount button, you’ll be taken to Tweetmeme statistics about that particular post. One of my posts last week really took off, getting over 150 retweets! You can follow the TLF on twitter here and find links to individual TLF authors’ feeds here.
If you’re not already on Twitter, you can use but Tweet counts as an indicator of which TLF posts are hottest. But what are you waiting for, anyway? You’d better claim your name on Twitter before someone else does! It’s easy to set up an account and free, of course, and you can add followers from your webmail contacts. If nothing else, you can easily pipe your Tweets into Facebook as status updates. If you think Twitter is a stupid fad, Kevin Spacey and David Letterman may agree with you. But what do they really know about technology?
I’m pleased to welcome Brooke Oberwetter back to the TLF after 2.5 year stint working for The Man. Make no mistake about it, she’s a hard-core TechLiberationista, having worked as a policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and research assistant at the Cato Institute. She’s now a freelance writer in Washington, DC. (In fact, she lives just down the street from me on the Yuppie Frontier of Shaw!)
Brooke achieved international celebrity as “The Jefferson 1″ after she was arrested in a non-violent, silent iPod-toting flashmob celebration of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday at the Jefferson Memorial on April 13, 2008. I was there that night to see the petty tyranny of the State, that Coldest of all Cold Monsters, in action. I can only say that we couldn’t have asked for a better or more articulate martyr for the cause of Liberty. See for yourself what happened:
Ahoy, TLFers! Looking for a way to do your part for the Cyber-Libertarian Resistance?
We’ve recently upgraded the site with a new look developed by our own Jerry Brito (preserving PJ Doland’s iconic art work) based on the Thesis Theme for Wordpress. We now need help customizing Thesis to improve the functionality of the site—like allowing users to access lists of content sorted by category, author or tag. If you think you might be able to help, please drop me a line at bszoka [at] pff [dot] org. We’d be very grateful for your help!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
It’s a great honor and pleasure for me to welcome Larry Downes to the TLF. Larry coined the term “Killer App” in his 1998 book, Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance. He’s written a few great pieces for CNET recently. And you can find our more about him at his website.
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TLF friends, I have an announcement: Today the Mercatus Center at George Mason University is launching a new Technology Policy Program, which I will be directing. Perhaps more exciting for TLF readers, though, is that we’re also launching a new blog and podcast.
It’s my pleasure to welcome Julian Sanchez to the Technology Liberation Front as a regular contributor. Julian 
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
