Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I received a mailing (see poorly taken iPhone photo) from Comcast a few days ago and I thought it was worth talking about from a libertarian perspective. I’m all for companies taking advantage of the digital changeover to make a little extra scratch, so long as they’re honest in doing so. This mailer never explicitly [...]
A new coalition, NoChokePoints, has been formed to lobby Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to further regulate the prices that incumbent telephone companies (Regional Bell Operating Companies or Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers) can charge for special access services purchased by businesses and institutions. Special access circuits are dedicated, private lines. For example, Sprint purchases [...]
Small cellphone operators want Congress or the Federal Communications Commission to prohibit larger carriers from becoming exclusive providers of popular handsets, like the Apple iPhone (AT&T), Blackberry Storm (Verizon Wireless), Palm Pre (Sprint) and Samsung Behold (T-Mobile). John E. Rooney, President and CEO of United States Cellular Corp., testified at a recent Senate Commerce Committee [...]
I previously lauded the Sunlight Foundation for its intention to bid on the contract for updating Recovery.gov. There’s been extensive excessive discussion of it on the Open House Project Google group. The general theme among the one or two critics has been “leave the incompetence to the experts.” They’ve been a bit curmedgeonly, frankly. But [...]
It’s fascinating to continue watching developments in Iran via Twitter and other social media. The fact that Twitter delayed a scheduled outage to late-night Tehran time was laudable, but contrary to a growing belief it wasn’t done at the behest of the State Department. It was done at the behest of Twitter users. Twitter makes [...]
Here’s a very cool little app from Identity Analytics: My ID Score. You enter a bit of identifying information. It checks to see if you know stuff that only you are likely to know. (This is what I called “epistemetric” identification in my book.)And then it spits out an estimate of your risk of being [...]
As many outlets reported last week, Disney’s ABC Enterprises has bought into Hulu, which had been a joint-venture of NBC Universal, News Corp., and investor Providence Equity Partners. Like other large media platforms before it, Hulu should brace for the possible antitrust implications of its increasing number of content deals—many of them exclusive, at least [...]
President Obama intends to nominate Mignon L. Clyburn to the Federal Communications Commission. Clyburn is a good pick. She has been a member of the Public Service Commission of South Carolina since 1998. She chaired the South Carolina commission from 2002 to 2004, is a past chair of the Southeastern Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners [...]
Unlike with wiretaps, law enforcement agents are not required by federal statutes to obtain search warrants before employing pen registers or trap and trace devices. These devices record non-content information regarding telephone calls and Internet communications. (Of course, “non-content information” has quite a bit of content – who is talking to whom, how often, and [...]
May 23, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
