Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
We’ve said it here before too may times to count: When it comes to the future of content and services — especially online or digitally-delivered content and services — there is no free lunch. Something has to pay for all that stuff and increasingly that something is advertising. But not just any type of advertising [...]
[UPDATE Feb. 2012: This little essay eventually led to an 80-page working paper, "Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle."] In this essay, I will suggest that (1) while “moral panics” and “techno-panics” are nothing new, their cycles seem to be accelerating as new communications and information networks and platforms [...]
Today I filed roughly 30 pages worth of comments with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in its proceeding on “Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: a Proposed Framework for Businesses and Policy Makers.” [Other comments filed in the proceeding can be found here.] Down below, I’ve attached the Table of Contents from [...]
Today the Mercatus Center has released a short new paper I have authored on “Unappreciated Benefits of Advertising and Commercial Speech.” I begin the piece by noting that: Federal policy makers, state legislators, and state attorneys general have recently shown interest in regulating commercial advertising and marketing. Several new regulatory initiatives are being proposed, or are already underway, that could [...]
[Here's an oped of mine that recently ran on Reuters. Readers will recognize many of these themes and arguments since I have developed them here on the TLF many times before.] Privacy Regulation and the “Free” Internet by Adam Thierer, Mercatus Center at George Mason University Would you like to pay $20 a month for [...]
This is a response to Nick Carr’s recent piece, “The Attack on Do Not Track,” in which he goes after me for some comments I made in this essay about the trade-offs at work in the privacy and online advertising debates. In his critique of my essay, he argues: What the FTC is suggesting is [...]
This morning, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released its eagerly-awaited Preliminary FTC Staff Report on Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: A Proposed Framework for Businesses and Policymakers. As expected, the agency has generally endorsed an expanded regulatory regime to govern online data collection and advertising efforts in the name of protecting [...]
One of the old saws we hear from those who wish to impose more stringent regulations on advertising or product placement is that “it’s for the children.” That is, critics such at the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and other organzations fear that, because children’s brains are less developed or they have not yet learned [...]
(Second in a series.) The Register quotes security guru Bruce Schneier saying: “Facebook is the worst [privacy] offender – not because it’s evil but because its market is selling user data to its commercial partners.” Facebook’s business model is to guide advertisements on its site toward users based on their interests as revealed by data [...]
I’m in front of a non-TiVo-enabled television this evening, which has permitted me to see ads for a search site called YP.com. It’s a rebranded YellowPages.com, affiliated with AT&T, and it’s organized to be a search engine for the things in your life—dining, travel nightlife—distinguished from Google’s utilitarian-tech web search. Meanwhile Microsoft’s Bing has overtaken [...]
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.
