Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I’ve just released a new PFF white paper looking at the hysteria that has often accompanied major media mergers and then taking a look at the marketplace reality years after the fact. Here‘s the PDF, but I have also pasted the entire thing down below. _____________________________ A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria: From AOL-Time [...]
I was just digging through some old files and came across a quote that I found entertaining. Back in 2003, when he was still president and chief operating officer of Viacom, Mel Karmazin said with reference to Microsoft, AOL-Time Warner, and Comcast: “I can’t imagine being a competitor with any of these guys.” At the [...]
Over the past couple of years here, I have relentlessly hammered Harvard’s dynamic duo of digital doom, Jonathan Zittrain (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) and Lawrence Lessig (see 1, 2, 3), for their extraordinarily gloomy predictions about the Internet creating a world of “perfect control.” In the hyper-pessimistic Lessig-Zittrain view of things, cyberspace [...]
Adam Thierer & I have just released a detailed examination (PDF) of brewing efforts to expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 to cover adolescents and potentially all social networking sites—an approach we call “COPPA 2.0.” As Adam explained on Larry Magid’s CNET podcast, COPPA mandates certain online privacy protections for children under 13, most [...]
Today, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced the members of the new Online Safety and Technology Working Group (OSTWG). I am honored to be among those chosen to participate in this new task force and I look forward to continuing the work started last year with the Harvard Berkman [...]
What would it take to create a more secure Internet? That’s what John Markoff explores in his latest New York Times article, “Do We Need a New Internet?” Echoing some of the same fears Jonathan Zittrain articulates in his new book The Future of the Internet, Markoff wonders if online viruses and other forms of [...]
This is just a listing of the installments of my ongoing “Media Deconsolidation Series.” I needed to create a single repository of all the essays so I could point back to them in future articles and papers. For those not familiar with it, this series represents an effort to set the record straight regarding the [...]
Sorry if it seems like I am beating a dead horse here, but the folks at the City Journal asked me a pen a review of Jonathan Zittrain’s new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Faithful readers here will no doubt remember that I have already penned a review of [...]
By Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer As we noted in our intro to this ongoing series, Google’s tenth anniversary has passed with Googlephobia reaching new heights of hysteria. But is Google really too big and dangerous, or are people just too lazy to find other alternatives to each of the wonderful services that Google offers? [...]
Over on Techdirt, Mike Masnick discusses an interesting new survey that highlights the sharp disconnect between how much we claim privacy matters to us and how far we’re willing to go to safeguard it. America Online polled 1,000 users in the United Kingdom, and the results further reinforce what other recent studies have suggested: The [...]
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.
