Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
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 [...]
Pundits are foaming at the mouth about AT&T’s just-announced end to unlimited data packages for smartphones. Here is Jeff Jarvis calling the move “cynical,” “retrograde,” and “evil.” However, he provides no evidence that this is anything but AT&T facing economic reality. The iPhone was a revolution, and how much data people consume given an awesome [...]
by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer, Progress Snapshot 5.11 (PDF) Ten years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman lamented the “Business Community’s Suicidal Impulse:” the persistent propensity to persecute one’s competitors through regulation or the threat thereof. Friedman asked: “Is it really in the self-interest of Silicon Valley to set the government on Microsoft?” After [...]
The smell of high-tech regulation is increasingly in the air these days and many lawmakers and some activist groups now have the mobile marketplace in their regulatory cross-hairs. Critics make a variety of claims about the wireless market supposedly lacking competition, choice, innovation, or reasonable pricing. Consequently, they want to wrap America’s wireless sector in [...]
Interesting piece here from Slate’s Farhad Manjoo on why AT&T should dump unlimited data plans and end what he calls the “iPhone all-you-can-eat buffet.” He notes that: “The typical smartphone customer consumes about 40 to 80 megabytes of wireless capacity a month. The typical iPhone customer uses 400 MB a month. AT&T’s network is getting [...]
Last Wednesday, Holman Jenkins penned a column in The Wall Street Journal about net neutrality (Adam discussed it here). In response, I have a letter to the editor in today’s The Wall Street Journal: To the Editor: Mr. Jenkins suggests that Google would likely “shriek” if a startup were to mount its servers inside the [...]
Blogger’s Note: I posted this blog entry over at BroadbandCensus.com earlier in the day. It’s the first of series this week — One Web Week — in which I’m taking a step back to look at the issue of broadband data and broadband transparency from a bit of a longer time frame. And today couldn’t [...]
Gilder explains the true meaning of the microcosm with his uniquely poetic prose: As Peter Drucker said. “What one man can do, another can do again.” Distilling discoveries of science, a set of technologies, and a Philosophy of enterprise, the microcosm is far too big for any one country. Even its products are mostly made [...]
Despite my frequent disagreements with his policy conclusions, Farhad Manjooo of Slate is one of the most gifted tech policy pundits around today and everything he writes is worth reading (and I whole-heartedly agreed with his recent article on the high-tech and antitrust). Alas, I find myself again disagreeing with him again today. In his [...]
The iPhone-obsessed blogosphere is atwitter about the Apple”s exclusion of the Google voice application from the iPhone app store. On Friday, the FCC sent letters of inquiry to the two companies as well as AT&T. Whatever one thinks about whether Apple and AT&T should be able to operate their own networks as they see fit, [...]
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.
