Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
According to a report today from SAI Business Insider, “The Federal Trade Commission is actively investigating Twitter and the way it deals with the companies building applications and services for its platform.” Apparently the agency has reached out to some competing application / platform providers to ask questions about Twitter’s recent efforts to exert more control over the [...]
I’m currently plugging away at a big working paper with the running title, “Argumentum in Cyber-Terrorem: A Framework for Evaluating Fear Appeals in Internet Policy Debates.” It’s an attempt to bring together a number of issues I’ve discussed here in my past work on “techno-panics” and devise a framework to evaluate and address such panics [...]
Loyal readers know of my generally bullish, optimistic outlook regarding the Internet’s impact on society, economy, and even politics. On that last front, columnist Peggy Noonan has a nice piece in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled, “The Internet Helps Us Get Serious.” Serious about politics and political rhetoric, she means. Speaking about how politicians are [...]
Here’s the first of two essays I’ve recently penned making “The Case for Internet Optimism.” This essay was included in the book, The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet (2011), which was edited by Berin Szoka and Adam Marcus of TechFreedom. In these essays, I identify two schools of Internet pessimism: [...]
Over at MediaFreedom.org, a new site devoted to fighting the fanaticism of radical anti-media freedom groups like Free Press and other “media reformistas,” I’ve started rolling out a 5-part series of essays about “The Battle for Media Freedom.” In Part 1 of the series, I defined what real media freedom is all about, and in [...]
[I’ve been working on an outline for a book I hope to write surveying technological skepticism throughout history. I first started thinking about this topic two years when I noticed that a great number of recent books about Internet policy could generally be grouped into one of two camps: Internet optimists vs. Internet pessimists. I [...]
by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka Move over, health care reform, climate change, and the economy. Judging by White House visits by various government agency heads, the Obama administration instead appears preoccupied with the re-regulation of communications, media, and the Internet. The Administration has just released logs of all visitors to the White House and [...]
President-elect Barack Obama will soon be naming Cass Sunstein, an old friend of his from their University of Chicago Law School days together, the new head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). OIRA oversees regulation throughout the U.S. government. Basically, Sunstein’s position is the equivalent of the federal regulatory czar. Sunstein [...]
Of the titles I included in a mega-book review about Internet optimists and pessimists that I posted here a few months ago, I mentioned Lee Siegel’s new book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. It is certainly the dourest of the recent books that have adopted a pessimistic view [...]
February 13, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
Anonymity, Reader Comments & Section 230
by Adam Thierer on April 9, 2009 · 13 comments
Doug Feaver, a former Washington Post reporter and editor, has published a very interesting editorial today entitled “Listening to the Dot-Commenters.” In the piece, Feaver discusses his personal change of heart about “the anonymous, unmoderated, often appallingly inaccurate, sometimes profane, frequently off point and occasionally racist reader comments that washingtonpost.com allows to be published at [...]