Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
This week I will again be attending the Family Online Safety Institute’s excellent annual summit. The 2-day affair brings together some of the world’s leading experts on online safety and privacy issues. It’s a great chance to learn about major developments in the field. As I was preparing for the session I am moderating on [...]
It seems peculiar to me that some of the same individuals and groups who so vociferously opposed a “broadcast flag” technological mandate in past years are now in a mad rush to have federal policymakers mandate a “Do Not Track” regulatory regime for privacy purposes. The broadcast flag debate, you will recall, centered around the [...]
As a cyber-libertarian, I’ve been lucky enough to work with people of all ideological stripes in pursuit of various public policy objectives. I’ve made selective alliances with people on the Right on economic policy issues (like opposing Net Neutrality regulation, Internet taxes, etc) and also worked closely with folks on the Left on speech and [...]
Common Sense Media (CSM) is a media “watchdog” group that provides a terrifically useful service to the public through independent reviews of popular media content (movies, music, TV, games, and more). As a parent, I find their service indispensable and, as a policy analyst, I have praised their rating system and their media literacy / [...]
Today’s Online Safety Technical Working Group (OSTWG) meeting included some heated debate about whether online intermediaries should be doing more to assist law enforcement to help track down child predators and those producing and distributing child pornography. (It’s not clear whether or when NTIA will actually put the archived video or a transcript online at [...]
I’ll be heading to Oxford University this week to participate in an Oxford Internet Institute (OII) forum on the subject of “Child Protection, Free Speech and the Internet: Mapping the Territory and Limitations of Common Ground.” It’s being led by several experts from the OII as well as my good friends John Morris and Leslie [...]
On July 27th, The Progress & Freedom Foundation hosted a Capitol Hill panel discussion entitled “Online Child Safety, Privacy, and Free Speech: An Overview of Challenges in Congress & the States.” The event featured remarks from: Parry Aftab, Executive Director, WiredSafety.org Todd Haiken, Senior Manager of Policy, Common Sense Media Jim Halpert, Partner, DLA Piper [...]
What Unites Advocates of Speech Controls & Privacy Regulation? [pdf] by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka The Progress & Freedom Foundation, Progress on Point No. 16.19 Anyone who has spent time following debates about speech and privacy regulation comes to recognize the striking parallels between these two policy arenas. In this paper we will highlight [...]
We often talk about the problem of having all 50 states impose different regulatory requirements on the Internet, with the most restrictive standard effectively applying to all Internet actors.Fortunately, in the U.S. such efforts can be stamped down either by invoking the “Dormant Commerce Clause” (DCC) in court or by passing ”preemptive federal regulation.” (Unfortunately, most [...]
by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer This morning, the House Energy & Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on “Behavioral Advertising: Industry Practices And Consumers’ Expectations.” If nothing else, it promises to be quite entertaining: With full-time Google bashers Jeff Chester and Scott Cleland on the agenda, the likelihood that top Google officials will be burned in [...]
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.
