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 [...]
Google’s new “Interest Based Advertising” (IBA) program represents the company’s first foray into what is generally called “Online Behavioral Advertising” (OBA): In order to deliver more relevant advertising, Google will begin tailoring ads delivered through AdSense on the Google Content Network (GCN) and YouTube.com (but not Google.com). This tailoring will be based on a profile [...]
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 [...]