Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Hanno F. Kaiser, a U.S. and EU antitrust lawyer and partner with Latham & Watkins LLP, has just released an important essay on a topic I have devoted much time to here over the years: the debate over the relative advantages of “open” vs. “closed” technological systems and the Lessig-Zittrain-Wu school of thinking about these [...]
I’ve spent a great deal of time here defending “techno-optimism” or “Internet optimism” against various attacks through the years, so I was interested to see Cory Doctorow, a novelist and Net activist, take on the issue in a new essay at Locus Online. I summarized my own views on this issue in two recent book [...]
I’m going to close out my series of essays about Tim Wu’s new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, by discussing his proposed solutions. In the first five essays in the series, [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] I’ve critiqued Wu’s look at information history as well as his use of [...]
Tim Wu was kind enough to comment on my general overview and critique of his new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. That essay will be the first of many I plan to pen about Wu’s important book. I appreciate Prof. Wu being willing to engage me in a debate [...]
Tim Wu’s new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, will be released next week and it promises to make quite a splash in cyberlaw circles. It will almost certainly go down as one of the most important info-tech policy books of 2010 and will probably win the top slot in [...]
So, do I need to remind everyone of my ongoing rants about Jonathan Zittrain’s misguided theory about the death of digital generativity because of the supposed rise of “sterile, tethered” devices? I hope not, because even I am getting sick of hearing myself talk about it. But here again anyway is the obligatory listing of [...]
Harvard Berkman Center professor Jonathan Zittrain has published another pessimistic, Steve-Jobs-is-Taking-Us-Straight-To-Cyber-Hell editorial building on the gloomy thesis he set forth in his 2008 book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. His latest piece appears in the Financial Times and it’s entitled, “A Fight over Freedom at Apple’s Core. Concerning the recent [...]
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 [...]
Over at the Verizon Policy Blog, Link Hoewing has a sharp piece up entitled, “Of Business Models and Innovation.” He makes a point that I have often stressed in my debates with Zittrain and Lessig, namely, that the whole “open vs. closed” debate is typically greatly overstated or misunderstood. Hoewing correctly argues that: The [...]
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 [...]
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.
