Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
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 [...]
[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, Progress Snaphot 6.1 Stephanie Clifford of the New York Times posted a very interesting article this week summarizing a recent “on-the-record chat” the Times staff had with Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chairman Jon Leibowitz and FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection chief David Vladeck. The interview [discussed by Braden here] is profoundly important in that [...]
Today I appeared on CNBC [video here and embedded down below] to discuss concerns about emerging “smart-sign” technology, which could give rise to a new generation of interactive retail advertising and marketing efforts. This is in the news because, as Don Clark and Nick Wingfield report today in The Wall Street Journal (“Intel, Microsoft Offer [...]
So, did the decade just end or do we have another year to go? Honestly, I’ve never understood when the cut-off is from one decade to the next. (My friend Larry Magid struggles with the same question in his recent column on “The Decade in Technology.”) Nonetheless, I’ve seen a lot of best-of-decade lists published [...]
My friend Larry Magid, a technology columnist for CBS News.com and others, has a wonderful new column out about “The Decade in Technology.” You have to read it to appreciate just how far we have come in such a short time. Larry notes: [T]he past 10 years were a momentous period for technology. Not only [...]
2009 was not as big of a year for Internet and information technology (“info-tech”) policy books as 2008 was, but there were still some notable titles released that offered interesting perspectives about the future of the Net and the impact the Digital Revolution is having on our lives, culture, and economy. So, like last year, [...]
I just finished Ken Auletta’s latest book, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, and I highly recommend it. Auletta is an amazingly gifted journalist and knows how put together a hell of good story. It helps in this case that he was granted unprecedented access to the Google team and their [...]
I’ve just released a new PFF white paper looking at the hysteria that has often accompanied major media mergers and then taking a look at the marketplace reality years after the fact. Here‘s the PDF, but I have also pasted the entire thing down below. _____________________________ A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria: From AOL-Time [...]
Perfect media equality is impossible. There has never been anything close to “equal outcomes” when it comes to the distribution or relative success of old media: books, magazines, music, movies, book, theater tickets, etc. A small handful of titles have always dominated, usually according to a classic “power law” or “80-20? distribution, with roughly 20% [...]
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.
