Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Filings are due to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today as part of its review of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the COPPA rule that the FTC devised and enforces. I didn’t have time to pen as much as I wanted, but I did submit a short filing to the agency in [...]
By Geoffrey Manne and Berin Szoka Back in September, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee held a hearing on “The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?” Given the harsh questioning from the Subcommittee’s Chairman Herb Kohl (D-WI) and Ranking Member Mike Lee (R-UT), no one should have been surprised by the letter they [...]
I highly recommend this important new study on “Why Parents Help Their Children Lie to Facebook about Age: Unintended Consequences of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act” by danah boyd of New York University, Eszter Hargittai from Northwestern University, Jason Schultz from University of California, Berkeley, and John Palfrey from Harvard University. COPPA is a [...]
Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released its long-awaited proposed revisions to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection rule (the “COPPA Rule”). Below I offer a few brief thoughts on the draft document. My remarks assume a basic level of knowledge about COPPA so that I don’t have to spend pages explaining the intricacies of this complex [...]
I can’t help but think that there might be a big advantage of having the AT&T-T-Mobile merger go to court. For once, the high-profile action everyone pays attention to will occur in an antitrust forum where the decision criterion is the effects of the merger on consumer welfare, period. Regardless of what one thinks about the merger, it’s [...]
My latest Mercatus Center white paper is entitled “Kids, Privacy, Free Speech & the Internet: Finding The Right Balance.” From the intro: Concerns about children’s privacy are an important part of [the ongoing privacy debate]. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) already mandates certain online-privacy protections for children under the age of [...]
Vivek Wadhwa, who is affiliated with Harvard Law School and is director of research at Duke University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, has a terrific column in today’s Washington Post warning of the dangers of government trying to micromanage high-tech innovation and the Digital Economy from above. For reasons I have never been able to understand, the [...]
It remains unclear how interested the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is in bringing a formal antitrust action against Google, but we at least know that inquiries have been made. I suspect these inquires are far more serious than whatever the agency is fishing for with its new Twitter inquires. After all, as I note in [...]
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 [...]
This morning, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released its eagerly-awaited “Future of Media” report. The 475-page final report is entitled, “The Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age.” [Here's a 2-page summary and the official press release.] The report is a bit overdue; the effort was supposed to be wrapped [...]
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.
