Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I haven’t been blogging much lately because, along with my PFF colleagues Berin Szoka and Adam Marcus, I’m working on a lengthy paper about the importance of Section 230 to Internet freedom. Section 230 is the sometimes-forgotten portion of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that shielded Internet Service Providers (ISP) from liability for information [...]
I’ve just finished reading Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion, by Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis, and it’s another title worth adding to your tech policy reading list. The authors survey a broad swath of tech policy territory — privacy, search, encryption, free speech, copyright, spectrum policy [...]
In a big post two months ago entitled “Age Verification Debate Continues; Schools Now at Center of Discussion,” I noted that there has been an important shift in the age verification debate: Schools and school records are increasingly being viewed as the primary mechanism to facilitate online identity authentication transactions. I pointed out that this [...]
Good editorial in the Boston Globe today about “The Dangers of Internet Censorship” by Harry Lewis, a professor of computer science at Harvard and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Lewis argues that: Determining which ideas are “harmful” is not the government’s job. Parents should judge what information their children should see [...]
This week, I have been up at Harvard University participating in another meeting of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF), of which I am a member. The ISTTF was organized earlier this year pursuant to an agreement between 49 state attorneys general (AGs) and social networking giant MySpace.com. A group of experts from academia, [...]
[Note: You might want to first read my review of Jonathan Zittrain’s book to give this essay some context.] Jonathan Zittrain must have been smiling as he read Leander Kahney’s excellent Wired cover story this month, “How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong.” In a sense, the article vindicates Zittrain’s thesis in The [...]
February 14, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
