Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Over at Ars, Matt Lasar has a piece about the need for better FCC indecency complaint statistics. He has been monitoring the wild fluctuations in indecency complaint tallies in recent years and wonders: whether the agency’s indecency/obscenity statistics reflect spontaneous viewer response to the level of erotic/linguistic friskiness on TV or solely on the power [...]
Chairman Mao–er… Martin–has canceled (WSJ) the FCC’s December 18 meeting, when the Commission was set to vote on Martin’s proposal to rig an auction to give away a valuable piece of spectrum (“AWS-3″) to M2Z networks. In exchange for a sweetheart deal on the spectrum, the company would have been required to use a quarter of it to provide [...]
Four-and-a-half years ago, I wrote this piece about how a converging media undermines the FCC’s rationalle for indecency enforcement. The piece, “TV Has Grown Up. Shouldn’t FCC Rules?” first appeared in the Washington Post Outlook section on Sunday, May 16, 2004, and it remains more relevant today than ever: the Supreme Court is today considering [...]
Just FYI, the latest update of my booklet on “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods” is now live. The new version, Version 3.1, provides minor updates to all sections of the book and a new appendix of relevant research in the field. I issue major updates early each year [...]
Lately I’ve been writing about potentially historic upcoming First Amendment case of FCC v. Fox Television Stations. The Supreme Court will hear the case on Tuesday, November 4th. All the briefs in the case are in and can be found on the ABA website here. But I’ve pasted the links for all of them below [...]
Along with my friends John Morris and Sophia Cope of the Center for Democracy & Technology, I have just submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the potentially historic free speech case FCC v. Fox, which will be heard in November. [Reminder: The FCC v. Fox case is the indecency case involving the [...]
I was on NPR’s “On the Media” program this weekend discussing the recent Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision striking down the FCC’s fines in the “Janet Jackson case.” As I noted in this lengthy analysis of the decision, the court said that the agency’s recent efforts to expand the parameters of “indecency” enforcement for [...]
Another chapter in the seemingly never-ending saga of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) of 1998 was written this week when the Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling striking down COPA, which would require Web operators to restrict access to large amounts of online speech and expression. [The Third Circuit's full [...]
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) lost another major First Amendment-related case today involving its recent efforts to expand the parameters of “indecency” enforcement for broadcast programming. The case involves the now infamous “wardrobe malfunction” that occurred during an unscripted 2004 Super Bowl halftime performance involving singers Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson. When Ms. Jackson’s breast [...]
Jeff Eisenach, Chairman of Criterion Economics, and I have just released a new article about the perils of a la carte regulation in the Federalist Society’s journal Engage. In “A La Carte Regulation of Pay TV: Good Intentions vs. Good Economics,” we argue that: “From a policy perspective, a la carte regulation is worse than [...]
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.
