Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Writing over at the conservative Big Government blog (part of the Breitbart.com network of blogs), someone who goes by the pseudonym “Capitol Connection” has posted an editorial about the debate over retransmission consent reform that is full of misinformation and misguided policy prescriptions, at least if you believe is truly limited government. The piece is [...]
Andrew Orlowski of The Register (U.K.) recently posted a very interesting essay making the case for treating online copyright and privacy as essentially the same problem in need of the same solution: increased property rights. In his essay (“‘Don’t break the internet’: How an idiot’s slogan stole your privacy“), he argues that, “The absence of [...]
Sometimes free-marketeers are branded “free market fundamentalists” or something similar by their ideological opponents. The implication is that our preference for a society in which free people interact voluntarily to organize society’s resources is an irrational desire or a religion. I’m sure there’s a similar epithet we give to nanny staters—oh, there’s one, “nanny staters”—who [...]
You have to read all the way to the end to get exactly what the New York Times is getting at in its Sunday editorial, “Netizens Gain Some Privacy.” Congress should require all advertising and tracking companies to offer consumers the choice of whether they want to be followed online to receive tailored ads, and [...]
I was just digging through some old files and came across a quote that I found entertaining. Back in 2003, when he was still president and chief operating officer of Viacom, Mel Karmazin said with reference to Microsoft, AOL-Time Warner, and Comcast: “I can’t imagine being a competitor with any of these guys.” At the [...]
From the satirical Book Titles if They Were Written Today: Then: The Wealth of Nations Now: Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them Funny how empowering consumers to choose for themselves is “manipulative.” Oh, right, I forgot: people are stupid and/or lazy, so so elites should [...]
One of the reasons that so many of us here take issue with proposals to expand regulation of communications, broadband, and media markets is because we have studied the horrendous inefficiencies of economic regulation in practice. We oppose regulatory proposals not because of a “blind faith” in free markets, but because we understand that even [...]
Information Week has an article in its September 29th issue that illustrates why regulatory interventions to temper Google’s dominance are folly – things like antitrust scrutiny of the Yahoo! deal. But it takes a little understanding of how markets work. The article lists all kinds of innovative startups that plan to challenge Google and take [...]
May 28, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
