Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Tech issues don’t move the needle in national elections like yesterday’s, but below I’ll make some general observations, followed by a few on winners and losers in issue areas I cover. All in all, I think it’s a good election result. We’re back to divided government. The acute tension between the Republican House and Democratic [...]
No, I’m not here to tell you more about the “supersized” FTC. Berin has done yeoman’s work to highlight that issue, among other things with the PFF event you can review here. On TechDirt, Mike Masnick wrote this morning about how the feds are itching to regulate the Internet. This is about the direct government [...]
I’ve written before about my dislike of “the cloud.” The term implies that there aren’t specific actors doing specific things with data, which will tend to weaken people’s impression that they have rights and obligations when using or providing cloud services. We’re talking privacy problems. When “cloud” services fail, the results can be widespread and [...]
Over at TechDirt, Mike Masnick has an interesting post asking “Why Did Apple Approve Spotify?” which builds on an AdAge column asking a similar question: “Did Apple Sacrifice ITunes With Latest Apps?” As the title of that AdAge piece suggests, some folks are wondering if Apple shot itself in the foot by approving Spotify, a [...]
Just before the New Year, Mike Masnick reported: It’s been well over five years since we first heard about a plan in Oregon to attach GPS devices to cars and tax drivers based on how much they drove and the idea hasn’t become any better in the intervening years… but apparently it’s still being pushed. Oregon’s governor is trying [...]
Is there any other issue under the tech policy sun today that creates stranger intellectual bedfellows than collective licensing of online music? After all, as I noted here before, on the pro-collective licensing side we find mortal enemies EFF and RIAA (at least Warner) in league. And on the anti-collective licensing side, we have Mike [...]
… environmental attorney Dusty Horwitt, who recently published this outlandishly stupid and highly offensive editorial in the Washington Post calling for an information tax to reduce the supply of information in society. “[I]n our information-overloaded society,” he argues, “the concept of [too much information] is no joke. The information avalanche coming from all sides — [...]
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.
