Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
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 [...]
Twitter could be in for a world of potential pain. Regulatory pain, that is. The company’s announcement on Friday that it would soon be cracking down on the uses of its API by third parties is raising eyebrows in cyberspace and, if recent regulatory history is any indicator, this high-tech innovator could soon face some [...]
Could net neutrality rules be unconstitutional? Maybe so, says Daniel Lyons of Boston College Law School. In a piece released last week by the Free State Foundation (based on a more extensive research paper for Boston College last March) he argues that rules of the sort being considered by the FCC may constitute a taking of property under the [...]
Leo Laporte claimed today on Twitter that Facebook had censored Texas radio station, KNOI Real Talk 99.7 by banning them from Facebook “for talking about privacy issues and linking to my show and Diaspora [a Facebook competitor]. Since Leo has a twitter audience of 193,884 followers and an even larger number of listeners to his [...]
By Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer We learned from The Wall Street Journal yesterday that “Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski gets a little peeved when people suggests that he wants to regulate the Internet.” He told a group of Journal reporters and editors today that: “I don’t see any circumstances where we’d take steps [...]
A funny thing happened to the FCC Friday on its way to regulating the Internet: a federal appeals court panel questioned the agency’s authority to regulate the web. There’s no final decision yet, but an adverse ruling could stop the agency’s Internet regulation plans in their tracks. And for good reason. In proposing new neutrality [...]
by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer, Progress Snapshot 5.11 (PDF) Ten years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman lamented the “Business Community’s Suicidal Impulse:” the persistent propensity to persecute one’s competitors through regulation or the threat thereof. Friedman asked: “Is it really in the self-interest of Silicon Valley to set the government on Microsoft?” After [...]
The Post, hardly a bastion of radical cyber-libertarianism, has come out strongly against FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s plans to have the FCC issue “Net Neutrality” regulations. The editorial asks the critical threshold question we crazy cyber-libertarians always insist on: Is this intervention necessary? Mr. Genachowski claims to have seen “breaks and cracks” in the Internet [...]
In a week in which neutrality regulation is making a lot of news, I hope that Robert Hahn and Hal Singer’s terrific new study, “Why the iPhone Won’t Last Forever and What the Government Should Do to Promote its Successor” gets some attention. It provides a wonderful overview of how dynamically competitive the mobile marketplace [...]
Adam Thierer and I have warned that neutrality regulation, once imposed on broadband providers, will extend to other Internet services wherever “gatekeepers” are alleged to control access to a platform used by others. In short, the slippery slope of creeping common carriage is real and we’re already heading down it, with cyber-collectivist “luminaries” like Jonathan [...]
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.
