Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Three months ago, when the DC Circuit struck down the FCC’s “Cable Cap”—which prevented any one cable company from serving more than 30% of US households out of fear that he larger cable companies would use their “gatekeeper” power to restrict programming—the New York Times bemoaned the decision: The problem with the cap is not [...]
The Comcast-NBC deal has the traditional media world all atwitter—well, better call it aflutter. “Atwitter” is losing its old media connotations. So the New York Times rounded up a foursome of advocates to air their views, among them Adam Thierer and yours truly. Huzzahs and rotten fruit in the comments, please. (And you can see [...]
Today, Jim Harper and I took on Andy Schwartzman of Media Access Projects and Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge in this New York Times online debate about, “Should Consumers Fear the Comcast Deal?” Like other media critics, Schwartzman and Sohn adopt the gloom and doom tone that many worrywarts use when discussing the deal. Andy [...]
Google Trends for websites reveals all kinds of fascinating insights into the way technology is reshaping the world. Among them is the fact that the HuffingtonPost.com has matured from a scruffy group blog into a new media powerhouse to rival the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post: Note that the convergence of these three sites [...]
In response to Professor Jonathan Zittrain’s op-ed in The New York Times last Monday about online privacy and open platforms (which Adam thoroughly refuted last week) I have a letter to the editor in today’s The New York Times: To the Editor: Re “Lost in the Cloud” (Op-Ed, July 20): In discussing the privacy risks [...]
Well, here we go again. Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain has penned another gloomy essay about how “freedom is at risk in the cloud” and the future of the Internet is in peril because nefarious digital schemers like Apple, Facebook, and Google are supposedly out to lock you into their services and take away your digital rights. [...]
I’ve been blathering on about this week’s big Supreme Court decision in FCC v. Fox, [See Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5], so I thought I would just wrap this series of essays up with a collection of other articles and views on the decision in case readers are looking for alternative perspectives: Mainstream Media [...]
Speaking of socializing media, acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps is someone who has devoted much of his life to regulating the media marketplace into the ground. If he had his way, federal bureaucrats would be controlling virtually every aspect of the media universe. Nothing would get done with Big Nanny’s permission. That’s what makes his [...]
Ben Edelman of the Harvard Business School has just released an interesting new study in the Journal of Economic Perspectives entitled, “Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?” Using data he obtained from a top-10 seller of adult entertainment, Edelman examined adult website subscriptions on the zip code level and found that conservatives seem [...]
There’s been plenty written about the death spiral that America’s newspaper industry finds itself stuck in — here’s an amazing summary of the recent online debates — and I’ve spent a lot of time writing on this issue here in the past, too. Ben Compaine, one of America’s sharpest media analysts and the co-author of [...]
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.
