Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I’ve just released a new PFF white paper looking at the hysteria that has often accompanied major media mergers and then taking a look at the marketplace reality years after the fact. Here‘s the PDF, but I have also pasted the entire thing down below. _____________________________ A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria: From AOL-Time [...]
Along with my colleague Barbara Esbin, the Director of PFF’s Center for Communications and Competition Policy, I have just released a new paper on discussing the possibility of reallocating a portion of broadcast television spectrum for alternative purposes, namely, mobile broadband. As I discussed here before, Blair Levin, the Executive Director of the FCC’s Omnibus [...]
Internet policy Shame Artist extraordinaire Chris Soghoian has struck again! Chris recently shamed the online advertising industry into improving their privacy practices with his Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO) plug-in for Firefox. Now Chris has set his sight on the security practices of cloud service providers. A letter released this morning, signed by 37 leading [...]
Google has announced that it will soon begin allowing U.S. advertisers to use trademarked keywords in limited circumstances in text ads, much as Yahoo! already does. Google currently allow advertisers to bid on trademarked terms as keywords that could cause an ad to appear, either next to Google search results or on a third-party publisher’s [...]
Is $1,200,000,000,000.00. That’s the expected 2009 Federal budget deficit. Since the current Federal debt is estimated at a “mere” $10.6 trillion, this means that we’re expected to add nearly 9% in a single year to a debt accumulated over 233 years (since 1774). This number also amounts to more than 8% of the U.S. economy. [...]
Microsoft’s share of the browser market across all versions of Internet Explorer has dropped, by one estimate, dropped from 78.58% in December 2007 to 68.15% in December 2008 (or by just under 8% in another estimate). [IE's] share dropped from 69.77% in November to 68.15% in December. [During the same period,] Firefox gained more than half a point and [...]
Regular readers will recall my great interest in video games and the public policy debates surrounding efforts to regulate “violent” games in particular. One thing I bring up in almost every essay I write on this subject is how fears about kids and video games are almost always overblown and that kids can typically separate [...]
Ken Ferree and I just filed an amicus brief with the D.C. Circuit in what could be among the most important First Amendment cases involving economic regulation in years: Comcast’s challenge to the FCC’s cap on the maximum size of a cable operator’s nationwide subscriber-audience. While few may feel righteous indignation at limitations targeted at [...]
Jesse Walker has a terrific feature story looking “Beyond the Fairness Doctrine” in this month’s issue of Reason magazine. I highly recommend it. It’s an in-depth exploration of what an Obama Administration means for the future of tech and media policy. Walker rightly opens the piece by noting that “The fairness doctrine is still dead, [...]
The introduction below was originally written by Berin Szoka, but now that I (Adam Marcus) am a full-fledged TLF member, I have taken authorship. Adam Marcus, our exceptionally tech-savvy new research assistant at PFF, has published his first piece at the PFF blog, which I reprint here for your edification. Today Google’s DC office hosted an [...]
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.
