Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
This morning, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released its eagerly-awaited “Future of Media” report. The 475-page final report is entitled, “The Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age.” [Here's a 2-page summary and the official press release.] The report is a bit overdue; the effort was supposed to be wrapped [...]
Two articles of interest in today’s Wall Street Journal with indirect impact on the debate over the future of Internet policy. First, there’s a front-page story (“Facing Budget Gaps, Cities Sell Parking, Airports, Zoo“) documenting how many cities are privatizing various services — including some considered “public utilities” — in order to help balance budgets. [...]
[cross-posted from BigGovernment.com] In the battle over media and communications freedom, no group poses a more serious threat to a free and independent press than the insultingly misnamed regulatory activist group Free Press. Along with their founders, the prolific neo-Marxist media theorist Robert W. McChesney and Nation correspondent John Nichols, Free Press has engaged in [...]
I’ve been so busy trying to cover breaking developments related to Washington’s new efforts to “save journalism” (FTC) and steer the “future of media” (FCC) — see all my recent essays & papers here – that I forgot to do a formal book review of the book that is partially responsible for whipping policymakers into [...]
Faithful readers know of my geeky love of tech policy books [here are my "best of" lists for 2008 & 2009], and the intriguing battle taking place today between Internet optimists and pessimists in particular. One of the things that I noticed when I was putting together my compendium, “The Digital Decade’s Definitive Reading List: [...]
Can we steer people toward hard news — and get them to financially support it — through the use of “news vouchers” or “public interest vouchers”? That’s the subject of this latest installment in my ongoing series on proposals to have the government play a greater role in the media sector in the name of [...]
by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka, Progress Snaphot 6.1 Stephanie Clifford of the New York Times posted a very interesting article this week summarizing a recent “on-the-record chat” the Times staff had with Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chairman Jon Leibowitz and FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection chief David Vladeck. The interview [discussed by Braden here] is profoundly important in that [...]
Free Press, the radical regulatory activist group founded by Marxist media scholar Robert W. McChesney, has never seen a media or technology regulation they don’t like, but their latest effort to have the feds halt innovation is shocking even by their standards. According to The Washington Post: Free Press and other public advocacy groups are [...]
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 [...]
Free Press, the radical pro-regulatory media activist group, recently filed comments with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for the agency’s upcoming workshop on “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” The Free Press comments provide an enlightening glimpse into the mind of how many on the Left now think about media policy in America. Their [...]
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.
