Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Boy, the symposium on “Competition in Online Search” that Daniel Sokol threw together this week over at the Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog could not have been better timed! As most of you know, the European Commission stepped up its attack on Google this week and all signs are that a lot more antitrust activity [...]
The fine folks at George Mason University School of Law’s Henry G. Manne Program in Law & Economics Studies have put together another stellar agenda and lineup of speakers for their Second Annual Conference on Competition, Search & Social Media. The event will be held at GMU’s School of Law on Wednesday, May 16th from [...]
[By Geoffrey Manne and Joshua Wright. Cross-posted at TOTM] Our search neutrality paper has received some recent attention. While the initial response from Gordon Crovitz in the Wall Street Journal was favorable, critics are now voicing their responses. Although we appreciate FairSearch’s attempt to engage with our paper’s central claims, its response is really little more than an extended [...]
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 [...]
I’m in front of a non-TiVo-enabled television this evening, which has permitted me to see ads for a search site called YP.com. It’s a rebranded YellowPages.com, affiliated with AT&T, and it’s organized to be a search engine for the things in your life—dining, travel nightlife—distinguished from Google’s utilitarian-tech web search. Meanwhile Microsoft’s Bing has overtaken [...]
Last July, Adam Thierer and I argued in a Forbes.com piece that the Microsoft/Yahoo! search partnership should be cause for “celebration among as a good thing for consumers. By providing a strong competitor with a combined 28% market share, the deal should also be a source of relief at Google, which has come under increasing [...]
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 [...]
It may be possible to wring consistency from the “open” manifesto Google SVP of Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg published earlier this week, but I can’t. He correctly extols the virtues of openness in technology and data for its pro-competitive effects. Closed systems may be profitable in the short run, but they are weak innovation engines: [...]
2009 was not as big of a year for Internet and information technology (“info-tech”) policy books as 2008 was, but there were still some notable titles released that offered interesting perspectives about the future of the Net and the impact the Digital Revolution is having on our lives, culture, and economy. So, like last year, [...]
As I noted here a few days ago, the Federal Communications Commission held a workshop on Tuesday about “Speech, Democratic Engagement, and the Open Internet.” It was a shockingly one-sided affair with the deck being stacked almost entirely in favor of advocates of Net neutrality regulation. Worse yet, those advocates shamelessly made up spooky stories [...]
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.
