Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer This morning, the House Energy & Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on “Behavioral Advertising: Industry Practices And Consumers’ Expectations.” If nothing else, it promises to be quite entertaining: With full-time Google bashers Jeff Chester and Scott Cleland on the agenda, the likelihood that top Google officials will be burned in [...]
NebuAd is dead. The company‘s plan to track users through their ISPs for the purpose of targeting advertising met with public and congressional concern that ultimately led to its demise. I believe that ISPs should stick to serving bits and not get into the business of serving or helping to serve ads, so I’m glad [...]
Adam Thierer and I have just released a new PFF paper entitled “Targeted Online Advertising: What’s the Harm & Where Are We Heading?” (PDF) about the FTC’s new “Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising.” Adam lampooned some of the attitudes at play in this debate in a great rant yesterday. But we give the FTC credit for resisting calls to abandon self-regulation, and for [...]
The Progress & Freedom Foundation has just launched the new Center for Internet Freedom. CIF offers an alternative to the proliferation of advocacy groups calling for government intervention online by offering timely analyses and critiques of proposals that diminish the vital role of free markets, free speech and property rights. We aim to drive the Internet policy [...]
By Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer Progress Snapshot 4.19 (PDF) Since the fall of 2008, a debate has raged in Washington over “targeted online advertising,” an ominous-sounding shorthand for the customization of Internet ads to match the interests of users. Not only are these ads more relevant and therefore less annoying to Internet users than [...]
Over on Techdirt, Mike Masnick discusses an interesting new survey that highlights the sharp disconnect between how much we claim privacy matters to us and how far we’re willing to go to safeguard it. America Online polled 1,000 users in the United Kingdom, and the results further reinforce what other recent studies have suggested: The [...]
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.
