Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I’ve written posts today for both CNET and Forbes on legislation introduced yesterday by Senators Olympia Snowe and John Kerry that would require the FCC and NTIA to complete inventories of existing spectrum allocations. These inventories were mandated by President Obama last June (after Congress failed to pass legislation), but got lost at the FCC [...]
For CNET, I posted a long piece describing a full day at CES’s Tech Policy Summit largely devoted to spectrum issues. Conference attendees in several packed sessions heard from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and three of the four other FCC Commissioners (Commissioner Copps was absent due to illness), as well as former Congressman Rick Boucher [...]
I’ve grown increasingly tired of the fight over not just retransmission consent, but almost all TV regulation in general. Seriously, why is our government still spending time fretting over a market that is more competitive, diverse and fragmented than most other economic sectors? It’s almost impossible to keep track of all the innovation happening on [...]
As part of its excellent “Room for Debate” series, the New York Times has an interesting new online symposium up now asking, “Will Networks Go Wild, With No Decency Rules?” It was in response to last week’s Second Circuit decision, which again slapped down an effort by the Federal Communications Commission to defend the agency’s [...]
Better late than never, I’ve finally given a close read to the Notice of Inquiry issued by the FCC on June 17th. (See my earlier comments, “FCC Votes for Reclassification, Dog Bites Man”.) In some sense there was no surprise to the contents; the Commission’s legal counsel and Chairman Julius Genachowski had both published comments [...]
I had a long interview this morning with the Christian Science Monitor. Like many of the interviews I’ve had this year, the subject was Google. At the increasingly congested intersection of technology and the law, Google seems to be involved in most of the accidents. Just to name a few of the more recent pileups, [...]
Today I am testifying at an FCC hearing on “Serving the Public Interest in the Digital Era.” [Speaker lineup here.] The purpose of the workshop is to explore: A brief history and overview of policies involving “public interest” requirements for commercial media and telecommunications companies; The state of local commercial broadcast TV and radio news [...]
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 [...]
PFF has just released the transcript of an excellent panel discussion I moderated last week entitled, “Let’s Make a Deal: Broadcasters, Mobile Broadband, and a Market in Spectrum.” As I’ve mentioned here before, one of the hottest issues in DC right now is the question of broadcast TV spectrum reallocation. Blair Levin, who serves as [...]
In a recent PFF paper I argued that “We Are Living in the Golden Age of Children’s Programming,” and showed how, despite incessant complaints by many policymakers: the overall market for family and children’s programming options continues to expand quite rapidly. Thirty years ago, families had a limited number of children’s television programming options at [...]
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.
