Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
It’s my great pleasure this week to be participating in a 2-day symposium on “Competition in Online Search” that is being hosted by the Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog. Daniel Sokol, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, was kind enough to invite me to join the fun. Professor [...]
Two weeks ago, I penned a column for Forbes about the astonishing rise and fall of BlackBerry (“Bye Bye BlackBerry. How Long Will Apple Last?”), which somehow became the most widely-read and retweeted thing I’ve ever written in my life. I argued that BlackBerry’s story — indeed, the story of the entire U.S. smartphone sector [...]
On Friday, both Josh Wright and I spoke on a panel at the Michigan State University’s conference on “Governance of Social Media.” Our particular panel focused on emerging competition policy issues affecting social media and social networking sites. Also joining us on the panel were Nicolas Economides of NYU and Michael Altschul of the CTIA. [...]
According to a report today from SAI Business Insider, “The Federal Trade Commission is actively investigating Twitter and the way it deals with the companies building applications and services for its platform.” Apparently the agency has reached out to some competing application / platform providers to ask questions about Twitter’s recent efforts to exert more control over the [...]
Twitter could be in for a world of potential pain. Regulatory pain, that is. The company’s announcement on Friday that it would soon be cracking down on the uses of its API by third parties is raising eyebrows in cyberspace and, if recent regulatory history is any indicator, this high-tech innovator could soon face some [...]
Writing over at Forbes, Bret Swanson notes that the progression of information technology history isn’t going so well for those Net pessimists who, not so long ago, predicted that the sky was set to fall on consumers and that digital innovation was dying. Specifically, Swanson addresses the theories set forth by cyberlaw professors Lessig, Zittrain, [...]
The folks at Reason magazine were kind enough to invite me to submit a review of Tim Wu’s new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires based on my 6-part series on the book that I posted here on the TLF late last year. (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) [...]
As Adam notes, Columbia lawprof and holder of the dubious distinction of having originated the term and concept of Net Neutrality, Tim Wu, is headed to the FTC as a senior advisor. Curiously, his guest stint runs for only about four and a half months. As the WSJ reports: Mr. Wu, 38, will start his new [...]
Congrats are due to Tim Wu, who’s just been appointed as a senior advisor to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Tim is a brilliant and gracious guy; easily one of the most agreeable people I’ve ever had the pleasure of interacting with in my 20 years in covering technology policy. He’s a logical choice for [...]
“Regulatory capture” occurs when special interests co-opt policymakers or political bodies — regulatory agencies, in particular — to further their own ends. Capture theory is closely related to the “rent-seeking” and “political failure” theories developed by the public choice school of economics. Another term for regulatory capture is “client politics,” which according to James Q. [...]
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.
