Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Toy Story 3 offers many pleasures and not a little wisdom. I absorbed them with a shocking output of tears, both the laughing kind and otherwise. At one point, too, I raised my fist in solidarity, moved by the political philosophy voiced by Barbie (brilliantly played by Barbie). I liked Barbie’s quote so much that [...]
PFF Adjunct Fellow Mike Palage led this extraordinary discussion of ICANN’s origins, evolution and future with four of ICANN’s “Founding Fathers”: Milton Mueller (author of Ruling the Root), law professor David Johnson, ICANN’s first CEO Mike Roberts and then ICANN CEO Paul Twomey. In particular, the group discussed ICANN’s mission, governance structure, and accountability; the difficult issue of [...]
Google today unveiled the Data Liberation Front, a team of engineers in Chicago dedicated to ensuring that Google build “liberated products”—ones that have “built in features that make it easy (and free) to remove your data from the product in the event that you’d like to take it elsewhere.” We’ve spent a lot of time [...]
My PFF colleague Mike Palage just released a paper about a series of recent applications for national trademark rights in terms that correspond to likely strings for new top-level domain names, or TLDs, (e.g., “.BLOG”). These attempts highlight just one way in which ICANN’s new generic TLD (gTLD) application process is likely to be “gamed.” But it [...]
The proliferation of Web 2.0 social media services has magnified the old problem of cyber-squatting: Every new service represents the possibility that someone else might claim your name, or your organization’s trademark, as a user name before you do! This problem is especially significant where user names correspond to vanity URLs, as with Twitter and, [...]
Google has announced that it will soon begin allowing U.S. advertisers to use trademarked keywords in limited circumstances in text ads, much as Yahoo! already does. Google currently allow advertisers to bid on trademarked terms as keywords that could cause an ad to appear, either next to Google search results or on a third-party publisher’s [...]
It seems Microsoft is facing much the same problem Pepsi faced in the 70s, when it created the Pepsi challenge (a blind taste test between Coke and Pepsi): A stark sign of the challenge Yusuf Mehdi faces as a point man for Microsoft in the company’s battle with Google comes from the company’s own research [...]
I’ve been working closely with PFF Adjunct Fellow & former ICANN Board member Michael D. Palage on ICANN issues. Michael had this to say about the ongoing saga of ICANN’s attempt to create new gTLDs. During the recent ICANN Board meeting in Mexico City, the Board authorized the creation and funding of an Implementation Recommendation Team (IRT). This [...]
I’ve gotten an unusually strong reaction to a TechKnowledge piece that went out today describing how the Nordstrom retail chain is capitalizing on a Patent and Trademark Office error to throw a small business under the bus. Beckons is an organic yoga and lifestyle clothing business that Nordstrom is trying to force off of a [...]
February 14, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
