Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
That’s the question I take up in my latest Forbes column, “The Danger Of Making Facebook, LinkedIn, Google And Twitter Public Utilities.” I note the rising chatter in the blogosphere about the potential regulation of social networking sites, including Facebook and Twitter. In response, I argue: public utilities are, by their very nature, non-innovative. Consumers [...]
Vivek Wadhwa, who is affiliated with Harvard Law School and is director of research at Duke University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, has a terrific column in today’s Washington Post warning of the dangers of government trying to micromanage high-tech innovation and the Digital Economy from above. For reasons I have never been able to understand, the [...]
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 [...]
It might be tempting to laugh at France’s ban on words like “Facebook” and Twitter” in the media. France’s Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel recently ruled that specific references to these sites (in stories not about them) would violate a 1992 law banning “secret” advertising. The council was created in 1989 to ensure fairness in French [...]
My latest Forbes column is entitled “With Freedom of Speech, The Technological Genie Is Out of the Bottle,” and it’s a look back at the amazing events that unfolded over the past week in the U.K. regarding privacy, free speech, and Twitter. I’m speaking, of course, about the “super-injunction” mess. I relate this episode to [...]
One of my favorite topics lately has been the challenges faced by information control regimes. Jerry Brito and I are writing a big paper on this issue right now. Part of the story we tell is that the sheer scale / volume of modern information flows is becoming so overwhelming that it raises practical questions [...]
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 [...]
That will be the subject of a Cato on Campus session this afternoon entitled: “The Internet and Social Media: Tools of Freedom or Tools of Oppression?” Watch live online at the link starting at 3:30 p.m., or attend in person. A reception follows. The delight that so many felt to see protesters in Iran using [...]
The Sixth Circuit ruled on Tuesday that criminal investigators must obtain a warrant to seize user data from cloud providers, voiding parts of the notorious Stored Communication Act. The SCA allowed investigators to demand providers turn over user data under certain circumstances (e.g., data stored more than 180 days) without obtaining a warrant supported by [...]
The ACLU of Northern California says it’s time for a privacy check-in on location based-services. Their handy chart compares several of the most popular location-based services along a number of dimensions. Little of what they examine has to do with civil liberties—cough, cough, ahem (this is a favorite critique of mine for my ACLU friends)—but [...]
February 13, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
