Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Two data points in the news over the past 24 hours to consider: A new report on “Smartphone Adoption & Usage” by the Pew Internet Project finds that “one third of American adults – 35% – own smartphones” and that of that group “some 87% of smartphone owners access the Internet or email on their [...]
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 [...]
I was pleased to see columnists George Will of The Washington Post and Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe take on the Internet sales tax issue in two smart recent essays. Will’s Post column (“Working Up a Tax Storm in Illinois“) and Jacoby’s piece,”There’s No Fairness in Taxing E-Sales,” are both worth a read. They [...]
Here’s an amazing graphic that appeared in today’s Washington Post depicting how digital information has grown exploded over the past two decades. It’s better viewed on a large monitor from this link on the Post website. And here’s the accompanying Post article. The underlying data come from a new study by Martin Hilbert and Priscila [...]
There’s a sharp piece in today’s Washington Post from Jack Goldsmith, currently with Harvard Law but formerly an assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, about “Why the U.S. Shouldn’t Try Julian Assange.” Goldsmith points to the sticky First Amendment / press freedom issues at stake should the U.S. try to go after Assange and [...]
I’m not one of those libertarians who incessantly rants about the supposed evils of National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcast Service (PBS). In fact, I find quite a bit to like in the programming I consume on both services, NPR in particular. A few years back I realized that I was listening to [...]
Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles is certainly no fan of free markets, but his contribution to today’s paper offers us this humorous take on the dangers of regulatory capture, a subject we’ve spent much time documenting here on the TLF.
Deep in this Washington Post story on dynamic pricing—prices that change based on what online retailers know or guess about individual customers—come these lines: [A]s much as retailers try to foil bargain shoppers, consumers do hold the upper hand online. Dynamic pricing is easy to counteract. Search multiple sites – including ones that collect prices [...]
“There’s no question [cable news is] contributing to the splintering of the political system and the means by which people get information about that system,” said Robert Thompson, who runs the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “If there’s no standard base line of fact and reporting, where can the conversation [...]
The Washington Post editorializes this morning on the “Google-Verizon” proposal for government regulation of the Internet: For more than a decade, “net neutrality” — a commitment not to discriminate in the transmission of Internet content — has been a rule tacitly understood by Internet users and providers alike. But in April, a court ruled that [...]
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.
