Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
We’ve talked here before about the dangers of a government-subsidized press as a way of “saving journalism.” But I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite as eloquent on the issue as Seth Lipsky’s editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled “All the News That’s Fit to Subsidize.” Mr. Lipsky is a member of the [...]
The Post, hardly a bastion of radical cyber-libertarianism, has come out strongly against FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s plans to have the FCC issue “Net Neutrality” regulations. The editorial asks the critical threshold question we crazy cyber-libertarians always insist on: Is this intervention necessary? Mr. Genachowski claims to have seen “breaks and cracks” in the Internet [...]
Google Trends for websites reveals all kinds of fascinating insights into the way technology is reshaping the world. Among them is the fact that the HuffingtonPost.com has matured from a scruffy group blog into a new media powerhouse to rival the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post: Note that the convergence of these three sites [...]
As part of our ongoing series that tracks the gradual transition of video content to the boob tube to online outlets, I want to draw everyone’s attention to two excellent articles in today’s Washington Post about this trend. One is by Paul Fahri (“Click, Change: The Traditional Tube Is Getting Squeezed Out of the Picture“) [...]
On the problems with the newspaper industry, Michael Kinsley writes in the Washington Post: You may love the morning ritual of the paper and coffee, as I do, but do you seriously think that this deserves a subsidy? Sorry, but people who have grown up around computers find reading the news on paper just as [...]
Sorry, this has nothing to do with tech policy, but I just had to comment on Eugene Robinson’s latest column in the Washington Post singing the praises of an unbounded stimulus plan. For those of you not familiar with Robinson’s work, you’re really missing a treat. Eugene Robinson and his colleague Harold Meyerson compete on [...]
The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration is delaying the Bush Administration plan to require federal contractors to use the E-Verify worker background check system. Criticizing the move, Lamar Smith (R-TX), ranking minority member on the House Judiciary Committee says, “It is ironic that at the same time President Obama was pushing for passage [...]
Regular readers will recall my great interest in video games and the public policy debates surrounding efforts to regulate “violent” games in particular. One thing I bring up in almost every essay I write on this subject is how fears about kids and video games are almost always overblown and that kids can typically separate [...]
George Will’s weekly Washington Post column focuses on the Fairness Doctrine and calls out those on the Left who would support its reinstatement: Because liberals have been even less successful in competing with conservatives on talk radio than Detroit has been in competing with its rivals, liberals are seeking intellectual protectionism in the form of [...]
May 24, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
Anonymity, Reader Comments & Section 230
by Adam Thierer on April 9, 2009 · 13 comments
Doug Feaver, a former Washington Post reporter and editor, has published a very interesting editorial today entitled “Listening to the Dot-Commenters.” In the piece, Feaver discusses his personal change of heart about “the anonymous, unmoderated, often appallingly inaccurate, sometimes profane, frequently off point and occasionally racist reader comments that washingtonpost.com allows to be published at [...]