Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
We’ve written a lot lately about Microsoft’s efforts to reinvent itself, first rebranding its Live search engine as the Bing, and then partnering with Yahoo! to make Bing the search engine on Yahoo!’s still-impressive empire of content and services. But if Microsoft is going to beat Google in Search 3.0 and master shifts in the driving paradigms [...]
Maybe Obama should invite Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer over to the White House for a beer to settle the two companies’ differences! While he’s at it, Obama might want to invite Apple CEO Steve Jobs, too, since the common cause Apple and Google once made against Microsoft now seems to be [...]
Like many others, I’ve wondered whether Yahoo! got less than it should have becuase government antitrust regulators prevented Google from bidding up the value of a deal with Yahoo!. Carl Icahn, who owns 5% of Yahoo! seems happy enough while others still wonder if Microsoft got the better end of the deal, BusinessWeek reports. While [...]
Nick Wingfield has a great piece in today’s WSJ: Yahoo Tie-Up Is Latest Sign Tide Turning for Microsoft’s Ballmer (subscription required but can be found through a Google News search) about how Microsoft’s fortunes may be looking up across the board—especially with yesterday’s Yahoo!/Microsoft search/advertising partnership. The most interesting passage is this one: For [Microsoft [...]
Eric Goldman, one of the few active cyberlibertarians in legal academe, has a thoughtful post about the search partnership announced today. Eric notes blogger Danny Sullivan’s observation about the decline in Yahoo’s assets and his comment that: Microsoft is getting a huge bargain courtesy of the US Department Of Justice. Without Google being able to compete for [...]
A key point that Berin and I try to get across in our Forbes editorial today about the Yahoo!-Microsoft deal is that the high-tech marketplace evolves too rapidly for creaky Analog Era antitrust laws to keep up. We wanted to say more on that point in our piece, but we had a tight deadline (and [...]
We’ve just published an op-ed over at Forbes.com about today’s big Yahoo!-Microsoft deal. Searching For Success: Web 1.0 Titans Struggle to Reinvent Themselves by Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer Yahoo! and Microsoft on Wednesday announced a partnership in which Microsoft’s Bing search engine technology will power search for both companies, but Yahoo! will manage advertising sales and content [...]
The latest edition (Version 4.0) of my PFF special report on “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods” is now up. For those not familiar with the report, it explores the market for parental control tools, rating schemes, education and media literacy efforts, and various other tools, methods, and initiatives [...]
We often talk about the problem of having all 50 states impose different regulatory requirements on the Internet, with the most restrictive standard effectively applying to all Internet actors.Fortunately, in the U.S. such efforts can be stamped down either by invoking the “Dormant Commerce Clause” (DCC) in court or by passing ”preemptive federal regulation.” (Unfortunately, most [...]
Fred Vogelstein’s essay in Wired, “Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out” describes the intensifying clash between Google and Facebook—a clash that focuses on the ability to target advertising: Like typical trash-talking youngsters, Facebook sources argue that their competition is old and out of touch. [...]
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.
