Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Hot-tempered police offers, pushover judges, and vague laws make for a dangerous combination. In July, a controversy erupted in Renton, Washington (a Seattle suburb) when the town’s police department launched a legal assault on an anonymous YouTube user for merely uploading a few sarcastic videos poking fun at the department’s scandals. In an op-ed in The Seattle Times, Nicole [...]
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 [...]
In the ongoing copyright debates, areas of common ground are seemingly few and far between. It’s easy to forget that not all approaches to combating copyright infringement are mired in controversy. One belief that unites many stakeholders across the spectrum is that more efforts are needed to educate Internet users about copyright. The Internet has [...]
Last week, it was my great honor to speak at the 2011 State of the Net 2011 event, where I participated in a panel discussion about the future of the online video marketplace. In an earlier essay, I mentioned how some of the discussion that day revolved around the Comcast-NBCU merger, which had just been [...]
Check out the Volokh post and the clip to which it links. The post is titled “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Meta.”
Today I am testifying at an FCC hearing on “Serving the Public Interest in the Digital Era.” [Speaker lineup here.] The purpose of the workshop is to explore: A brief history and overview of policies involving “public interest” requirements for commercial media and telecommunications companies; The state of local commercial broadcast TV and radio news [...]
Very cool little video here by Jess3 documenting Internet growth and activity. Ironically, Berin sent it to me as Adam Marcus and I were updating the lengthy list of Net & online media stats you’ll find down below. Many of the stats we were compiling are shown in the video. Enjoy! 1.73 billion Internet users [...]
By Berin Szoka & Adam Thierer We learned from The Wall Street Journal yesterday that “Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski gets a little peeved when people suggests that he wants to regulate the Internet.” He told a group of Journal reporters and editors today that: “I don’t see any circumstances where we’d take steps [...]
Most of you have probably already seen this but Pingdom recently aggregated and posted some amazing stats about “Internet 2009 In Numbers.” Worth checking them all out, but here are some highlights: 1.73 billion Internet users worldwide as of Sept 2009; 18% increase in Internet users since previous year. 81.8 million .COM domain names at [...]
Over at Mashable, Ben Parr has a post (“Facebook Turns to the Crowd to Eradicate Offensive Content“) expressing surprise that Facebook has a crowdsourcing / community policing solution to deal with objectionable content: Did you know that Facebook has a crack team of employees whose mission is to deal with offensive content and user complaints? [...]
May 28, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
