Via Marc Andreessen comes the latest silly example of a foreign government trying to use industrial policy to help its companies catch up to the Silicon Valley. I’ll give you three guesses on how well this plan will work.
Of course, making fun of foreign governments and their search engine projects is old hat here on TLF. More interesting, from my perspective, is this tidbit:
Some blame Japan’s copyright laws for holding back the development of web services. Services such as Google hold copies of other companies’ web pages on their servers. Because Japanese law forbids the duplication of copyrighted works without the rights holders’ permission, Yahoo Japan, Google Japan and other search engines offered in Japan operate from US-based servers.
One wonders how the Internet might have evolved had a similar rule been imposed on the United States in the mid-1990s.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.