Here’s a blessedly short video introducing the cost of regulation – and its equivalence to taxation. Another reason why this video is so blessed? No Dan Mitchell!
When it comes to the Internet, Republican presidential candidate John McCain recently said that he’s “an illiterate who has to rely on his wife for any assistance he can get.” In an era where the Internet is playing an ever greater role, does such an admission matter, and does it say anything important about the age gap between McCain and Democratic candidate Barack Obama?
This is not the first time a politician has come under fire for sweeping claims about the Internet. Recall, for instance, Al Gore’s comment that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet.” Everyone knows that DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) drove the creation of the Net, not the former vice president, but his comment made for many jokes on late-night shows.
McCain, of course, made quite the opposite assertion, but is he really the “illiterate” he mentioned or is something else going on? His campaign aides say he’s fully capable of browsing the Web and that he has a Mac and uses it several times a week. Senator McCain will get “hip points” for using a Mac; nevertheless, he clearly doesn’t think being Internet savvy is an important branding strategy. This may bother some, but many politically active technology entrepreneurs don’t seem to be upset.
[…]
Read more here.
I’ve run across the most curious thing today.
Searches on Google that should turn up the Cato@Liberty blog (at http://www.cato-at-liberty.org) do not return any result with that URL in it.
Berin took great care the other day to report on the temporary demotion of some Progress & Freedom Foundation content by the Google search engine. I want to do a similar, careful job with this because it’s a sensitive area.
Could I ask you, our visitors, to check what you get from Google? Visit Cato@Liberty and then craft the Google search that you think is most likely to return that Web site. (I’ve tried searching “site:cato-at-liberty.org the” for example, which would return instances of the word “the” on the cato-at-liberty.org domain, and gotten no results.)
Next, if you have any technical knowledge, please opine on what might be causing this to occur. Cato@Liberty is a fairly high-traffic site with a large following. Its disappearance from Google search results is unusual. Any ideas on how to get it restored would be welcome.
Update: It’s a problem with robots.txt on the site.
Tom Hazlett’s latest column in the FT tries to make us all pay more attention to the Clearwire deal. Even those of us here at the TLF have been remiss in following the venture. As Tom points out, the fact that open-spectrum and net-neutrality stalwarts such as Google and Intel are in bed with Comcast and Sprint tells us a lot. He writes:
Municipal Wi-Fi Adieu. When local government networks were the rage, circa 2003, their loudest corporate backer was Google. Broadband for all via “free” unlicensed spectrum, smart radios and just a gentle nudge from City Hall. Politicians from Philadephia to Portland drank the Kool-Aid. But Google just paid $500m to jump to the Clearwire ship. The change in strategy speaks volumes: municipal wi-fi is considered small opportunity for Google and no threat to Clearwire.
Fleeing the “Spectrum Commons”. Five years ago, Intel was pressuring US regulators for more unlicensed bands. It won – the Federal Communications Commission dumped hundreds of MHz into the market. The bump was little noticed – short-range apps continued to work, but not much else developed. Meanwhile, wireless phone networks – providing wide area, mobile service – were booming. But regulators held off new allocations for a decade, starving the sector just when it was upgrading to high-speed data networks.
New Clearwire boasts WiMAX, “wi-fi on steroids”, as its technological innovation, but note: this WiMAX runs on licensed frequencies. That is an economic choice, not a technical one. Only with the control afforded by exclusivity will these companies invest in the networks that, they hope, will make consumers sing. The “spectrum commons”? Been there, done that. This wireless broadband innovation aims to do what no one has done in unlicensed – and betting $14bn on it.
Net Neutrality Not. Clearwire consortium members are not passive investors. Buying in, they become network friends with benefits. The cable ops will retail service. McCaw’s NextNet is the lead gear maker. Motorola supplies handsets. Intel’s chips are plugged in. And Google’s search engine gets its own button on the phones, a cute efficiency copied from the wildly popular DoCoMo network in Japan. If the NTT model, where the carrier extracts payment from mobile apps for a preferred spot on the wireless web, is “open” – then “open” all capitalists must be. Richly, NTT is a member in good standing in Google’s Open Handset Alliance.
Now, the question my friends on the other side will rightly ask is, where’s the beef? Here it is. Any ideas how fast it will grow?
The WashingtonWatch.com blog has a breakout of all 36 bills in the “Coburn Omnibus.”
#36: a greenhouse in Suitland, Maryland!
Another chapter in the seemingly never-ending saga of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) of 1998 was written this week when the Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling striking down COPA, which would require Web operators to restrict access to large amounts of online speech and expression. [The Third Circuit’s full decision is here. And I penned a 3-part series on the lower court ruling by Judge Lowell Reed Jr., senior judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, here, here, and here].
The DOJ will likely appeal the decision, yet again, to the Supreme Court. I can’t be certain, but I know of no other free speech-related law that has made THREE trips to the Supreme Court for review. (If readers know of any laws that can match that record, please let me know). It really is quite amazing, and even a little outrageous, when you think about it. After all, just think of all the time, energy and money that has gone into this 10-year legal fiasco. I know it is the DOJ’s job to defend congressional enactments before the courts, but how might we have spent that time and money if all this litigating wasn’t going on?? Regulation always has opportunity costs and in this case those costs have been 10 years of wrangling among lawyers. Those resources could have been used to educate parents and kids about online safety; to create and disseminate more and better private screening tools; and so on. Alas, we instead have mounds of paper piling up in the courts and millions being spent with nothing to show for it.
Continue reading →
This YouTube video nearly brought me to tears. At minute 8:31, Dan Mitchell utters the words, “What matters is freedom” . . . .
Why the tears, though? Because I’d been watching and listening to Dan Mitchell for over eight minutes! You’d cry too.
Might learn something, though. It’s about Social Security taxes or something. And nobody has objected to me putting these videos up. Hey, it’s a new, exciting, “online” way of talking about public policy.
Here’s a good article by Declan McCullagh on New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s outrageous vendetta against Usenet. The article is good not only because yours truly is quoted.
I’ve been looking, and haven’t found a single advocate from the left or critic of Comcast’s network management practices that has said a word of support for Comcast on this subject. This is where Internet freedom is really in peril – and nothing?
I wrote here sometime back about e-gold, a very interesting value-transfer business suffering through some difficult legal troubles. They have now pled guilty to criminal charges.
A blog post by e-gold’s Douglas Jackson calls it a “new beginning.” The company will pay some fines, get square with U.S. regulatory law, and go on providing its services.
Payments is an interesting business. Once value is de-linked from a physical asset, representations of it can be transferred electronically, by “wire” or over the Internet. As is already happening with intellectual property, people will eventually create value transfer systems that operate outside the control of any government.
Whether the Secret Service and the Justice Department like it or not, e-gold is the next step in the beginning of the end of government-controlled currency. I don’t expect governments to lose control of payments quickly or to give it up easily, but they will.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.