Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Last month, it was my great honor to be invited to be a keynote speaker at Lincoln Network’s Reboot 2018 “Innovation Under Threat” conference. Zach Graves interviewed me for 30 minutes about a wide range of topics, including: innovation arbitrage, evasive entrepreneurialism, technopanics, the pacing problem, permissionless innovation, technological civil disobedience, existential risk, soft law and more. They’ve now posted the full event video and you can watch it down below.
National Public Radio, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health just published a new report on “Life in Rural America.” This survey of 1,300 adults living in the rural United States has a lot to say about health issues, population change, the strengths and challenges for rural communities, as well as discrimination and drug use. But I wanted to highlight two questions related to rural broadband development that might make you update your beliefs about massive rural investment. Continue reading →
Many are understandably pessimistic about platforms and technology. This year has been a tough one, from Cambridge Analytica and Russian trolls to the implementation of GDPR and data breaches galore.
Those who think about the world, about the problems that we see every day, and about their own place in it, will quickly realize the immense frailty of humankind. Fear and worry makes sense. We are flawed, each one of us. And technology only seems to exacerbate those problems.
But life is getting better. Poverty continues nose-diving; adult literacy is at an all-time high; people around the world are living longer, living in democracies, and are better educated than at any other time in history. Meanwhile, the digital revolution has resulted in a glut of informational abundance, helping to correct the informational asymmetries that have long plagued humankind. The problem we now face is not how to address informational constraints, but how to provide the means for people to sort through and make sense of this abundant trove of data. These macro trends don’t make headlines. Psychologists know that people love to read negative articles. Our brains are wired for pessimism Continue reading →
Last week, I had the honor of being a panelist at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s event on the future of privacy regulation. The debate question was simple enough: Should the US copy the EU’s new privacy law?
When we started planning the event, California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) wasn’t a done deal. But now that it has passed and presents a deadline of 2020 for implementation, the terms of the privacy conversation have changed. Next year, 2019, Congress will have the opportunity to pass a law that could supersede the CCPA and some are looking to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for guidance. Here are some reasons for not taking that path. Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
