Articles by Sonia Arrison 
Sonia Arrison is an author and policy analyst who has studied
the impact of new technologies on society for more than a decade. A Senior Fellow at the California-based Pacific Research Institute (PRI) and a columnist for TechNewsWorld, she is author of two previous books (Western Visions and Digital Dialog) as well as numerous PRI studies on technology issues. A frequent media contributor and guest, her work has appeared in many publications including CBS MarketWatch, CNN, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. She was also the host of a radio show called "digital dialogue" on the Voice America network and has been a repeat guest on National Public Radio and CNN's Headline News.
Econ professor Marius Schwartz just wrote a short, yet incredibly useful analysis of competition in the Internet backbone space. You can find the AEI-Brookings publication here, but if you want the summary version it’s this: there is tons of competition and the SBC/AT&T merger won’t change that.
And here’s one bit you won’t want to miss regarding the Verizon merger:
Thus SBC/AT&T and Verizon/ MCI together would have less than 30% of Internet traffic. To put this in context, at the time of the Sprint merger, MCI by itself had a larger share–but still was unable to impose interconnection charges on fully eleven competitors!
Cross-posted from Sonia Says.
I highly recommend a new book called More Than Human by Ramez Naam. He makes the case that the desire and implementation of biological enhancement is entirely human. Here’s a column I wrote weaving some of his ideas in with the controversy over “designer babies” in the UK.
Crossposted from www.soniaarrison.com
Now, it’s also a tower for WiMax. Speakeasy is a cool company, and this should be one more piece of evidence to regulators around the country that there is *not* a monopoly in the broadband space. Don’t think anyone’s arguing that? Just take a look at this article about California.
Crossposted from my personal blog at www.soniaarrison.com.
I attended the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco this week and was impressed to see that the community I once regarded as mostly a bunch of socialists has morphed into a capitalist-loving crew. Here’s my column for more details.
The high-profile battle over the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube is about more than one woman’s life. It is the beginning of an important dialogue on American views about life while science and technology progress at rapid speed.
To read more, see my column here. This is an incredibly important issue for transhumanists and others who value somatic choice.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t be wary of the abuse of government power, but it is to say that arguments over whether or not we should have a national ID are outdated. The truth is that we already have at least two national IDs: our driver’s license and our social security numbers.
The more important issue Americans face is how to ensure that government is strong enough to fight terrorists but also weak enough to be forced to respect liberty, privacy and the general will of the people. This may mean stronger security on national ID accompanied by stronger constraints on what government can do with the data. For more, see my recent column here.
This is an interesting parody on the problems associated with extending copyright. That said, someone could write a competing story where creative work doesn’t get done because no one is paying for it and creative authors don’t have enough money to send their kids to school.
Implantable RFID chips have recently caused some privacy extremists to flip their wigs, but it’s not the privacy crisis they say. Find out why in my recent column at TechNewsWorld.
Will political spam have an impact on the election? I doubt it, but there’s a company called MailFrontier that says it could.
If you’re wondering where the Presidential candidates stand on tech issues, CompTIA interviewed both campaigns and the record is here. They don’t seem all that different from each other (mainly b/c Kerry is so vague it’s hard to tell what his positions are on some issues). On VoIP, though, Kerry’s response seems more regulatory in tone whereas Bush seems more free market. The Chronicle also did a comparison.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.