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Monday, September 6, 2010

Coping with Information Overload: Thoughts on Hamlet's BlackBerry by William Powers

Information overload is a hot topic these days. I've really enjoyed recent essays by Aaron Saenz ("Are We Too Plugged In? Distracted vs. Enhanced Minds"), Michael Sacasas ("Technology Sabbaths and Other Strategies for the Digitized World"), and Peggy Noonan ("Information Overload is Nothing New") discussing this concern in a thoughtful way. Thoughtful discussion about this issue is sometimes hard to find because, as I've noted here before, information overload is a subject that bitterly divides Internet optimists and pessimists. The pessimists tend to overplay the issue and discuss it in apocalyptic terms. The optimists, by contrast, often dismiss the concern out of hand. Certainly there must be some reasonable middle ground on this issue, no?

There is, and some of it can be found in a fine new book, Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, by William Powers. Powers, a former staff writer for the Washington Post, is a gifted storyteller and his walk though the history of philosophy and technology makes this slender volume an enjoyable, quick read. He begins by reminding us that:

whenever new devices have emerged, they've presented the kinds of challenges we face today -- busyness, information overload, that sense of life being out of control. These challenges were as real two millennia ago as they are today, and throughout history, people have been grappling with them and looking for creative ways to manage life in the crowd. (p. 5)

His key insight is that is that humans can adapt to new technology, but it takes time, patience, humility, and a little effort. "The key is to strike a balance," he says, between "the call of the crowd" and the "need for time and space apart" from it. (p. 4) The problem we face today is that all the pressure is on us to be what he calls "Digital Maximalists." That is, many of us are increasingly out to maximize the time spent in front of various digital "screens" whether we have made the determination that is really in our best interest or not. It has just gradually happened, Powers argues, because "The goal is no longer to be 'in touch' but to erase the possibility of ever being out of touch." (p. 15)

Continue reading Coping with Information Overload: Thoughts on Hamlet's BlackBerry by William Powers . . .

posted by Adam Thierer @ 7:47 PM | Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism, What We're Reading

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Monday, August 30, 2010

Two Schools of Internet Pessimism

[I am currently helping Berin Szoka edit a collection of essays from various Internet policy scholars for a new PFF book called "The Next Digital Decade: Essays about the Internet's Future." I plan on including two chapters of my own in the book responding to the two distinct flavors of Internet pessimism that I increasingly find are dominating discussions about Internet policy. Below you will see how the first of these two chapters begins. I welcome input as I refine this draft. ]

Surveying the prevailing mood surrounding cyberlaw and Internet policy circa 2010, one is struck by the overwhelming sense of pessimism about our long-term prospects for a better future. "Internet pessimism," however, comes in two very distinct flavors:


  1. Net Skeptics, Pessimistic about the Internet Improving the Lot of Mankind: The first variant of Internet pessimism is rooted in general skepticism regarding the supposed benefits of cyberspace, digital technologies, and information abundance. The proponents of this pessimistic view often wax nostalgic about some supposed "good 'ol days" when life was much better (although they can't seem to agree when those were). At a minimum, they want us to slow down and think twice about life in the Information Age and how it is personally affecting each of us. Other times, however, their pessimism borders on neo-Ludditism, with proponents recommending steps be taken to curtail what they feel is the destructive impact of the Net or digital technologies on culture or the economy. Leading proponents of this variant of Internet pessimism include: Neil Postman (Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology), Andrew Keen, (The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture), Lee Siegel, (Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob), Mark Helprin, (Digital Barbarism) and, to a lesser degree, Jaron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget) and Nicholas Carr (The Big Switch and The Shallows).

  2. Net Lovers, Pessimistic about the Future of Openness: A different type of Internet pessimism is on display in the work of many leading cyberlaw scholars today. Noted academics such as Lawrence Lessig, (Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace), Jonathan Zittrain (The Future of the Internet & How to Stop It), and Tim Wu (The Master Switch The Rise and Fall of Information Empires), embrace the Internet and digital technologies, but argue that they are "dying" due to a lack of sufficient care or collective oversight. In particular, they fear that the "open" Internet and "generative" digital systems are giving way to closed, proprietary systems, typically run by villainous corporations out to erect walled gardens and quash our digital liberties. Thus, they are pessimistic about the long-term survival of the wondrous Internet that we currently know and love.


Despite their different concerns, two things unite these two schools of techno-pessimism.

Continue reading Two Schools of Internet Pessimism . . .

posted by Adam Thierer @ 10:43 PM | Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism, What We're Reading

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Tuesday, August 24, 2010

The Broadband Investment Leviathan

The August 5th issue of The Economist had a compelling cover story entitled "Leviathan, Inc." in which the author notes "[p]oliticians are reviving the notion that intervening in individual industries and companies can drive growth and create jobs." But direct, long-term government management of companies, corporations or, worst yet, entire industries has proven time and again not to be successful.

Simply put, the head of a company makes decisions to maximize the outcome for that company and its owners or shareholders. Any government employee—even one in a role as acting head of a private company—is legally required to make decisions under a far stricter set of guidelines. Guidelines which force the decisions to be made for what is best not for the business they are charged with operating, but for the country as a whole. This is the case even if the decision made by the bureaucrat will result in a 'net negative' to the company and its owners/shareholders.

The article's anonymous author suggests that instead of "pick[ing] winners and coddl[ing] losers," government should improve the environment for all business by reducing regulations, investing in infrastructure, and "encourage winners to emerge by themselves, for example through the sort of incentive prizes that are growing increasingly popular."

Continue reading The Broadband Investment Leviathan . . .

posted by Adam Marcus @ 2:03 PM | Broadband, Communications, Economics, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism, The FCC

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Monday, August 23, 2010

Crovitz on the Great Internet Optimist vs. Pessimist Debate

I've noted here before that Gordon Crovitz is my favorite technology policy columnist and that everything he pens for his "Information Age" column for The Wall Street Journal is well worth reading. His latest might be his best ever. It touches upon the great debate between Internet optimists and pessimists regarding the impact of digital technology on our culture and economy. His title is just perfect: "Is Technology Good or Bad? Yes." His point is that you can find evidence that technological change has both beneficial and detrimental impacts, and plenty of people on both sides of the debate to cite it for you.

He specifically references the leading pessimist, Nicholas Carr, and optimist, Clay Shirky, of our time. In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains and The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, Carr paints a dismal portrait of what the Internet is doing us and the world around us. Clay Shirky responds in books like Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in the a Connected Age, arguing that we are much better off because of the rise of the Net and digital technology.

This is a subject I've spent a lot of time noodling over here through the years and, most recently, I compiled all my random thoughts into a mega-post asking, "Are You an Internet Optimist or Pessimist?" That post tracks all the leading texts on both sides of this debate. I was tickled, therefore, when Gordon contacted me and asked for comment for his story after seeing my piece. [See, people really do still read blogs!]

Continue reading Crovitz on the Great Internet Optimist vs. Pessimist Debate . . .

posted by Adam Thierer @ 10:35 AM | Books & Book Reviews, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Stupid People, Stupid Lawsuits, Stupid Warning Labels & the Coming Digital Tort Reform Fight

I spend a lot of my time as an Internet policy analyst railing against elitist suggestions that "ordinary" users are just too dumb to take care of themselves online, no matter how effectively technology empowers them to make decisions for themselves about the content they and their children consume, what data they allow to be shared about themselves on social networking sites or while browsing, etc. Indeed, Adam Thierer and I wrote a lengthy paper about What Unites Advocates of Speech Controls & Privacy Regulation? attacking such elitism when enforced by paternalist laws that assume everyone has the same values and that only the wise philosopher-kings of technology policy can possibly protect us all from our own stupidity.

But of course there are plenty of stupid people in the world, and they often do very stupid things--like walking on the side of a highway with just a few feet between a noise barrier and passing cars just because "Google Maps told you to do so!" That's essentially what Lauren Rosenberg claims in her very stupid lawsuit against Google, after she was hit by a passing car following directions from the beta walking directions tool in Google Maps--and despite the warning Google provided. Danny Sullivan tells the full story at SearchEngine Land, complete with photos that should have caused any reasonably prudent person to think, "Hey, what a minute, maybe that warning label I saw telling me the suggested route might lack sidewalks or pedestrian paths was actually there for a reason!"

Rosenberg seeks several hundred thousand dollars in damages from Harwood (the driver who hit her) and Google, asserting Google was negligent and failed to adequately warn her. The key policy issue this case raises is the same as in many, many aspects of Internet policy: How much disclosure is enough? As clearly shown by the photos in Danny's post, Google did warn Rosenberg; so the real danger in this case is that the courts (or lawmakers in the future) could set ever-higher standards for increasingly obnoxious warning labels on websites than they would provide on their own. This reminds me of my all-time favorite warning label (on a collapsible baby stroller): "REMOVE BABY BEFORE FOLDING!" (A contest for similarly inane real-life warnings can be found here.)

Continue reading Stupid People, Stupid Lawsuits, Stupid Warning Labels & the Coming Digital Tort Reform Fight . . .

posted by Berin Szoka @ 5:24 PM | Intermediary Deputization & Section 230, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Wednesday, June 30, 2010

TechDirt Errs Again: Copyrights Are the Definition of "Market Forces" in Action.

I just read the latest Deep Thought from the editor of the blog TechDirt, Mike Masnick, who must be the only person, other than Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, who often uses the royal "we" when expressing a personal opinion. In Pushing for More Stringent Copyright Laws Is the Opposite of Allowing "Market Forces" to Act, Masnick rants that granting legally protected private exclusive rights, (a.k.a., "private property rights"), to private producers of socially valuable resources like expressive works will thwart what Masnick calls "market forces":

[I]t's flat out wrong to say that copyright (or patents, for that matter) are about "allowing market forces" to act. By definition, copyright and patent laws are the opposite of allowing market forces. It's the government stepping up and providing monopoly rights because they believe (rightly or wrongly) that basic market forces don't work in those areas and, thus, the government needs to step in and "correct" some sort of imbalance.

This is all--as Masnick might put it--"flat out wrong...." Economists and the economically literate know that if we want "market forces" to encourage the consumer-driven private production of any resource (including expressive works) then we must grant exclusive rights to private producers of that socially valuable resource. In other words, property rights---government-granted, legally protected exclusive rights--are required to use "market forces" to encourage the production of any resource.

Continue reading TechDirt Errs Again: Copyrights Are the Definition of "Market Forces" in Action. . . .

posted by Thomas Sydnor @ 11:10 AM | Capitalism, Copyright, IP, Innovation, Internet, Mass Media, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism, Trademark

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Thursday, June 10, 2010

What the Oil Spill Really Says About Net Neutrality: Regulatory Capture v. the Nirvana Fallacy

A diverse group of technology companies including broadband, video and wireless providers as well as Google, Microsoft and hardware giants like Intel and Cisco today launched the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (BITAG or TAG) to provide exactly the kind of self-regulatory forum for dealing with concerns about network management practices that we at PFF have long called for--most recently in Adam Thierer and Mike Wendy's recent paper, "The Constructive Alternative to Net Neutrality Regulation and Title II Reclassification Wars." But rather than applauding BITAG, the regulatory radicals at Free Press insisted that:

this or any other voluntary effort is not a substitute for the government setting basic rules of the road for the Internet.

There must be a separate FCC rulemaking process, which can take the recommendations of this or any other voluntary advisory group into account, but rubber-stamping those recommendations would ignore the agency's mandate to create public policy in the public interest. Allowing industry to set its own rules is like allowing BP to regulate its drilling. The Comcast BitTorrent case shows that without government oversight, Internet Service Providers will engage in what are already deemed by engineers to be bad practices


Free Press certainly wouldn't have the influence they do if they weren't so good at picking metaphors. But what does the oil spill really teach us about regulation? The Wall Street Journal notes the growing outrage on the political Left against president Obama from those who are "furious and frustrated that the President hasn't demanded the heads of BP executives on pikes." But the Journal points out the central irony of the situation:
The [so-called] liberals' fury at the President is almost as astounding as their outrage over the discovery that oil companies and their regulators might have grown too cozy. In economic literature, this behavior is known as "regulatory capture," and the current political irony is that this is a long-time conservative critique of the regulatory state....

In the better economic textbooks, regulatory capture is described as a "government failure," as opposed to a market failure. It refers to the fact that individuals or companies with the highest interest or stake in a policy outcome will be able to focus their energies on politicians and bureaucracies to get the outcome they prefer.

Continue reading What the Oil Spill Really Says About Net Neutrality: Regulatory Capture v. the Nirvana Fallacy . . .

posted by Berin Szoka @ 9:22 PM | Broadband, Neutrality, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Monday, May 24, 2010

Facebook Triggers Another False Alarm over Corporate "Censorship"

Leo Laporte claimed yesterday on Twitter that Facebook had censored Texas radio station, KNOI Real Talk 99.7 by banning them from Facebook "for talking about privacy issues and linking to my show and Diaspora [a Facebook competitor]. Since Leo has a twitter audience of 193,884 followers and an even larger number of listeners to his This Week In Tech (TWIT) podcast, this charge of censorship (allegedly involving another station, KRBR, too) will doubtless attract great deal of attention, and helped to lay the groundwork for imposing "neutrality" regulations on social networking sites--namely, Facebook.

Problem is: it's just another false alarm in a long series of unfounded and/or grossly exaggerated claims. Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes responded:

The pages for KNOI and KRBR were disabled because one of our automated systems for detecting abuse identified improper actions on the account of the individual who also serves as the sole administrator of the Pages. The automated system is designed to keep spammers and potential harassers from abusing Facebook and is triggered when a user sends too many messages or seeks to friend too many people who ignore their requests. In this case, the user sent a large number of friend requests that were rejected. As a result, his account was disabled, and in consequence, the Pages for which he is the sole administrator were also disabled. The suggestion that our automated system has been programmed to censor those who criticize us is absurd.

Absurd, yes, but when the dust has settled, how many people will remember this technical explanation, when the compelling headline is "Facebook Censors Critics!"? There is a strong parallel here to arguments for net neutrality regulations, which always boil down to claims that Internet service providers will abuse their "gatekeeper" or "bottleneck" power to censor speech they don't like or squelch competitive threats. Here are just a few of the silly anecdotes that are constantly bandied about in these debates as a sort of "string citation" of the need for regulatory intervention:

posted by Berin Szoka @ 11:02 AM | Antitrust & Competition Policy, Free Speech, Neutrality, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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More Zittrainian Nonsense about "The Death of the Open Web"

Since Jonathan Zittrain's ideas about the "generativity" have permeated the intellectual climate of technology policy almost as thoroughly as those of Larry Lessig, scarcely a month passes without a new Chicken Little shouting about how the digital sky is falling in a major publication. The NYT has had not one, but two such articles in the course of a week: first, Brad Stone's piece about Google, Sure, It's Big. But Is That Bad? (his answer? an unequivocal yes! as I noted), followed by Virginia Heffernan's piece "The Death of the Open Web," which bemoans the growing popularity of smart phone apps--which she analogizes to "white flight" (a stretched analogy that, I suppose, would make Steve Jobs the digital Bull Connor).

What really ticks me off about these arguments (besides the fact that Apple critics like Zittrain use iPhones themselves without a hint of bourgeois irony) is Heffernan'ssuggestion that, "By choosing machines that come to life only when tricked out with apps from the App Store, users of Apple's radical mobile devices increasingly commit themselves to a more remote and inevitably antagonistic relationship with the Web." To hear people like Heffernan (and others who have complained about Apple's policies for its app store) talk, you might think that modern smart phones don't come with a web browser at all, or that browser software is next to useless, so the fact that browsers can access any content on the web (subject to certain specific technical limitations, such as sites that use Flash) is irrelevant, and users are simply at the mercy of the "gatekeepers" that control access to app stores.

In fact, the iPhone and Android mobile browsers are amazingly agile, generally rendering pages originally designed for desktop reading in a way that makes them very easy to read on the phone--such as by wrapping text into a single column maximized to fit either the landscape or portrait view of the phone, depending on which way it's pointed.  In fact, I do most of my news reading on my Droid, and using its browser rather than through any app--although there are a few good news apps to choose from. In fact, I probably spend about 10 times as much time using my phone's browser as I spend using all other 3rd party apps (i.e., not counting the phone, e-mail, calendar, camera and map "native" apps). So I can get any content I want using the phone's browser, I certainly don't lose any sleep at night over what I can or can't do in apps I get through the app store. I'd love to see actual statistics on the percent of time that smartphone users spend using their mobile browser, as compared to third-party apps. Do they exist?

But however high that percentage might be, the important thing is that the smartphone browser offers an uncontrolled tool for accessing content, even if appson that mobile OS do not.

Continue reading More Zittrainian Nonsense about "The Death of the Open Web" . . .

posted by Berin Szoka @ 11:02 AM | Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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"The Rise and Fall of Information Empires" & Constant Growth of Regulation"The Rise and Fall of Information Empires" & Constant Growth of Regulation

Today's NYT piece by Brad Stone about Google (Sure, It's Big. But Is That Bad?) offers a superb example of how to use the rhetorical question in an article headlined to suggest that you might actually be about to write a thoughtful, balanced piece--while actually writing a piece that, while thoughtful and interesting, offers little more than token resistance to your own preconceived judgments. But perhaps I'm being unfair: Perhaps Stone's editors removed "YES! YES! A THOUSAND TIMES, YES!" from the headline for brevity's sake?

Anyway, despite its one-sidedness, the piece is fascinating, offering a well-researched summary of the growing cacophony of cries for regulatory intervention against Google, and also a suggestion of where they might lead in crafting a broader regulatory regime for online services beyond just Google. In short, the crusade against Google and the crusade for net neutrality (in which Google has, IMHO unwisely been a major player) are together leading us down in intellectual slippery slope that, as Adam and I have suggested, will result in "High-Tech Mutually Assured Destruction" and the death of Real Internet Freedom.

Ironically, this push for increased government meddling--a veritable "New Deal 2.0"--is all justified by the need to "protect freedom." But it would hardly be the first time that this had happened. As the great defender of liberty Garet Garrett said of the New Deal 1.0 in his 1938 essay The Revolution Was:

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.

That theme lives on in the works of those like antitrust warrior Gary Reback, an anti-Google stalwart whose book Free the Market: Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive Adam savaged in his review last year. Reback argues:
Google is the "arbiter of every single thing on the Web, and it favors its properties over everyone else's," said Mr. Reback, sitting in a Washington cafe with the couple. "What it wants to do is control Internet traffic. Anything that undermines its ability to do that is threatening."

Move over, ISPs! Search engines are the real threat! Somehow, I feel fairly confident in predicting that this will be among the chief implications of Tim Wu's new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, to be released in November, which his publisher summarizes as follows:

Continue reading "The Rise and Fall of Information Empires" & Constant Growth of Regulation"The Rise and Fall of Information Empires" & Constant Growth of Regulation . . .

posted by Berin Szoka @ 8:42 AM | Advertising & Marketing, Antitrust & Competition Policy, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Thursday, April 29, 2010

While We're Talking About Propping Up Failed Business Models...

posted by W. Kenneth Ferree @ 10:18 PM | Generic Rant, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Saturday, March 27, 2010

Eric Goldman on New Threats to Sec. 230

posted by Adam Thierer @ 1:42 PM | Intermediary Deputization & Section 230, Online Safety & Parental Controls, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Thursday, March 25, 2010

Slippery Slope Alert: "National Office for Cyberspace" Proposed

posted by Adam Thierer @ 10:41 AM | Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Great Pessimist Satire on the Post-Print World

posted by Berin Szoka @ 10:21 PM | Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Monday, March 22, 2010

Luddites of the World Unite! 199 Years of Future-Phobia

posted by Berin Szoka @ 9:14 AM | Innovation, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Thursday, March 18, 2010

Kakutani 's Look at Internet Optimists & Pessimists

posted by Adam Thierer @ 1:33 PM | Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism, What We're Reading

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Friday, March 12, 2010

Two Cheers for the Treasury Department on Internet Freedom!

posted by Berin Szoka @ 11:20 AM | Open Source, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism, e-Government & Transparency

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Sunday, February 14, 2010

Glen Robinson, Communications Law Giant, Speaks at George Mason Law Thursday 2/18 @ 4 pm

posted by Berin Szoka @ 4:29 PM | Communications, Events, Free Speech, Mass Media, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Wednesday, February 10, 2010

FCC's Genachowski Promises He's Not Out to Regulate Net, New Media

posted by Berin Szoka @ 12:27 PM | Advertising & Marketing, Antitrust & Competition Policy, Free Speech, Media Regulation, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Thursday, December 17, 2009

Congresswoman, CALM Thyself! LA Times Eschews Eshoo Nanny State Bill to Regulate Ad Volume

posted by Berin Szoka @ 12:25 PM | Advertising & Marketing, Free Speech, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Private Enterprise, Moore's Law & Accessibility Innovation Are Empowering the Disabled

posted by Berin Szoka @ 10:22 PM | Innovation, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Sunday, November 15, 2009

Apple Empowering Users to "Sell" Their Attention to Advertisers for "Free" Stuff

posted by Berin Szoka @ 10:46 PM | Advertising & Marketing, Appleplectics, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Thursday, November 12, 2009

Privacy Trade-Offs: PFF Comments on December 7 FTC Privacy Workshop

posted by Berin Szoka @ 5:53 PM | Advertising & Marketing, Free Speech, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism, Privacy, Security

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Odlyzko on Net Neutrality, Price Discrimination, PrivacyFail, Search & Cloud Neutrality

posted by Berin Szoka @ 5:46 PM | Add category, Broadband, Neutrality, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Net Neutrality Regulation => Online Product/Service Definitions => Online Taxation

posted by Berin Szoka @ 9:40 AM | Broadband, Neutrality, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Humbling the Mighty: How the Internet's Media Abundance Killed the News Embargo

posted by Berin Szoka @ 7:38 AM | Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism, The News Frontier

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Tuesday, September 29, 2009

The "Manipulative" Market

posted by Berin Szoka @ 7:36 PM | Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Monday, September 28, 2009

The Economist Launches "Schumpeter" Column on Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Dynamism

posted by Berin Szoka @ 5:38 PM | Innovation, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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George Gilder's Micrososm: Hardware as Ideas

posted by Berin Szoka @ 5:23 PM | Innovation, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism, What We're Reading

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Tuesday, September 22, 2009

The Day Real Internet Freedom Died: Our Forbes Op-Ed on Net Neutrality Regulation

posted by Adam Thierer @ 2:52 PM | Broadband, Net Neutrality, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism, Wireless

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Tuesday, September 15, 2009

You'd Have to Be Smoking Dope to Believe the Zittrain-Lessig Thesis

posted by Adam Thierer @ 11:07 PM | Commons, Net Neutrality, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Friday, September 11, 2009

Meetup.com: Tocqueville's Democracy in (Digital) America

posted by Berin Szoka @ 12:18 PM | Free Speech, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Wednesday, September 2, 2009

George Gilder's Microcosm: How Entrepreneurial Capitalism Creates & Uplifts

posted by Berin Szoka @ 9:54 PM | Antitrust & Competition Policy, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism, What We're Reading

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RFK's Peaceful Progress, JFK's New Frontier, Technological Dynamism & Pragmatic Techno-Optimism

posted by Berin Szoka @ 9:42 PM | Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Please, Let's Have Fewer "Guardrails" Online!

posted by Berin Szoka @ 11:38 AM | Free Speech, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Texting While Driving: Regulate or Empower & Educate?

posted by Berin Szoka @ 11:36 AM | Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Thursday, August 27, 2009

Online Advertising: Privacy Zealot-Elitists v. Real Consumer Advocates

posted by Berin Szoka @ 9:01 AM | Advertising & Marketing, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism, Privacy

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Sunday, August 23, 2009

Can Humans Cope with Information Overload? Tyler Cowen & John Freeman Join the Debate

posted by Adam Thierer @ 10:26 PM | Books & Book Reviews, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Thursday, August 20, 2009

Section 230: The Cornerstone of Internet Freedom

posted by Berin Szoka @ 10:42 PM | E-commerce, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Twitter Power Laws

posted by Berin Szoka @ 10:37 PM | Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Tuesday, August 11, 2009

What Unites Advocates of Speech Controls & Privacy Regulation?

posted by Adam Thierer @ 2:07 PM | Free Speech, Mass Media, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism, Privacy

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Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments Turns 250

posted by Adam Thierer @ 10:50 PM | Books & Book Reviews, Capitalism, Economics, General, Generic Rant, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Zittrain's Pessimistic Predictions and Problematic Prescriptions for the Net

posted by Adam Thierer @ 8:52 AM | Advertising & Marketing, Books & Book Reviews, Capitalism, Googlephobia, Googlephobia, Innovation, Internet, Interoperability, Mass Media, Net Neutrality, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism, Privacy, Search

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Monday, July 13, 2009

Three Cheers for Information Abundance!

posted by Berin Szoka @ 10:36 AM | Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Music as Technology, Innovation & Part of Human Evolution

posted by Berin Szoka @ 10:32 AM | Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Saturday, July 11, 2009

Mill's On Liberty at 150: Its Legacy for Freedom of Speech & Expression

posted by Adam Thierer @ 12:06 AM | Books & Book Reviews, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Thursday, July 9, 2009

YouTube, Power Laws & the Persistence of Media Inequality

posted by Adam Thierer @ 9:58 PM | Free Speech, Mass Media, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The Costs of SSL Encryption for Webmail & Other Cloud Services

posted by Berin Szoka @ 6:49 PM | Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism, Privacy

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Saturday, May 16, 2009

The Lord's Prayer of Internet Pessimist Orthodoxy

posted by Berin Szoka @ 4:34 PM | Copyright, IP, Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism

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