No really, Governor Haslam, you do not want to bring California taxation to Tennessee. Have you seen our unemployment? That’s why we just might defeat it at referendum.
PETA people are hijacking phones, sending malicious messages without consent, and running up text message bills. People need to be careful about what they install, but this sort of thing needs to send people to jail, as well. We don’t need more laws and regulations, we need more enforcement against the bad guys.
How badly do we not need more laws and regulations? Even the Progressive Policy Institute’s Michael Mandel thinks so, calling on the President to lead in the direction of less regulation and pro-growth change.
I’ve come out strongly against the proposed PROTECT IP law, that would create a national Internet censorship blacklist, like they have in unfree countries. Tech Liberation Front has gone further in studying the bill and finding just what’s wrong with it, proposing a list of fixes:
- Drop provisions that tamper with the DNS system in an effort to block U.S. access to banned sites.
- Drop provisions that tamper with search engines, indices, and any other linkage to banned sites.
- Remove a private right of action that would allow copyright and trademark holders to obtain court orders banning ad networks and financial transaction processors from doing business with banned sites.
- Scale back current enforcement abuses by the Department of Homeland Security under the existing PRO-IP Act of 2008.
- Focus the vague and overinclusive definition of the kind of websites that can be banned, limiting it to truly criminal enterprises.
Copyright and Trademark are, in theory, good things to have, but mass censorship of the Internet in the support of a good thing is not in itself good.
Though sometimes trademark expansions annoy me. See the US Olympic Committee picking on the “Redneck Olympics”. Of course, I don’t like the IOC and its affiliated bodies anyway, so maybe I’m biased.
Google has drawn some criticism for its restrictive Google+ policies, where they try to lock you down onto one and only one account, preventing you from juggling multiple identities for different communities, and blocking the use of aliases to that effect. Facebook may adopt the same policy. Me? I’ll never join Google+ and I might just delete my Facebook account one of these days. These firms are greedy for personal information, and control of it.
The chickens continue to come home to roost at Google, as the FTC might try to implement Phone Neutrality for Android in response to Google’s plans to acquire Motorola’s phone business. When will Google learn that they blew it on Net Neutrality?
It turns out Germany overstepped its bounds legally in the EU, and most injunctions against Samsung importing the Galaxy Tab have been lifted, due to German courts having no legal right to impose them. Samsung’s not out of hot water for copying Apple designs, though.
Big surprise: the President foolishly handed over total control of the Internet to international bodies, and now we run the risk of totalitarian nations trying to wreck it through the UN. Sigh.
Another shocker: The Obama FCC found a great, market-based way to get us more wireless spectrum, incentive auctions, so that we can have nigh universal access to multiple carriers of wireless, high speed Internet, and John Dingell is having a temper tantrum. Only a totalitarian socialist would be “disturbed” by free market allocation of resources. Freedom threatens dictators, not small-d democrats.
Oh, and be prepared for more surprise: Obama’s cybersecurity plans won’t actually improve security. They’re just power grabs. You could knock me over with a feather.
Democrats are just serving up failure after failure after failure on tech policy. A combination of incompetence and ideological socialism will do that, I guess.
Let’s just hope they stumble into the right idea and stay out of the way enough that AT&T can do its 4G rollout using T-Mobile spectrum.