With that business out of the way, back to Tech at Night. I for one am glad that Jon Kyl and Sheldon Whitehouse are having trouble coming up with a compromise. The Lieberman-Collins bill favored by Harry Reid and Barack Obama is terrible and just an awful, huge power grab. We’re better off waiting to see if we get a Republican Senate next time to pass something along the lines of CISPA or SECURE IT, than passing bad bill in compromise.
Well, it looks like some Anontards haven’t learned from Lulzsec and want to go to prison. And yes, there are already laws against this stuff, despite the Senate’s problems with getting a new Cybersecurity bill passed.
Senator Enzi sums up well my best argument for passing the Marketplace Fairness Act, or by some other amendment to a bill ratifying the interstate compact implementing interstate sales taxes, especially for online sales: “If Congress fails to authorize states to collect tax on remote sales, and electronic commerce continues to grow, we are implicitly blessing a situation where states will be forced to raise other taxes – such as income or property taxes – to offset the growing loss of sales tax revenue. We do not want this to happen.”
This is why Republican governors are lining up behind the compact and the bill: they don’t want to raise taxes or impose new ones. The Marketplace Fairness Act is a Constitutional means of fixing the sales tax problem by restoring the originally intended revenue stream of taxing purchases by people in a state.
Hey House Small Business Committee: the answer to your question is that the role of the federal government is to deregulate, particular the secondary spectrum market, allow increased competition, and then free up more spectrum currently held by government. Wireless is the answer to rural access where wired access just isn’t practical.
This Risk Response Continuum, describing ways to deal with risks posed by new technologies, is thought-provoking. Biased toward minimal government, to be sure, but still worth thinking about.
Mike Wendy is right: if we let the grabbers grab real estate, they will grab other property, including copyrights.
Good news: The Cable Act is getting hearings which could lead to support for the Jim DeMint/Steve Scalise bill reforming regulations in the industry, opening the market to negotiation and competition.
Riddle me this: we’re both supposed to be concerned about police requests of phone records and that wireless firms are compensated for executing these requests? Time and resources aren’t free, but I don’t expect House Democrats to get that. They have no freaking clue about the real world, and want us all to be unpaid socialist drones working for free for Dear Leader Obama, apparently.