Leviathan Spam Send the bits with lasers and chips See the bytes with LED lights Wireless, optical, bandwidth boom A flood of info, a global zoom Now comes Lessig Now comes Wu To tell us what we cannot do The Net, they say, Is under attack Stop! Before we can’t turn back They know best These coder kings So they …
A New Leash on the Net?
Today, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski proposed new regulations on communications networks. We were among the very first opponents of these so-called “net neutrality” rules when they were first proposed in concept back in 2004. Here are a number of our relevant articles over the past few years: “Let There Be Bandwidth” – The Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2006 “The …
Political Noise On the Net
With an agreement between the U.S. Department of Commerce and ICANN (the nonprofit Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, headquartered in California) expiring on September 30, global bureaucrats salivate. As I write today in Forbes, they like to criticize ICANN leadership — hoping to gain political control — but too often ignore the huge success of the private-sector-led system. …
Innovation Yin and Yang
There are two key mistakes in the public policy arena that we don’t talk enough about. They are two apparently opposite sides of the same fallacious coin. Call the first fallacy “innovation blindness.” In this case, policy makers can’t see the way new technologies or ideas might affect, say, the future cost of health care, or the environment. The result …
Romer’s transformative “Charter Cities”
Stanford economist Paul Romer has had lots of good ideas over the years. Particularly his ideas about the importance of ideas in the economy. But his “Charter City” idea explored at the recent TED conference is one of the best yet. Maybe I like it so much because it so closely tracks the concepts offered in my long paper of …
