When EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow delivered his Declararion of the Independence of Cyberspace in Davos, Switzerland in February of 1996, it was in response to the Telecommunications Act, which had become law just a month earlier. In this speech that would become a manifesto for the industry’s libertarian nature, Barlow proclaimed the web as a place beyond the scope ...
“What should govern the behavior of huge multinationals like Google: the law Google makes for itself, or the laws that people make?” asks Andrew Orlowski. Indeed. For anyone interested in whether or not the tech giants are simply going to be allowed to operate above the law, the Equustek case is one to watch. As reported, Google was ordered by ...
Image by nicholashan This week, the Wall Street Journal reports that Google has been funding academic research papers worldwide and, unsurprisingly, the conclusions in these papers tend to support Google’s policy interests. This is familiar territory of course. Most obviously, we remember that Big Tobacco funded all manner of “research” that produced alternative facts about the health hazards of smoking. This ...
Neil Turkewitz, Senior Policy Counsel at the International Center for Law & Economics asserts that critics of the Canadian Supreme Court decision in Equustek v Google are overlooking the case itself in favor of spinning hyperbole. Turkewitz sees the specifics of the ruling as a model for good governance and the protection of sovereignty and civil liberties, even on the ...
Image by beebright There. Did you feel that? A tremor in the First Amendment? Somewhere in cyberspace, a website has died, taking with it a tiny Yop of free speech. You can hardly be blamed for missing it against the sound of trillions of other Yops. But it happened and it will happen again. There. It just happened again. Do you ...
