“The more speech the merrier,” was the central argument made by Justice Scalia in writing the majority opinion on Citizens United, but that case suggests, at least to many of us, that the mechanism of the speech matters a great deal. Yes, in many ways, money can be speech; but at the same time, I think Scalia conjured an illusion ...

Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye, Not uttered by based sale of chapmen’s tongues. So, like, what’s a Like worth anyway?  I mean a Facebook Like.  Well, for starters, like, Facebook is valued at like more than 120 times its earnings, so, like, the concept “value” is like, y’know, hard to define. Likes are indeed currency, though good ...

Last week, the ITIF (Information Technology & Innovation Foundation) hosted a panel discussion on a theme familiar to readers of this blog. The title of the discussion, based on a report of the same name, was How Tech Populism is Undermining Innovation. The lead author of that report and host of the conversation, ITIF president, Robert D. Atkinson stated that ...

Yeah, that was a shameless use of a headline with a hook; but since you took the bait, here’s the switch. I don’t literally mean to say that all content creators need to watch pornography (that’s up to them), but I do mean that professional content creators might want to look at a business dynamic that has occurred in the ...

On the day my first child was born in New York City in 1993, my wife told me she was kept awake that night by all the sirens.  These wails that most New Yorkers instinctively ignore suddenly had new meaning; they became a chorus singing the refrain of all the terrible things that can happen to a person.  I suspect ...

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