When I saw the theme of this year’s World IP Day, Innovate for a Green Future, I will admit that it was hard not to be cynical. In light of the reinvigorated political assault on science—let alone to be thinking about climate change in the middle of a pandemic—it is tempting to believe that the debate about global warming still rages—or ...
As our attention turned to concerns about disinformation, hate speech, and data security after the 2016 election, it became clear that the big cyber policy on deck was going to be a fight about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996). For some detailed discussion about this legislation, see posts here, here, and here; but in nutshell, Section 230 ...
Over the past three years since the internet industry first had to respond to the so-called “Techlash,” various comments on the theme that “the internet didn’t turn out like we expected” have generally shared one common flaw—a failure to acknowledge that the expectation itself was folly. Whether parties are debating the amount of moderation that should or should not be done ...
In a new, must-read article at MIT Technology review, Professor Zeynep Tufekci at the the University of North Carolina describes How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump. Beginning with the euphoric naivete of just a few years ago that universally assumed Facebook and Twitter would save democracy, Tufekci details the mechanisms by which social media became a ...
The underlying premise of this blog—indeed its title—is a rejection of the tech-utopian pursuit of more as a virtue unto itself. It is true that the presumed benefit of more access to more content happens to be one of the commonly-alleged rationales for mass copyright infringement, but the destructive power of more goes far beyond the interests of authors of ...
