Adam Thierer's Blog, page 177

Genomics industry facing risk of government regulation

It's been a tough week for the personal genomics testing marketplace.  First there were two long days of FDA meetings, and then today an Energy and Commerce Committee held hearings where the GAO announced the results of a "sting" operation into direct to consumer (DTC) genomics companies.   Below is the (brutal) GAO video.  As Daniel MacArthur has pointed out, today there exist both legitimate and not-so-legitimate testing firms, but the GAO has lumped them all in together, which will make...

After the Deluge, More Deluge

If I ever had any hope of "keeping up" with developments in the regulation of information technology—or even the nine specific areas I explored in The Laws of Disruption—that hope was lost long ago.  The last few months I haven't even been able to keep up just sorting the piles of printouts of stories I've "clipped" from just a few key sources, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNET News.com and The Washington Post.

I've just gone through a big pile of clippings...

"Best Practices" Online Safety Panel at Tomorrow's IGF-USA Event

Internet governance is often thought of as ICANN and domain names, but the Internet Governance Forum, a body of the UN, takes a broad approach. Tomorrow I'll be speaking on a panel about online safety at IGF-USA,  a national body that reports to the full IGF.  We'll discuss the recent NTIA OSTWG "Youth Safety on a Living Internet" report, among other online safety issues such as sexting, cyberbullying, and proposed state legislation. Here's the panel:

Moderator: Danny Weitzner, Associate...

When it comes to Internet taxes, where you sit determines where you stand

In light of the Delahunt "Main Street Fairness Act" () introduced earlier this month, over at the NetChoice blog Steve DelBianco describes why it is important to consider that "where you sit determines where you stand"  when it comes to Internet taxes:

Big-box stores like Walmart and Target support a federal mandate that forces everyone to collect sales tax, even for states where they have zero presence.  So why would these giant chains  — who already have to collect taxes on their...

New York Times Symposium on Future of Indecency Regulation

As part of its excellent "Room for Debate" series, the New York Times has an interesting new online symposium up now asking, "Will Networks Go Wild, With No Decency Rules?"  It was in response to last week's Second Circuit decision, which again slapped down an effort by the Federal Communications Commission to defend the agency's indecency enforcement regime.  I was honored to be asked to contribute a short essay on the subject. Here are the other contributors and their essays.  Take the...

Coupla Cybersecurity Notes

Check out national security reporter Shaun Waterman's report on lapses in security using techniques that only recently became known as "social engineering."

Ms. Sage's connections invited her to speak at a private-sector security conference in Miami, and to review an important technical paper by a NASA researcher. Several invited her to dinner. And there were many invitations to apply for jobs.

"If I can ever be of assistance with job opportunities here at Lockheed Martin, don't hesitate to...

Title II for broadband is desperate and ill-conceived

Julius Genachowski is in a hurry.

He is arguing that the commission must act quickly to "restore the longstanding deregulatory—as opposed to 'no-regulatory' or 'over-regulatory'—compact" that governed broadband Internet access services prior to a recent court decision.  Such an approach is urgently needed to "restore the status quo," he claims.

If the Federal Communications Commission cannot regulate the Internet, it may die.   The telephone and television industries are declining, whereas...

We Need "New York Times Neutrality"—NOT!

I've long been a fan of Danny Sullivan, who edits Search Engine Land, and probably knows more about search engines than anyone outside the companies that actually run them. But my respect for his wit, eloquence and perspective  has reached new heights with his latest piece:  The New York Times Algorithm & Why It Needs Government Regulation, a lampoon of the NYT's foolish call for search neutrality in an editorial yesterday, turning the Times' arguments right back at them, and pointing out...

Sen. Klobuchar Stirs Up Facebook Child Safety Technopanic

Sen. Amy Klobuchar just released a letter to Facebook demanding the site require "a prominent safety button or link on the profile pages of users under the age of 18″—akin to the so-called "panic button" app launched earlier this week by the UK's Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP). She doesn't seem to realize that this app is available to all Facebook users, not just those in the UK. But her focus on empowerment tools and education is admirable, and it's certainly a fair...

Catherine White on the Noisy Idiot Dilemma

This week on the podcast, Catherine White, graduate student at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she is researching productive participatory discussion, talks about her thesis on the Noisy Idiot Dilemma.  White explains the dilemma — how to foster productive online conversation when certain speakers exhibit noisy, unproductive, or unhelpful behavior — and discusses her research on various online forums, weblog comments, effects of humor, anonymity, and...