The Technology Liberation Front just marked its 15th year in existence. That’s a long time in the blogosphere. (I’ve only been writing at TLF since 2012 so I’m still the new guy.)

Everything from Bitcoin to net neutrality to long-form pieces about technology and society were featured and debated here years before these topics hit the political mainstream.

Thank you to our contributors and our regular readers. Here are the most-read tech policy posts from TLF in the past 15 years (I’ve omitted some popular but non-tech policy posts).

No. 15: Bitcoin is going mainstream. Here is why cypherpunks shouldn’t worry. by Jerry Brito, October 2013

Today is a bit of a banner day for Bitcoin. It was five years ago today that Bitcoin was first described in a paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. And today the New York Times has finally run a profile of the cryptocurrency in its “paper of record” pages. In addition, TIME’s cover story this week is about the “deep web” and how Tor and Bitcoin facilitate it.

The fact is that Bitcoin is inching its way into the mainstream.

No. 14: Is fiber to the home (FTTH) the network of the future, or are there competing technologies? by Roslyn Layton, August 2013

There is no doubt that FTTH is a cool technology, but the love of a particular technology should not blind one to look at the economics.  After some brief background, this blog post will investigate fiber from three perspectives (1) the bandwidth requirements of web applications (2) cost of deployment and (3) substitutes and alternatives. Finally it discusses the notion of fiber as future proof.

No. 13: So You Want to Be an Internet Policy Analyst? by Adam Thierer, December 2012

Each year I am contacted by dozens of people who are looking to break into the field of information technology policy as a think tank analyst, a research fellow at an academic institution, or even as an activist. Some of the people who contact me I already know; most of them I don’t. Some are free-marketeers, but a surprising number of them are independent analysts or even activist-minded Lefties. Some of them are students; others are current professionals looking to change fields (usually because they are stuck in boring job that doesn’t let them channel their intellectual energies in a positive way). Some are lawyers; others are economists, and a growing number are computer science or engineering grads. In sum, it’s a crazy assortment of inquiries I get from people, unified only by their shared desire to move into this exciting field of public policy.

. . . Unfortunately, there’s only so much time in the day and I am sometimes not able to get back to all of them. I always feel bad about that, so, this essay is an effort to gather my thoughts and advice and put it all one place . . . .

No. 12: Violent Video Games & Youth Violence: What Does Real-World Evidence Suggest? by Adam Thierer, February 2010

So, how can we determine whether watching depictions of violence will turn us all into killing machines, rapists, robbers, or just plain ol’ desensitized thugs? Well, how about looking at the real world! Whatever lab experiments might suggest, the evidence of a link between depictions of violence in media and the real-world equivalent just does not show up in the data. The FBI produces ongoing Crime in the United States reports that document violent crimes trends. Here’s what the data tells us about overall violent crime, forcible rape, and juvenile violent crime rates over the past two decades: They have all fallen. Perhaps most impressively, the juvenile crime rate has fallen an astonishing 36% since 1995 (and the juvenile murder rate has plummeted by 62%).

No. 11: Wedding Phtography and Copyright Release by Tim Lee, September 2008

I’m getting married next Spring, and I’m currently negotiating the contract with our photographer. The photography business is weird because even though customers typically pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars up front to have photos taken at their weddings, the copyright in the photographs is typically retained by the photographer, and customers have to go hat in hand to the photographer and pay still more money for the privilege of getting copies of their photographs.

This seems absurd to us . . . .

No. 10: Why would anyone use Bitcoin when PayPal or Visa work perfectly well? by Jerry Brito, December 2013

A common question among smart Bitcoin skeptics is, “Why would one use Bitcoin when you can use dollars or euros, which are more common and more widely accepted?” It’s a fair question, and one I’ve tried to answer by pointing out that if Bitcoin were just a currency (except new and untested), then yes, there would be little reason why one should prefer it to dollars. The fact, however, is that Bitcoin is more than money, as I recently explained in Reason. Bitcoin is better thought of as a payments system, or as a distributed ledger, that (for technical reasons) happens to use a new currency called the bitcoin as the unit of account. As Tim Lee has pointed out, Bitcoin is therefore a platform for innovation, and it is this potential that makes it so valuable.

No. 9: The Hidden Benefactor: How Advertising Informs, Educates & Benefits Consumers by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka, February 2010

Advertising is increasingly under attack in Washington. . . . This regulatory tsunami could not come at a worse time, of course, since an attack on advertising is tantamount to an attack on media itself, and media is at a critical point of technological change. As we have pointed out repeatedly, the vast majority of media and content in this country is supported by commercial advertising in one way or another-particularly in the era of “free” content and services.

No. 8: Reverse Engineering and Innovation: Some Examples by Tim Lee, June 2006

Reverse engineering the CSS encryption scheme, by itself, isn’t an especially innovative activity. However, what I think Prof. Picker is missing is how important such reverse engineering can be as a pre-condition for subsequent innovation. To illustrate the point, I’d like to offer three examples of companies or open source projects that have forcibly opened a company’s closed architecture, and trace how these have enabled subsequent innovation . . . .

No. 7: Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society by Adam Thierer, January 2010

The cycle goes something like this. A new technology appears. Those who fear the sweeping changes brought about by this technology see a sky that is about to fall. These “techno-pessimists” predict the death of the old order (which, ironically, is often a previous generation’s hotly-debated technology that others wanted slowed or stopped). Embracing this new technology, they fear, will result in the overthrow of traditions, beliefs, values, institutions, business models, and much else they hold sacred.

The pollyannas, by contrast, look out at the unfolding landscape and see mostly rainbows in the air. Theirs is a rose-colored world in which the technological revolution du jour is seen as improving the general lot of mankind and bringing about a better order. If something has to give, then the old ways be damned! For such “techno-optimists,” progress means some norms and institutions must adapt—perhaps even disappear—for society to continue its march forward.

No. 6: Copyright Duration and the Mickey Mouse Curve by Tom Bell, August 2009

Given the rough-and-tumble of real world lawmaking, does the rhetoric of “delicate balancing” merit any place in copyright jurisprudence? The Copyright Act does reflect compromises struck between the various parties that lobby congress and the administration for changes to federal law. A truce among special interests does not and cannot delicately balance all the interests affected by copyright law, however. Not even poetry can license the metaphor, which aggravates copyright’s public choice affliction by endowing the legislative process with more legitimacy than it deserves. To claim that copyright policy strikes a “delicate balance” commits not only legal fiction; it aids and abets a statutory tragedy.

No. 5: Cyber-Libertarianism: The Case for Real Internet Freedom by Adam Thierer & Berin Szoka, August 2009

Generally speaking, the cyber-libertarian’s motto is “Live & Let Live” and “Hands Off the Internet!” The cyber-libertarian aims to minimize the scope of state coercion in solving social and economic problems and looks instead to voluntary solutions and mutual consent-based arrangements.

Cyber-libertarians believe true “Internet freedom” is freedom from state action; not freedom for the State to reorder our affairs to supposedly make certain people or groups better off or to improve some amorphous “public interest”—an all-to convenient facade behind which unaccountable elites can impose their will on the rest of us.

No. 4: Here’s why the Obama FCC Internet regulations don’t protect net neutrality by Brent Skorup, July 2017

It’s becoming clearer why, for six years out of eight, Obama’s appointed FCC chairmen resisted regulating the Internet with Title II of the 1934 Communications Act. Chairman Wheeler famously did not want to go that legal route. It was only after President Obama and the White House called on the FCC in late 2014 to use Title II that Chairman Wheeler relented. If anything, the hastily-drafted 2015 Open Internet rules provide a new incentive to ISPs to curate the Internet in ways they didn’t want to before.

No. 3: 10 Years Ago Today… (Thinking About Technological Progress) by Adam Thierer, February 2009

As I am getting ready to watch the Super Bowl tonight on my amazing 100-inch screen via a Sanyo high-def projector that only cost me $1,600 bucks on eBay, I started thinking back about how much things have evolved (technologically-speaking) over just the past decade. I thought to myself, what sort of technology did I have at my disposal exactly 10 years ago today, on February 1st, 1999? Here’s the miserable snapshot I came up with . . . .

No. 2: Regulatory Capture: What the Experts Have Found by Adam Thierer, December 2010

While capture theory cannot explain all regulatory policies or developments, it does provide an explanation for the actions of political actors with dismaying regularity. Because regulatory capture theory conflicts mightily with romanticized notions of “independent” regulatory agencies or “scientific” bureaucracy, it often evokes a visceral reaction and a fair bit of denialism. . . . Yet, countless studies have shown that regulatory capture has been at work in various arenas: transportation and telecommunications; energy and environmental policy; farming and financial services; and many others.

No. 1: Defining “Technology” by Adam Thierer, April 2014

I spend a lot of time reading books and essays about technology; more specifically, books and essays about technology history and criticism. Yet, I am often struck by how few of the authors of these works even bother defining what they mean by “technology.” . . . Anyway, for what it’s worth, I figured I would create this post to list some of the more interesting definitions of “technology” that I have uncovered in my own research.

Technology policy has made major inroads into a growing number of fields in recent years, including health care, labor, and transportation, and we at the Technology Liberation Front have brought a free-market lens to these issues for over a decade. As is our annual tradition, below are the most popular posts* from the past year, as well as key excerpts.

Enjoy, and Happy New Year.

10. Thoughts on “Demand” for Unlicensed Spectrum

Unlicensed spectrum is a contentious issue because the FCC gives out this valuable spectrum for free to device companies. The No. 10 most-read piece in 2017 was my January commentary on the proposed Mobile Now Act. In particular, I was alarmed at some of the vague language encouraging unlicensed spectrum.

Note that we have language about supply and demand here [in the bill]. But unlicensed spectrum is free to all users using an approved device (that is, nearly everyone in the US). Quantity demanded will always outstrip quantity supplied when a valuable asset (like spectrum or real estate) is handed out when price = 0. By removing a valuable asset from the price system, large allocation distortions are likely. Any policy originating from Congress or the FCC to satisfy “demand” for unlicensed spectrum biases the agency towards parceling out an excessive amount of unlicensed spectrum.

9. The FCC’s Misguided Paid Priority Ban

Net neutrality has been generating clicks for over a decade and there was plenty of net neutrality news in 2017. In April, I explained why regulating and banning “paid priority” agreements online is damaging to the Internet.

The notion that there’s a level playing field online needing preservation is a fantasy. Non-real-time services like Netflix streaming, YouTube, Facebook pages, and major websites can mostly be “cached” on servers scattered around the US. Major web companies have their own form of paid prioritization–they spend millions annually, including large payments to ISPs, on transit agreements, CDNs, and interconnection in order to avoid congested Internet links. The problem with a blanket paid priority ban is that it biases the evolution of the Internet in favor of these cache-able services and against real-time or interactive services like teleconferencing, live TV, and gaming. Caching doesn’t work for these services because there’s nothing to cache beforehand.

Happily, a few months after this post was published the Trump FCC, led by Chairman Pai, eliminated the intrusive 2015 Internet regulations, including the “paid priority ban.”

8. Who needs a telecom regulator? Denmark doesn’t.

In March, the Mercatus Center published a case study by Roslyn Layton, a Trump transition team member, and Joe Kane about Denmark’s successful telecom reform since the 1990s. I summarized the paper for readers after it was published.

Layton and Kane explore Denmark’s relatively free-market telecom policies. They explain how Denmark modernized its telecom laws over time as technology and competition evolved. Critically, the center-left government eliminated Denmark’s telecom regulator in 2011 in light of the “convergence” of services to the Internet. Scholars noted, “Nobody seemed to care much—except for the staff who needed to move to other authorities and a few people especially interested in IT and telecom regulation.” Even-handed, light telecom regulation performs pretty well. Denmark, along with South Korea, leads the world in terms of broadband access. The country also has a modest universal service program that depends primarily on the market. Further, similar to other Nordic countries, Denmark permitted a voluntary forum, including consumer groups, ISPs, and Google, to determine best practices and resolve “net neutrality” controversies.

This fascinating Layton-Kane case study inspired a November event in DC about the future of US telecom law featuring FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and former Danish regulator Jakob Willer.

7. Shouldn’t the Robots Have Eaten All the Jobs at Amazon By Now?

Artificial intelligence and robotics are advancing rapidly but no one is certain what the effects will be for American labor markets. In July, Adam looked at Amazon’s incorporation of robots and urged scholars and policymakers to resist the doomsayers who predict crushing unemployment.

The reality is that we suffer from a serious poverty of imagination when it comes to thinking about the future, and future job opportunities in particular. …Old jobs and skills are indeed often replaced by mechanization and new technological processes. But that in turn opens the door to people to take on new opportunities — often in new sectors and new firms, but sometimes even within the same industries and companies. And because human needs and wants are essentially infinite, this process just goes on and on and on as we search for new and better ways of doing things. And that’s how, in the long run, robots and automation are actually employment-enhancing rather than employment-reducing.

6. Does “Permissionless Innovation” Even Mean Anything?

Adam spoke at an Arizona State University conference in May about emerging technologies and published his remarks at Tech Liberation. He commented on the rise of “soft law” for government oversight of tech-infused, fast-moving industries.

That is, there seemed to be some grudging acceptance on both our parts that “soft law” systems, multistakeholder processes, and various other informal governance mechanisms will need to fill the governance gap left by the gradual erosion of hard law. Many other scholars, including many of you in this room, have discussed the growth of soft law mechanisms in specific contexts, but I believe we have probably failed to acknowledge the extent to which these informal governance models have already become the dominant form of technological governance, at least in the United States.

5. Book Review: Garry Kasparov’s “Deep Thinking”

In May, Adam reviewed Garry Kasparov’s new book about AI, describing it as a “welcome breath of fresh air” in a genre often devoted to generating technopanics.

Kasparov’s book serves as the perfect antidote to the prevailing gloom-and-doom narrative in modern writing about artificial intelligence (AI) and smart machines. His message is one of hope and rational optimism about future in which we won’t be racing against the machines but rather running alongside them and benefiting in the process. …Kasparov suggests that there are lessons for us in the history of chess as well as from his own experience competing against Deep Blue. He notes that his match against IBM’s supercomputer, “was symbolic of how we are in a strange competition both with and against our creation in more ways every day.” Instead of just throwing our hands up in the air in frustration, we must be willing to embrace the new and unknown — especially AI and machine-learning.

4. Remember What the Experts Said about the Apple iPhone 10 Years Ago?

2017 marked the ten-year anniversary of the release of the first iPhone. Adam took a look back at some of the predictions made when the groundbreaking device first hit stores.

A decade after these predictions were made, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, and Blackberry have been decimated by the rise of Apple as well as Google (which actually purchased Motorola in the midst of it all). And Microsoft still struggles with mobile even though they are still a player in the field. Rarely have Joseph Schumpeter’s “perennial gales of creative destruction” blown harder than they have in the mobile sector over this 10 year period.

3. 4 Ways Technology Helped During Hurricanes Harvey and Irma (and 1 more it could have)

Jennifer Huddleston Skees joined our team in 2017 and September wrote the No. 3 most-popular post of the year about how technology is aiding disaster relief.

Technology is changing the way we respond to disasters and assisting with relief efforts. As Allison Griswold writes at Quartz, this technology enabled response has redefined how people provide assistance in the wake of disaster. We cannot plan how such technology will react to difficult situations or the actions of such platforms users, but the recent events in Florida and Texas show it can enable us to help one another even more. The more technology is allowed to participate in a response, the better it enables people to connect to those in need in the wake of disaster.

2. Some background on broadband privacy changes

Hyperbole, misinformation, and worse is amplified in too many news stories and Facebook feeds whenever Republicans undo an Obama FCC priority. Early in 2017 Congress and President Trump decided to use the rarely-used Congressional Review Act process to repeal broad Internet privacy regulations passed by the Obama FCC in 2016. My explainer about what was really going on (No, ISPs are not selling your SSNs and location information without your permission.) was the No. 2 story of the year.

Considering that these notice and choice rules have not even gone into effect, the rehearsed outrage from advocates demands explanation: The theatrics this week are not really about congressional repeal of the (inoperative) privacy rules. Two years ago the FCC decided to regulate the Internet in order to shape Internet services and content. The leading advocates are outraged because FCC control of the Internet is slipping away. Hopefully Congress and the FCC will eliminate the rest of the Title II baggage this year.

1. Here’s why the Obama FCC Internet regulations don’t protect net neutrality

There are plenty of myths about the 2015 “net neutrality” Order. Fortunately, many people out there are skeptical of the conventional narrative surrounding net neutrality. My post from July about the paper-thin net neutrality protections in the 2015 Order saw new life in November and December when the Trump FCC released a proposal to repeal the 2015 Order. Driven by the theatrics by those opposing the December 2017 Restoring Internet Freedom Order (and a Mark Cuban retweet), this post came from behind to be the most-read Technology Liberation post of the year.

The 2016 court decision upholding the rules was a Pyrrhic victory for the net neutrality movement. In short, the decision revealed that the 2015 Open Internet Order provides no meaningful net neutrality protections–it allows ISPs to block and throttle content. As the judges who upheld the Order said, “The Order…specifies that an ISP remains ‘free to offer ‘edited’ services’ without becoming subject to the rule’s requirements.”

No one knows what 2018 has in store for technology policy, but your loyal TLF bloggers are preparing for driverless car technology, cybersecurity, spectrum policy, and more.

Stay tuned, and thanks for reading.

*Excepting the most-read post, which was a 2017 update to a 2014 post from Adam about the definition of technology.

As 2014 draws to a close, we take a look back at the most-read posts from the past year at The Technology Liberation Front. Thank you for reading, and enjoy.

10. New York’s financial regulator releases a draft of ‘BitLicense’ for Bitcoin businesses. Here are my initial thoughts.

In July, Jerry Brito wrote about New York’s proposed framework for regulating digital currencies like Bitcoin.

My initial reaction to the rules is that they are a step in the right direction. Whether one likes it or not, states will want to license and regulate Bitcoin-related businesses, so it’s good to see that New York engaged in a thoughtful process, and that the rules they have proposed are not out of the ordinary.

9. Google Fiber: The Uber of Broadband

In February, I noted some of the parallels between Google Fiber and ride-sharing, in that new entrants are upending the competitive and regulatory status quo to the benefit of consumers.

The taxi registration systems and the cable franchise agreements were major regulatory mistakes. Local regulators should reduce regulations for all similarly-situated competitors and resist the temptation to remedy past errors with more distortions.

8. The Debate over the Sharing Economy: Talking Points & Recommended Reading

In September, Adam Thierer appeared on Fox Business Network’s Stossel show to talk about the sharing economy. In a TLF post, he expands upon his televised commentary and highlights five main points.

7. CES 2014 Report: The Internet of Things Arrives, but Will Washington Welcome It?

After attending the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in January, Adam wrote a prescient post about the promise of the Internet of Things and the regulatory risks ahead.

When every device has a sensor, a chip, and some sort of networking capability, amazing opportunities become available to consumers…. But those same capabilities are exactly what raise the blood pressure of many policymakers and policy activists who fear the safety, security, or privacy-related problems that might creep up in a world filled with such technologies.

6. Defining “Technology”

Earlier this year, Adam compiled examples of how technologists and experts define “technology,” with entries ranging from the Oxford Dictionary to Peter Thiel. It’s a slippery exercise, but

if you are going to make an attempt to either study or critique a particular technology or technological practice or development, then you probably should take the time to tell us how broadly or narrowly you are defining the term “technology” or “technological process.”

5. The Problem with “Pessimism Porn”

Adam highlights the tendency of tech press, academics, and activists to mislead the public about technology policy by sensationalizing technology risks.

The problem with all this, of course, is that it perpetuates societal fears and distrust. It also sometimes leads to misguided policies based on hypothetical worst-case thinking…. [I]f we spend all our time living in constant fear of worst-case scenarios—and premising public policy upon them—it means that best-case scenarios will never come about.

4. Mark T. Williams predicted Bitcoin’s price would be under $10 by now; it’s over $600

Professor Mark T. Williams predicted in December 2013 that by mid-2014, Bitcoin’s price would fall to below $10. In mid-2014, Jerry commends Prof. Williams for providing, unlike most Bitcoin watchers, a bold and falsifiable prediction about Bitcoin’s value. However, as Jerry points out, that prediction was erroneous: Bitcoin’s 2014 collapse never happened and the digital currency’s value exceeded $600.

3. What Vox Doesn’t Get About the “Battle for the Future of the Internet”

In May, Tim Lee wrote a Vox piece about net neutrality and the Netflix-Comcast interconnection fight. Eli Dourado posted a widely-read and useful corrective to some of the handwringing in the Vox piece about interconnection, ISP market power, and the future of the Internet.

I think the article doesn’t really consider how interconnection has worked in the last few years, and consequently, it makes a big deal out of something that is pretty harmless…. There is nothing unseemly about Netflix making … payments to Comcast, whether indirectly through Cogent or directly, nor is there anything about this arrangement that harms “the little guy” (like me!).

2. Muddling Through: How We Learn to Cope with Technological Change

The second most-read TLF post of 2014 is also the longest and most philosophical in this top-10 list. Adam wrote a popular and in-depth post about the social effects of technological change and notes that technology advances are largely for consumers’ benefit, yet “[m]odern thinking and scholarship on the impact of technological change on societies has been largely dominated by skeptics and critics.” The nature of human resilience, Adam explains, should encourage a cautiously optimistic view of technological change.

1. Help me answer Senate committee’s questions about Bitcoin

Two days into 2014, Jerry wrote the most-read TLF piece of the past year. Jerry had testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in 2013 as an expert on Bitcoin. The Committee requested more information about Bitcoin post-hearing and Jerry solicited comment from our readers.

Thank you to our loyal readers for continuing to visit The Technology Liberation Front. It was busy year for tech and telecom policy and 2015 promises to be similarly exciting. Have a happy and safe New Years!

The deadline for the Google Policy Fellowship is Friday, January 21 (at midnight PST). My new think tank, TechFreedom, just launched yesterday, is participating (as The Progress & Freedom Foundation, my former think tank, did for the last two years)—as are the Competitive Enterprise Institute (home to the TLF’s Ryan Radia, Wayne Crews & Alex Harris) and Cato Institute (Jim Harper & Julian Sanchez).

The deadline for the Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Program, run by the Institute for Humane Studies, is Monday January 31. TechFreedom, CEI and Cato are all participating, as are the Pacific Research Institute (Sonia Arrison), the Reason Foundation (Steve Titch) and the Washington Policy Center (Carl Gipson). Descriptions are available here (just select “technology” on the right). Also participating, for the first time, is the Space Frontier Foundation, on whose board I sit and for which I served as Chairman in 2008-2009.

If you look through each of our recent posts, you’ll get a pretty good idea of the diverse array issues we all cover, and who focuses on what. There’s certainly no shortage of interesting technology policy work to be done!

Both programs run 10 weeks and offer stipends. The Koch Program (which I participated in) is specifically geared towards those interested in free market ideas, and includes an excellent retreat, ongoing series of lectures, and group research project. As a “Koch-head” myself (class of 2000), I can attest to the quality of the program and the value of the alumni network. The Google program is in its fourth year and is already developing a valuable alumni network of its own.

Of course, most of our think tanks would probably be happy to have extra help around, so if you’re interested in an internship during the school year or over the summer, don’t hesitate to reach out to one of us. We may not necessarily be able to pay you but, hey, no one ever went into the think tank world to get rich!

This is the 5,000th post on the TLF.  We started on August 14, 2004 with this post, so we celebrated our fifth anniversary last August. As Adam Thierer explained back then:

The idea for the TLF came about after I asked some tech policy wonks whether it was worth putting together a blog dedicated to covering Internet-related issues from a cyber-libertarian perspective.  The model I had in mind was a “Volokh Conspiracy for Tech Issues,” if you will. I wanted to bring together a collection of sharp, liberty-loving wonks (most of whom worked in the think tank world) to talk about their research on this front and to give them a place to post their views on breaking tech policy developments.  It was to be a sort of central clearinghouse for libertarian-oriented tech policy analysis and advocacy. At first, Tim Lee and I debated whether it even made sense to have that sort of narrow focus, but I think the passage of time and the rise of plenty of competition on this front shows that it was worthwhile.  And I’ve been very pleased with the tag-team effort of all our TLF contributors and the way—without anyone planning it, in true libertarian fashion—we’ve sort of developed a nice division of labor on various tech policy issues.

Our traffic level is roughly in the same place as it was last summer: hovering somewhere around 2600 active Feedburner subscribers measured on a rolling basis (see the little red box at the top right-hand corner of the page under the banner) and our PageRank is still a healthy 7, putting us in the same league (logarithmically speaking) with the Volokh Conspiracy, our model, as well as popular sites like TechMeme, my daily first-stop for tech news. Here are a few key traffic statistics:

• 34,000 comments
• 1100+ Twitter followers
• 1,325,621 pageviews since Nov. 2006 when we started using Google Analytics
• 223,828 absolute unique visitors in the last year or about 21,000/month

Since last August, we’ve had three new bloggers join our merry band, now 21 strong!

• Steve Titch of the Reason Foundation;
• Carl Gipson of the Washington Policy Center; and
• Larry Downes, the author of the best-selling book Unleashing the Killer App and, recently, The Laws of Disruption:  Harnessing the New Forces that Govern Business and Life in the Digital Age , currently a nonresident fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society.

Recent Memorable Articles

Here are a few of our more popular and memorable posts since August:

• Net Neutrality: James Gattuso’s Horseshoes, Hand Grenades, and the FCC: Will the D.C. Circuit Ground Net Neutrality Rules?, Ryan Radia’s How Government Control of Internet Threatens Innovation: My FOXNews.com Op-Ed on Net Neutrality, Adam and my The Day Real Internet Freedom Died & Net Neutrality, Slippery Slopes & High-Tech Mutually Assured Destruction, and Steve Titch’s Net Neutrality Means No More iPhones
• Copyright: Tom Bell’s Copyright Duration and the Mickey Mouse Curve & Cord Blomquist’s Special 301 Watchlist” Threatens Open-Source Software
• Books: Adam’s The Digital Decade’s Definitive Reading List: Internet & Info-Tech Policy Books of the 2000s & The 10 Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2009
• Privacy: Jim’s The Government Can Monitor Your Location All Day Every Day Without Implicating Your Fourth Amendment Rights & Dropbox: A Privacy Black Box, my Google Buzz is No “Privacy Nightmare” (Unless You’re a Privacy Paternalist) & Julian Sanchez’s Defining “Paternalism” Online
• Online Safety: Adam’s Rethinking “Sex Crimes” and Sex Offender Registries
• Openness: Ryan Radia’s Newsflash to FCC: The iPhone is a Closed Platform, and Consumers Love It and Adam’s Oh Farts! The Droid, the iPhone & the Lessig-Zittrain Thesis & Apple’s App Store, Porn & “Censorship”
• Philosophy & Ideas: Adam & my Cyber-Libertarianism: The Case for Real Internet Freedom and Adam’s Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society, Can Humans Cope with Information Overload? Tyler Cowen & John Freeman Join the Debate, & Hillary Clinton’s Historic Speech on Global Internet Freedom
• Media: Adam’s A “Public Option” for Media? The Free Press Plan to Put Journalists on the Public Dole, Free Press, Robert McChesney & the “Struggle” for Media, A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria: From AOL-Time Warner to Comcast-NBC, & Violent Video Games & Youth Violence: What Does Real-World Evidence Suggest?
• Humor: Wayne Crews’s Act Now! Support a Bold National Elevator Plan & Adam’s My Swan Song Moment: I Will Take Elmo Hostage in the Name of First Amendment Freedoms!

Get Involved & Share Your Thoughts!

I hope you’ll take a moment to:

• Subscribe to our RSS feed or to our email updates;
• Follow us on Twitter or Facebook, or this list of our individual Twitter accounts;
• Add a TLF search engine to your browser so you can easily find TLF posts whenever you’re researching a particular tech policy topic; and
• Check out our new events calendar.

As always, we welcome any feedback you may have on the substance of what we’ve been writing about or how to make the site more user-friendly. We’ve kicked around a few ideas recently, such as:

• Trying to find some way to make older posts somewhat more visible, so they don’t just get buried below new posts;
• Adding Facebook Share & Buzz buttons in addition to the Retweet button for easy sharing, as Mashable has done;
• Making the category list more of a navigation menu by moving that column to the left of the main column (a bit like Reason Magazine has done with the menu at on the left of their site);
• Moving some of the content in column 2 into drop-down nav menus;
• Displaying tags at the bottom of each post in addition to categories;
• Finding a consistent way to display related posts at the bottom of each post; and
• Showing our tech-related individual tweets on the home page in a widget.

Just a few UI ideas… If you have any thoughts on this or any aspect of the TLF, please share them. We’d love to hear from you now or in comments on our posts.

We hope you enjoy the site and will pass word on to friends who might also be interested in coming here and discussing these issues with us.  Viva la (Technology) Revolucion!

It’s a great honor and pleasure for me to welcome Larry Downes to the TLF. Larry coined the term “Killer App” in his 1998 book, Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance. He’s written a few great pieces for CNET recently. And you can find our more about him at his website.

His latest book,  The Laws of Disruption, was a rare bright spot in a decade of terrible books about technology and revived a venerable tradition of dynamist classics, including his previous book as well as Clayton Christensen’s 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail and Virginia Postrel’s 1999 The Future and its Enemies. The Laws of Disruption expresses both optimism about the capacity of ongoing disruptive innovation to improve our lives and a healthy skepticism about regulation—as Adam noted in his 10 Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2009 review.

Larry’s taught technology law (Northwestern) and business (Chicago, UC-Berkeley) over the years and is currently a nonresident Fellow with the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society. He’s a terrifically nice guy, a great writer, and a welcome ally in the fight for cyber-freedom.

It is my great pleasure to welcome Steve Titch as a contributor to the Technology Liberation Front.  Like me, Steve has some journalism blood in his background but came to find that think tank hours were much better (even if the pay isn’t)! He has been a telecom and IT policy analyst for the Reason Foundation since 2005 and you can find a collection of his past work with Reason here.

Previously he was a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute and managing editor of Heartland IT and Telecom News. He has published research reports and editorials on a wide array of issues that are of interest to TLF readers, including: municipal broadband, network neutrality, universal service and telecom taxes.  We very much look forward to his contributions here.

Welcome to the TLF, Steve!

After over five years of blogging (since August 2004), 20+ TLF contributors have authored over 4,700 posts—creating an enormous repository of writing that provides free-market, market-oriented, skeptical, bottom-up, decentralist, cyber-libertarian, and/or Internet-exceptionalist perspectives on technology, communications, media and Internet news & policy.

To make it easier to sort through all these posts, and find material relevant to your quirkiest interests, just add our new search plug-in to Firefox. Firefox users, click here and then click on “Technology Liberation Front.” Check the box to “start using it right away,” and our custom search engine (powered by Google) will appear immediately in the drop-down of search engines under your search box (without having to restart Firefox), like so:

You can change where our search engine appears by clicking on “managed search engines” at the bottom of the drop down (not shown here).  Please let us know if you have any problems with the search engine, but it should work exactly the same way the search engine on the TLF itself works (near the top of column 2 just under the clenched fist graphic).

You can create your own search plug-ins, accessible through Mozilla’s database, here. The process should take just a few minutes.

P.S. Microsoft will let users add a custom search engine to Internet Explorer 7 & 8 here (instructions), but hasn’t made it easy for people like me to add the custom search engines to the IE Gallery so that other users can easily find and add the search engine with a single click.

Google has just announced its 2010 Fellowships, open to students 18+ (as of January 1st, 2010) eligible to work U.S. Among the participating organizations are three think tanks home to TLFers:  The Progress & Freedom Foundation (Adam & I), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (Ryan Radia) and Cato (Jim Harper). Applications are due December 28th, 2009, so apply today to help us in the fight for real Internet freedom!

TLF friends, I have an announcement: Today the Mercatus Center at George Mason University is launching a new Technology Policy Program, which I will be directing. Perhaps more exciting for TLF readers, though, is that we’re also launching a new blog and podcast.

The new site is called Surprisingly Free, and it will focus on the intersection of technology, policy, and economics. We’ll feature commentary from Mercatus and GMU scholars, guest bloggers, and aggregated posts from other academics around the country.

The podcast is imaginatively called Surprisingly Free Conversations and it’s modeled after Russ Robert’s excellent Econtalk. The format is a weekly in-depth one-on-one conversation with a thinker or entrepreneur in the tech field. The first episode is up and features TLF veteran Tim Lee on bottom-up processes, innovation, and the future of news. Check it out, and please subscribe in iTunes.

We’re looking forward to engaging the tech policy discussion online from a law and econ academic perspective, and we hope you’ll join us for the ride. I look forward to your feedback!

Google today unveiled the Data Liberation Front, a team of engineers in Chicago dedicated to ensuring that Google build “liberated products”—ones that have “built in features that make it easy (and free) to remove your data from the product in the event that you’d like to take it elsewhere.” We’ve spent a lot of time here warning about the dangers of Googlephobia, but now that Google has brazenly appropriated the TLF’s unique mock-Communist iconography, we’re starting to think that Jeff Chester and Scott Cleland may be right: Maybe Google really is trying to take over the world!

So we regret to announce our filing of a lawsuit in the Twelfth Circuit Court of Appeals to challenge Google’s infringement of our mark. We demand 50% of the $0.00 Google earns every time they “allow” users to port their application data out of Google to a competitor’s services! We will, of course, dedicate these royalties to the important project of educating and empowering users about how they can determine their own destiny online.

But seriously… We heartily agree with our Data Liberation Front comrades that users should be fully empowered to switch from one service to another online. This kind of competition is clearly the best protection for consumers in the Digital Age. Making switching easy should assuage not just antitrust concerns, but also concerns about how much privacy or security each web service offers to its users, no matter how big its market share: If you don’t like what a service offers, just take your data and leave! Who needs the government micro-managing the Internet when users have that kind of control?

Viva la (Technology) Revolution!

P.S. In case you haven’t seen it the Monty Python video we’re all riffing on:

http://www.youtube.com/v/gb_qHP7VaZE

It’s my pleasure to welcome Julian Sanchez to the Technology Liberation Front as a regular contributor.  Julian recently joined the Cato Institute as a Research Fellow and he previously spent time at Reason and Ars Technica, where he served as Washington Editor.

Although he won’t be spending all his time writing about technology policy issues at Cato, he will still be active on that front.  With his impressive knowledge of digital technology and his formidable journalistic skills, Julian will make an excellent addition to our merry band of cyber-libertarian rebels here at the Tech Liberation Front.

You can learn more about Julian at his personal blog, from his Cato bio page, and his Wikipedia entry.

We very much look forward to his contributions to the TLF.  Welcome aboard Julian!

You might have noticed that we’ve added a Tweetmeme button at the top of each TLF post showing how many times each post has been “retweeted” on Twitter. If you like a TLF post, please take a second to retweet it. Retweeting is an easy way to spread the TLF’s message that politicians should keep their hands off the ‘Net and everything else related to technology! Here are three ways you can help us with viral marketing the message of technology freedom:

1. If you’re already signed into Twitter, clicking the green “retweet” button will take you to Twitter with a retweet ready to go (“RT @techliberation “). You just have to click “Update.”
2. You can make retweeting even easier—just one click!—by connecting your Twitter account with Tweetmeme. Just sign in to Tweetmeme with your Twitter log-in and select “Allow” to enable TweetMeme to automatically send your retweets to your Twitter account.
3. You can tweet your comments on our posts by logging in with your Twitter account or using a Disqus account (assuming you’ve linked Twitter to your Disqus Profile). Each tweeted comment will count as a retweet of the post.

If you click the gray tweetcount button, you’ll be taken to Tweetmeme statistics about that particular post. One of my posts last week really took off, getting over 150 retweets! You can follow the TLF on twitter here and find links to individual TLF authors’ feeds here.

If you’re not already on Twitter, you can use but Tweet counts as an indicator of which TLF posts are hottest. But what are you waiting for, anyway? You’d better claim your name on Twitter before someone else does! It’s easy to set up an account and free, of course, and you can add followers from your webmail contacts. If nothing else, you can easily pipe your Tweets into Facebook as status updates. If you think Twitter is a stupid fad, Kevin Spacey and David Letterman may agree with you. But what do they really know about technology?

http://www.youtube.com/v/2Z1aZ7Gs46A

I’m pleased to welcome Brooke Oberwetter back to the TLF after 2.5 year stint working for The Man. Make no mistake about it, she’s a hard-core TechLiberationista, having worked as a policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and research assistant at the Cato Institute. She’s now a freelance writer in Washington, DC.  (In fact, she lives just down the street from me on the Yuppie Frontier of Shaw!)

Brooke achieved international celebrity as “The Jefferson 1” after she was arrested in a non-violent, silent iPod-toting flashmob celebration of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday at the Jefferson Memorial on April 13, 2008.  I was there that night to see the petty tyranny of the State, that Coldest of all Cold Monsters, in action. I can only say that we couldn’t have asked for a better or more articulate martyr for the cause of Liberty. See for yourself what happened:

http://www.youtube.com/v/ujrSAJ1b6Go

Ahoy, TLFers!  Looking for a way to do your part for the Cyber-Libertarian Resistance?

We’ve recently upgraded the site with a new look developed by our own Jerry Brito (preserving PJ Doland’s iconic art work) based on the Thesis Theme for Wordpress. We now need help customizing Thesis to improve the functionality of the site—like allowing users to access lists of content sorted by category, author or tag. If you think you might be able to help, please drop me a line at bszoka [at] pff [dot] org.  We’d be very grateful for your help!

As we’ve noted here before, there are many ways to follow the TLF.  [Did you notice those cool icons over on the upper right-hand side of the page?]  But we wanted to make sure that our readers were aware of our Twitter feed, in particular, as well as the individual feeds of some of our contributors.  So, in case you are interested, here ya go!

• TLF main feed:  http://twitter.com/TechLiberation
• Jerry Brito: http://twitter.com/jerrybrito
• Cord Blomquist: http://twitter.com/cordblomquist
• PJ Doland: http://twitter.com/pjdoland
• Adam Thierer: http://twitter.com/AdamThierer
• Berin Szoka: http://twitter.com/BerinSzoka
• Braden Cox: http://twitter.com/BradenCox
• Wayne Crews: http://twitter.com/wayne_crews
• Sonia Arrison: http://twitter.com/SoniaArrison
• Hance Haney: http://twitter.com/hance_haney
• Bret Swanson: http://twitter.com/JBSay

Five years ago today the Technology Liberation Front (the “TLF”) got underway with this post.  The idea for the TLF came about after I asked some tech policy wonks whether it was worth put together a blog dedicated to covering Internet-related issues from a cyber-libertarian perspective.  The model I had in mind was a “Volokh Conspiracy for Tech Issues,” if you will. I wanted to bring together a collection of sharp, liberty-loving wonks (most of whom worked in the think tank world) to talk about their research on this front and to give them a place to post their views on breaking tech policy developments.  It was to be a sort of central clearinghouse for libertarian-oriented tech policy analysis and advocacy.

At first, Tim Lee and I debated whether it even made sense to have that sort of narrow focus, but I think the passage of time and the rise of plenty of competition on this front shows that it was worthwhile.  And I’ve been very pleased with the tag-team effort of all our TLF contributors and the way—without anyone planning it, in true libertarian fashion—we’ve sort of developed a nice division of labor on various tech policy issues.

Perhaps a few stats are in order on this occasion to mark our progress 5 years in. The best indication of our success is the fact that our Pagerank (Google’s logarithmic scale of website importance based on links to that site) has reached 7/10—the same score shared by the Volokh Conspiracy (our model), as well as Techmeme (the leading tech news aggregator), the Cato Institute, CDT, etc. (For comparison: ArsTechnica and EFF are 8s.) Unfortunately, we’ve only been using Google Analytics for three of the past five years, so it’s impossible to get a authoritative accounting of traffic growth since Day 1. But here are few markers:

• 4,450+ posts
• 29,000+ comments
• 2,698 RSS subscribers
• 15,763 unique visitors per month
• 1,000,000 pageviews since Nov. 2006 when we started using Google Analytics
• Besides organic search and direct links, we get the bulk of our traffic from other tech-oriented sites (in order of hits) TechDirt, Freedom to Tinker, Ars Technica, GamePolitics.com, TechMeme, Slate, etc., and aggregators such as reddit, Fark, and StumbleUpon

So, what’s our #1 post of all-time? That would be Jim Harper’s “Where to Get Your Fake ID,” proving that if you play Google search terms wisely, you can build a link goldmine!  18,200+ pageviews and counting!  (Harper… You finally have something to list on your resume that lots of people have read!)  Sometimes silly posts like that can net a lot of traffic. For example, another top 5 TLF post was my piece on “The Most Powerful Computer Ever,” which has netted over 7,700 pageviews.  It was just an old magazine ad that Wayne Crews had found years ago and sent me a copy of.

In case you’re interested, some of our other most popular TLF posts include:

• My post “Grouping Recent Net Books: Internet Optimists vs. Pessimists” (6,631 views)
• Jim Harper’s “Social Hack on Gmail Users” (3,756 views)
• My rant on “Video Games & Moral Panic” (3,408 views)
• Berin Szoka’s look at “The Right Way to Allow Cell Phone Jammers” (3,322 views)
• Tim Lee’s piece on the tech community & civil liberties: “Pissing on Their Graves” (2,828 views)
• Harper’s “ID Checks are About Control, Not Security” (2,870) and his look at “Border Biometrics” (2,402 views)
• Cord Blomquist’s “Sirius XM Bankruptcy: Thank Washington for the Delay” (2,069 views)
• Alex Harris’s look at the “Best and Worst Supreme Court Decisions” (1,714 views)
• My book review of  “Zittrain’s Future of the Internet” (1,689 views)

I want to thank all my TLF blogging colleagues for their contributions over the past 5 years. As I noted in that very first post here back in 2004, “this blog is not a one-man show.”  Almost all of us here have our own personal or organizational blogs, but when we come together here on the TLF, it helps us show the world that there is another vision for ordering the affairs of cyberspace beside the command-and-control, hands-all-over-the-Net mentality that dominates today: real Internet freedom!

There are a couple of people who deserve special thanks for what they have done for the TLF:

PJ Doland has not only generously hosted our site all these years and donated endless hours of his time to keeping it running through waves of spam attacks, but he also designed our unique TLF banner. His use of Soviet-style art for libertarian purposes is the perfect compliment to our “Liberation Front” theme.  PJ also provided that awesome TLF tagline: “The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.” (It’s a B.F. Skinner quote, incidentally).

Jerry Brito has also been enormously helpful with the back office stuff, including getting our podcast off the ground. He is also is responsible for the wonderful site redesign and improvements that were just rolled out recently. And Jerry has been extremely patient with all the TLF bloggers through the years as he taught us the basics about how to be more effective bloggers.

Tim Lee has been the TLF’s most prolific and popular blogger and, as I noted recently when he announced his departure from the TLF, it is not an overstatement to say that for many of the TLF’s five years the rest of us here have simply been riding on his coat tails. We were just lucky to be along for the ride as he made the TLF more visible to the tech policy world. He brought us a significant portion of the audience and respect that we have to today and I cannot thank him enough for that.

Berin Szoka, my colleague at PFF, came on board just over a year ago but since then has become a prolific force on the TLF and helped spawn several new “ongoing series” features such as the Privacy Solutions Series, “Googlephobia,” and Cutting the Video Cord.  Berin is also helping with the back-office stuff and trying to help me get the podcast going again regularly.

Our Readers! Seriously, we thank each and every one of you who has taken the time to visit our site, read our rants, and leave comments (even the shitty ones!)  We really appreciate it. We know there are countless other blogs out there to occupy your time and we’re honored that you’d give ours even a few minutes of your day. If you’re in D.C. today, we hope you’ll join us for our celebratory happy hour tonight!

Here’s to another 5 great years of technology freedom!  If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to our blog feed, podcast feed (iTunes), Twitter and Facebook page.

Cheers,

Adam Thierer

P.S. I’m feeling a bit sentimental as I think back and realize all the things that didn’t exist even just 5 years ago: Twitter, the iPhone, FiOS, Facebook, Pandora, Chrome, the PS3 + Wii + 360, YouTube, Hulu, etc…   Just imagine how exciting the next 5 years will be!

Please join us tonight for a very special Alcohol Liberation Front happy hour at Rocket Bar, 714 7th ST (7th & G) right across from the Chinatown/Verizon Center metro (Red/Green/Yellow) in D.C., 6:30-8:30ish.

Please join us as we celebrate, commiserate and plan for the next five years of fighting the good cyber-libertarian fight. We’ll even through in a free TLF laptop sticker! Just RSVP on Facebook!

Five years ago, we started the TLF to report on—and hopefully help to reverse—this dangerous trend of over-regulation of the Internet, communications, media and high-technology in general. We’ve become a full-service technology policy blog that covers complete gamut of public policy issues affecting the future of the Internet and technology.

Please join us as we celebrate, commiserate and plan for the next five years of fighting the good cyber-libertarian fight. We’ll even through in a free TLF laptop sticker! Just RSVP on Facebook today!

RocketBar will be offering the following drink specials:

• $3 PBR cans,
• $5 Rail Cocktails,
• $5 House Wine and
• $4.50 Miller High Life 16oz cans.

They have a wide variety of games, so you can get your pool/shuffleboard/darts/Risk/Trivial Pursuit on.

Please spread the word about the event to your friends and, if you haven’t already done so, become a fan of our Facebook page!

Adam Thierer recruited me to contribute to what became the Technology Liberation Front way back in August 2004, when I was fresh out of college and working as a writer at the Cato Institute. My first post was about DRM (I was against it). I remember going back and forth with Adam about whether there was really a demand for a libertarian tech-policy blog. I think the last five years have laid those questions to rest, as both our traffic and our list of contributors have grown steadily. The last year or so has gone especially well, as we’ve been joined by Ryan, Berin, and Alex and Adam inaugurated new features like his annual Best Tech Books series.

At the same time, I’ve been blessed with a steadily growing list of other blogging opportunities. I’m now nominally a regular contributor to at least 6 blogs. In practice, this has meant woefully neglecting all six of them. And at the same time, I’ve had a number of people complain that it’s impossible to follow my writing, scattered as it is in so many places.

So I’ve decided that now is a good time to “go solo.” I’ve launched a new blog called “Bottom-Up,” and I’m going to be ending or scaling back my involvement with all the other blogs to which I nominally contribute. This will be my last post at TLF, and starting tomorrow the vast majority of my blogging activities will be found at the new site.

Some of what I’ll be talking about will be familiar to longtime TLF readers. I did a post today on the decline of newspapers, a topic I’ve weighed in before. But I’ll also be covering some new ground. This post, for example, examines the why Darwin’s theory of evolution remains so controversial after 150 years. I hope you’ll check it out, and if it looks interesting, please subscribe.

In closing, I want to thank my fellow TLFers, with whom I’ve fought the good fight over the last five years. I’m excited to see what they come up with in the next five years.

Viva la (Technology) Revolution!

As you might have noticed, we’re giving the TLF a facelift as we approach our five-year anniversary on August 14. Our own Jerry Brito is leading the charge, with Cord Blomquist and PJ Doland providing backup vocals. Thanks, guys!

We’re still ironing out bugs and experimenting with widgets, but we’d welcome your feedback as we work things out. Please feel free to share your thoughts on the new design or features by posting comments here, or to email me at bszoka pff.org.

Party on, Wayne!

Just a reminder, we’re meeting at the Science Club on Tuesday, July 14 for one of our semi-regular happy hours: 1136 19th St NW, Washington DC from 5:30-8 pm. The club will be offering happy hour drink specials.

We’ll celebrate the Digital Revolution (while also denouncing the scourge of centralizing, totalitarian Digital Jacobinism).  All those interested in technology, the freedom of technology and technologies of freedom are welcome.

RSVP on Facebook today!

Hello, and welcome to the Technology Liberation Front blog. Does the world really need another blog, you might ask? Well, yes, on this issue the world most certainly does need another blog because there’s not another one like this out there.

Do you remember when politicians would run around saying government should keep its “Hands off the Net”? It was nice rhetoric while it lasted but, ultimately, it was a hollow promise. Today the government has its hands all over the Internet. It’s difficult to name an area where lawmakers and regulators are not currently promulgating or considering rules and regulations for the high-technology and communications sectors.

This is why this site is needed. We aim to report on, and hopefully help to reverse, this dangerous trend of over-regulation of the Internet, communications, media and high-technology in general. We will not hide our love of liberty on this site and we will take every opportunity to castigate those who call for expanding the reach of government into these fields.

Second, this will be what you might call a full-service technology policy blog. While there are other technology blogs out there, those dealing with public policy often seem to be focused on just a few core issues. In particular, copyright law dominates the discussion on many blogs these days. While that’s understandable given the increasing intersection of copyright law and technology policy, one wonders why other sites haven’t popped up to cover a broader array of topics in our exploding universe of high technology pubic policy issues, including: First Amendment & free speech concerns; regulation of e-commerce markets and online services; privacy regulation; SPAM; spectrum management policy and wireless issues; broadcast television and radio regulation; media ownership / concentration concerns; traditional telecom regulatory policy; broadband Internet deployment policy; cable regulation; VoIP issues; network regulation and open access mandates; Internet taxation; online gambling; cyber-surveillance issues; and the role of the Federal Communications Commission and other regulatory agencies in the Information Age. And that just scratches the surface of what we’ll be covering here.

Third, this blog is not a one-man show. We have brought together several of the brightest and most provocative minds in the field of technology public policy today to compile and comment on the important developments of the day. This will help us keep the site fresh, entertaining and informative.

We hope you enjoy the site and will pass word on to friends who might also be interested in these issues. We also hope you will be willing to provide feedback on our entries and please let us know how we can improve the site to make it more useful and consumer-friendly.

Viva la (Technology) Revolution!