Back in July, I wrote about a consultation on net neutrality from the EU, entitled
On-line public consultation on “specific aspects of transparency,
traffic management and switching in an Open Internet”. Just to remind
you, here’s the background:
On Open Enterprise blog.
… Read More
As Techdirt stories regularly report, governments around the world,
including those in the West, are greatly increasing their surveillance
of the Internet. Alongside a loss of the private sphere, this also
represents a clear danger to basic civil liberties. The good news is
that we already have the solution: encrypting communications makes it
very hard, if not entirely impossible, for others to eavesdrop on our
conversations. The bad news is that crypto is largely ignored by the
general public, partly because they don’t know about it, and partly
because even if they do, it seems too much trouble to implement.
On Techdirt.
… Read More
In the wake of the Twitter joke trial fiasco, which saw Paul Chambers dragged through the courts for two years before being acquitted, the UK’s Director of Public Prosecutions announced that there should be an “informed debate”
about the boundaries of free speech for social media. That really
can’t happen soon enough, as the UK continues to arrest and punish
people for the crime of posting stupid and tasteless messages online.
Here are some of the latest developments.
On Techdirt.
… Read More
Back in August, I urged
people to respond to the consultation on the truly dreadful Draft
Communications Bill, aka Snooper’s Charter. Obviously, I wasn’t alone
in doing that: many organisations concerned about the impact on civil
liberties in this country have done the same. For example, both 38
Degrees and Open Rights Group (ORG) provided suggested texts and asked
people to contact the Joint Parliamentary Committee that has been
considering the Bill – and doing rather a good job of it, I must say.
On Open Enterprise blog.
… Read More
As we know, lock-in is one of the biggest obstacles to moving from
closed, proprietary formats, to open ones. But so far as I know, no one
has tried to quantify the extent to which people cling to old formats.
That makes the following piece of research useful, at least as a first stab at finding out what is really going on:
On Open Enterprise blog.
… Read More
One of the reasons the copyright lobby has been able to get so far
with Net-hostile legislation like SOPA/PIPA and treaties like ACTA and
TPP is that the companies affected adversely — both big Internet
players and smaller startups — have failed to make their voice heard
effectively. That’s finally starting to change, as Google ramps up its
lobbying efforts, and Net entrepreneurs start to get organised.
On Techdirt.
… Read More
Transparency is worth having for itself, since governments often tend
to behave a little better when they know that someone is watching. But
occasionally, requests for data turn up something big and totally
unexpected because someone failed to notice quite what the information
provided implies.
On Techdirt.
… Read More
