This may be the year when the limitation of biometric capture goes national. Right now, company’s using biometrics are driven by one state law, but others could soon join. As limits on biometrics cascade forth from Illinois in private cases based on the state’s Biometric Information Protection Act […]
In the current environment of reckoning for the societal power of Big Tech, one threat seems ever-present on the tongues of those who would cut these companies down to size. Enacting this threat is likely to have the opposite effect that many people intend, but it is still […]
The huge search and social media platforms of the internet are reaching an inflection point. For decades they have been able to deflect attention from their role as content providers. The issue is now front and center in our national debate and the long-reigning status quo is likely […]
Your body may be a wonderland or a wasteland, but it is a goldmine of data. Collectors of information have noticed. In our midwinter exploration of the economic and legal foundations of data regulation, we next turn to a natural tool for personal identification, for ongoing transactions (like […]
Last week I jumped from the starting point of the newest U.S. anti-trust action against Google into a discussion about the legal and economic status of data. I would like to carry the discussion of data further. To briefly recap: data is history (it describes someone at a […]
In 2020, a more tragic year than most, we lost giants of the technology world. We lost Larry Tesler, PARC’s magician, later at Apple, who helped develop the computer commands that run our lives, like ‘search and replace’ and ‘copy and paste,’ and other concepts crucial for user-friendly […]
Two weeks ago I collected the major recent anti-trust/competition lawsuits, by regulators and competitors alike, filed against U.S. big technology companies. My point was that, after a long fallow period where these giants received the benefit of the doubt for their successful competitive practices, the public trust has […]
Tim Wu, the bard of big tech, has written multiple books about the rise and coming fall of technology monopolies, oligopolies, and empires. In The Master Switch, Wu tells the story of how, in the 19th Century, the existing telegraph empire tried to smother telephone technology in its […]
Stung by Brexit and set adrift by a neglectful U.S. foreign policy, the European Union has started to explore new ways of breaking away from the rest of the world, including taking steps to cordon EU data into locally managed systems. While this kind of protectionist move is […]
Meet the Euro-crats who think that the European Union needs to behave more like Russia and China. More like Nigeria, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia. These leaders are pushing not just to punish U.S. firms for successfully building data-focused businesses, but pushing to actively pull data away into localized pods […]
