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 [...]

Better late than never, I’ve finally given a close read to the Notice of Inquiry issued by the FCC on June 17th.  (See my earlier comments, “FCC Votes for Reclassification, Dog Bites Man”.)  In some sense there was no surprise to the contents; the Commission’s legal counsel and Chairman Julius Genachowski had both published comments [...]

I was interviewed yesterday for the local Fox affiliate on Cal. SB1411, which criminalizes online impersonations (or “e-personation”) under certain circumstances. On paper, of course, this sounds like a fine idea.  As Palo Alto State Senator Joe Simitian, the bill’s sponsor, put it, “The Internet makes many things easier.  One of those, unfortunately, is pretending [...]

I participated last week in a Techdirt webinar titled, “What IT needs to know about Law.”  (You can read Dennis Yang’s summary here, or follow his link to watch the full one-hour discussion.  Free registration required.) The key message of  The Laws of Disruption is that IT and other executives need to know a great [...]

I write in “The Laws of Disruption” of the risk of unintended consequences that regulators run in legislating emerging technologies.  Because the pace of change for these technologies is so much faster than it is for law, the likelihood of defining a legal problem and crafting a solution that will address it is very slim.  [...]

After attending last week’s Federal Trade Commission online privacy roundtable, I struggled for several days to make some sense out of my notes and my own response to calls for new legislation to protect consumer privacy. The result was a 5,000 word article—too long for nearly anyone to read. More on that later. Even as [...]

My analysis of this week’s privacy stories (and there were plenty of them) appears this afternoon on CNET.  See “Note to Silicon Valley:  How Not to Handle Privacy.”  Compared to most of the press coverage of Facebook’s new privacy policy and related tools, I sound almost enamored.  Ouch.

Two stories in the news today about online privacy suggest a paradox about user attitudes. But not the one everyone always talks about, in increasingly urgent terms. One story from CNET’s Don Reisinger reports on a study conducted by an Australian security firm. The company created two phony Facebook users and tried to “friend” 100 [...]

Law Six of The Laws of Disruption deals with the myths and realities of Internet crime.  It’s a subject that’s bothered me for a long time.  Back in the Stone Age (1995), John Perry Barlow and I wrote a Position Paper for Computer Sciences Corporation titled, “Five Privacy and Security Imperatives for Electronic Trade.”   (It’s [...]

No doubt the gooiest problem at the intersection of technology and law continues to be what is unhelpfully referred to as “privacy.” I’ve clipped five articles in just the last week on the subject, including several about Facebook’s efforts to appease users and government regulators in Canada, demands by Switzerland to Google to stop its [...]