I would think that most of us would agree that there are certain less than acceptable ways of talking in the public square. Now even less than acceptable language, even that of the coined “hate speech” variety of communication is still protected speech. The philosophy of deterring certain types of speech through government regulation is something that I and many of my colleagues feel is a 1st Amendment violation. Most notably is the Fairness Doctrine which continues its journey via Mark Lloyd, and the Internet version suggested by Cass Sunstein creating “Internet sidewalks” of opposing viewpoints across the Web.

AEI’s Nick Schulz has a very good video interview of Great Stagnation author Tyler Cowen.

I have no independent opinion on the current dispute about whether Bing uses Google results to improve its own, but for a sober extended discussion of the issue, go to SearchEngineLand, which ends by seeing both sides: Perhaps we’ll get some detente going forward. But I’ll close with one last observation. PR is not leading [...]

The good news is that the adults seem to be taking over as the stakeholders in the Internet are increasingly aware that this is a joint problem, and not a Hobbesian war of all against all. No one knows the optimum path, but one principle should be to minimize the role of government and maximize the role of the private actors.

Facebook’s new full SSL feature finally works three years after it became widely known that Facebook user accounts were easily hijacked. Unfortunately, their update still won’t fully protect Facebook users because Facebook forgot to deploy HTTPS authentication on the user login page.

Hillicon Valley reports that Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) will introduce legislation dealing with online privacy next week. The legislation will provide an “opt out” for individuals that do not want to allow advertisers to track them.

Why all the “Net Neutrality” screaming about Verizon throttling 5% of the heaviest users? Even under the strictest Net Neutrality rules, a fair sharing throttling scheme is reasonable and legal. For wireless networks, it’s the only way to keep the network operational for everyone.

The appeals of the FCC’s Net Neutrality rule continued to run their courses this week. [For background, see Which Court Gets to Hear the Net Neutrality Appeal? (Jan. 21) &  More on the Verizon Appeal of the Net Neutrality Regulation (Jan. 24).] On Jan. 10, even before the rule was published (which still has not [...]

Renesys who conducts real-time web studies has posted their real-time video of Egypt’s Internet activity this week.  As is well known by now there is a massive revolutionary uprising in Egypt that has been going on for the past week.  Several days ago the government pulled the plug on all the major ISP’s in the [...]

Google accused Microsoft of copying its Google search data as a ranking factor in Microsoft’s Bing search engine, but this is strange coming from Google since it routinely uses public web data gathered from the world’s websites.  For example, Google YouTube uses Amazon’s recommendation rankings.