There has been a lot of soul-searching in mainstream media in the past week, following Shane Smith‘s scathing health check at this year’s MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh international TV festival. The lecture should be obligatory viewing for anyone interested in media in general, but also for those of us […]
John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace was published 20 years ago. While it is something that tends to concern mostly Internet regulation theorists, it is surprising just how relevant it continues to be. The text usually deserves a mention in some of the most cited works on […]
Last Sunday night Citizenfour, the Laura Poitras documentary about Edward Snowden, won the Oscar for best documentary. This is a great development for those of us who believe that the Snowden revelations constitute one of the most important events of our time, and hopefully it will prompt a wider examination […]
It has been a bad week for sharing economy app Uber. First the city of Delhi banned Uber because of a rape allegation, and now a judge in Spain has also banned the service. A judge in Madrid has allowed a cease and desist injunction from the Madrid Taxi Association. […]
Costa Rica, like so many other countries, heavily regulates taxi services; this means that the government gives out a limited number of taxi certifications and licence plates and requires the use of a taxi meter. These requirements are designed to ensure a certain level of protection to consumers, as well […]
For many of us interested in Internet Regulation, cyber-libertarianism is that wacky and archaic theory that is described at the start of a presentation, sort of like Geocities pages and Myspace profiles. “Look at what those naïve early Internet theorists believed, and isn’t that animated dancing baby hideous?” The cyber-libertarian […]
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has held its 50th meeting in London this week. ICANN is one of the bodies that play an important role in running that decentralised, disconnected mishmash of networks that we call the Internet. ICANN is in charge of some of the […]
Turkey declared war on the Internet this week when its regime decided that it did not like the portrayal of its leader in social media. Accusing them of bias, the Telecommunication’s Department issued a directive ordering the immediate blocking of Twitter across its territory. The reason for the ban was […]
In a move that did not surprise Yours Truly, the unlicensed streaming service Popcorn Time was shut down by its developers a few days after it had gained notoriety. There was no reason why the site was removed, other than the developers needed to move on with their lives (after […]
Earlier today, the caching and security service provider CloudFlare went down, taking with it more than 700 thousand websites for over an hour (including our very own SCRIPTed journal). While downtime is to be expected even in the ever-connected world, what piqued my interest about this event is the nature […]