Technology & Democracy Project
The idea for creating a legal analog to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) occured to Peter Harter while writing an essay criticising Senator Exon’s “Communications Decency Act of 1995” (S.314). Click here to see this unpublished essay.) The following is a brief idea outline for the Internet Law Task Force , written prior to the launch of the task force in October of Read More ›
Every now and then, timing is all. Take George Gilder’s Aug. 28 Forbes ASAP piece, “The Coming Software Shift.” Lucky Forbes readers got their copies in mid-August, smack between the year’s two biggest technology events — Netscape’s record-hot IPO and the release of Windows 95. Gilder used the timing to explain why creative energy and profits in desk-top software would Read More ›
U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska wants to know: With deregulation of telecommunications, who will bring connections to Unalakleet, to Aleknagik and to Sleetmute? Who will bring 500 channels up the Yukon with the salmon to the people in Beaver? What will happen to the Yupik, the Inupiat and the Inuit? Will we leave them stranded in the snow while Read More ›
It’s time to deregulate America’s telecom infrastructure. And let the creative destroyers go to work. MICHAEL MILKEN IS BACK! Back, so the story goes, from the orgies of ’80s greed, back from the best-selling den of thieves, back from his preening at the predators’ ball, back from soft time at Pleasanton pen, back from prostate cancer and plagues of litigation, Read More ›
Much hype and misinformation has been churned out about cyberspace and the information highway. While the mass media’s coverage of this new medium does not rival that of the O.J. trial, attention being paid to users and providers of computer networks and online services has grown intense during the past two years. Culminating this misinformation glut is legislation in Washington, Read More ›
Death and taxes are known as life’s certainties. Far less common, but much more enjoyable to contemplate, is the death of a tax. In fact, a little-known technology may be about to accomplish what generations of Americans have joked and dreamed about — and both the new Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Archer and his predecessor, Chairman Sam Gibbons, Read More ›
This article was first published in Forbes ASAP, February 27, 1995. The article contains letters from various correspondents commenting upon a wide variety of issues raised in the series of George Gilder’s “Telecosm” articles which will be published in 1996 by Simon & Schuster, as a sequel to Microcosm, published in 1989 and Life After Television published by Norton in Read More ›
Craig Mundie of Microsoft thinks that Tiger, his video-on-demand operating system, signals a fundamental shift in the computer industry. Ruling the new era will be bandwidth measured in billions of bits per second rather than in the millions of instructions per second of current computers. “We’ll have infinite bandwidth in a decade’s time.” Bill Gates, PC Magazine, Oct. 11, 1994. Read More ›
New low earth orbit satellites mark as decisive a break in the history of space-based communications as the PC represented in the history of computing. Pay attention to much-maligned Teledesic. Backed by Craig McCaw and Bill Gates, it is the only LEO fully focused on serving computers George Gilder “They’ll Be Crowding The Skies.” THUS STEVEN DORFMAN, president of telecommunications Read More ›
In his visionary new book George Gilder brilliantly and persuasively outlines the sweeping new developments in computer and fiber optic technology that spell certain death to traditional television and telephony. In their places, he argues, will emerge a new paradigm in which people-to-people communications give way to links among computers to be found in every home and office. The rise Read More ›