• "Stevens: Include Satellites in Broadband Discussion," Satellite Week, April 30, 2007
  "The OECD rankings are a 'modern version of the 1957 Sputnik launch -- an indicator to some that the U.S. has fallen behind in a key technology,' said Jeffrey Eisenach, [PFF board member and co-founder,] Criterion Economics chmn.: 'Happily, it turned out our fears about losing the space race to the Russians were to say the least exaggerated, and I suspect the fears are the same with respect to our fears about broadband.'"
  "[The] OECD numbers that cause 'consternation' are largely meaningless, said Scott Wallsten, the Progress & Freedom Foundation's dir.-communications policy studies. 'Notwithstanding the international rankings, the evidence indicates that the U.S. does not have a broadband problem,' he said. The OECD and ITU do not explain how they derive their estimates, Wallsten said: 'More importantly, many factors differ across countries that affect both the costs of supplying broadband, such as population density, and the demand for broadband.'"
• "FCC: TV Violence Can Be Regulated," abc7news.com, April 26, 2007
  "Adam Thierer, Progress and Freedom Foundation: 'I think the FCC is overreaching here. I think basically what you're seeing is that our government wants to play the role of national nanny for all of us.'"
• "Say what? The YouTube-ing of presidential debates," CNET's News blog, April 26, 2007
  "'It's far from clear to me that it's a good idea to put this stuff up on YouTube and have anyone able to modify it however they choose,' [Jim Delong,] a senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation explained. 'You know what's going to happen on both the left and the right. The stuff will be mangled, and everything will be pulled out of context, and it'll be ricocheted around the world.'"
• "Lawmakers Bemoan New Drop In High-Speed Ranking," Tech Daily, April 24, 2007
  "Some witnesses voiced a positive outlook. Jeffrey Eisenach, [PFF board member, co-founder,] adjunct law professor at George Mason University and chairman of Criterion Economics, a consulting firm whose clients include phone and cable firms, said the OECD ranking does not reflect the facts that broadband is being rapidly deployed in the United States and that competition is growing.
  "Echoing those views was Scott Wallsten, a senior fellow and director of communications policy studies at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, whose donors include broadband companies. He argued that the market is working well and cautioned against sweeping regulation that would saddle providers with regulatory barriers."
• "FCC Seeks to Rein in Violent TV Shows," The Washington Post, April 24, 2007
  "Adam D. Thierer, a senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation who writes extensively on government regulation of the media, said the answer to preventing children from seeing violent content is in the hands of the parents — literally.
  "'There are more ways to control violent and objectionable content on cable and satellite television than ever before,' Thierer said. 'Every single set-top-box technology on the market has some sort of parental-control mechanism embedded in it.'"
  "Thierer said that if Congress were to pass laws that empower the FCC or another agency to regulate basic-cable channels for violent content, they likely would not stand legal challenges brought by the cable industry. He drew an analogy to local and federal attempts to regulate violent content in video games, which — like cable and satellite television — do not come into the home free over the airwaves.
  "'Every single one of them was struck down as unconstitutional,' Thierer said."
• "National Roadmap Targets The 'Blight' Of Identity Theft," Tech Daily, April 23, 2007
  "The Progress and Freedom Foundation's Thomas Lenard had a favorable reaction to the report. He said the panel is appropriately treating the problem as a law enforcement issue rather than recommending regulations 'that would limit the collection or use of personal information for legitimate commercial purposes.'"
• "Municipal Broadband Systems Censor Web," Info Tech & Telecom News, April 23, 2007
  "'Though many Internet users find such content objectionable, they should have the opportunity to filter it themselves rather than have the city determine what content they should and shouldn't be able to receive,' according to Adam Thierer, senior fellow and director of the Center for Digital Media Freedom at the Progress & Freedom Foundation in Washington, DC. 'This is supposed to be an open network,' he noted.
  "'Controls can be provided at the user end to stop objectionable material, much like blocking software available from several different sources,' Thierer said. Government officials should not be dictating what people can and can't receive on the public network, he said.
  "'They're treating everyone who uses the network like children,' Thierer said. 'You don't need to treat everyone like children when there are less restrictive means of doing this. Why should you deputize the government to determine morality?'"
• "Reaction to the Patent Reform Act of 2007," Tech Law Journal, April 18, 2007
  "Solveig Singleton of the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF) wrote in a short piece in the PFF web site that 'Some computer-related enterprises like eBay and Microsoft support the additional procedures. Others, like Qualcomm, want to move more cautiously. Small inventors, biotech, and pharmaceutical firms like the system as it is. This kind of polarization can bring the process to a grinding halt...'"
• "Social Networks Safer Than Perceived," WebPro News, April 11, 2007
  "Adam Thierer, from the Progress and Freedom Foundation believes that blocking all social networking sites is not a wise move because under the current definition sites such as Wikipedia, CBS Sportsline and Flickr would be subject to blocks.
  "Thierer suggests that the answer is not stricter controls, but to use the tools that are already in place in the offline world to protect children such as education, law enforcement and adult supervision."
• "Pressure Builds to Address Copyright Issues," CQ Daily, April 10, 2007
  "Jim DeLong, a senior fellow at the free market think tank Progress and Freedom Foundation, said much of the problem stems from the inflexibility of the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act], because it has been modified over the years to deal with discrete technologies."
  "[Licensing] laws arise in the context of a technology, and so people . . . essentially disaggregated rights of all sorts,” DeLong said. "So you have the rights split among the songwriters, recording people and artists, and everybody has a piece of it. With the digital age there's no way to go back and get all those rights back together."
• "Comcast Cuts Off Bandwidth Hogs," PC Magazine, April 4, 2007
  "'Some of these people who are bandwidth hogs are [Comcast's] best broadband customers,' said Adam Thierer, director of the Center for Digital Media Freedom at D.C. think tank Progress & Freedom Foundation. By angering this base, 'you're just given your competitors a way to step in' and steal customers.
  "'What mystifies me is why no one is willing to propose tiered pricing' for broadband, he said. 'Obviously, one potential reason is that it is wildly unpopular with people. There is something about the all-you-can-eat, buffet-style pricing that people just love. I think with broadband, we've just already become accustomed to the idea that is should be offered at a flat rate.'"
• "Will the EU Topple Apple's iTunes Empire?," CIO Magazine, April 3, 2007
  "The EU's treatment of Microsoft suggests that the Commission can make out an antitrust case against any American company with deep pockets, consumer harm or not, according to Solveig Singleton, a senior adjunct fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation.
  "'The theory of this case seems to be, don't be the first to market to bring a service to consumers in a way that catches on,' Singleton noted. 'The case is unlikely to bring down the iTunes empire, but it can cost it a lot in fines.'"
• "Why MySpace Is SafeSpace," Forbes.com, April 3, 2007 "But Thierer, a senior fellow at the free market technology think tank The Progress and Freedom Foundation, believes lawmakers and others are seriously misguided. The media has overstated the actual number of dangerous incidents happening on the site, he says in a new paper titled 'Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions.' Improving age verification is not only ineffectual solution, he writes, but counter-productive. Forbes.com talked to Thierer about MySpace, sexual predators and safer Web surfing for kids."
• "EMI Opens DRM-Free Digital Music Book," Tech Daily, April 2, 2007
  "If EMI's new format quickly turns up on peer-to-peer sites and if sales start off high and then fade away as songs spread from iPod to iPod, 'then we will have learned something,' the Progress and Freedom Foundation's James DeLong said on the IPcentral Web log. 'If these things do not happen, then we will have learned something considerably cheerier,' the known copyright hawk said. 'Some of us pessimists might have to eat some crow, but it would taste pretty good, actually.'"

Previous Months:

December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

Previous Years:

2006
2005
2004