November 2007
7 posts
Obama on e-transparency
Today Sen. Barack Obama gave a speech at Google where he laid out his tech policy platform. (Platform here in PDF; speech soon available here and here.) There’s much not to like, including a net neutrality regulatory agenda and support for media ownership restrictions, but I’d like to focus on the positive aspect of his speech. In the arena of technology-aided government transparency,...
E-Gov Act reauthorization: A new hope for XML?
Last week, Joe Lieberman and others introduce a bill in the Senate to reauthorize the E-Government Act of 2002. In my new paper about online government transparency I explain how most agencies are likely in compliance with the Act by simply putting their regulatory dockets online, even though those dockets may be largely inaccessible by the public. For example, the FCC’s online docketing...
Waiting for the Open Search Alliance
The brilliant Fake Steve Jobs has a great post on Google’s announcement of its new Open Handset Alliance. You should go read it right now because it’s all priceless, but I love this particular bit about openness:
Finally, has anyone else noticed the way Google is kind of desperately grasping at straws lately? They spend years trying to do something other than search and nothing works....
Will they find this post?
The New York Times reports on Attributor, a company tackling the broad re-use of copyrighted material online:
The company has developed software that identifies an electronic “fingerprint” for a particular piece of material — an article, a picture, a video. Then it hunts down any place across the Web where a significant chunk of that work has been copied, with or without permission.
When the use...
FCC.gov: The docket that doesn't exist
When Congress delegates its authority to make laws to unelected regulators, a certain bit of accountability is lost. To make up for this, the Administrative Procedure Act requires regulators to act openly and transparently. They must make publicly available the rules they are considering, must take comments from the public, and must consider these in adopting final rules. As I explain in my new...
