Jerry Brito

“This is an evolutionary step in interactive TV,” Mr. Bohrman said.

It’s hardly the first time a network has shown tweets on the TV screen, but none have devoted this much real estate to social media before.

I thought one of Twitter’s main features is that you don’t have to see tweets from people you don’t follow.

That’s the proposition I am defending in a week-long online debate at The Economist versus Symantec CTO Greg Day. Please check out our opening statements, and by all means feel free to vote for my side.

Yours truly writing with Adam Thierer in The Atlantic about the bipartisan congressional resolution that passed today against UN regulation of the Internet:

From the tone of the hearing, and the language of the House resolution, we are being asked to believe that “the position of the United States Government has been and is to advocate for the flow of information free from government control.”

If only it were true. The reality is that Congress increasingly has its paws all over the Internet. Lawmakers and regulators are busier than ever trying to expand the horizons of cyber-control across the board: copyright mandates, cybersecurity rules, privacy regulations, speech controls, and much more.

Perhaps the lesson here is that Congress is commendable only when it is being hypocritical.

WCITLeaks is cited in the WSJ this morning. Gordon Crovitz:

The process is secret, so it was hard to know what authoritarian governments were plotting or how the U.S. was responding. This column last month detailed some of the proposals, but other commentators doubted that any changes would be material.

Disclosure came when two academics decided to use the openness of the Web to help save the Web. George Mason University researchers Jerry Brito and Eli Dourado earlier this month created a site called WCITLeaks.org. They invited anyone with access to the documents describing the U.N. proposals to post them, so as “to foster greater transparency.” These documents are not classified but had not been made public.

The WCITLeaks site hit pay dirt this past Friday. Someone leaked the 212-page planning document being used by governments to prepare for the December conference. Mr. Dourado summarized: “These proposals show that many ITU member states want to use international agreements to regulate the Internet by crowding out bottom-up institutions, imposing charges for international communication, and controlling the content that consumers can access online.”

Ars Technica quoting yours truly:

These developments don’t surprise Jerry Brito, a researcher at the libertarian Mercatus Center at George Mason University. For most uses, he said, dollars (or other countries’ official currencies) are simply more convenient, so it’s hard for Bitcoin to gain traction. But he argued that Bitcoin’s relative anonymity and the lack of intermediaries gives it a crucial advantage for “illicit stuff: drugs, gambling, pornography, getting money out of countries where there are restrictions on moving funds. That’s where it’ll establish itself first.”

That’s what Eli Dourado predicted a while back.