4.12: Five Years of Facepalming (Live at NC State)

The EU and internet law—monopolies, copyright, taxing, freedom of speech, and learning from each other.

In this second of two episodes recorded live at NC State (with a different class of students), we tackle the European Union’s approach to internet legislation—including everything from copyright law to dealing with monopolies—as a way to look at how differently things work around the world. What might we learn from other countries here in the U.S.? What might they learn from us?

• Internet history
  • ARPANET (Wikipedia)
  • MILNET (Wikipedia) (actually a subsection of ARPANET used specifically for military purposes)
  • World Wide Web & Tim Berners Lee (Pew)
  • Minitel (Wikipedia)
    • “Minitel, France’s precursor to the Web, to go dark on June 30 [2012]” (Ars Technica)
• Monopsony (Economics Online)
  • Applied to the tech industry: “Publishers’ Deal with the Devil” (Stratechery)
• United States v. Microsoft Corp.
  • “Justice Department Files Antitrust Suit Against Microsoft for Unlawfully Monopolizing Computer Software Markets” (United States Department of Justice, 1998)
  • Wikipedia summary
• “EU Politicians Try To Create A New ‘Link Tax’ To Protect Newspapers Who Don’t Like Sites Linking For Free”
• “Google dominates search. But the real problem is its monopoly on data”
• Pirate Party (Wikipedia)
• TARDIS
• Last mile “loop unbundling” (Wikipedia)
  • “We Don’t Need Net Neutrality; We Need Competition” (Ars Technica)
  • “You Won’t Have Broadband Competition Without Regulation” (Reuters blog)
• Schengen Agreement (Wikipedia)
  • “The Schengen area and cooperation” (Summaries of EU legislation at europa.eu)
• DuckDuckGo
• Bing
• Packet sniffing
  • Packet analyzer (Wikipedia)
  • “Packet sniffing basics” (Linux Journal)
  • Wireshark network protocol analyzer tool
• “Brazil Arrests Facebook Executive in WhatsApp Data Access Case” (New York Times)
  • “Brazil orders release of Facebook executive arrested in WhatsApp dispute” (The Verge)
• End-to-end encryption (Wikipedia)
• “Why Are We Fighting the Crypto Wars Again” (Steven Levy) – with a helpful history of the fight in the 1990s as well as the current issues
• “You Can’t Outlaw Math (Accidental Tech Podcast 26:31 and following)”
• Trans-Pacific Partnership
  • “Everything You Need to Know About the Trans-Pacific Partnership” (Washington Post, 2013)
  • “Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement” (Electronic Frontiers Foundation)
• DMCA (Electronic Frontiers Foundation)
• Digital cash in Kenya
  • “The Invisible Bank: How Kenya Has Beaten the World in Mobile Money” (National Geographic, 2012)
  • “Kenya’s mobile innovation brings digital money closer” (BBC)
  • Similar ventures in the U.S.:
    • Square Cash
    • Venmo

• 4.09: A Ghost in Singapore

• “The House”, by Air Traffic Controller. Used by permission.
• “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. That Creative Commons bit is pretty great: it means you can do whatever you want with this theme wherever you live.

Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors:

• Andrew Fallows
• Jeremy W. Sherman
• Jeremy Cherfas

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