Friday 11 December 2015

Internet governance: on the right road or the road to nowhere?

Internet governance: on the right road or the road to nowhere? | LSE Media Policy Project: "The problem with today’s debates on Internet governance, is that they’re still yesterday’s debates. Arguments about ‘enhanced cooperation’ are a cul-de-sac. It’s the changes taking place in the fast lane of the motorway – the transition to cloud computing, the concentration of economic power within the Internet, the step change in the Internet-user interface which the Internet of Things is poised to bring – that will determine the future of the Internet and its growing impact on our societies. It’s in that fast lane that today’s debates about Internet governance need to be taking place." 'via Blog this'

Thursday 10 December 2015

VSPs and the FN - Krugman on LePen

VSPs and the FN - The New York Times:

"Funke, Schularick, and Trebesch recently did some work asking whether the rise of right-wing extremism in the 1930s was paralleled in other times, and found that the answer is yes: “politics takes a hard right turn following financial crises.”

 Interestingly, this isn’t true for all kinds of crises. Financial crises, they suggest, are different, in part because

financial crises may be perceived as endogenous, ‘inexcusable’ problems resulting from policy failures, moral hazard and favouritism.

 I would put it a bit differently: financial crises call into question whether respectable people know what they’re doing, in a way that other kinds of economic shocks often don’t.

 The point for Europe is that the doctrinaire policies followed since 2010, and the unwillingness to rethink dogma in the light of experience, aren’t just economically destructive. They undermine the legitimacy of the whole European system, and may in the end lead to political catastrophe." 'via Blog this'