The Economist

Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and consultant to the FTC, has even argued that in the interests of promoting competition, big “information monopolies” such as Apple and Google should be forced to choose between being providers of digital ...

Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on internet freedom, says web firms act as “legislature, police, judge, jury and executioner” in enforcing moderation policies and should offer their members more opportunity to appeal. Marietje Schaake, a Dutch politician ...

An article in the Spectator by Liza Mundy predicts that in a generation’s time, British women will be the richer sex.

Original article

Rebecca MacKinnon, the author of “Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom”, agrees. “The goal has never been total control. The goal is to keep the Chinese Communist Party in power,” she says. “Total, stifling, straitjacket control is not possible unless they want China to be North Korea, which they don’t.”

Original article

Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on internet freedom, notes that Microsoft and Google, keen to avoid Yahoo!’s fate, never introduced Chinese-based versions of Hotmail and Gmail. To keep its nose clean in Vietnam, Yahoo! maintains its Vietnamese-language servers in Singapore. (Facebook and Twitter, used by some Chinese activists, are blocked in China and accessible only using special tools.)

Original article

By Peter Bergen. Crown; 384 pages; $26. Bodley Head; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk A COMPELLING account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden requires two things: captivating detail about how the mission was carried out and answers to difficult ...

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, giving Mr Romney some credit for his promised spending cuts, says his plan would send the national debt up to 96% of GDP by 2021 from 73% this year; it would reach only 76% under Mr Obama’s latest budget. Neither group gives Mr Romney credit for his promise to pay for the cuts by closing loopholes, because he has specified none, though he has reportedly told donors he might eliminate deductions for rich people’s second mortgages and for state and local taxes.

As Anatol Lieven concludes in his splendid recent book, “A Hard Country”, Pakistan, “though a deeply troubled state, is also a tough one”. Its elected civilian government, now in office for four years, might yet become the first in Pakistan's history ...

Others, such as Evgeny Morozov, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, worry that they can easily be abused by repressive regimes to track and monitor opponents. Although talk of “Twitter revolutions” is greatly overblown, there is little doubt ...

The New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank, found that up to 2551 people have been killed in the strikes since 2004. Based on press reports, it estimates that 80% of them were militants, rising to a pretty astonishing 95% in 2010. ...