Marcelo Thompson

Two paragraphs, your conclusions. Jacques Ellul, 1964, The Technological Society:  Justice is no longer conceived of as a practical requirement vis-à-vis individual problems, but rather as a mere idea, an abstract notion. Then it becomes simple to discard it entirely. Even so, men of law have certain scruples and are unable to eliminate justice from [...]

This week, Eric Schmidt told the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee that Google does not have “separate products and services”, that all of its offerings can be classified under the banner of “universal search”. Schmidt is absolutely right: any distinction between “search” and other “products and services” is inaccurate. “Search” is not a distinctive relevant market. Search [...]

In “The Neutralization of Harmony” (forthcoming in the Boston University Journal of Science and Technology Law), I question the very idea of neutrality in technology law and politics. Technological neutrality has been resorted to before the World Trade Organization by a number of Western countries, in particular the United States, as a means of preventing [...]

I have just made available @SSRN two of my forthcoming papers. “In Search of Alterity” inquires into that which has been the archetypal voice in network neutrality discourses: Google’s. In doing so, the paper reveals as much about Google’s views on network neutrality as it does about the normative context and regulatory implications of Google’s [...]

The University of Ottawa Law and Technology Journal has published online my “Property Enforcement or Retrogressive Measure? Copyright Reform in Canada and the Human Right of Access to Knowledge”, which I wrote a number of years ago. You can access it here via SSRN. The article is by now a bit dated on the part [...]

I have just published a piece (earlier draft on SSRN) with a critical analysis of the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed short cut (the so-called “Third Way”) to deal with the outcome of the Comcast case. The article comes in the just released 1st volume of the Communications Law Review, a new Thomson, RT bilingual publication [...]

The proposal of a Civil [Rights-Based] Framework for the Internet in Brazil invites serious scrutiny by the Global Community due to its cross-jurisdictional repercussions (some very positive; some urgently negative). The most emergent provision is that which renders Online Service Providers invulnerable for the conscious hosting of illicit content. That is to say, unless OSPs host illegal [...]

Awesomeness: Google in Search of a Value MARCELO THOMPSON* Google’s glove slap in the mainland reflects an ambiguity which is not atypical among Internet policies it normally champions. What has really prompted the Internet giant’s threat to move its search engine away from a regime it has, in the past, worked so closely with? It [...]

Law Tech Talk | Law and Technology Centre Mr. Marcelo Thompson, Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong Abstract: When the United States Federal Communications Commission released its Memorandum Opinion and Order on the Comcast case last year, more than the future of the Internet was at stake. What was at stake was the very [...]

So, here goes a Sci-Fi thought (or perhaps not quite). If singularity theories turn out to be right, what to make of a principle of technological neutrality (in law and politics)? Even if we assume the internal coherence of such a principle. Even if we assume that there is a sound legal theoretical way of [...]