The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. ENERGY
High gas prices continue to fuel voter dissatisfaction.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Director of Energy Policy Myron Ebell on the need to increase access to domestic energy sources:
“Affordable and stable energy supplies are vital to our collective economic health. Starving ourselves of energy by placing blanket restrictions on developing new oil and gas resources is sheer foolishness.”
2. PRIVACY
The Department of Veterans Affairs computers receive an encryption upgrade, following a series of embarrassing data security breaches.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Director of Technology Studies Wayne Crews and Policy Analyst Brooke Oberwetter on how private industry can protect data better than government mandates:
“Government solutions tend to disincentivize honesty and cooperation among industry players in the long term, leading to even greater problems of imperfect information. Intervention can also interfere with prices, meaning a less efficient allocation of resources. In addition to economic inefficiency, regulations can define industry standards down and reduce innovations in the field of cybersecurity, leading to lower levels of security than we have now.”
3. TECHNOLOGY
A Swedish political party, concerned with consumer privacy, launches a computer network to enable untraceable online file sharing.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Adjunct Analyst James Plummer on how copyright holders can help protect their property through new business models:
“Instead of passing enforcement costs on to taxpayers, large copyright holders should move towards internalizing more of the costs of enforcing—or at least protecting the value of—their copyrights through new technologies for preventing unauthorized copying, while making copyright protection more efficient.”
Blog feature: For more news and analysis, updated throughout the day, visit CEI Open Market.
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