The Most Read TAP Blogs from 2019
Publication Date: December 31, 2019 4 minute readWith 2019 coming to a close, TAP offers this list of the top-10 viewed blog posts from this past year that have been written by TAP scholars.
The list is compiled using simple page view analytics; therefore, posts published earlier in the year have had more time to garner page views than those published in the last quarter. To off-set this imbalance, the below list includes blogs published from December 2018 since their page view numbers didn’t have the time to build up for 2018’s top-read list. (Apologies to TAP’s economists for such a simple and unrefined process.)
Below are the top 10 most read blogs written by TAP scholars this past year. They are listed in order of most viewed posts.
“Everything You Wanted to Know About Emojis and the Law”
By Eric Goldman, December 14, 2018
Believe it or not, there are now court cases involving emojis. The “use of emojis in lawsuits is on the rise,” says Santa Clara High Tech Law Institute co-director Eric Goldman. Professor Goldman has been investigating emojis as they appear in law. He offers a compilation of his work.
“Largest COPPA Penalty Ever – NY AG Settles with Oath (Formerly AOL)”
By Daniel Solove, December 19, 2018
A $4.95 million settlement was announced by the New York Attorney General with Oath, Inc. (formerly AOL). “This is the largest penalty in a COPPA enforcement case in U.S. history,” says GWU law professor Daniel Solove. Oath, was found to have violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act in a number of instances involving their ad auctions and ad exchange.
“Can Cloud Computing Keep Growing?”
By Nicholas Bloom, June 21, 2019
New research by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom shows that while the uptake of cloud computing by new firms has slowed, companies are ramping up their spending on the technology. “This corresponds to a classic theory of the diffusion of innovation, in which a new technology first spreads across firms or consumers before deepening in its use.”
By Joshua Gans, August 14, 2019
Joshua Gans, Rotman School of Management, shares key takeaways from a report he co-authored with colleagues on the Committee for the Study of Digital. The report addresses the challenges arising from digital platforms and their impact on the news media, and offers policy recommendations.
“Trump’s 5G Plan Is More Than a Gift to His Base”
By Kevin Werbach, March 22, 2019
In this opinion piece written for The New York Times, University of Pennsylvania Legal Studies and Business Ethics professor Kevin Werbach explains why the wireless open access proposal from the Trump re-election campaign is worth considering.
“Facebook and Google Are the New Data Brokers”
By Chris Hoofnagle, January 26, 2019
“It’s time to wise up to one of the most misleading claims of Facebook and Google. Contrary to what they say, Facebook and Google sell your data. They don’t sell it to advertisers. They sell it to developers.” – Privacy law expert Chris Hoofnagle, University of California, Berkeley
“Will the United States Finally Enact a Federal Comprehensive Privacy Law?”
By Daniel Solove, May 13, 2019
Though he is not optimistic that Congress can pass a comprehensive privacy law, privacy expert Daniel Solove offers a practical path to establish security protections: “Learn from the HIPAA experience. Punt the details to the FTC to figure out in a rulemaking. ... Give some enforcement power to state attorneys general.”
By Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, December 21, 2018
Daron Acemoglu, MIT, and Pascual Restrepo, Boston University, argue that AI can be the basis of two types of technological progress: automation and enhancement; and they show that “there is scope for public policy to ensure that resources are allocated optimally between the two in order to ensure fulfillment of AI’s potential for growth, employment, and prosperity.”
“The Automated Administrative State”
By Danielle Citron and Ryan Calo, April 11, 2019
Danielle Citron, Boston University, and Ryan Calo, University of Washington, examine what happens when automation takes humans out of the loop. “Computers terminate Medicaid to cancer patients and deny food stamps to individuals. They identify parents believed to owe child support and initiate collection proceedings against them. Computers purge voters from the rolls.”
By Shane Greenstein, March 6, 2019
Harvard Business School professor Shane Greenstein outlines the internet infrastructure trends from the recent past, and shows how they’ve evolved to support the modern digital economy. “Interconnectedness has led the economic fortunes of one sector to become linked to another.”
