Alan McQuinn

The current music licensing system is labyrinthine, often failing to pay artists and publishers fair rates for all their works while also limiting how the digital media platforms that license this music can innovate. Congress is trying to fix that.

Putting a nonprofit in charge of a social media platform like Facebook would decrease the security of consumers’ personal data, damage the digital ecosystem, and ultimately lead to less innovation in online services, leaving consumers worse off.

In an op-ed for Law360, ITIF’s Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn outline four ways incoming Chairman Joseph Simons can balance the FTC’s consumer protection duties while allowing innovation to proceed apace.

In an op-ed for TechCrunch, Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn call on Congress to close a loophole that could allow police to use a Fourth Amendment exception to conduct digital searches of connected cars without warrants.

A Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) proposal to block access to online piracy expands on successful efforts in other countries while imposing extraordinary safeguards to protect users’ digital rights, ITIF’s Daniel Castro and Alan McQuinn write in The Hill Times.

If privacy advocates get their way, getting an oil change will involve as much legal paperwork as going to the doctor. As Alan McQuinn writes for The Hill, this is not the future most consumers want.

While there is much excitement about autonomous vehicles, connected vehicles hold much more promise over the next decade or so. However, absent proactive public policies, especially to enable infrastructure to “talk” to vehicles, the development and adoption of connected vehicles will be suboptimal.

The growing use of artificial intelligence actually increases the potential for protecting consumers' privacy by reducing the number of humans who see their personal information.

A year after ITIF first collected data on the most popular federal websites, more than nine out of 10 continue to fall short of government and industry standards for design and development.

The overwhelming evidence shows that in most cases opt out rules for data collection and sharing are better for innovation and productivity while still protecting privacy.

It is increasingly common at the border for federal agents to demand that U.S. citizens hand over their smartphones and security passwords. Congress should step in and ensure these devices are subject to a higher level of legal protection.

Hasty policymaking around emerging technologies such as delivery robots is self-defeating, argues Alan McQuinn in StateScoop.