Baseball Begins In Earnest

Posted by Richard Bennett

Baseball season starts in earnest tonight as the Mighty A’s venture down Anaheim way to take on the Angels for the first time this season. The teams are tied for first place in the division, with the best records in the American League (some National League teams have better records, but that comes from playing [...]

First Draft FCC Piece

Posted by Richard Bennett

This is the full, uncut copy I submitted to the Mercury News. The published piece (In neutrality debate, carriers get blamed for Net’s weaknesses) has moved to the Merc’s archives, where you have to pay to retrieve it.
The Circus is Coming
The circus is coming to Palo Alto. The FCC’s network neutrality circus that is, the [...]

Shooting the Messenger

Posted by Richard Bennett

Silicon Valley’s newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, runs an Op-Ed of mine on the net neutrality circus today:

The circus is coming to Stanford University. The network neutrality circus, that is, which makes cable companies the whipping boys for underlying flaws in the design of the Internet.
Go to the paper to read the whole thing. [...]

The poor commissioners

Posted by Richard Bennett

The FCC commissioners are going to sit through seven hours of non-stop testimony tomorrow, a severe test of bladder and patience. Here’s the last-minute witness list:
12:45 p.m. Panel Discussion 1 – Network Management and Consumer Expectations
Introduction: Lawrence Lessig, C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law, Stanford Law School
* Rick Carnes, President, Songwriters Guild [...]

Not as dumb as they look

Posted by Richard Bennett

It’s easy to make fun of government regulators, since they’re political people doing technical jobs. But these remarks by Commissioner Copps on the 700 MHz auction indicate the man actually has a clue:
Third, the FCC needs to make sure that it has, in-building or via contract, the expertise it needs to contribute network, technical and [...]

Check it out, yo

Posted by Richard Bennett

H/T John Cole’s excellent Balloon Juice blog.
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BBC Breaks the Internet

Posted by Richard Bennett

Here’s a sign of the impending Exaflood, from the UK where the BBC’s iPlayer is breaking the Internet’s congestion controls:
The success of the BBC’s iPlayer is putting the internet under severe strain and threatening to bring the network to a halt, internet service providers claimed yesterday.
They want the corporation to share the cost of [...]

Google falling

Posted by Richard Bennett

The inability to retain key employees is the first clear sign of company in decline, so this news has to be disturbing to Google shareholders:
Facebook hires away Google’s top chef

Is it “poaching” when a company steals a rival’s chef? At Google, executive chef Josef Desimone scrambled cruelty-free eggs by the truckload. Now Facebook has [...]

Truth in Advertising

Posted by Richard Bennett

Leave it to the clever Brits to forge new laws regarding religion on this holiest of days:
“Congregants should be aware of the gaps and/or problems in the Catholic theory of transubstantiation, including, but not limited to, the Protestant notion that the bread and wine are merely symbolic, the opinions of other religions on the life [...]

The MAP Strikes Back

Posted by Richard Bennett

I called out Harold Feld of MAP, one of the FCC petitioners that started the FCC’s broadband circus, for his failure to respond to the BitTorrent/Comcast deal in my latest article in The Register, and he’s pretty upset about it:

There must be something in the air that has turned Comcast from a fighter to a [...]