Sometimes you have to wonder if people appreciate the significance of what they’re saying. On Huffington Post this morning, I found an account of a panel at the Personal Democracy Forum gathering on the question of who controls the Internet’s optical core. The writer, Steve Rosenbaum, declares that Broadband is a Civil Right:
If the internet [...]
This talk from Om Malik’s Structure conference is very good.
The Internet doesn’t work the way you think it does.
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Those who follow tech policy have probably noticed that, as of this spring, an increasing hue and cry is being raised about the cost of those telecommunications services which are dubbed “special access.”
Most people’s inclination, when they hear the term “special access,” is to dismiss the issue as unimportant. After all, if it’s something [...]
Advocates of network neutrality regulations have been largely unsuccessful in advancing their agenda in the US. The one case in which they claim to have secured a victory was the Vuze vs. Comcast action in the FCC, which was severely tainted by Vuze turning to porn to resuscitate its dying business:
In a bid to increase [...]
The Register stumbled upon an eye-opening report commissioned by the UK telecom regulator, Ofcom, on sources of Wi-Fi interference in the UK:
What Mass discovered (pdf) is that while Wi-Fi users blame nearby networks for slowing down their connectivity, in reality the problem is people watching retransmitted TV in the bedroom while listening to their offspring [...]
The New York Times reports that regulators have an interest in the structure of the Apple and Google boards of directors:
The Federal Trade Commission has begun an inquiry into whether the close ties between the boards of two of technology’s most prominent companies, Apple and Google, amount to a violation of antitrust laws, according to [...]
Not surprisingly, Time Warner Cable has decided to put its consumption-based billing trials on hold:
Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Officer Glenn Britt said, “It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests
on consumption based billing. As [...]
Time-Warner’s bandwidth metering plan continues to attract attention, in part because a couple of prominent tech journalists are taking an activist position against it: Nate Anderson is unabashedly opposed to most revenue-enhancing plans that come from ISPs and carriers, and Stacey Higginbotham imagines she’ll be personally affected since she lives in one of the trial [...]
I’ve been asked to join a panel at the Congressional Internet Caucus’ short conference on the State of the Mobile Net on April 23rd. I’ll be on the last panel:
What Policy Framework Will Further Enable Innovation on the Mobile Net?
Richard Bennett, [bio forthcoming]
Harold Feld, Public Knowledge [bio]
Alexander Hoehn-Saric, U.S. Senate Commerce Committee [bio]
Larry Irving, Internet [...]
Despite the fact that I’ve been trying to explain why companies like Time Warner need to impose broadband usage caps on their systems before going to the capital markets for assistance in beefing up their innards, I’m not a fan of usage caps generally. They’re a very crude tool for imposing an equitable distribution of [...]
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