Nick R. Brown

When former Mississippi Congressman Charles “Chip” Pickering criticizes the proposed AT&T merger with T-Mobile, his words drip with conservative indignation and free-market rhetoric. But the evidence surrounding his life and work in recent years suggests that the onetime C Street Republican moved to K Street long ago. (more)

No Takeover Project (notakeover.org) released a poll Thursday that it believes shows that "the more consumers know about AT&T's proposed takeover of T-Mobile, the more they oppose the deal," though the poll is not without its critics. (more)

A recent update to the Federal Communications Commission seal has resulted in a somewhat embarrassing problem for an organization staffed with technology experts and engineers. (more)

This past Monday, Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) attended a field hearing on regulatory impediments to job creation in the high technology field. The AmericanJobCreators.com hearing included top tech firms like Microsoft and Google. (more)

Update: After recently speaking with Blair Levin, he believes his comments about the taxation of Google or Netflix at the February 23rd meeting of the Congressional Internet Caucus have been taken out of context. He has described to me that he simply feels that the discussions should take place, but that he has disagreed with the approach of taxing content in order to support the Universal Service Fund in the past. (more)

This week Congress made inroads towards reversing the Federal Communications Commissions attempt to implement Net Neutrality regulatory rules on Internet Service Providers that would disallow the use of various business models.  Representatives using part of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) known as the Joint Resolution of Disapproval passed House Resolution 37, introduced by Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) this past Tuesday 241-178. (more)

Yesterday Melissa Clouthier, whom many of you know as @MelissaTweets on Twitter, wrote a post about the "needless division between social cons and fiscal cons." Clouthier believes that the 60 additional GOP congressmen and six additional GOP senators are already finding areas within the Republican agenda to disagree with rather than coming together to fight against liberals and progressives. Clouthier points to an open letter released Monday in which GOProud and some Tea Party leaders called for Republicans to focus only on fiscal issues and leave the social issues at home for another day. (more)

The link that you can find here leads to a list of the 95 Democrats that were in support of net neutrality legislation.  If you were curious how many of them we in the free market still have to contend with, I went ahead and did the research for you so that you could save yourself the headache of counting to zero. (more)

This is a great time for conservatives. There is a weariness in our souls that has somewhat dissipated. But something has been troubling me for some time now, and I think that it is important that we all take a minute to find some perspective. (more)

I was recently speaking with one of my teachers from high school, reflecting on her summer reading assignment, JFK’s Profiles in Courage.  If you have never read the book, it can be summarized quite simply in that it follows the actions of statesmen throughout the history of our country that took serious resolve and unwavering confidence.  That’s not to say that these individuals who were profiled did not face fear in their hearts, fear for their jobs, and possibly fear for their lives.  Fear is an emotion and it is understandable to have felt such emotion when placed in the situations that these men were embroiled. (more)

In the loud echoing outcry for net neutrality regulation over the years, there has always remained some voice of reason even if it was a low murmur. That voice has remained constant and consistent in its concerns regarding the infrastructure market. As the drum beats have grown louder in the recent months for regulation, examples of concerns over stifled investment in broadband infrastructure have increased: (more)

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For the last three years, the World Wildlife Fund has sponsored an event called Earth Hour. Earth Hour is an event in which individuals are asked to turn off all their power in celebration of the history of cavemen. They secretly worship Gaia and enjoy having a martyr complex while sitting in the dark while they have conversations about feet. (more)

“From this site, I vow as the leader of the Jewish state that we will never again allow the hand of evil to destroy the life of our people and the life of our state. Never again.” —Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking on Holocaust Memorial Day. (more)

The FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on net neutrality announced in October 2009 just closed the “comments period” this past Friday. This was the period in which anyone may address the FCC’s announced NPRM and provide positive or negative comments, solutions, and advice. If the proposed rules move forward in their current fashion, or with the possibility of being even more restrictive, they will most likely squash all legitimate and necessary forms of network management. When the rules fall into, place time-sensitive services and applications like voice-over-IP (VoIP) will suffer and operate in a degraded form. The results of which will be stagnation in Internet innovation and advancement, further damage to our economy, and higher prices for Internet access in areas in which Internet service providers (ISP) are dependent on network management techniques to deliver quality service to their customers. (more)

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