At first glance, Tuesday’s federal court ruling on Comcast looked like a clean win for the cable giant and for competitors including Time Warner and AT&T. The court, after all, ruled that Comcast could regulate high-speed Internet traffic over its own system and that a company that wanted to push its content through Comcast’s pipelines could not. (more)
At first glance, Tuesday’s federal court ruling on Comcast looked like a clean win for the cable giant and for competitors including Time Warner and AT&T. The court, after all, ruled that Comcast could regulate high-speed Internet traffic over its own system and that a company that wanted to push its content through Comcast’s pipelines could not. (more)
America’s communications industry comprises, like health care, roughly one-sixth of our economy. Unlike health care, however, which required majorities in Congress for sweeping new regulations, the Federal Communications Commission believes it can take over the communications system with just three votes of an unelected commission. (more)
Internet freedom got a reprieve Tuesday when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia slapped down a brazen attempt by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to ignore the rule of law and begin imposing onerous regulations on broadband network operators. The decision, Comcast v. FCC, deals with arcane matters of regulatory agency jurisdiction, but the stakes were profound and the ramifications for the future of the Internet will reverberate for years to come. (more)
President Obama has made broadband a key part of his telecommunications agenda. To get there, he has tasked the Federal Communications Commission with the responsibility to make changes to Internet regulations and promote his “National Broadband Plan,” an ambitious effort to reform the industry and expand broadband access across the country. (more)
Free Press is asking the FCC to consider a number of changes to the NPRM Net Neutrality regulations which they claim will “promote investment”. But once we examine their proposal in detail, we find that it will produce just the opposite and devastate the U.S. economy. Not only would Free Press preclude broadband providers from innovative new business models and economic opportunities, they would substantially undermine their existing business models and revenue streams. Yet despite all this, Free Press insists that their proposals would not deter broadband companies from investing money but that it would spur new dotcom investments at the edges of the network. (more)
The National Football League is entering a new phase of the 2010 season, the player recruitment campaign will start on March 5 and there are new rules for this endeavor because the owners have decided to blow up the old collective bargaining agreement, a document that kept both owners and players relatively happy. (more)
Allen Iverson has taken an indefinite leave from the 76ers due to personal reasons related to an illness being suffered by one of his children, the 76ers announced on Monday. It’s not clear when he will return, but at the very least he won’t rejoin the team as it finishes the final three games of a road trip. (more)
Google is certainly getting a lot of media attention over their plans for an experimental gigabit broadband network. The main argument for this type of a network is to give high bandwidth applications a home to be tested because the theory was that broadband networks in the US were constricting applications to very low bandwidth. But does broadband really lag applications, or is it really the other way around? (more)
Something unfortunate happened in the search for Net Neutrality and an “open Internet”. We have essentially been asked to suspend economic reason and accept the premise that the commodity of Internet server bandwidth is not a free market but a low-cost fixed rate service. We are told by proponents of Net Neutrality that the Internet is a place where the smallest websites that might pay tens of dollars per month for Internet connectivity have the same capability as the largest websites that pay millions per month for Internet connectivity. “Equal access for equal payment” has been replaced with “equal access for any payment”. By trying to “preserve” a vision of the Internet that never even existed, Net Neutrality would eliminate the existing open and competitive Internet server bandwidth market. (more)
Feb. 10 (Bloomberg) — Google Inc. is planning to build high-speed fiber-optic broadband networks in the U.S. to offer Internet speeds that are more than 100 times faster than what Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. sell today. (more)
























