“ISP” on The Daily Caller

PARIS — The highest court in the European Union said Thursday that Internet service providers could not be required to monitor their customers’ online activity to filter out the illegal sharing of music and other copyrighted material. (more)

Since 2005, the Federal Communications Commission classified broadband Internet access as an “information service,” and effectively deregulated it; your phone company via DSL, your wireless provider via whatever generation of network speed that it offered, and your cable provider via cable modems, could offer access without regulation as a telecommunications service provider under what is known as “Title II” of the Communications Act. Instead, the FCC declared it would regulate only as necessary under its Title I “ancillary authority.” In a Policy Statement the FCC espoused principles of good sportsmanship it would expect of market participants. (more)

Washington, D.C.—Last week negotiators held the eighth round of negotiations of the hotly contested Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in New Zealand. As a result of these negotiations, negotiators publicly released the previously confidential negotiating text for the first time. The negotiations have been plagued with leaks over the past several years, and non-governmental organizations have criticized both the Bush and Obama administrations for their failure to release the confidential text before now. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) released the 39-page ACTA text this week, which includes numerous brackets around provisions that remain under negotiation between the parties. (more)

Google has just announced that they will now begin factoring page speed in their search algorithm rankings.  That means the faster a website loads, the higher up they show up in Google searches.  Sluggish sites on the other hand will be knocked down the search rankings even if they have the most relevant information.  While I believe that Google’s latest actions are rational and that it serves consumer interests since no one wants a slow results, it does raise an interesting dilemma for “Network Neutrality” advocates who propagate the myth that all websites should operate at the same speed. (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)

Inimai M. Chettiar and J. Scott Holladay from the Institute for Policy Integrity of the New York University School of Law has published the paper “Free to Invest: The Economic Benefits of Preserving Net Neutrality i” (henceforth referred to as “Free to Invest” in this article for expediency). Free to Invest argues that Net Neutrality is crucial to the economic health of the Internet and that without it; broadband providers would be free to extort content providers by double charging for network access. But the analysis is based almost exclusively on a misguided and flawed understanding of how the modern Internet actually works. (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)