Research -- Digital Society

The Internet has been a revolutionary technology that has empowered the little guy, but not for the reasons Free Press and others neutrality advocates think (more)

The key evidence against YouTube is that they knew that only 20% of their content was legal and one executive even resorted to uploading stolen content. In fact, the fundamental business model of YouTube was to build up as much traffic as possible through any “tactics, however evil” according to YouTube founder Steve Chen (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 (more)

NTIA reports that this paper confirms that a sizable portion of Americans are still using Internet connections classified as narrowband (less than 200 kilobits per second) or do not have any access to the Internet (more)

CNet’s Marguerite Reardon reports that the FCC is citing cost as a major barrier to broadband adoption, and Wall Street Journal’s Amy Schatz reports something similar (FCC report here). The FCC is citing the $41/month average broadband cost as an obstacle, but broadband plans start as low as $15/month (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)

There is some heated debate as to whether the FCC should allow movie studios to limit pre-DVD release movies to digital video interfaces with content protection with the use of Selectable Output Control (SOC) (more)

Since the early days of computer networking, there has been a long standing debate as to whether we can grow our way out of network congestion problems with more network capacity (more)

It is crucial that policymakers spend far more time researching the numerous types of Internet interconnection models before they write broad and open ended rules to prohibit things that aren’t fully debated and fully understood (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. (more)

But as Washington concentrates on employment, it also is considering a possibly job-killing set of new regulations on the communications sector. Known as “Net Neutrality,” these proposed new rules could, in their extreme form, prohibit many technologies and business plans used today on the Internet, not to mention stifling future experimentation and entrepreneurship (more)