Net Neutrality Lawmaking May Be Near

Finding sponsors to carry the bill may be troublesome before the mid-term, but a legitimate work product will be useful whenever Congress is of a mind to consider legislating. We may actually be closer to legitimate, regular Congressional action on Internet regulation than we’ve been since the summer of 2010.

August 3, 2018 0

Europe’s Piracy Dilemma

Their problem in the long tail of pirates, scammers, and amateurs who impose costs on the platform but don’t generate revenue. That’s a business model issue that should concern Alphabet. It’s not an excuse for making artists pay for YouTube’s content-related costs out of their own pockets to support piracy.

July 5, 2018 0

Don’t Ask Zuckerberg about Shadow Profiles

At a minimum, Facebook needs to reorganize the company in such a way that a single CEO can exercise effective control over its major pieces. An Alphabet-like reshuffling with a new level of management would at least signal seriousness about improvement.

May 22, 2018 0

Tim Berners-Lee is Depressed about the Web

The web’s greatest shortcoming, as well the greatest shortcoming of the Internet before the web, is the absence of tools for commerce in the plumbing. The web needs to provide each user with a persistent identity – or more, and they don’t need to be real – and a dance card for all the permissions we’ve given for data collectors to record our activities.

March 16, 2018 0

Big Picture Issues with EFF Letter

As I pointed out in the last post, the Engineers Letter EFF filed with the FCC in the Internet Freedom docket is riddled with errors. It attacks the Commission’s understanding…

July 27, 2017 0

Highly Illogical Broadband Claims

What the FCC can do is help to keep large swathes of the American population from falling behind. And it can do this by saying yes to network deployment and innovation. A good first step in that process is to let go of the vacuous virtuous cycle of networks + apps innovation. That argument is illogical.

June 13, 2017 0

Dave Farber on Title II ISP Regulation

The FCC was designed as an independent agency because the public is always biased in favor of the status quo. As Henry Ford may have said about his Model T, the public just wanted faster horses because they were scared of cars.

May 17, 2017 0

Making Time-Sensitive Networks Happen

We need the ability to offer virtual services that use software-defined networking to merge and coordinate diverse applications over the common Internet resource pool. But the regulatory problem needs to be solved by Congress and the FCC before the engineering can create real services

May 15, 2017 0

Five Myths about Title II and the Internet

Myth #1: Title II is the foundation of the Internet. Fact: Title II didn’t make an appearance on a significant part of the Internet until the Obama FCC’s Open Internet…

May 2, 2017 0

Congress is Watching You: What to Look For in the House Internet Privacy Debate

Yes. Does Google track you outside of google.com? Yes. Does Google share sensitive data about you with third parties it collects from sites like edmarkey.com and standtallforamerica.com? I don’t know that it does, but it’s entitled to by its privacy disclosures. And the same goes for a dozen other trackers unleashed on web users who visit these two sites.

March 28, 2017 0