American Broadband Policy: Information over Manipulation
While it’s true that Americans aren’t dancing in the streets over ISP customer service, it’s unrealistic to claim that replacing them with municipal utility providers will change this dynamic at all.
Voluntary Net Neutrality: Holy Grail or Total Hoax?
If net neutrality is what its supporters say it is – the best overall way of setting expectations and managing Internet service agreements, it should be expected to become self-executing at some point. I think we passed that point about ten years ago, but we will see what we will see.
Wireless First: A Winning Strategy for Rural Broadband
The nice thing about focusing on wireless for the final leg of the extended broadband system is that it doesn’t duplicate effort or waste money. Despite the glory of fiber optic networks, people want mobility. So wireless is going to be part of the solution regardless. Why don’t we just accept that and concentrate on building the best wireless networks first and fill in with fiber only when and where it’s truly needed?
Congress Gives the FCC a Privacy Mulligan
“Don’t collect what you can’t protect” seems like a reasonable approach. Given that the current discourse is all about collection, we probably won’t have the conversation we need to have for a long time. And in the meantime we’re going to hear nothing but nonsense about gatekeepers, “sensitive” browsing histories, and how hard it may be to switch ISPs (as if we don’t do that several times more often than we switch social networks and search providers.
Five Myths About Internet Privacy
Our web activity is tracked by “edge services” such as Google and Facebook even if we don’t go to their web sites. This is because they both operate tracking networks with the cooperation of web sites that carry their tracking code.
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.
What’s a Tracker Network and What Can it See?
In Wednesday’s Senate floor debate over the Congressional Review Act resolution on the Wheeler FCC’s privacy regulations, each Democratic Senator made the same claim: ISPs can see all the web…
Apple Augmented Reality Play: Glasses and Much More
If Apple is successful in bringing information-rich AR into daily life, consumers will demand that all of our machines adapt as well. So that means Siri-enabled (or Alexa-enabled if Amazon wins) devices in the car, the home, and the office.
San Francisco’s Cultural Divide
The failure of Google Fiber to connect America’s cities to ultra-fast gigabit networks took a bizarre turn this week: San Francisco, the incubator of the apps economy, is seriously considering…
Saving the Web from Humanity
28 years ago today, Sir Tim Berners-Lee designed the web in a memo to his bosses at CERN, the European Union’s research center for nuclear energy. While nuclear energy is…