2018 Broadband Deployment Report

After flirting with some major restructuring in the way broadband progress is assessed in the US, Chairman Pai has released a fact sheet that maintains the analytical status quo with…

January 19, 2018 0
Before the broadband benchmark is adjusted again, the FCC really does need to lay out a methodology for coming up with the numbers. It appears than the 25/3 standard was driven by the desire of Netflix to stream 4K video everywhere.

The Myth of Internet Fast Lanes

Should three unelected bureaucrats be able to reverse three other unelected bureaucrats on vital social, political, and economic questions? This is the haunting question for Internet policy in the United…

December 19, 2017 0

The Internet After Net Neutrality

Let’s not be distracted by shiny objects any more. The Internet still has tremendous promise as well as serious problems to solve. Making it better through continuous experimentation should be the top priority.

December 12, 2017 0

Training Wheels for the Internet

We’re on the brink of the rollout of a new technology that promises to offer more competition for residential broadband. Allowing 5G to flourish is much more important than keeping the training wheels on the Internet.

December 6, 2017 0

Internet Regulation in the Age of Hyper-Giants

As we enter the seventh round of the net neutrality fight,  advocates continue to make the same argument they’ve offered since 2002: infrastructure companies will do massive harm to little…

December 5, 2017 0

The Great Social Media Freakout

Senator Al Franken got Silicon Valley’s attention by proposing to apply net neutrality regulations to mega-gatekeepers Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al. Writing in The Guardian, the senator correctly observed that…

November 14, 2017 0

Internet Monopoly Platform Crisis

Monopoly Platform Crisis

How the tables have turned. At the dawn of the net neutrality debate, the good guys in the Internet marketplace were the scrappy platform startups created in dorm rooms and…

October 26, 2017 0

FCC Marriott Consent Decree Makes KRACK Attack Worse

By now you’ve certainly heard about the KRACK Internet security nightmare afflicting Wi-Fi. The exploit, discovered by Mathy Vanhoef and Frank Piessens, leverages a vulnerability in the IEEE 802.11i standard for  data…

October 17, 2017 0

Cooking the Books While Startups Languish

Since leaving the FCC, former chairman Tom Wheeler and Special Advisor Gigi Sohn have relentlessly attacked current chairman Ajit Pai. This is an unusual breach of decorum because former FCC…

October 3, 2017 0

Tech Policy Tribalism

The tribal forces of the left appear to be forming a drum circle around the idea that rural broadband is entirely screwed up in the US so we need to create thousands of broadband co-ops to solve it the problem in a few decades. I think we can do a lot better, but only if we can forget about the tribal identities and apply some reasoning informed by facts.  

September 27, 2017 0