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.
My FCC Comments on Broadband Progress
Here’s the summary of the comments I filed with the FCC on its broadband deployment report to Congress. A lot of the ink in the mainstream media today echoes a…
The Coming Productivity Boom with Bret Swanson
[powerpress] In this edition of the HTF podcast, we talk with Entropy Economics founder Bret Swanson about his recent paper (with Michael Mandel), The Coming Productivity Boom. Swanson sees high…
Progress in the Debate over TV White Space
Tuesday (July 11, 2017), Microsoft unveiled their current vision for unlicensed radio services in the TV White Space (see “Microsoft calls for U.S. strategy to eliminate rural broadband gap within…
Microsoft Closes Digital Divide! Heh, Just Kidding
Happy Prime Day! Here’s one special deal you don’t want to buy: Microsoft’s grand plan to bring high speed broadband to the less-populated fringe of rural America for peanuts. It…
Roslyn Layton Visits High Tech Forum
What are we losing by pretending that mobile broadband is a noncompetitive market that needs to be tightly managed by a Washington-based regulator? We can’t know that in the US because we only have the market we have. But data from other countries suggests that we’re not seeing the explosion in mobile apps development that we should expect.
Making the Internet of the Future Happen Today
With all the policy controversy around the Internet today it’s useful to take a step back and look at the overall trajectory. While the battles over privacy, security, and the…
Faster Internet up to Web Sites
The ISP can take traffic from a server to a user as fast as the speed of light, but if the web server is underpowered or overloaded with badly written tracking code, the user isn’t going to be happy.
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.
Senate Internet Hearings
As a technical matter, it is the case that the Internet is more like cable TV than the telephone network. While the Internet does support interpersonal communication, its primary role is publishing audio, video, pictures, and text. And like cable TV, it’s a platform in which advertising is a very important source of revenue.