Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Of all the shockingly naive and shamelessly self-serving editorials I’ve read by businesspeople in recent years, today’s Wall Street Journal oped by Netflix general counsel David Hyman really takes the cake. It’s an implicit plea to policymakers for broadband price controls. Hyman doesn’t like the idea of broadband operators potentially pricing bandwidth according to usage [...]
This morning, the Technology Committee of the New York City Council convened a large hearing on a resolution urging Congress to pass a robust Net Neutrality law. I was supposed to testify, but our narrowband transportation system prevented me from getting to New York. Here, however, is the testimony I prepared. It focuses on investment, [...]
Interesting piece here from Slate’s Farhad Manjoo on why AT&T should dump unlimited data plans and end what he calls the “iPhone all-you-can-eat buffet.” He notes that: “The typical smartphone customer consumes about 40 to 80 megabytes of wireless capacity a month. The typical iPhone customer uses 400 MB a month. AT&T’s network is getting [...]
Those who advocate regulating Internet service providers as common carriers subject to “open access” mandates (a/k/a “Net Neutrality”) want us to believe that their cause is the “Civil Rights” issue of the digital age, with huge popular support and opposed only by self-interested cable companies and their henchmen. In fact, such regulations would actually harm [...]
Make sure to read George Ou’s two recent articles over at the Digital Society blog setting the record straight about broadband usage caps: “Putting American Bandwidth Caps into Context” and “We Need to be Reasonable about Broadband Usage Caps.” George is one sharp cookie. I particularly like the way he takes apart Free Press for [...]
In several of our previous podcasts (see episodes 34, 35,and 37), we’ve discussed what we’ve called the “Comcast Kerfuffle,” which was the controversy surrounding the steps Comcast took to manage BitTorrent traffic on its networks. Critics called it a violation of Net neutrality principles while Comcast and others called it sensible network management. This week [...]
The venerable Economist magazine has made a hash of my research on the growth of the Internet, which examines the rich media technologies now flooding onto the Web and projects Internet traffic over the coming decade. This “exaflood” of new applications and services represents a bounty of new entertainment, education, and business applications that can drive productivity [...]
Last week I discussed Barbara Esbin’s new PFF paper about the FCC’s absurd investigation into how the cable industry is transitioning analog customers over to digital. This is an essential transition is the cable industry is going to free up bandwidth to compete against telco-provided fiber offerings in the future. The faster the cable industry [...]
A new report from TeleGeography finds that bandwidth prices for backbone transit continue to decline rapidly across the globe. In San Francisco, for instance, the price per mbps of Gigabit Ethernet transit has dropped 38 % in the past 12 months. Developing countries are also enjoying substantial price cuts in 15 to 20% range. But [...]
Web Pro News’ Jason Lee Miller seems to think he’s hoisted my colleague Bret Swanson, and The Progress & Freedom Foundation in general, on our own collective petard. Bret had responded to Tim Wu’s NYT op-ed by questioning Wu’s argument for developing “alternative supplies of bandwidth” to free us from the tyranny of the OPEC-like [...]
February 14, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
