Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Stephen Lawson reports here on BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker’s comments about net neutrality regulation at the eComm conference yesterday. Klinker used the word “regulation” to mean a couple different things in his remarks, but nothing he said justifies the headline PC World gave the story. Here’s Lawson reporting Klinker’s comments: “There is no ambiguity. There [...]
Facebook has been at the center of a controversy involving its moderation policies and The Pirate Bay, a popular Bittorrent tracker that was found guilty of copyright infringement by a Swedish court last month. Since early April, Facebook has enforced a “site-wide” ban on links to The Pirate Bay – including those in private messages. [...]
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 [...]
My colleague Barbara Esbin, a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Communications and Competition Policy at The Progress & Freedom Foundation, was asked to pen a short history of the net neutrality wars in the U.S. for a French publication, La Lettre de l’Autorité. Her essay provides an excellent, concise overview of where [...]
Over at TechDirt, Tom Lee has a sharp critique of Muayyad Al-Chalabi’s much-circulated paper (via GigaOm) opposing bandwidth caps. Make sure to read Tom’s entire essay, but here’s the key take-away: this whitepaper merely amounts to a complaint that a free lunch is ending. Bandwidth is clearly an increasingly limited resource. And in capitalist societies, [...]
On Wednesday, the FCC released the decision (PDF, text) it adopted back on August 1 holding that Comcast had violated the FCC’s 2005 net neutrality principles (PDF, text) by “blocking” peer-to-peer file-sharing traffic on its network using the popular program BitTorrent. Paragraphs 3-11 lay out the FCC’s (still-disputed) finding of facts. Commissioner McDowell‘s Scaliaesquely scathing [...]
There’s been a fair amount of chatter on this blog (here, here, and here) about how to properly view the FCC’s recent Comcast decision. My take is that while everyone is focused on questions of market failure, we are in the midst of a huge government failure. Read my full explanation here.
Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Net, has a very thoughtful post up on the Google Public Policy Blog today asking “What’s a Reasonable Approach for Managing Broadband Networks?” He runs through a variety of theoretical approaches to network load management. There’s much there to ponder, but I just [...]
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 [...]
The AP reports today the results of an investigation it conducted on Comcast’s “traffic shaping” practices as they relate to BitTorrent. The bottom line, if the AP is correct, is that Comcast interferes with packets coming from both ends of a BitTorrent communication. Comcast allegedly inserts messages pretending to be one or the other end [...]
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.
