Tag Archives: Society

FCC Broadband Plan Shrivels Compared To New Hampshire

By Posted in Current Affairs Tagged , , 2 Comments

Last March, the FCC announced a national broadband plan with the goal of connecting ~85 percent of the US population to 100 Mbps high speed broadband by 2020. I just learned that New Hampshire is requiring that North Carolina-based FairPoint* (which paid $2.3 billion for Verizon’s New England land lines and internet service) is required to offer broadband service to 95 percent of its customers by 2013.

It’s true that the NH requirement contains no speed threshold. However, broadband speeds have been increasing by 50 percent a year for the past decade. Therefore, assuming that FairPoint keeps up with the technology – or even lags a little – they should be at 100 Mbps by 2010, given that the US average was 5 Mbps last March:

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US Broadband: The FCC and Network Neutrality

By Posted in Current Affairs, Mobile Tagged , , , Leave a comment

Part 1 of a series (How US Broadband and Cellular Telecomm Got So Messed Up) on U.S. telecommunication infrastructure

Back in December, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 3-2 along partisan lines to approve network neutrality rules, rules which had not yet been made public. The proposed rules (pdf) were released on 23 December.

The proposal features three primary points: transparency (Internet Service Providers can do whatever they want, so to speak, they just have to disclose what they are doing); no blocking (if content is legal, an ISP cannot “block” it, ditto applications, services and non-harmful devices); and no “unreasonable” discrimination against lawful traffic (which means yeah, it’s OK to discriminate against spammers … but there’s no definition of “unreasonable”).

As a concept, network neutrality is simple: just like telephone companies are required to treat competitor incoming calls like they would treat their own, ISPs should be prohibited from treating “bits” differently based on point of origin. However, as with most complex topics, the devil is in the details. And, in this case, also buried in a law written in 1934.

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Moral Ambiguity? Claim Of Sexual Assault Versus Copyright Infringement

By Posted in Social Networks Tagged 1 Comment

On Thursday, the Facebook section of the Internet demonstrated pitchfork mentality towards one Judith Griggs, who had allegedly asserted that content on the Web is public domain. On Friday, Google tech writer Noirin Shirley accused Google engineer Florian Leibert of sexual assult at an after-hours party during ApacheCon in Atlanta. Guess where the pitchforks were aimed this time? Blog post commenters and tweets attacked both Shirley and Leiber.

Full story at @Storify. This post is here for comments.

On Internet Censorship: ACTA and COICA

By Posted in Economics, Legal Tagged , , , Leave a comment

Here’s the money quote:

For much of the 20th century, oligarchs have made bucket-loads of money by being able to monetize culture through increasingly-generous copyright protections (every time Mickey Mouse was about to lose his, critics contend). They will not give up those cash cows quietly, even as digital technologies render their opposition moot, in the long run.

Also posted at Newsvine.