by Fawn Johnson, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Verizon Communications Inc. Chairman Ivan Seidenberg on Wednesday had some harsh words for the Federal Communications Commission a day ahead of its planned vote on open Internet rules, adding to what has become a fever pitch of public debate over the proposal.
Given the level of sturm and drang over the FCC’s proposed net-neutrality rules over the past week, it might be a little hard to believe the FCC hasn’t even released its proposal yet. The earliest anyone outside of the agency will see the FCC’s 50-ish page proposal is Thursday.
by Cecilia Kang, Contributor, Post Tech, Washington Post
AT&T’s top lobbyist, Jim Cicconi, sent a letter to all of the telecom giant’s 300,000 employees on Sunday, urging them to express their concerns over a net neutrality proposal under consideration by the Federal Communications Commission.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski is proposing that the agency apply tougher open-Internet rules broadly, raising concerns of cable and phone companies and some lawmakers that the government could try to control efforts to offer products such as digital cable or premium business services.
The junior Senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, asked a decidedly unfunny question Wednesday afternoon when it was his turn to quiz Supreme Court nominee Sonya Sotomayor.
Franken turned to the contentious issue of net neutrality, or rules that would require cable and phone companies to treat legal Internet traffic equally and would prevent the creation of a two-tiered system that would allow speedier deliver of premium services.
It’s sometimes quite amusing to watch how various economic ecosystems grow, where multiple companies have symbiotic relationships, and then start to freak out when they think that other companies in the ecosystem are somehow earning “too much.” That, of course, is at the heart of many recent battles we’ve seen.
If there’s any one thing that stands to determine the future of news brands, it is the current debate in Washington over net neutrality legislation. Why is net neutrality so important?
It is the building block of the abundance-based economy on the Internet.
by Galen Gruman and Tom Kaneshige, Contributing Writers, InfoWorld
The digital Disneyland of the future–where we freely work and play online–may be at risk. Why? Because, some argue, broadband carriers can’t support it. The Internet’s “free ride” culture has led to more people downloading gigabytes of data at practically no cost.
If you thought that federal regulators were upset at Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent, wait until they start scrutinizing what wireless providers are doing.
by Andrew Odlyzko, Professor, School of Mathematics, University of Minnesota
Service providers argue that if net neutrality is not enforced, they will have sufficient incentives to build special high-quality channels that will take the Internet to the next level of its evolution.
by Therese Poletti, Senior Columnist, MarketWatch, Tech Tales
Comcast Corp. rightfully received a smackdown from the Federal Communications Commission last week for not telling customers that it was blocking some of them from using peer-to-peer services to download videos and other content off the Internet.
The Federal Communications Commission’s order last Friday in the Comcast-BitTorrent dispute should help ensure that today’s broadband networks remain open platforms to the Internet. But more broadly, the recent attention on Comcast–and on Time Warner’s recently launched trial of “consumption-based billing”–raises the question: what is a reasonable approach for broadband networks to manage their Internet [...]
Americans today spend almost as much on bandwidth–the capacity to move information–as we do on energy. Just as the industrial revolution depended on oil and other energy sources, the information revolution is fueled by bandwidth. If we aren’t careful, we’re going to repeat the history of the oil industry by creating a bandwidth cartel.
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