Net Neutrality In the News

Page 1 of 76 pages  1 2 3 >  Last »

Nov 11, 2008

High-tech industry sees Obama as an ally Kevin Bogardus, The Hill

Lobbyists for the high-tech industry see Barack Obama’s victory last week as a boost to their interests.

Advocates are encouraged by how the president-elect embraced technology in his own campaign — by using the Internet to set new fundraising records, for example — and for his support of open access to Internet networks and tax breaks for research and development.

“The Obama position is the government has a role in promoting technology. It is a breath of fresh air,” said Josh Ackil, president of the Franklin Square Group. Ackil, a former Democratic Senate aide, now lobbies for Apple, Google and other tech interests.

read more >>
article link >>

Nov 11, 2008

Obama Strong on Internet Neutrality Melody Y. Hu, The Harvard Crimson

As the preparations for the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama begin, the computer-savvy at Harvard are taking notice of the Harvard Law School graduate who supports network neutrality.

Officials at the University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Harvard Computer Society said that the promise of network neutrality, which could materialize under an Obama administration, would help preserve the Internet’s democratic qualities.

read more >>
article link >>

Nov 11, 2008

Is Our Internet Future in Danger? Galen Grumman and Tom Kaneshige, PC World

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. Even if broadband infrastructure’s capacity doubled or tripled, there’s no avoiding the equivalent of an abrupt work stoppage.

There are signs of the free ride being nearly over. In the U.K., a million users are about to bump into “soft caps” for usage that their carriers imposed, according to consumer research group uSwitch. In the U.S., some carriers have also started imposing caps that customers have found out about only when they exceeded them in their inaccurately labeled “unlimited” plans. (These limits were hidden in the “unlimited” contracts’ fine print.) Comcast, for example, now has a national cap of 256GB per month. And a few are experimenting with tiered pricing, where the more you use, the more you pay—just like you do for electrical, gas, and water.

read more >>
article link >>

Nov 07, 2008

Democratic win could herald wireless Net neutrality Declan McCullagh, CNET News

SAN JOSE, Calif.--If you thought that federal regulators were upset at Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent, wait until they start scrutinizing what wireless providers are doing.

Comcast’s offense was merely to slow or abort some BitTorrent transfers. AT&T Wireless goes much further and flatly bans all “peer-to-peer file sharing” and “downloading movies.” Verizon Wireless’ terms of service also single out P2P applications.

If those restrictions applied to wired Internet connections, there would have been Federal Communications Commission proceedings, congressional hearings, and plenty of outrage, real or feigned. Wireless providers’ network management policies, on the other hand, have mostly been left alone--a situation that left-leaning groups are hoping that an Obama administration will help them remedy.

“That regulatory disparity is going to become a problem when we go forward and it ought to be addressed right now,” Ben Scott, policy director of media advocacy group Free Press, said at the Wireless Communications Association’s conference here Thursday.

read more >>
article link >>

Nov 05, 2008

Google Wins the Presidential Election (So Does Obama) Sascha Segan, PC Magazine

And it’s done: Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States. Let’s set aside the crashing economy, two wars, and a deeply divided society to ask (we are PC Magazine, of course): What does this mean for tech?

Google actually won this election. Every way you slice Obama’s tech policy, it is good news for Google.

The struggles over net neutrality, white-space broadband, and telecom competition all have the same theme. Should the government lean towards protecting the rights of large, incumbent players in a space, or lean towards disrupting those marketplaces for new entrants? No matter what, there’s always a lean; in these kinds of battles, no policy is neutral.

read more >>
article link >>

Page 1 of 76 pages  1 2 3 >  Last »