Broadband Politics

The latest FCC report on broadband penetration is out and the growth in wireless broadband is amazing:

One interesting detail of the new statistics is the rise of new platforms for delivering broadband. Cable and DSL still dominate the market, with 28.5 and 22.6 million lines, respectively. Mobile wireless, however, went from only about 379,000 subscribers [...]

Stephen Colbert takes on Wikipedia again with this great clip on Wiki-lobbying. He exhorts fans to edit the Wikipedia entry on “Reality” to say “Reality has become a commodity” and sure enough they comply. Ironically, they’re fought off by Wikipedia Admin Raul654, one of the Google fan-boys who mangled the Network Neutrality entry to reflect [...]

For today’s “compare and contrast” exercise look at the concise and clear Peter Huber explaining why net neutrality is a boon to lawyers:

The new Congress is determined to enact a “net neutrality” bill. Nobody yet knows what those two words mean. The new law won’t provide any intelligible answer, either. It will, however, put a [...]

Check out Cringely on Google’s plans for world domination:

Google controls more network fiber than any other organization. This is not to say that Google OWNS all that fiber, just that they control it through agreements with network operators. I find two very interesting aspects to this story: 1) that Google has acquired — or even [...]

Public Knowledge intern Bill Herman has written a marvelous piece of propaganda for net neutrality regulations and managed to have it published in a law journal.
Herman argues, in essence, that the traditional Internet represents the last word on network architecture, and any attempt to improve it will necessarily result in the Lord smiting the American [...]

One of the lamest forms of discourse is sliming your opponent as a stooge of capitalistic or other assumed-to-be-evil interests. Professors Farber, Katz, Yoo, and Faulhaber have been attacked as shills by Jeff Chester on account of their publishing a well-reasoned Op-Ed in the Washington Post opposing new Internet regulations:

Super cable monopoly Comcast hired UC [...]

Dave Farber, Michael Katz, Chris Yoo, and Gerald Faulhaber have a very concise and well-constructed Op-Ed in today’s WaPo on the downsides of net neutrality regulations:

The legislative proposals debated in the 109th Congress take a very different approach. They would impose far-reaching prohibitions affecting all broadband providers, regardless of whether they wielded monopoly power and [...]

Andrew Orlowski has some fun with the AT&T-Bell South merger:

In a decade, American consumers have seen the number of Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), or Baby Bells, coalesce from six down to just three: the odd man out, Qwest, the RBOC which covers the sparsely populated Mountain states, is surely next on AT&T’s menu.
The extraordinary [...]

Google’s one patent on network Quality of Service, US Patent #7142536, isn’t very neutral:

The present invention provides efficient and effective quality of service for information that is time sensitive (e.g., real time data)…In one embodiment of the present invention time sensitive information is cut through routed on a virtual channel and pre-empts non time sensitive [...]