Broadband Politics

This is the full, uncut copy I submitted to the Mercury News. The published piece (In neutrality debate, carriers get blamed for Net’s weaknesses) has moved to the Merc’s archives, where you have to pay to retrieve it.
The Circus is Coming
The circus is coming to Palo Alto. The FCC’s network neutrality circus that is, the [...]

The FCC commissioners are going to sit through seven hours of non-stop testimony tomorrow, a severe test of bladder and patience. Here’s the last-minute witness list:
12:45 p.m. Panel Discussion 1 – Network Management and Consumer Expectations
Introduction: Lawrence Lessig, C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law, Stanford Law School
* Rick Carnes, President, Songwriters Guild [...]

Here’s a sign of the impending Exaflood, from the UK where the BBC’s iPlayer is breaking the Internet’s congestion controls:
The success of the BBC’s iPlayer is putting the internet under severe strain and threatening to bring the network to a halt, internet service providers claimed yesterday.
They want the corporation to share the cost of [...]

I called out Harold Feld of MAP, one of the FCC petitioners that started the FCC’s broadband circus, for his failure to respond to the BitTorrent/Comcast deal in my latest article in The Register, and he’s pretty upset about it:

There must be something in the air that has turned Comcast from a fighter to a [...]