Check out this essay from The Atlantic, “Closing the Digital Frontier”: Digital freedom, of the monetary and First Amendment varieties, may in retrospect have become our era’s version of Manifest Destiny, our Turner thesis. Embracing digital freedom was an exaltation, a kind of noble calling. In a smart essay in the journal Fast Capitalism in [...]
I posted the second part of my Internet congestion article on High Tech Forum: This is the second part of an examination of the nature of congestion on packet switched networks such as the Internet. In the first part, Internet Congestion 101, we looked the at an idea expressed on Chris Marsden’s blog regarding the [...]
The FCC’s “Third Way” rhetoric is especially interesting to ITIF because the notion that a third way was needed is something ITIF president Rob Atkinson and current Obama advisor Phil Weiser introduced in a 2006 paper. The rhetoric of the third way doesn’t align with the use of a Title II classification, however, because Section [...]
News leaked out earlier today to the effect that the FCC has decided to pursue a Title II regulatory program for the Internet, treating it in effect as if it were a telephone network. Others have called this approach “the nuclear option,” but I think it’s less severe, more like the 9/11 attacks on New [...]
I gave a presentation at eComm last week on the challenges in building a mobile Internet building on themes I explored in my recent ITIF report, Going Mobile. As I didn’t have much time, I skipped over some of the policy content, so I’m uploading my slides for interested parties to peruse. FacebookTwitterDiggItTechnoratiDel.icio.us
I’m presenting a report on the Mobile Internet at the ITIF Global Command Center in Washington bright and early Tuesday morhing: The Internet is changing. In a few short years, Internet use will come predominately from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets rather than traditional PCs using fixed broadband. A fully mobile broadband Internet [...]
Incidentally, ITIF filed comments with the FCC in the Open Internet rule-making: The FCC should proceed with caution in conducting its inquiry into Open Internet rules, according to comments filed by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation today. All the evidence suggests that the Internet is thriving: network operators are investing and new applications, devices, [...]
The long-awaited video of the FCC’s December 10 workshop Review and Discussion of Broadband Deployment Research is finally on-line. This workshop featured discussions of Yochai Benkler’s controversial Berkman Center report on unbundled DSL and Bob Atkinson’s report on current broadband investment dynamics in the US. As the FCC put it: As part of the Commission’s [...]
ITIF released a report today on digital piracy, Steal These Policies: Strategies for Reducing Digital Piracy co-authored by Dan Castro, Scott Andes, and yours truly. Here’s the blurb: It is time for the U.S. government to take global theft of U.S. intellectual property, especially digital content, much more seriously. A new ITIF report finds that [...]
Have you ever wondered how South Africa got connected to the Internet? It happened during the bleak days of apartheid, thanks to the valiant efforts of self-proclaimed hippie Randy Bush: I suppose you are wondering what a computer scientist, engineer, and unrepentant hippie is doing at this lectern today. Well, I am also wondering the [...]
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