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 [...]
My guest blog at GigaOm deals with paid peering and the net neutrality regulations, How Video Is Changing the Internet: But paid peering may be forbidden by Question 106 of the FCC’s proposed Open Internet rules because it’s essentially two-tiered network access, Norton points out. Paid peering illustrates how hard it is to write an [...]
The fledgling high-tech community in the smokey little hipster ghetto called Austin is apoplectic about Time Warner’s announcement that it’s testing bandwidth caps in central Texas: When it comes to trialing its metered broadband service, Time Warner Cable’s choice to do so in the tech-savvy city of Austin, Texas, was no accident. And residents may [...]
Kevin Martin’s FCC has hired a new chief technologist, Jon Peha: Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin named John Peha chief technologist, the senior adviser post at the commission on technology issues, based out of the Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis. I’m a bit disappointed. Peha is the guy who delivered strong testimony [...]
See my article in The Register to understand why your broadband bill is going to rise: Peer-to-peer file sharing just got a lot more expensive in the US. The FCC has ordered Comcast to refrain from capping P2P traffic, endorsing a volume-based pricing scheme that would “charge the most aggressive users overage fees” instead. BitTorrent, [...]
Comcast has modified its terms of use to clarify that “excessive use” is 250 GB per month. If you download more than this, and are on the list of heaviest users, you’ll get a letter from Comcast telling you to dial it back. If you don’t you’ll be canned. Over-limit fees are not part of [...]
Kevin Martin and his Democratic Party colleagues at the FCC have issued their Comcast order, available at this link. They find some novel sources of authority and apply some interesting interpretations of the facts. I’ll have some detailed commentary after I’ve read it all and checked the footnotes. It’s an amusing exercise, if you like [...]
Valleywag’s outstanding reporting on the BitTorrent collapse continues with a detailed account of the tussle: BitTorrent has denied our report that the company laid off 12 out of 55 employees. That may be true: While our source told us 12 employees were on the layoff list, we’ve learned that, at the last minute, the jobs [...]
Twitter: iPolicy