When members of Congress earlier this month considered the Stop Online Piracy Act — better known to anyone who actually hangs out on the Internet as #SOPA — the most notable feature of the debate turned out to be the sheer ignorance of the elected officials discussing it. One after the other, members of the U.S. House of Representatives professed — nay, bragged about — approaching this weighty legislation from the vantage point of someone who is not “a nerd” or a “tech expert.” Nerds and tech experts, and plenty of savvy Internet users who don’t consider themselves either ... Read More
Civil Rights Groups’ Surprising Net-Neutrality Bedfellows
September 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
For the most part, media-justice advocacy groups present a unified front in support of net neutrality, the concept — which many would like to see enshrined in federal regulation — that says telecom companies shouldn't be able to discriminate against users, content, or applications on the Internet. The telcos shouldn't be able to block controversial stories, or degrade traffic to websites that can't afford to pay more, or dictate the nature of online public debate. Net neutrality, its supporters argue, is nothing less than the civil rights issue of the 21st century. In an awkward ... Read More
The Government, Google and Lady Gaga
July 22, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
In an editorial last week, The New York Times proposed a startling, if cautiously worded idea. "The potential impact of Google's algorithm on the Internet economy," the paper wrote, "is such that it is worth exploring ways to ensure that the editorial policy guiding Google's tweaks is solely intended to improve the quality of the results and not to help Google's other businesses." The national paper of record, in other words, was talking about government regulation of Google's famously classified search algorithm. (The mealy-mouthed language used to suggest this might explain why the ... Read More
Court Decision Could Lead FCC to Redefine Internet
April 9, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
A federal appeals court in D.C. earlier this week threw up a roadblock to the Federal Communications Commission's plans for the future of the Internet in America. The details of the case were relatively straight-forward: Comcast was caught interfering with traffic by customers using the cumbersome file-sharing application BitTorrent, flouting a 2005 FCC Internet policy stating that Web users are entitled to access the content and applications of their choice. The FCC tried to sanction Comcast. Comcast sued. And on Tuesday — to the surprise of no one who has been following the case — the ... Read More
Is the Net Best Stuck in Neutrality?
January 20, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Advocates of net neutrality have a debilitating disadvantage in their camp: the topic is messy and technical, with the stakes for the average Internet user lost in a web of arguments over concepts like common carriage, structural separation and data discrimination. The Federal Communications Commission and Congress are mulling new guidelines for how the Internet will be used in the future and who can control how people access it. It seems like an odd debate to have — and one about the very core of what we think the Internet should be — a full two decades into the technology's ... Read More
