Tag: Competition
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Verizon Violates Net Neutrality with DNS Deviations
While many of us were discussing Comcast’s partial blocking of BitTorrent Traffic, and debating its implications for the net neutrality debate, a more clear-cut neutrality violation was apparently taking place on Verizon’s network – a redirection of Verizon customers’ failed DNS lookups, to drive traffic to Verizon’s own search engine. Here’s the background. Suppose you’re…
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Comcast Podcast
Recently I took part in a Technology Liberation Front podcast about the Comcast controversy, with Adam Thierer, Jerry Brito, Richard Bennett, and James L. Gattuso. There’s now a (slightly edited) transcript online.
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Economics of Eavesdropping For Pay
Following up on Andrew’s post about eavesdropping as a profit center for telecom companies, let’s take a quick look at the economics of eavesdropping for money. We’ll assume for the sake of argument that (1) telecom (i.e. transporting bits) is a commodity so competition forces providers to sell it essentially at cost, (2) the government…
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Eavesdropping as a Telecom Profit Center
In 1980 AT&T was a powerful institution with a lucrative monopoly on transporting long-distance voice communications, but forbidden by law from permitting the government to eavesdrop without a warrant. Then in 1981 Judge Greene took its voice monopoly away, and in the 1980s and 90s the Internet ate the rest of its lunch. By 1996,…
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Comcast and Net Neutrality
The revelation that Comcast is degrading BitTorrent traffic has spawned many blog posts on how the Comcast incident bolsters the blogger’s position on net neutrality – whatever that position happens to be. Here is my contribution to the genre. Mine is different from all the others because … um … well … because my position…
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Comcast Blocks Some Traffic, Won't Explain Itself
Comcast’s apparent policy of blocking some BitTorrent traffic, which has been discussed on tech sites [example] for months, has now broken out into the mainstream press. Comcast is making things worse by refusing to talk plainly about what they are doing and why. (This is an improvement over Comcast’s previously reported denials, which now appear…
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Why Don't NFL Teams Encrypt Their Signals Better?
Yesterday the National Football League punished the New England Patriots and their coach, Bill Belichick, for videotaping an opposing team’s defensive signals. The signals in question are used by coaches to tell their on-field defensive unit how to line up and which tactics to use for the next play. The coach typically makes hand signals…
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iPhone Unlocking Secret Revealed
The iPhone unlocking story took its next logical turn this week, with the release of a free iPhone unlocking program. Previously, unlocking required buying a commercial program or following a scary sequence of documented hardware and software tweaks. How this happened is interesting in itself. (Caveat: This is based on the stories I’m hearing; I…
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Does Apple Object to iPhone Unlocking?
I wrote Monday about efforts to “unlock” the iPhone so it worked on non-AT&T cell networks, and the associated legal and policy issues. AT&T lawyers have aggressively tried to stop unlocking; but Apple has been pretty silent. What position will Apple take? It might seem that Apple has nothing to lose from unlocking, but that’s…
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iPhone Unlocked; Legal Battle Looming?
In the past few days several groups declared victory in the battle to unlock the iPhone – to make the iPhone work on cellular networks other than AT&T’s. New Jersey teenager George Hotz published instructions (starting here) for a geeks-only unlock procedure involving hardware and software tweaks. An anonymous group called iPhoneSimFree reportedly has an…