Tag: Innovation Policy
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Comcast's Disappointing Defense
Last week, Comcast offered a defense in the FCC proceeding challenging the technical limitations it had placed on BitTorrent traffic in its network. (Back in October, I wrote twice about Comcast’s actions.) The key battle line is whether Comcast is just managing its network reasonably in the face of routine network congestion, as it claims,…
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Google Objects to Microhoo: Pot Calling Kettle Black?
Last week Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo at a big premium over Yahoo’s current stock price; and Google complained vehemently that Microsoft’s purchase of Yahoo would reduce competition. There’s been tons of commentary about this. Here’s mine. The first question to ask is why Microsoft made such a high offer for Yahoo. One possibility is…
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Could Use-Based Broadband Pricing Help the Net Neutrality Debate?
Yesterday, thanks to a leaked memo, it came to light that Time Warner Cable intends to try out use-based broadband pricing on a few of its customers. It looks like the plan is for several tiers of use, with the heaviest users possibly paying overage charges on a per-byte basis. In confirming its plans to…
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Clinton's Digital Policy
This is the second in our promised series summing up where the 2008 presidential candidates stand on digital technology issues. (See our first post, about Obama). This time,we’ll take a look at Hillary Clinton Hillary has a platform plank on innovation. Much of it will be welcome news to the research community: She wants to…
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Scoble/Facebook Incident: It's Not About Data Ownership
Last week Facebook canceled, and then reinstated, Robert Scoble’s account because he was using an automated script to export information about his Facebook friends to another service. The incident triggered a vigorous debate about who was in the right. Should Scoble be allowed to export this data from Facebook in the way he did? Should…
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Obama's Digital Policy
The Iowa caucuses, less than a week away, will kick off the briefest and most intense series of presidential primaries in recent history. That makes it a good time to check in on what the candidates are saying about digital technologies. Between now and February 5th (the 23-state tsunami of primaries that may well resolve…
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Workshop: Computing in the Cloud
I’m excited to announce that Princeton’s Center for InfoTech Policy is putting on a workshop on the policy and social implications of “Computing in the Cloud” – the trend where companies, rather than users, store and manage an increasing range of personal data. Examples include Hotmail and Gmail replacing desktop email, YouTube taking over as…
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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 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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Greetings, and a Thought on Net Neutrality
Hello again, FTT readers. You may remember me as a guest blogger here at FTT, writing about anti-circumvention, the print media’s superiority (or lack thereof) to Wikipedia, and a variety of other topics. I’m happy to report that I’ve moved to Princeton to join the university’s Center for Information Technology Policy as its new associate…