Tag: Managing the Internet
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New Internet? No Thanks.
Yesterday’s New York Times ran a piece, “Do We Need a New Internet?” suggesting that the Internet has too many security problems and should therefore be rebuilt. The piece has been widely criticized in the technical blogosphere, so there’s no need for me to pile on. Anyway, I have already written about the redesign-the-Net meme.…
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Three Flavors of Net Neutrality
When the Wall Street Journal claimed on Monday that Google was secretly backtracking on its net neutrality position, commentators were properly skeptical. Tim Lee (among others) argued that the Journal misunderstood what net neutrality means, and others pointed out gaps in the Journal’s reasoning — not to mention that the underlying claim about Google’s actions…
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Economic Growth, Censorship, and Search Engines
Economic growth depends on an ability to access relevant information. Although censorship prevents access to certain information, the direct consequences of censorship are well-known and somewhat predictable. For example, blocking access to Falun Gong literature is unlikely to harm a country’s consumer electronics industry. On the web, however, information of all types is interconnected. Blocking…
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How Fragile Is the Internet?
With Barack Obama’s election, we’re likely to see a revival of the network neutrality debate. Thus far the popular debate over the issue has produced more heat than light. On one side have been people who scoff at the very idea of network neutrality, arguing either that network neutrality is a myth or that we’d…
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Bandwidth Needs and Engineering Tradeoffs
Tom Lee wonders about a question that Ed has pondered in the past: how much bandwidth does one human being need? I’m suspicious of estimates of exploding per capita bandwidth consumption. Yes, our bandwidth needs will continue to increase. But the human nervous system has its own bandwidth limits, too. Maybe there’ll be one more…
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Comcast Gets Slapped, But the FCC Wisely Leaves its Options Open
The FCC’s recent Comcast action—whose full text is unavailable as yet, though it was described in a press release and statements from each comissioner—is a lesson in the importance of technological literacy for policymaking. The five commissioners’ views, as reflected in their statements, are strongly correlated to the degree of understanding of the fact pattern…
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What's the Cyber in Cyber-Security?
Recently Barack Obama gave a speech on security, focusing on nuclear, biological, and infotech threats. It was a good, thoughtful speech, but I couldn’t help noticing how, in his discussion of the infotech threats, he promised to appoint a “National Cyber Advisor” to give the president advice about infotech threats. It’s now becoming standard Washington…
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Online Symposium: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music
Today we’re kicking off an online symposium on voluntary collective licensing of music, over at the Center for InfoTech Policy site. The symposium is motivated by recent movement in the music industry toward the possibility of licensing large music catalogs to consumers for a fixed monthly fee. For example, Warner Music, one of the major…
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Music Industry Under Fire for Exploring EFF Suggestion
Jim Griffin, a music industry consultant who is in the unusual position of being recognized as smart and reasonable by participants across a broad swath of positions in the copyright debate, revealed last week that he’s working to start a new music industry organization that will urge ISPs to bundle a music licensing fee into…
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Comcast and BitTorrent: Why You Can't Negotiate with a Protocol
The big tech policy news yesterday was Comcast’s announcement that it will stop impeding BitTorrent traffic, but instead will respond to network congestion by slowing traffic from the highest-volume users, regardless of what those users are doing. Comcast also announced a deal with BitTorrent, aimed at developing more effective ways of channeling peer-to-peer traffic through…