Tag: Telecom Act
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New Congress, Same Old Issues
With control of the House and Senate about to switch parties, everybody is wondering how the new management will affect their pet policy issues. Cameron Wilson has a nice forecast for tech policy issues such as competitiveness, globalization, privacy, DRM, and e-voting. Most of these don’t break down as partisan issues – differences are larger…
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Taking Stevens Seriously
From the lowliest blogger to Jon Stewart, everybody is laughing at Sen. Ted Stevens and his remarks (1.2MB mp3) on net neutrality. The sound bite about the Internet being “a series of tubes” has come in for for the most ridicule. I’ll grant that Stevens sounds pretty confused on the recording. But’s let’s give the…
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Net Neutrality: Strike While the Iron Is Hot?
Bill Herman at the Public Knowledge blog has an interesting response to my net neutrality paper. As he notes, my paper was mostly about the technical details surrounding neutrality, with a short policy recommendation at the end. Here’s the last paragraph of my paper: There is a good policy argument in favor of doing nothing…
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New Net Neutrality Paper
I just released a new paper on net neutrality, called Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality. It’s based on several of my earlier blog posts, with some new material.
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Quality of Service: A Quality Argument?
One of the standard arguments one hears against network neutrality rules is that network providers need to provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to certain kinds of traffic, such as video. If QoS is necessary, the argument goes, and if net neutrality rules would hamper QoS by requiring all traffic to be treated the same,…
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AOL, Yahoo Challenge Email Neutrality
AOL and Yahoo will soon start using Goodmail, a system that lets bulk email senders bypass the companies’ spam filters by paying the companies one-fourth of a cent per message, and promising not to send unsolicited messages, according to a New York Times story by Saul Hansell. Pay-to-send systems are one standard response to spam.…
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How Would Two-Tier Internet Work?
The word is out now that residential ISPs like BellSouth want to provide a kind of two-tier Internet service, where ordinary Internet services get one level of performance, and preferred sites or services, presumably including the ISPs’ own services, get better performance. It’s clear why ISPs want to do this: they want to charge big…
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Net Neutrality and Competition
No sooner do I start writing about net neutrality than Ed Whitacre, the CEO of baby bell company SBC, energizes the debate with a juicy interview: Q: How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others? A: How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe.…
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Discrimination Against Network Hogs
Adam Thierer has an interesting post about network neutrality over at Tech Liberation Front. He is reacting to a recent Wall Street Journal story about how some home broadband service providers (BSPs) are starting to modify their networks to block or frustrate network applications they don’t like. Why would a BSP discriminate against an application’s…
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Who Is An ISP?
There’s talk in Washington about a major new telecommunications bill, to update the Telecom Act of 1996. A discussion draft of the bill is floating around. The bill defines three types of services: Internet service (called “Broadband Internet Transmission Service” or BITS for short); VoIP; and broadband television. It lays down specific regulations for each…