Tag: NETNEUTRALITY

Today Google and Verizon unveiled their joint statement of principles regarding the governance and regulation of the Web. The policy proposal makes a number of suggestions regarding the application of Net neutrality ideology, and the ultimate goal, Google says, is to protect consumer choice, and to encourage investment and innovation in broadband infrastructure. The proposal, which Verizon and ...

Share The war over Net neutrality is about to really heat up. After being dealt a major blow by the D.C. Federal Court of Appeals, the FCC has declared its intention to reclassify broadband Internet as a Title II service, and thus place it under the same regulatory classification as phone service. Net neutrality opponents, meanwhile, are stepping up their efforts. Americans for Prosperity, or ...

The National Broadband Plan, Net neutrality and consumer advocates around the country took a major blow today when a federal appeals court ruled that the FCC had no authority to regulate how service providers manage network traffic. The ruling was handed down in favor of Comcast following a 2008 challenge leveled by the FCC against the cable provider for blocking and throttling P2P file-sharing ...

Americans might be on the fence about whether or not health care is a right or a privilege, but they seem to be in agreement with the vast majority of the world's population when it comes to the question of Internet access being a fundamental right. An international survey, conducted by the BBC World Service, found that 79-percent of respondents thought that having access to the Web was a basic ...

For over a year, France has been considering plans to ban illegal downloaders from the Web. In the U.S., the FCC may actually begin regulating the Web by forcing providers to charge various fees. But neither of those disturbing developments compare at all to the rumors gathering momentum in England. Various outlets are reporting that the U.K. Secretary of State Peter Mandelson, referred to ...

The war over Net neutrality may finally be coming to an end. After years of back and forth between ISPs, consumer advocacy groups, Web-based companies like Google, and government officials, formal rules concerning broadband data pipelines are finally being proposed by Federal Communication Commission (FCC) chairman Julius Genachowski. The proposed policy would prevent service providers of any ...

It's hard to believe that just 40 years ago, the Internet was but a glimmer in the eye of researchers at UCLA. On September 2nd, 1969, Len Kleinrock and his team successfully passed test data between two giant computers via a 15-foot cable. This small victory was just the beginning of what would eventually become Arpanet, the government project that eventually led to the creation of the Internet. ...

An American think-tank, Nemertes Research, is warning that the Internet could be seriously lacking in capacity within a year, and that it could be little more than an "unreliable toy" by 2012, reports the Times Online. Over the last several years, demand for bandwidth has increased at a dramatic rate -- roughly 60-percent per year. Visitors to YouTube alone generate as much data traffic in a ...

Google makes much of its corporate mantra, "Do no evil," but has been repeatedly accused of violating this motto over the past few years. Revelations of its dealings with ISPs, however, are the clearest violation of its stated values we've seen yet. Despite having publicly fought for the principle of network neutrality, it appears that behind closed doors, opinions at Google have shifted. ...

Google Vice President and so called "father of the Internet," Vint Cerf, has thrown his two cents in on this year's election. Cerf has come out forcefully in favor of Obama, based primarily on his support for 'Net neutrality, which John McCain does not support. Net neutrality is a complex issue that we can't possibly cover in a single brief blog post, but we're willing to risk some slight ...

From our 'so much for Net Neutrality' department comes a story from the Associated Press, which assigned a reporter to see if there was any validity to recent accusations that Comcast, the cable TV and Internet provider, is throttling and/or blocking file-sharing on its networks. The AP turned to the Bible, which is public domain and legal to share. The tests were run from two different PCs in ...

AT&T has come out and said it was wrong to censor a live Pearl Jam song that featured a pair of lines a pair of lines criticizing George W. Bush. Last weekend, AT&T streamed live performances from the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago through its Blue Room website. It was during Pearl Jam's performance that a pair of lines critical of President Bush, sung to the tune of Pink Floyd's ...