President Obama's FCC Chairman, Julius Genachowski, has a reputation in D.C. of being a 'tepid' regulator. From reports of his net neutrality proposal, he's living up to that reputation.
Even though the Internet touches every part of our lives, one person is to blame for potentially destroying its potential for innovation and freedom of expression: former FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.
Almost 85 percent of the Latin American market is subject to net neutrality rules, and the European Parliament already favors strong ones.
The neutral and level playing field provided by permissionless innovation has empowered all of us with the freedom to express ourselves and innovate online without having to seek the permission of a remote telecom executive.
The current FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, is highly regarded, but some distrust him because he is the former head lobbyist of both the cable and wireless phone industries. He's also made some statements suggesting he doesn't understand or opposes network neutrality.
'Negative liberty' is a political science term meaning a liberty from government action. It is not a liberty to anything - like the liberty to meaningfully contribute to public debate or to have ample spaces for speech.
The first devices to record and play back music were the phonograph and the gramophone. The gramophone's inventor: Alexander Graham Bell.
President Obama is a big supporter of keeping the Internet open. During his presidential campaign, he pledged his support to net neutrality repeatedly.
If the court is a political institution making important political decisions, then the public should debate the politics of Supreme Court decisions.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, declaring that all men were created equal, he owned slaves. Women couldn't vote. But, throughout history, our abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights leaders called on our nation, in reality, to live up to the nation's professed ideals in that Declaration.
Free speech has remained a quintessential American ideal, even as our society has moved from the ink quill to the touch screen.
Before the Internet, we were in a different sort of dark age. We had to wait to hear news on TV at night or in print the next day. We had to go to record stores to find new music. Cocktail party debates couldn't be settled on the spot.
The CEO of AT&T told an interviewer back in 2005 that he wanted to introduce a new business model to the Internet: charging companies like Google and Yahoo! to reliably reach Internet users on the AT&T network.
Anyone unhappy with Google can use other search engines - including DuckDuckGo and Blekko, along with Bing or Yahoo.
Net neutrality is the idea that Internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all traffic that goes through their networks the same, not offering preferential treatment to some websites over others or charging some companies arbitrary fees to reach users.
The FCC banned throttling for good reason, namely that Internet service providers should not bias their networks toward some applications or classes of applications. Biasing the network interferes with user choice, innovation, decisions of application makers, and the competitive marketplace.
News seems to travel far more quickly on Twitter and Facebook than through search.
Default choices often remain unchanged for no reason other than being the default, either because of this lack of information or humans' status quo bias.
I'm all in favor of the FTC investigating companies when it believes there is proper cause to do so. An investigation, however, can lead to political pressure to bring a case, even if such a case is unwarranted.
