You are here March 2008
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Thu, 2008-03-13 10:42
Professor Tim Wu, who coined the term "net neutrality" is reportedly now advocating "law breaking" to advance the "information commons" agenda, which believes Internet infrastrructure, spectrum and content should be publicly owned and not privately owned.
- Communications Daily quoted Professor Wu on March 11, 2008:
- "To move things along, unlicensed users should start occupying unused spectrum for wireless broadband, Wu said: "You gotta start somewhere, and it always starts with law-breaking.""
- My experience is that Comm Daily is careful to accurately quote people and if Professor Wu did not to clarify his remarks, we can assume them to be accurate. I also have not seen a clarification of this after two more publications.
- I would also like to extend the courtesy to Professor Wu to be able to qualify his remarks that they were meant to be flippant, or a joke, or that he really didn't mean to call to publicly encourage people to break the law.
- He could resolve this issue with a simple blog post.
That said, it is very troubling to any public civility minded person who believes in the rule of law and respect for property, that such a prominent person as Professor Wu (who coined the term net neutrality, and who proposed Caterfone open access rules for the 700 MHz auction) would advocate "law-breaking" to advance his political agenda.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Fri, 2008-03-14 16:55
Kudos to CNET's article "YouTube's expanded API not for everybody" which exposes Google's hypocrisy in pushing for everyone else BUT Google-YouTube to have open and non-discriminatory access to their networks. (Remember: Google is leading the Open Internet Coalition to mandate net neutrality for all broadband providers; Google is leading the wireless open access push for more open wireless APIs; and Google asked the court to extend Microsoft's decree and keep their API's open.)
It is telling that Google-YouTube's API (Application Programming Interface) terms of service BLOCKS any commercial competitor seeking to generate advertising from using the API.
- This is an interesting discriminatory position for Google-YouTube which supposedly subscribes to the information commons philosophy of the Open Internet and which also happens to have the dominant share of video streaming market per ComScore (Google-YouTube has seven times the viewer share as any other video-streaming provider.)
Bottom line: What's good for Google is not good for the Gander.
- Google believes it is "special," and that one set of rules should apply to Google and its wholly-owned companies like YouTube, and another set of much more onerous rules should apply to all of their potential competitors.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Fri, 2008-03-14 18:41
I was surprised and concerned to read in Comm Daily today that the FCC's broadband data collection rulemaking "is expected to swap the FCC minimum speed for broadband -- 200 kbps -- for a tiered approach. The lowest tier would set 768 kbps as the minimum speed, an FCC source said."
- I certainly hope this is not the case, as it could have a ton of negative unintended consequences which I will outline below.
How could changing the baseline minimum definition of what is broadband turn out to be anti-competition and undermine the universal availability of broadband?
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Fri, 2008-03-14 18:42
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Mon, 2008-03-24 13:52
New evidence exposes that Google has much more serious financial conflicts of interest and is much less of an "honest broker" of online advertising than most appreciate.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Tue, 2008-03-25 11:11
Google's CEO Eric Schmidt must have an extremely dry sense of humor.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Tue, 2008-03-25 17:28
Apparently, Yahoo is trying to douse itself with some "Microsoft-repellant" in joining Google's OpenSocial allance and forming a non-profit OpenSocial Foundation with Google and MySpace.
While Yahoo's OpenSocial press release never mentioned Microsoft, the impetus for this change of heart by Yahoo was clearly a way to "dis" Microsoft and make Yahoo marginally less attractive to Microsoft.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Wed, 2008-03-26 10:33
Per Reuters, Google's board is recommending that its investors vote against a shareholder proposal from the New York City Employee Retirement System that asks Google to commit to abiding by Net Neutrality.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Thu, 2008-03-27 12:33
In my previous blog post I flagged a Reuters article that highlighted that Google asked its shareholders to oppose a shareholder vote that Google should abide by net neutrality itself, even though it is the single biggest proponent of mandating net neutrality for all its competitors -- on the planet.
Today I came across a quote in Investors Business Daily's section on quotes, "Wisdom to Live By" and found one that the radically-liberal founders of Google should ponder:
- "Its not fair to ask others to do what you are unwilling to do yourself." Eleanor Roosevelt, former First Lady to the ultimate uber-liberal Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Alas, I don't hold out much hope that Google will ever see this as a double standard because they are so committed to Google's Motto: "Don't be evil" and because they like to insinuate that most every other corporation is evil...
If you think I am being "unfair" in labeling Google's founders radically-liberal, check out The Burning Man Festival gathering that Google's founders avidly and regularly have attended.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Thu, 2008-03-27 16:02
Free markets work. The FCC's net neutrality policy statement has worked. Congressional policy to "preserve the free market Internet...unfettered by Federal or State regulation" has worked.
In a hugely important free market development, Comcast and BitTorrent have voluntarily announced that they "will undertake a collaborative effort," together and with the rest of the industry, to "more effectively address the issues associated with rich media content and network capacity management."
Why is this development such a big deal?
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