Intellectual Property

FreePress' antagonistic and borderline hysterical response to the legitimate consumer-friendly progress made in the Comcast-Pando agreement to lead a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" shows FreePress' and the net neutrality movement's true colors and suggests that they are not interested in really advancing their stated goals, but in scoring political points and advancing their broader political agenda. They don't seem interested in solutions, because it appears that they are in the business creating and grandstanding about problems. 

Amazing that FreePress and SaveTheInternet had nothing good to say about this breakthrough agreement that finds common ground to start working towards what FreePress et al say they care about. Any reasonable person can see their are positive developments here and progress being made. See my post on this agreement highlighting its significance.

• If Net neutrality proponents were genuinely interested in achieving or making progress towards their stated goals, they would have found something ositive to say about the clear progress the agreement made towards their stated goals and not had a knee jerk ad hominem attack that impugned the integrity of Comcast and Pando Networks.

As I said in my post, no good deed goes unpunished.

Seems like another observer agrees with this take:

Kudos to the Wall Street Journal for a very wise editorial, “An alternative to net neutrality,” and for its clear conclusion and advice to the FCC: “that markets work.”

The Journal understands the facts and the real dynamic here -- that there is no longer much for the FCC to do now that market forces have solved the alleged problems raised against Comcast.

Simply, Comcast wisely, responsibly, and reasonably managed their network to favor quality-of-service for the vast majority of their customers, at the miniscule, intermittent expense of the biggest bandwidth hogs, who were hogging bandwidth on auto-pilot while not even attending their computers.

The Hill has a good article highlighting the growing "battle" over "White Spaces", or the potential for use of the buffer spectrum bands in-between TV channels to ensure that there is no interference with TV signals.

Despite Japan having some of the fastest and cheapest broadband in the world, they still have to worry about network congestion and need to manage their networks and shape traffic, according to Adam Peake, a fellow at the International University of Japan who spoke yesterday at the Freedom to Connect Conference.

The takeaway here is that many in the net neutrality movement maintain that there is no need to manage the network if providers would just add more capacity.

• The Japan experience is powerful evidence of the fallacy of that argument.
• Experience shows that usage can often fill whatever capacity is made available.

Peake also explained that there is a pernicious p-2-p program called Winny, which is a major culprit in the network congestion and which is near universally reviled because it is one of those pernicious p-2-p programs that give all p-2-p a bad name because the protocol routinely makes the private content on users' hard drives available for identity theives and fraudsters.

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?

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.

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.

Garret Rogers of Googling Google on ZDnet has an illuminating post: "Google gives developers access to your contacts."

• While Google extols the benefits of its "open" system it is irresponsibly silent on how it allows third parties "open access" to one of users most intimate and private treasures of information -- ones private contacts.
  • Doesn't law enforcement have to get a court authorized subpoena to see this type of private information?
  • Didn't Facebook just get whacked by users and privacy advocates for sharing access to contact lists without a users explicit permission?  

This is another big evidence point of a long and continued cavalier attitude to users privacy by Google (read on if you doubt this is a pattern -- these posts have most all the relevant links to all the mainstream articles on Google's cavalier attitude to Privacy):

Save the Internet campaign director Tim Karr in Huffington Post and columnist John Dvorak in PC Magazine are making a strategic blunder in their latest posts in responding to Andy Kessler's Wall Street Journal op ed "Internet Wrecking Ball" in bringing the net neutrality discussion back to a political philosophy discussion about whether the Internet should continue be a free market or whether Government should effectively "socialize" the Internet with net neutrality economic regulation and a implementation of an "information commons" agenda. 

Chairman Markey's newly introduced net neutrality bill should more aptly be called "The Google Welfare Act of 2008." 

• Google was quick to applaud introduction of the Markey bill on its blog and in a fawning call with reporters. 
• Google's standard line was that "this bill is not about Google but about the next Google."
  • When anyone says something is not about "me" but about the next incarnation of "me" you can be pretty sure it really is about the "me."

Let us cut through all the platitudes, spin, fluff and distractions in this bill of which there are many. Let us also remember the useful phrase: "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth."

• Proponents of the Markey bill are indeed telling the truth that the bill does not formally or explicitly mandate FCC net neutrality regulations.
• Unfortunately they are not telling "the whole truth and nothing but the truth," because the real world impact of the crux of this bill would be to trigger a cascade of new regulations of the Internet in order to comply with the U.S. policy change in this bill.

Why would the Markey bill trigger a cascade of new Internet regulations?