September 2007 Archives
Is this going to be the start of future crackdowns by dictators? Today, we learn that Burma's military dictatorship has shut down the internet to hinder international coverage of its use of force against the protesters.
3229Kbps down and 1500Kbps up with a 70ms ping!
Broadband Reports' Karl Bode points to an article in Ars Technica about a recent demonstration in Chicago of Motorola's latest WiMAX technology. The speeds achieved were impressive.
Commentators were kind today when they discussed AOL's move from Virginia (the D.C. suburbs) to my home town, New York City. They didn't mention that the dialup business has been losing a million subscribers every quarter for some time now, as detailed in our rankings.
Some said that Time Warner might sell the dialup business but did not answer this question: who'd want to buy it?
We sometimes assume that basic rights we take for granted here in the U.S. are respected in other countries, especially those of the first world. But recent events in Canada are demonstrating how the right to privacy is valuable to ISPs, and how rare that right is in the world. The big difference between what Canada's considering and what the U.S. already does: the U.S. requires a court order. Canada would not.
A Canadian blogger writes that his government is holding a secret commission to make laws like the U.S. CALEA law that would force ISPs to hand over private details of their subscribers to law enforcement agencies.
Here in the U.S., CALEA is restricted by privacy rights enshrined in the Constitution and placed there because of the intrusive nature of British colonial rule. The Constitution's Fourth Amendment is detailed (if you ever wondered where the phrase "probable cause" comes from, now you know).
Are you offering DSL to subscribers? Soon, you might not be able to. (H/T to Peter Radizeski and BBR).
Regulatory uncertainty -- the capriciousness of an anti-competition FCC -- has helped the monopolies destroy competition over the past eight years, a process that accelerated after the 2003 Triennial Review Order, which had many serious problems of which the three most important have turned out to be:
Today, competitors who have managed to continue offering DSL in spite of the illegal strategies of the phone companies are learning that the FCC may kill the service at any time.
The only company left to fight this (after the acquisition of AT&T and MCI and UUNet), it seems, is Time Warner Telecom.
While this (Feds OK Fee for Priority Web Traffic) seems like bad news for the internet (or good news for people building fiber), the actual impact of this decision will not be felt immediately. AT&T is not about to try to charge Google a per user fee for the subscribers that use its content.
The fact is that if any ISP tries to charge Google money for using it, Google can simply call their bluff and let the ISP block its users from using Google.
There's already a backlash against ISPs that prevent or throttle the use of file sharing services, which are not always used legally. In fact, Comcast may be violating state laws with its own method of throttling and shutting down Bit Torrent streams.
Red herring
But fears for Google are misplaced. Instead, it's the startups that could get hit with fees.
Just last month, we wrote about how PBS finally noticed that the phone companies ripped off state governments (and the taxpayers who fund them) to the tune of about $200 billion over the past 20 years (see PBS Notices the Bells' $200 Billion Ripoff).
Today, we received in the mail an even larger claim against the phone companies: that the Federal Government has given away $480 billion in spectrum. We'll have more on the report later this month on ISP-Planet, but wanted to point out the report to you in case you'd like to read it. It's from the magnificent New America Foundation, a friend of competition (with an impressive Leadership Council that includes Schmidt and Soros). New America is already well-known to WISPA members for its work on opening spectrum and opposing giveaways.
Two things make the work of the New America Foundation so useful to people like me. First of all, its work, though academic in depth and loaded with detail, is nevertheless written in language that is easy to understand. Second, the Foundation presents a point of view rarely heard in the regulatorium.
In this report, The Art of Spectrum Lobbying: America's $480 Billion Spectrum Giveaway, How it Happened, and How to Prevent it from Recurring, the Foundation's wireless expert, J.H Snider, explores not only who owns what and how they came to own it so cheaply (think CBS/Viacom, Clear Channel, Fox, and Univision). . .