Policy and regulation

Open ditch policies

It is spring, and around the country, many communities are starting water, sewer, and road projects of one kind or another. On the way back and forth to a project Design Nine is working on, I pass a water line project--a couple of miles of new water line along a major artery and business corridor, and the main route between two communities.

FCC still studying net neutrality

Slashdot reports that the FCC is still studying net neutrality. The problem is, there really is not anything to study. Big carriers are playing all sorts of games with traffic to favor their own services (e.g. VoIP) over the services of competitors (e.g. Vonage, Skype). Google is buying fiber because it knows it cannot rely on others to carry bandwidth-intensive video traffic.

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Open access satellite radio

The impending merger of XM and Sirius satellite radio providers is a good example of why open access networks make sense. Sirius and XM have not grown as expected, largely because the two companies provide redundant and duplicative systems. Nobody cares about which satellite a radio station comes from, and people particularly do not care to spend hundreds of dollars on special radios that only work with one provider.

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Phone deregulation in Virginia

Verizon wants to be deregulated in Virginia for phone service. The company asserts that there is ample competition and that the company should no longer be forced to charge set prices for certain services.

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Community news and projects:

50% tax rate on business telecom

One big change in the switch to an all IP-based telecommunications system is that businesses may see lower taxes. Franchise fees, carrier line assessments, subscriber line charges, and other state and local telecom taxes often add up to nearly 50% of the cost of a business telephone line. Most or all of those charges disappear when a business switches to VoIP.

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Ruled by idiots

In one of the most disheartening and discouraging articles I have read in a long time, Robert Cresanti, the Undersecretary of Commerce for Technology, says, essentially, that Americans are stupid and that we need to import more foreign engineers and scientists.

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Image spam driving everyone crazy

NetworkWorld reports that spam traffic has jumped substantially in the past month or two. Fueling the deluge of junk mail are two changes in the spam ecosphere. Spammers are using two new zombie programs that infect Windows computers, making ordinary desktop computers into spam machines that can send out hundreds of thousands of spam emails per day. Often, people don't even know their machine has been infected; the only hint that something may be wrong is sluggish performance.

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Cisco patents the triple play

If you needed proof that the US Patent and Trade Office (USPTO) has problems, look no further. The USPTO just granted Cisco a patent on the triple play, which means delivering voice, video, and data to the home. Cisco does not have much a presence in the Fiber To The Home (FTTH) market because their gear is designed for corporate and institutional networks, and is not really the first or even second choice for community broadband systems.

Technology News:

More top level domains not an improvement

Demonstrating that the big telecom companies have not learned much over the past decade, they have successfully gotten a new top level domain called 'mobi,' as in cingular.mobi. In theory, this is supposed to make it easier for people to find content customized for cellphones, but this is a non-problem. It is straightforward now to design Web sites for cellphones, and you don't need a new domain to do it--there is no value add here.

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A blog too far

The media has numerous stories on the Maryland campaign aide who was fired for blogging on the job. The young woman's remarks, aside from being insensitive and rude, are incredibly naive. Not only was she making inappropriate remarks about her boss' opponent, she was also making inappropriate remarks about her boss' own associates--she was writing negative comments about her own boss.

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Competition works

This CNet article describes how telephone and cable companies are responding to competition with better customer service. As cable companies roll out voice services and telephone companies are slowly rolling out TV service, we are getting a glimpse of what happens when these companies have to worry about keeping their customers--they treat them better.

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Public safety project has to fight Verizon

A consortium of communities in Michigan figured out that building their own fiber network would save them millions in taxpayer funds, but if you read the article, you get the distinct impression that Verizon believes the purpose of government is to ensure that Verizon never has any competition.

Apparently, Verizon believes government should never try to save money and never try to do things differently if there is any impact on Verizon's bottom line.

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Two tier Internet: We know what happens

We know exactly what will happen if the big telecom companies succeed in convincing Congress to let them partition the Internet. We have a perfectly good example of the mess we will be in, and it is called the cellphone industry. Read this article [link no longer available] to see how innovation is choked off, small businesses are forced out of the market place, and how consumers end up paying more, much more, for mediocre services.

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Friends and enemies: Google and the telcos

Regular readers know that I am often no fan of Google, but this article suggests Google may be the best friend we have as the telecom wars heat up. With Congress determined to pass the best laws that the big telecom firms can buy, Google (and Microsoft, if it wants to take sides) is a firm with pockets deep enough to go eyeball to eyeball with the cable and phone companies over net neutrality and the two tier Internet.

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Net neutrality does not "limit" providers

This article talks about Verizon's new claim that net neutrality "limits" the company, and the nothing but a scare tactic of claiming they won't be able to roll out any new services unless they get to erect toll gates.

One thing net neutrality does limit is the ability of one or two big companies from setting up walled gardens that keep consumers locked into a few choices (from, say, Verizon or Comcast). Net neutrality gives consumers and innovative startups a chance to play on a level playing field.

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Knowledge Democracy:

Save the Internet

A distinguished group of technology leaders has begun a Save the Internet campaign, which is intended to provide information to legislators on the network neutrality issue.

Many of the incumbent broadband providers want to start charging differential fees for access to their broadband networks. The effect will be to squeeze much of the innovation and opportunity out of the Internet, leaving only deep pocket companies that can afford to pay the tolls--and that is all they really are.

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Swedish study says cellphones may create tumor risk

A new Swedish study, via the Drudge Report, says that cellphones appear to raise the risk of brain tumors. People who appear to be at risk are those who have used cellphones for more than 2000 hours in their life, so the risk accumulates the longer that you use a cellphone. The researchers recommended hands-free use of cellphones to get them away from the head.

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Bloggers exempt from political rules

Teh Federal Election Commission has clarified rules for political and campaign activity by exempting virtually all kinds of political speech on the Internet from the onerous rules that cover how campaign funds can be spent.

The rules, which surfaced last year, seemed to require onerous reporting by citizen bloggers if they even wrote about political candidates, and if they accepted campaign ads on their Web sites, it was worse. But occasionally government does the right thing.

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Feds compromise with Google on search queries

The Federal government has reached a compromise with Google on the government's request to Google to turn over a chunk of search queries. The Feds claim they need to see what people are searching for so that they can design better child pornography laws.

A federal judge has ordered Google to turn over the URLs (Web addresses) of some of the sites Google indexes, but not the search queries that people type in on the search engine.

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Net Neutrality Defined

Doc Searls, one of the tech community's best commentators on technology and its impact on us, has done an outstanding job of explaining network neutrality--what it is, why it has made the Internet successful, and why it needs to be preserved.

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