Google and YouTube argue that they are innocent in the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom because they are protected under the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions. But Safe Harbor only protects websites that have no knowledge of infringement yet YouTube founders clearly knew of and almost entirely depended on pirated content. One YouTube co-founder even uploaded stolen content himself.

The whole repressive world is watching to see whether the United States adopts network neutrality as law in the land of liberty, and then they will use it as an excuse to further curtail Internet freedom in their own countries. That’s the message between the diplomatic lines that a top State Department information policy official uttered this week.

Back in January I wrote a post titled “‘Gamers For Lag’ Weighs In On Net Neutrality“. The post argued the pro-net neutrality position adopted by the Electronic Consumers Association (an organization of which I am a member) would actually be detrimental to gamers.

They didn’t reply directly to the post, but we wanted to be fair to ECA. We asked, nearly two months ago, if we could submit some questions on the topic and have them address our concerns over their network neutrality position. The questions were pretty straightforward, but get straight to the heart of our concerns.

AT&T has announced an interesting “ZERO Draw” phone charger that draws no power when not charging a phone.

Settle on a talking point, please.

In Are Your Bits Worn Out?, author Todd Adelmann discusses the problems inherent within the age old hardware-software war and the consumer that is caught in the middle.

Free Press wants the FCC to mandate a dumb Internet because they claim that network prioritization technology makes networks unfair and inefficient. But the engineering shows that prioritized networks are actually more fair and more efficient.

If the FCC interprets the national broadband plan it sent to Congress today as an invitation to impose heavy burdens on the Internet, it will be against the better judgment of Commissioners Robert McDowell and Meredith Attwell Baker. They reminded the commission that the Internet has reshaped American business and society precisely because it has been allowed to thrive without interference from the government.

When government gives away super valuable 700 MHz mobile spectrum, it gets wasted on wireless backhaul which could have used 5 GHz. While 700 MHz might save a little money on backhaul costs, it saves a lot more money on access and mobile networks. Commercial operators that paid billions of dollars for 700 MHz spectrum would never waste valuable spectrum like this.

If the FCC doesn’t want the Internet to become a vast wasteland for “Gilligan’s Island” reruns, it had better start working with broadband providers now to reserve bandwidth for the transformative applications of the future. So said Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban. He wants the Internet to be “a platform for amazing” and said that won’t happen if all of the video content now on TV is hogging Internet bandwidth.