Upon venturing to the FCC’s new Future of Media site you will be of course welcomed to the future. It seems lately that the FCC has been welcoming us all to the “future” in a lot of areas. Which generally means that FCC fingers and venturing into areas we are not used to seeing them.

I had some interesting back-and-forth discussions by e-mail this week about people donating money to charity using text messages. The inquiries involved various allegations about cellular carriers and what they were doing with donations given via text. Here are the questions we got, and the answers we were given by friends in the cellular industry.

Late last week, the National Telecommunications & Information Association and the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service announced the rules for doling out the second round of broadband stimulus funding – totaling $4.8 billion. The Notices of Funds Availability (NoFA) contain significantly different rules from the first round funding restrictions. As many trade publications have [...]

The Wall Street Journal‘s Digits blog asks, “Could Verizon Handle Apple Tablet Traffic?” The tablet’s little brother, the iPhone, has already shown how an explosion in data usage can overload a network, in this case AT&T’s. And the iPhone is hardly the kind of data guzzler the tablet is widely expected to be. After all, [...]

Free Press’ opposition to TV Everywhere is at odds with reality.

The gaming community should be distressed at the ECA selling them out. If ECA is going to continue to argue for policies that harm gamers, perhaps they should change their name to “Gamers for Lag” and be upfront about the impact of their position.

I’ve been saying for years that 3G is not suitable or scalable for VoIP communications, but it’s great to see Gigaom being level headed about the lack of VoIP services over 3G and going beyond the usual conspiracy theories.  There were some things in Om’s article that needs to be clarified.  Skype’s VoIP payload is [...]

This past Friday, Digital Society submitted three separate comments for the FCC’s Comments Period session on its Network Neutrality NPRM. These comments can be found through the FCC’s filing system and are open to the public. But in the interest of full transparency and ease of finding them we wanted to also post them here.

Amazon, a big Net Neutrality advocate has come around to acknowledge the fact that it is reasonable for broadband service providers to sell premium service to broadband subscribers or content providers. But its requirement of “no harm” needs a lot of clarification to be practical.

Just two more New York Times articles that point out what’s obvious around here: the Internet’s dramatic and unpredictable disruption of the whole “media” space. Isn’t Washington’s assumption that it can sort all this out and impose particular business models on the media space through prescriptive Net Neutrality regulation, a case of supreme hubris? “What if [...]