The FCC is asking for a good way for consumers to monitor broadband performance and they have put out a public Request For Quotation (RFQ).  Well I’m going to suggest a more granular and complete method of network monitoring that doesn’t generate unnecessary traffic on the network, and one that does not require any third [...]

See our article today at RealClearMarkets . . . Entrepreneurial Innovation and the Internet by Bret Swanson As Washington and the states pile up mountainous liabilities – $3 trillion for unfunded state pensions, $10 trillion in new federal deficits through 2019, and $38 trillion (or is it $50 trillion?) in unfunded Medicare promises – the [...]

Earlier last month, I found that YouTube’s HTML5 beta wasn’t even worthy of being beta. Three weeks after that, Jan Ozer ran some CPU performance tests between YouTube Flash and HTML5 on Mac OS X and Safari and found that CPU performance was better on HTML5.

Burlington Vermont’s experiment in municipal fiber was once thought to be shining example of why muni-fiber broadband was such a great idea. Those dreams have now turned into a $50 million nightmare for the tax payers of Burlington Vermont the majority of whom don’t use the service.

Municipal fiber is seen by many as the holy-grail of broadband utopia, but like utopia it hasn’t had much success in the real world. This paper examines the challenges of implementing community owned fiber and why tax payers are getting stuck with a huge debt.

I generally admire the work coming from the SANS Institute, but Alan Paller’s call for software liability (via Deb Shinder) for security vulnerabilities just doesn’t make sense.  That’s because software security is like a bank vault which are rated by the time and effort required to break, but none are rated unbreakable. While SANS is [...]

One of the standard arguments for government subsidies of tomorrow’s media is that as the news moves online, advertising is not following so journalism will need new sources of funding. But the research company Outsell this week predicted that digital marketing will outpace print ads for the first time in 2010. Smart media companies will adapt their business models to seize their share of the ever-expanding online ad pie.

Randolph J. May writes that the health care public option and what he calls the “Internet public option” share similar threads.

The FCC yesterday announced its plan to create a volunteer “digital literacy corps.” But based on the government’s track record in implementing a similar technology-oriented volunteer plan, the National Emergency Technology Guard, the idea will never meet the FCC’s lofty expectations. Congress authorized NET Guard in 2003, but it took five years just to launch a pilot program.

Amtrak is actively blocking downloads and video streams – going so far as to prevent YouTube embeds in pages you load, and redirecting links to downloads.

A lot of people like to claim ISPs are only interested in network management as a pretense for preventing competition with their video offering. Yet here is a perfect example of a privately owned network choosing to manage congestion by limiting downloads and video – absent any competing video service.