Kennedy discusses the June 17th announcement of the Notice of Inquiry by the Federal Communications Commission asking for comment on the authority of the FCC to regulate broadband Internet service.

Amity Shlaes is Senior Fellow in Economic History at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the highly regarded The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (2008). Her recent column on AOL News taps her knowledge of the 1930s to recount “what happened in the 1930s to the Internet equivalent of [...]

Now that the official BitTorrent client with uTP has moved past the beta stage, I decided to test it again to see if it made any improvements in reducing the damage it causes to other applications on the network. What I found was that not only did BitTorrent not improve in its network friendliness, it’s more destructive than ever.

A little while back Blizzard announced a new feature called Real ID that would allow individuals playing World of Warcraft and the forthcoming Star Craft II to see the real names of players they had added to their friends list. The move has been protested vehemently, specifically the fact that this new “feature” will be added into the official WoW forums as well.

Astroturf is creating the appearance of a grassroots movement where none actually exists. According to an article in The Daily Caller today, groups that Free Press listed as signatories to its pro-net neutrality agenda not only didn’t sign it, but had no recollection of ever being asked.

Ford presents an article on the continued push for Internet regulation based on misleading data. He believes that the mindset is that the U.S. is “falling behind” the rest of the world in broadband adoption. So the only solution is one in which the government pushes ahead to solve the supposed problem.

The big copyright case this summer is not primarily about copyright – it is Barclay’s Capital, Inc. v. Theflyonthewall.com in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and it is about the state law tort of misappropriation of assets belonging to another.

There are many people in the blogosphere and policy space that oppose mobile data usage caps like the one that AT&T recently implemented, but they don’t seem to understand the reasoning. AT&T stopped offering their $30 unlimited iPad and iPhone data plan and changing to a $25 2-GB plan and a $15 200-MB plan, and some believe that this is merely a shameless profit grab that overcharges customers for overages. But when we look at the actual data, it would seem that these conspiracy theories are unfounded.

Slashdot posted a great discussion on intellectual property from famous composer Jason Robert Brown. The debate highlights the divide between the rights owners and the rights violators. For composers, they’re struggling to communicate to the public that they have a right to make a living off of their creators. For content pirates, they go to great lengths to rationalize their own behavior.

Content & Copyright Bloomberg News, New York Times Must Charge for News, Google Too: Commentary by Janet Guyon (July 4): “Why content creators, in particular newspapers, ever succumbed to the notion that they should forever give away their product online seems one of those odd, lemming-like phenomena akin to the “irrational exuberance” that preceded the [...]