The new report commissioned by European broadband providers speaks of an impending crisis if content providers don’t pay up while the content providers continue to propagate the myth that all websites should run at the same speed regardless of what they pay. But both sides are being ridiculous and their alarmism could lead to nasty political outcomes that they will both regret.

Increasingly, value on the Internet will be provided by services that filter out distractions and repetitions. One of the best mechanisms for this is payment. From my point of view, the information that is most likely to be valuable to me is that for which the provider demands payment from me, for the obvious reason that if I do not receive value then I will not pay and the provider will not have a business. An alternative is the situation where the provider must pay money to reach me, again, because if the transaction does not add value somewhere then it will not occur.

Craig Engler, GM and senior vice president of Syfy Digital, provides The truth about TV ratings, online viewing and sci-fi shows, debunking the idea that sci-fi gets shortchanged on the viewer count because a high proportion of its audience is tech savvy and uses alternatives to conventional TV. In fact, the counting systems are sophisticated, [...]

In the second part of Thierers examination of Internet Optimism, he looks at the Supporters, where previously he examined the Internets Detractors. The main focus is the question of how to save the Internet from becoming a closed platform after celebrating roughly a decade of openness.

Netflix published their ISP performance metrics that managed to fool the media into reporting the data as some kind of broadband performance metric. But the results probably reflect Netflix’s inadequacies rather than the ISPs’ because the numbers are probably related to the amount of peering bandwidth that Netflix purchased from the ISPs.

Here’s my Forbes column on The Great Stagnation, the new e-book essay by George Mason economist and Marginal Revolution blogger Tyler Cowen that argues we’re mired in a long technology slump with no obvious way out.

Netflix and its CDN partners want the media and the government to pressure and force consumers to subsidize Netflix to the tune of thousands of Gbps of free bandwidth. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is misleading all of us when he says that Netflix already pays their share of the bandwidth costs and that they deserve free server capacity.

Facebook announced that they’ve finally added secure web browsing for Facebook 2 months after the release of the Firesheep tool that made it trivially easy to hack Facebook accounts.  That prompted me to give them an “F” in security which was widely cited in the media.  But there are some major problems with this update [...]

In last nights State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama called on America to rebuild to win the future. Part of the rebuilding America effort that the President mentioned was High Speed Internet. Some thoughts…

Video Game Industry in North Carolina NC Now – UNC-TV January 21, 2010 Length: 6:32 UNCTV presents an episode of NC Now that looks into the burgeoning gaming and computer sector in Raleigh, North Carolina.  North Carolina has become one of the top areas for the games industry, with claims that the industry has grown [...]