At Investor’s Business Daily, Robert Higgs takes a gloomy look at the current state of net investment in the U.S., and concludes: Unless private investment recovers more rapidly, the economy’s recovery is sure to remain slow, too slow to significantly lower unemployment. Firms are reluctant to undertake risky long-term investments because they continue to view [...]

Wallsten examines the state of the Universal Service Fund. The USF is a program that collects taxes for telecommunications services in the neighborhood of about $7.5 billion a year. The funds are intended to be used to provide telephone lines and subsidize telephone service in rural areas to low-income individuals.

I’ve been hammering popular online services like Facebook and Twitter for months for utterly weak efforts to protect consumers so I was pleased to hear that Senator Chuck Schumer has joined the fight. Some of the worst online services in my online security report card were served letters by Senator Schumer asking them to turn SSL security on by default.

Now, fans of the 2002 sci-fi series Firefly are adapting this collective action approach to bringing back their show. It started when the Science channel announced a showing of the 12-episode series, starting in March, and escalated when leading actor Nathan Fillion opined that he would love to pick up the role of Captain Malcolm Reynolds again and that if he had the money he would buy the rights and put the on the Internet. Others involved in the show chimed in with their support.

I had the opportunity to read a paper by several professors at the University of Madrid, Darmstadt University of Technology, and the University of Oregon a few weeks back on the subject of Peer to Peer (P2P) file sharing often referred to in passing as “torrenting”.

CNN is reporting that Apple is in talks with the music industry to offer improved quality 24-bit audio tracks, but an increase in sampling rate was not mentioned in the article.  The 24-bit format has been around since the late 1990s among professional musicians and it’s been readily available to consumers since the early 2000s, [...]

The National Broadband Map was brought about by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in order to research communities across the U.S. to help create a visualization of broadband availability.  The map launched within the last week and has seen a massive amount of hits (and can be found here). Geographic Information Officer, Michael Byrne, [...]

Michael DeGusta does a nice job analyzing “The REAL Death of the Music Industry” at Business Insider. In terms of revenue per capita, the recorded music business has gone down from $71 in 2000 to $26 in 2009 (2011 dollars).  In terms of raw revenue, the take fell from about $15 billion in 1999 [corrected] [...]

Harris and Wong comment on “Internet Freedom” and believe the government should be doing more to promote solutions to ongoing issues that threaten the existing state of the Net. The two comment that circumvention tools that were used in Egypt to get around blocking attempts and censorship were not enough and were not a solution to Internet blackouts.

Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) grilled FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski about the FCC’s Net Neutrality rules, and whether the rules would cover disputes like the one between Level 3 and Comcast. Genachowski evaded the question and even misrepresented his own rules to preserve the flexibility for future FCC intervention and overreach.