ITIF is putting on a forum tomorrow on The Obama Administration’s Innovation Policy. The cast is, as Hollywood would say, star-studded,  with Austan Goolsbee (CEO Chair), Phil Weiser (NEC Senior Advisor), & Aneesh Chopra (US CTO), to list only Federal government people, plus reps of state governments and several high tech companies. The background document [...]

Pigs have apparently begun to fly as Google and AT&T seem to agree on something.  Both companies expressed a desire to get rid of the legacy analog phone network so in December 2009, AT&T wrote a letter to the FCC advocating the abandonment of the old telephone system. Google is adding a feature to their Google Voice software that [...]

Following the announcement of the sale of the Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million, all of which will, apparently, be kept by a few founders, some of its writers are organizing a strike to protest the level of their wages, which is zero. The leader wrote that “it is unethical to expect trained and [...]

Netflix doesn’t actually compete with subscription TV services from cable and Telco operators because their services are very different. Netflix is lobbying the Government to stop higher broadband prices when they’re also lobbying to have consumers subsidize the Netflix’s delivery costs.

Larry Downes has a good piece on the hunt for 300-500 MHz of mobile Internet spectrum and how the FCC is working to complete an inventory check on spectrum allocation.  When it comes to mobile Internet, physics and practical engineering and usability requirements limits us to frequencies between 300 MHz and 3700 MHz.  Less than [...]

It appears that Ashton Kutcher has become a high profile victim of Twitter’s negligence when someone at the TED conference hijacked Kutcher’s Twitter account using tools like Firesheep.  The Twitter PR account @TwitterGlobalPR twitted that Kutcher should have enabled SSL by typing HTTPS in front of twitter.com, but that deflects from the fact that it’s [...]

The authors assess the costs and benefits of the possibilities of either assigning D Block spectrum to public safety or auctioning the spectrum for commercial use. They suggest that analysis purports that the 10 MHz spectrum, if used for public safety, would provide somewhere in the neighborhood of $3.4 billion in “social benefits”. Social benefits being any positive outcome for a community in the case of an emergency.

A recent House Energy & Commerce hearing on Network Neutrality and Internet Regulation: Warranted or More Economic Harm Than Good took up the quality of the FCC’s “market analysis,” and the question whether the agency had performed any such analysis at all. The FCC Chairman insisted that the work had been done and that it [...]

“Why Unlimited Mobile-to-Mobile Calling is Evidence of a Lack of Wireless Competition”, suggests that there has been no competition in the wireless marketplace because AT&T is offering a new unlimited mobile-to-mobile plan. Mr. Weinberg claims that this new plan is evidence that there has not been competition in the market for some time.

The same people protesting a 10 watt cell tower don’t seem to be as alarmed by TV towers broadcasting at over a million watt in the exact same VHF and UHF frequencies. By effectively paralyzing new cell tower construction, people are exposed to much higher cell phone transmit levels which are millions of times stronger than the cell tower due to close proximity.