The DC Circuit yesterday dismissed the appeals of the FCC Net Neutrality order filed by Verizon and MetroPCS on the grounds that they were filed prematurely – no appeal can be taken until the order is published in the Federal Register, an event that has not yet occurred. It would be a mistake to regard [...]

[O]nly the whinging culture of the liberal state could take one of the greatest opportunities ever presented to humanity – the astonishing progress in medicine and biology – and convert it into a cause for complaint and despair while at the same time taking one of the best-known issues in institution building — the over-use of a commons — and see it as an intractable problem beyond society’s capacity to address.

While working on a non-DigSoc project, I ran across this statement from the Association of American Railroads: The U.S. rail model is of “vertical integration,” in which a railroad generally both owns the track and operates trains over that track. The efficient U.S. model has resulted in huge productivity gains, sharply lower average rail rates, [...]

The FCC & Regulatory Analysis (March 1) reviewed the 45-year history of Executive Office regulatory analysis requirements and their nonapplicability to the FCC. Today, at the AEI’s Enterprise Blog, I explain why Regulatory Agencies Cannot Be Controlled by Requirements of Interior Rationality, and suggest that 45 years of issuing the same basic Executive Order over [...]

My Wednesday post on Jason Kilar and Hulu touched on the possibility that Kilar sees Hulu as a potential prime distributor, dealing directly with content creators instead of getting only content originally distributed by others. It turns out that Netflix is thinking along the same lines — see Netflix’s Risky Bet on Original Programming, at GigaOm: [...]

Perhaps even free of your employment. When Hulu CEO Jason Kilar blogged his “thoughts about the future of TV” on the Hulu website, the reaction was strong:  “Is Jason Kilar Trying to Get Fired?” headlined a piece the next day on the WSJ’s All Things Digital site, noting that “some . . . believe Kilar [...]

An old adage of marketing is that people do not buy drills – they buy holes. Cliché it may be, but the statement embodies real wisdom, in that businesses that focus on value as the customer sees it are more likely to prosper than those that do not. The cliché leads to other thoughts, such [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]