In Scientific American, Tim Berners-Lee seems to argue right past the important policy issues facing the Internet today. Instead of describing actual policy or technology problems, he suggests implausibly apocalyptic outcomes.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am skeptical of “the Internet has changed everything!” analyses.  It’s great for the imagination, but it has a tendency not to provide much useful guidance.  I bring that up because of an exchange I saw between Jeff Jarvis and Andrew Keen on Twitter the other day.  Andrew Keen had asked [...]

As Blair Levin said upon exiting the FCC, people tend to see what they expect to see. Reaction to the Verizon/Google announcement reinforces his point.

The fact is that people have always been free to create art without a “corporate middleman”, question the media and do their own reporting, organize and protest, make their content free and pursue unconventional business models.

This is not new. Pointing out that people can also do this on the Internet does not mean The Internet Has Changed Everything. It just means people can continue doing these things in a different medium.

The Internet is not a magical device that makes everything free, copyright is not simply a legal mechanism to make creators get out of bed, creative output is not an undifferentiated mass of content and there are many more variables than just piracy that affect content production.

Chairman Genachowski gets the cold shoulder?

A Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group could be a substantial solution to the net neutrality problems. At least, that is what some net neutrality supporters have argued in the past.

Declan McCullagh really gets to the heart of where the net neutrality battle stands right now. The last time there was a major rewrite of telecommunications laws, it took something like five years for Congress’ internal mechanisms to spit out the Telecommunications Act of 1996. A push for national cable franchising legislation went on for [...]

Chairman Genachowski has said only 6 sections of the Title II regulations will be applied to broadband and this would give “confidence and certainty that this renunciation of regulatory overreach will not unravel…” Yesterday, the FCC reached just a little further and 6 sections became 7… “According to sources, the Federal Communications Commission will add [...]

Free Press has assured us that net neutrality couldn’t possibly have a negative impact on investment, so this is clearly just a coincidence.