The House Communications and Technology Subcommittee is currently streaming live video of the hearing on H.J. Resolution 37, “Disapproving the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission.”

Conversations With America: A Discussion on the State Department’s Internet Freedom Strategy DipNote Bloggers Michael Posner, Assistant Secretary of State for Domcracy, Human Rights, and Labor Leslie Harris, President and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology Moderated by P.J. Crowley, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs P.J. Crowley moderates a discussion between [...]

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.

“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.

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 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”.

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, [...]

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.

Facts of Life: The Citizen’s Guide to Network Engineering The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation Richard Bennett February 2011 In Bennett’s latest white paper, he focuses his attention on the notion in which many believe the Internet has always worked at a “dumb pipe” system, or a network consisting of no management.  This is a [...]

I recently ran into an blog article by Jonathan at WhoIsHostingThis.com which is a web hosting review site. The article in question was calling for the Internet as we know it to become a public utility. This is a meme that crops up from time to time, but has definitely had some additional traction as of late.