In October 1517, Martin Luther nailed a paper with 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany, an event often characterized as the start of the Protestant Reformation.

In a discussion taking place over on Jon Henke’s “The Internet Has Not Changed Everything” post, the topic of sales and use taxes has come up.  Based on the discussion, it’s clear that there is a misconception of what exactly the issues are in an online context.  So I thought I’d provide this short, but [...]

A senator criticized the FCC last week saying that the FCC’s National Broadband Plan was leading us to second tier status, but there are a few problems with this. For one thing, it’s based on the grossly exaggerated broadband speeds and prices of other nations. The other problem is that the FCC doesn’t control the purse strings.

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.

Kennedy discusses the June 17th announcement of the Notice of Inquiry by the Federal Communications Commission asking for comment on the authority of the FCC to regulate broadband Internet service.

Amity Shlaes is Senior Fellow in Economic History at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the highly regarded The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (2008). Her recent column on AOL News taps her knowledge of the 1930s to recount “what happened in the 1930s to the Internet equivalent of [...]

Now that the official BitTorrent client with uTP has moved past the beta stage, I decided to test it again to see if it made any improvements in reducing the damage it causes to other applications on the network. What I found was that not only did BitTorrent not improve in its network friendliness, it’s more destructive than ever.

Ford presents an article on the continued push for Internet regulation based on misleading data. He believes that the mindset is that the U.S. is “falling behind” the rest of the world in broadband adoption. So the only solution is one in which the government pushes ahead to solve the supposed problem.

Navx, a GPS company who maintains online databases of geolocation makers, issued a complaint against Google to the Autorite. Navx claims that Google is active in anti-competitive practices in online advertising. Autorite has made a temporary decision while it investigate for its final action. At the moment they feel that Google holds a dominant position and is used for 90% of all searches in France.

CDT, PFF, and EFF have filed joint comments to the FCC regarding COPPA. They state that the COPPA rule is in place to prevent information being collected from children under the age of 13. This is something that the groups believe have been successful and that has improved parental supervision of what children are viewing online.