Earlier last month, I found that YouTube’s HTML5 beta wasn’t even worthy of being beta. Three weeks after that, Jan Ozer ran some CPU performance tests between YouTube Flash and HTML5 on Mac OS X and Safari and found that CPU performance was better on HTML5.

Burlington Vermont’s experiment in municipal fiber was once thought to be shining example of why muni-fiber broadband was such a great idea. Those dreams have now turned into a $50 million nightmare for the tax payers of Burlington Vermont the majority of whom don’t use the service.

Municipal fiber is seen by many as the holy-grail of broadband utopia, but like utopia it hasn’t had much success in the real world. This paper examines the challenges of implementing community owned fiber and why tax payers are getting stuck with a huge debt.

Randolph J. May writes that the health care public option and what he calls the “Internet public option” share similar threads.

The FCC yesterday announced its plan to create a volunteer “digital literacy corps.” But based on the government’s track record in implementing a similar technology-oriented volunteer plan, the National Emergency Technology Guard, the idea will never meet the FCC’s lofty expectations. Congress authorized NET Guard in 2003, but it took five years just to launch a pilot program.

Conventional wisdom says that more innovation for applications on the Internet must involve much more bandwidth. But once we understand the economics of video on the Internet, we quickly begin to understand why applications will never be high bandwidth.

The FCC and the John S. and James. L. Knight Foundation today are hosting a “digital inclusion” summit in order to draw attention to America’s push for expanding high-speed Internet access. The summit is being held a week before the FCC’s scheduled release of a national broadband plan. Speakers will include: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski; Commissioners Meredith Attwell Baker, Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn; and members of Congress. Keep a browser open here for live updates.

A new global poll shows that 79 percent of people believe Internet access “should be a fundamental right for all people,” but 53 percent also think “the Internet should never be regulated by any level of government anywhere.” They are sending conflicting messages because proclaiming Internet access a “fundamental right” is an invitation to destructive bureaucratic meddling in the digital marketplace.

The Free State Foundation Annual Winter Telecom Policy Conference Panel: The FCC’s Broadband Plan: The Good, The Bad, and the Just So-So? January 29, 2010 Moderator Deborah Taylor Tate, an adjunct senior fellow at the foundation and a former FCC commissioner, joined several panelists to discuss the upcoming FCC broadband plan, which is due to [...]

The American Consumer Institute
Center for Citizen Research
Innovation and National Broadband Policies: Facts, Fiction and Unanswered Questions
March 2, 2010
Larry F. Darby
Joeseph P. Fuhr