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.

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.

Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) grilled FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski about the FCC’s Net Neutrality rules, and whether the rules would cover disputes like the one between Level 3 and Comcast. Genachowski evaded the question and even misrepresented his own rules to preserve the flexibility for future FCC intervention and overreach.

A 57% majority of the US House of Representatives has voted to block funding for the FCC’s Net Neutrality rules passed by a slim FCC majority last December. The vote now heads to the Senate and then the President’s desk. We found the FCC rules to be incoherent because the FCC ignored the record and overreached when it outlawed Paid Prioritization.

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.

Spiwak contemplates the notion of States Rights as applied to the Open Internet order in his latest Perspectives piece for the Phoenix Center.

Says the National Academy of Engineering: [In 1988] the first transatlantic fiber-optic cable is installed . . . . The shark-proof TAT-8 is dedicated by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who praises “this maiden voyage across the sea on a beam of light.” Linking North America and France, the 3,148-mile cable is capable of handling [...]

Deep packet inspection or web crawlers had nothing to do with the Egyptian Internet shutdown, but Free Press rarely lets facts get in the way of exploiting a good crisis to call for government hearings. Ironically, it was Free Press asking the FCC to regulate Internet speech for decency.