The appeals of the FCC’s Net Neutrality rule continued to run their courses this week. [For background, see Which Court Gets to Hear the Net Neutrality Appeal? (Jan. 21) &  More on the Verizon Appeal of the Net Neutrality Regulation (Jan. 24).] On Jan. 10, even before the rule was published (which still has not [...]

Renesys who conducts real-time web studies has posted their real-time video of Egypt’s Internet activity this week.  As is well known by now there is a massive revolutionary uprising in Egypt that has been going on for the past week.  Several days ago the government pulled the plug on all the major ISP’s in the [...]

The new report commissioned by European broadband providers speaks of an impending crisis if content providers don’t pay up while the content providers continue to propagate the myth that all websites should run at the same speed regardless of what they pay. But both sides are being ridiculous and their alarmism could lead to nasty political outcomes that they will both regret.

Increasingly, value on the Internet will be provided by services that filter out distractions and repetitions. One of the best mechanisms for this is payment. From my point of view, the information that is most likely to be valuable to me is that for which the provider demands payment from me, for the obvious reason that if I do not receive value then I will not pay and the provider will not have a business. An alternative is the situation where the provider must pay money to reach me, again, because if the transaction does not add value somewhere then it will not occur.

In the second part of Thierers examination of Internet Optimism, he looks at the Supporters, where previously he examined the Internets Detractors. The main focus is the question of how to save the Internet from becoming a closed platform after celebrating roughly a decade of openness.

Netflix published their ISP performance metrics that managed to fool the media into reporting the data as some kind of broadband performance metric. But the results probably reflect Netflix’s inadequacies rather than the ISPs’ because the numbers are probably related to the amount of peering bandwidth that Netflix purchased from the ISPs.

Netflix and its CDN partners want the media and the government to pressure and force consumers to subsidize Netflix to the tune of thousands of Gbps of free bandwidth. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is misleading all of us when he says that Netflix already pays their share of the bandwidth costs and that they deserve free server capacity.

Barry Collins of PCPro UK claimed that “ISPs are threatening to cripple websites that don’t pay them first” and set off some predictable outrage against the ISPs. But Collins’ article is a perfect example of scaremongering because its thesis wasn’t even supported by his own evidence gathered for the article, and some of the quotations seem to have been misinterpreted to throw gas on the fire against ISPs.

Verizon’s action last Wednesday (Jan. 19) in filing an appeal of the FCC’s Net Neutrality rule caught the tech world by surprise. My post last Friday discussed some aspects of the situation, but a question remains, why did Verizon appeal and no one else? Surely others are aggrieved, so are they slow or is Verizon over-eager?

Thierer looks at two schools of thought in Net Policy, the detractors and the supporters. (The supporters will be reviewed in another post.) In this article found in The Next Digital Decade book from Tech Freedom, Thierer introduces us to two “schools of Internet pessimism”.