The Free Press’ view of Net Neutrality, as expressed on its website, is: We need to keep the Internet free, open and neutral. Network Neutrality is vital to ensuring that everyone can connect and share content freely, that we can access the information, visit the Web sites and say what we want online, free from [...]

TechCrunch predicts a matter of time before Google becomes a wireless carrier. But is Google prepared to raise their capital expenditures 20-fold and employee headcount 10-fold? Are they prepared to halve their profit margin and stock valuations to get into the carrier business?

The FCC just declared paid Prioritization legal and illegal at the same time by giving it two arbitrary names. Defined as “Peering” or “Interconnection”, it’s legal but not if it’s called “Paid Peering”. The FCC’s justifications made even less sense.

Why should Paid Peering be illegal when CDNs fit the FCC’s definition of Paid Peering perfectly? The Internet has always been a medium where companies who paid more got their packets delivered with higher priority. Why is that fundamentally wrong now?

Destruction of property rights, or rejection of all methods of effectively defending them, is not the road to less government power and control. Quite the reverse. If creators cannot use property rights and markets to monetize their work, they will be forced to beg for government subsidies, and the system would rapidly evolve into total government control of expression.

Now that the FCC is set to vote on Net Neutrality regulations this week, the “real” Net Neutrality hardliners are no longer hiding their true intentions. They want CDNs, app market, and devices to all be regulated under the Net Neutrality banner.

Content Delivery Network (CDN) companies like Level 3 claim that they’re doing all the work delivering the video across the country and broadband providers are doing little work delivering video on the last mile. But it turns out that broadband networks have to do far more work to deliver thousands of replicated on-demand videos.

With less than 10% of the US population subscribing to Netflix DVD rental service, Netflix already pays more than $700 million a year to the US Postal service for the postage for the DVDs they send which is a staggering 28% of Netflix revenue. Should taxpayers pick up the tab?

At The American, some thoughts about “Protecting Property on the Internet,” which defends S. 3804, Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA)(the Leahy Bill) against recent attacks. The major point: I agree that the free speech and due process are important, but I also think that the values which the bill defends — economic empowerment [...]

Bloomberg ponders the question of “will Netflix kill the Internet”, but I think it has a misguided view of the effect of Netflix on the Internet. The evidence shows that Netflix is actually *growing* the Content Delivery Network (CDN) and broadband networks which are now a significant component of the Internet. In fact, entities like Netflix will force and enable this expansion to happen.