The whole repressive world is watching to see whether the United States adopts network neutrality as law in the land of liberty, and then they will use it as an excuse to further curtail Internet freedom in their own countries. That’s the message between the diplomatic lines that a top State Department information policy official uttered this week.

Back in January I wrote a post titled “‘Gamers For Lag’ Weighs In On Net Neutrality“. The post argued the pro-net neutrality position adopted by the Electronic Consumers Association (an organization of which I am a member) would actually be detrimental to gamers.

They didn’t reply directly to the post, but we wanted to be fair to ECA. We asked, nearly two months ago, if we could submit some questions on the topic and have them address our concerns over their network neutrality position. The questions were pretty straightforward, but get straight to the heart of our concerns.

Free Press wants the FCC to mandate a dumb Internet because they claim that network prioritization technology makes networks unfair and inefficient. But the engineering shows that prioritized networks are actually more fair and more efficient.

When government gives away super valuable 700 MHz mobile spectrum, it gets wasted on wireless backhaul which could have used 5 GHz. While 700 MHz might save a little money on backhaul costs, it saves a lot more money on access and mobile networks. Commercial operators that paid billions of dollars for 700 MHz spectrum would never waste valuable spectrum like this.

Advocates of Internet regulation dream of a government-run utopia, but consumers have seen the yellow brick road on the other side of telecommunications law and are flocking to it. Dorothy wanted to go home after her fantastical journey through the “Wizard of Oz.” Information-age consumers have no interest in traveling back in time to the realm of telecom stagnation.

The FCC is asking for a good way for consumers to monitor broadband performance and they have put out a public Request For Quotation (RFQ).  Well I’m going to suggest a more granular and complete method of network monitoring that doesn’t generate unnecessary traffic on the network, and one that does not require any third party tools to collect the information.  The current methods of installing Java and/or other tools and using small active measurement samples is inferior.
Every modern Operating System (OS) has built in …

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.

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.

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.

When the FCC announced its “Future of Media” hearing, it was described in rather contradictory terms.  Steven Waldman, who is heading up the project, had this to say:
The starting point for this effort, of course, is the First Amendment.  A free press, independent of government control, is a foundational principle of our democracy. Any time the government even looks at the media, we have to be very careful. Keeping that principle in mind always, the experts here working on these issues will work first to …