Nick R. Brown takes his leave from Digital Society.

As of today, April 1 2011, I am leaving Digital Society and moving to High Tech Forum. I would like to thank Jon Henke for this great opportunity to work with him and the rest of my Digital Society colleagues including Mike Turk, Nick Brown, James Delong, Brett Swanson, and Steve Effros.  It’s been a [...]

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.

Edward Wyatt of the New York Times has sounded the alert to a possible deal on Net Neutrality between Google and Verizon and many in the blogosphere including GigaOm is decrying this as a betrayal of Net Neutrality. Aside from the fact that this story is based on many vague and undisclosed sources, the story is wrong on the facts, self contradictory, and incoherent.

Thierer publishes a work looking into the desire of Robert McChesney and Free Press to model the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal in order to fund a government run media agency.

With the announcement of Google TV, we have yet another box to connect in the living room though it seems a bit half baked at the moment. Many have tried their hand at convergence of TV and Internet such as Microsoft with their media center PC or other various Linux based devices such as Boxee or Roku. Even the mighty Apple has had a difficult time carving out anything more than a niche in the TV market.

Two video codec experts have examined Google’s VP8 video compression codec and they don’t bode well for the new codec. VP8 is supposed to be at the heart of the new WebM open media project for squeezing video down to a much smaller size while minimizing the noticeable loss of quality.

The Open Internet Coalition (OIC) which has been lobbying hard for reclassification seems to have gotten their wish from the FCC chairman, but neither has offered a good explanation of what such a legally risky maneuver can actually accomplish even if it is successful. When asked about the parts of the Internet that would be regulated under Title II, the Open Internet Coalition dodged the question.

When it comes to exploiting fabricated conspiracy theories to smear their enemies, the extreme Net Neutrality advocacy groups seems to have mastered every trick over the last 4 years.  From knowingly and falsely smearing phone companies of blocking earth quake relief efforts this year to wrongly accusing Cox Communications of blocking Craig’s List, they’re at [...]

A post on Saturday mused on the difficulty of combating the simplistic memes of the Free Culture Movement. The theme is continued today, this time by examining the simplistic memes that characterize conventional news media — with a bit on the Congress tossed in for good measure. The Washington Post has a feature called Story [...]