Wednesday, January 23, 2008

International broadband policy recap

There are several very good books on the recent history of broadband policies around the globe. However, for those not interested in reading several books, there is an excellent synopsis from the Economist. You can read it here.

The increase in broadband penetration and speeds, generally, comes from overtures of governments into the realm of private busines, id est policy.

Need for broadband policy...

The following story is very well written. It also calls for a national broadband policy for the United States. The idea of a national policy has been in my mind for years, and in some others, perhaps by charging per quantity of data downloaded Americans will see a need for a broadband policy instead of a band-aid policy to keep customers satisfied year by year.

Here is the story

Monday, January 14, 2008

MySpace and protecting children

Today the MySpace and several states attorneys general commented on a comprehensive plan to protect the safety of minors on MySpace. The plan calls for monitoring MySpace for inappropriate materials, the creation of new technologies to determine and assign the age of users, and user education.

How does this affect MySpace users? The details are not all that clear, of course providing details would allow people to circumvent the plan. However, a concern that needs to be raised is why do we as a society keep limiting free expression in earnst to protect children? Most commonly cited are cyberbullying cases or child abuse cases all caused by technology. Perhaps, as this plan finally takes into account, educating the users is better than limiting the ability and speech of users. It is a touch subject to discuss, especially when children are involved, but society and elected officials seem to be a step behind or misinformed about the abilities of technology. Protection measures are needed, but they need to be done by the parents not the State.

Friday, January 11, 2008

FCC to investigate Comcast

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said on January 8th, 2008 that the FCC would investigate Comcast Corporation. Recently Comcast had been investigated by several groups for blocking and/or dealying packets associated with the software program BitTorrent.

The blogs are going crazy...

Today it seems that the ICT policy blogs and Internet blogs are going crazy with news about Connect Kentucky. I believe the original article is here, as I said the blogs are going crazy.

The debates and opinions, to put it nicely, seem to claim that Connect Kentucky is a sham. Some go so far to claim that several pesidential candidates are in league with telecommunications companies. Read what you can and make your own conclusions.

The silly thing about all of this is that there is currently a bill, H.R. 3919 , that will inventory broadband penetration. Perhaps more effort should be put into H.R. 3919, than polarizing Internet policy by political party.