shouting loudly

[This is a draft blog post as submitted to SaveTheInternet.]
Academic associations tend to be politically conservative.
I don’t mean they revere Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman, though plenty of scholars do. Rather, each group–representing a field’s professors and graduate students–tends to evade controversy, rarely taking a public stance on an issue that might divide the membership.
Thus, [...]

Over at Public Knowledge, Robb Topolski has written an inspirational post, ISPs Behaving Badly, which criticizes Time Warner’s trial runs at tiered pricing.
I’m not opposed to tiered pricing in principle, though TW appears to have handled it rather badly, and it still fails to solve the root problem of weak competition in the wireline ISP [...]

Thanks to Alex Curtis at Public Knowledge for the stimulus bill content filtering update. The good news is in the headline: No on content filtering, yes on open network requirements.
He also posted a PDF of the relevant section. See the highlighted portion on page 9 for the nondiscrimination requirements.

In a(nother) huge election day win, yesterday the FCC deregulated the “white spaces” between TV stations, allowing technology firms and enthusiasts the right to play around in these unused channels of high-quality spectrum.
In a 5-0 decision, the Commission issued a ruling allowing anybody to transmit messages in white spaces, within fairly limits on the generation [...]

At yesterday’s FCC hearing into Comcast’s practice of blocking BitTorrent traffic in Cambridge, Comcast hired several dozen seat warmers to reduce the number of critics who could get into the hearing.
The hearing was held at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. When Catherine Bracy, the Center’s administrative manager, opened the door to the hearing [...]

In a filing with the FCC (pdf), Comcast claims that, thanks to market competition and blogging watchdogs, there is no need for regulatory intervention to protect net neutrality.
The company’s recent discrimination against peer-to-peer traffic is the cause of the hearing. Last August, Comcast denied the charges (which were first documented on… drumroll please… a blog), [...]

Today, Reps. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Chip Pickering (R-MS) introduced HR 5353, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act (pdf).
For more, see SaveTheInternet.com or CNet.

In Comcast’s new Terms of Service, the company explicitly admits that it degrades peer-to-peer traffic as a means of reducing their network load.
The company also admits that they will kick off end users who use (what they determine to be) too much bandwidth:
The Service is for personal and non-commercial residential use only. Therefore, Comcast reserves [...]

ArsTechnica has an excellent summary of the eloquent, biting critiques of Comcast being aired in an FCC proceeding.
End users with an exceptional understanding of the underlying technology provide pretty damning evidence that the broadband service provider is deliberately degrading certain kinds of internet traffic.

Two quick links (both on Wetmachine) here on the FCC’s 700 MHz spectrum auction.
First, Harold Feld has another great bit of analysis on why Google is bidding to win, though it’s not nearly as in-depth as his Great Google Prophecy last month.
Second, Greg Rose has an outstanding critique of the media’s premature 700 MHz doom-and-gloom.
The [...]