shouting loudly

Professor Lessig is presenting on Institutional Corruption today at the Kennedy School as his first public appearance at Harvard since his return a few months ago.
Professor Lessig likes to introduce three ideas to frame his talk today: 1) influence, 2) independence and 3) responsibility.
Relying on his framework of the four modalities of control [...]

Why are media and power always a bad combination? Whether it is the elite who is abusing the media for its own purposes (in the words of Chomsky and Herman, to ‘manufacture consent‘) or whether it is the media themselves who are powerful, often heard as in ‘the media are biased‘, the message seems clear [...]

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), [...]

Robert Reich’s latest book, Supercapitalism, is a fantastic analysis of the current relationship between corporations, citizens, and politics.
I put Supercapitalism on my wish list after Prof. Lawrence Lessig’s glowing recommendation. While I make no pretense of being such a gifted writer as either of these scholars, here I attempt to summarize the book and follow [...]

David Isenberg has a great post on why Time Warner’s bandwidth-sensitive pricing plan is good.
The very short version is that it’s honest and a reasonable substitute for non-neutral packet discrimination, but the details will matter tremendously.
(Isen.blog link via Berkman Buzz)
UPDATE: I failed to mention the important caveat that bandwidth-sensitive pricing will not solve our bandwidth [...]

The Register notes that while Manhunt 2 may have been effectively banned from distribution in UK stores by the British Board of Film Classification’s refusal to assign a rating (again), the game could still sell online, via direct download (link via Game Politics).
Sound familiar? If you’re familiar with the regulatory history of the comic book, [...]

Rumor has it that the uncut version of Manhunt 2 is available for download through torrent files online. You may remember Manhunt 2 as a PS2/PSP/Wii game that was slapped with an “Adults Only” rating by the ESRB, a self-regulatory industry body, until the publisher modified the game for a “Mature” rating. The earlier rating [...]