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 [...]

I was excited when Carol Pardun, President of the Association for Education and Journalism and Mass Communication, told me that the group would be issuing a statement supporting network neutrality. I was ecstatic when she asked for my input on the statement. Now, the statement is out, and I’m listed as a contact. Later today, [...]

Just a quick, 24-hours-overdue thanks to the folks at the Newsweek Dev Team for hosting me last night at their third News/Geek event. I had a rollicking good time, the questions were awesome, and the post-talk celebration was even better. If you want the Powerpoint, it’s here in all its 12.2 MB glory. Further discussion [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

I’m stoked by Damian Kulash’s New York Times opinion calling for mandated network neutrality. It’s a far more accessible, engaging piece than almost anything written on the subject, and he makes a compelling case. Kudos to him. P.S. On a personal note, it’s been a metric year since I blogged, and for good reason. Life [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.