The Wall Street Journal is reporting that antitrust enforcement in telecommunication is being ramped up by the Obama Administration, after relatively lax times. In a piece entitled Telecoms Face Antitrust Threat it indicates that investigators are weighing up the roles of the large carriers and whether they are abusing the market power amassed under the Bush Administration. more
Our world finds itself at a critical juncture. Both trillions of dollars and the future of human communications including fundamental access to it are at stake. For telecom operators and media outlets there is not a migratory way from where we are to the future. There is a clear consumer shift underway that runs in the opposite direction to that of telecom and media incumbents; emergent social practice is increasingly clashing with the very structure and desires of incumbent players... It was for these reasons that one of the six keynote speakers invited to Spring 2009 Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) in San Francisco was Richard Whitt, Google's Washington Telecom and Media Counsel. His keynote was entitled, Tinkering without Tampering: Wrestling with Convergence and Communications Policy... more
Grant Gross of IDG News report: "The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will launch an investigation into exclusive handset deals between mobile carriers and handset makers, acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps said. Copps has instructed FCC staff to open an inquiry into exclusive handset deals, he said during a speech at the Pike and Fischer Broadband Summit Thursday." more
Lord Carter's Digital Britain report contains few surprises given that its essential thrust has been much discussed during the past six months. What remains unequivocal is that the report and its (political) backers trumpet a national broadband network which promises to deliver an insufficient network. It also lacks a broader vision... more
CAUCE just posted a blog entry about C-27; we will be speaking to the Industry, Science, and Technology committee reviewing the bill this afternoon. The meeting will be webcast starting at 15:30 eastern... more
In response to Canada's recent decision to keep a hands-off approach to distributed content over the Internet and through mobile devices, Jacob Glick, Google's Canada Policy Counsel has highly commended the decision. In a blog post today, Glick writes: "If you've ever wondered about the power and popularity of user-generated content in Canada, consider this: if all three Canadian television networks began broadcasting Canadian content 24 hours a day, seven days a week, YouTube would still have more Canadian content than those three networks combined." more
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Information have released a report raising concern over website monitoring practices which appear to be taking advantage of critical loopholes in privacy protection. According to the study, most popular websites in the United States "all share data with their corporate affiliates and allow third parties to collect information directly by using tracking beacons known as 'Web bugs' -- despite the sites' claims that they don't share user data with third parties." more
I cringe whenever I hear the arguments that we can't have community owned infrastructure for connectivity because local governments can't fix potholes. I wouldn't mind it so much if that argument wasn't used to shut off further discussion. We should be asking why we are denied the "dumb-pipes" that provide vital infrastructure and why we allow phone (and TV) companies to horde vital infrastructure. Instead we accept the "pothole" argument as a reason we can't be trusted to communicate on our own. more
President Sarkozy of France recently managed to get his 'Création et Internet' law passed by the National Assembly, and if all goes well in the Senate then French internet users will soon find their activities being supervised by HADOPI, the grandly named 'Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Œuvres et la Protection des Droits sur Internet.' The rights it is concerned with are not those of ordinary net users but of copyright owners, and especially the large entertainment companies that have lobbied so hard and so successfully for the power to force internet service providers to terminate the accounts of those accused of downloading unlicensed copies of music, films and software... more
Seventy-five years ago today, on May 29th, 1934, Egyptian private radio stations fell silent, as the government shut them down in favor of a state monopoly on broadcast communication. Egyptian radio "hackers" (as we would style them today) had, over the course of about fifteen years, developed a burgeoning network of unofficial radio stations... It couldn't last. After two days of official radio silence, on May 31st, official state-sponsored radio stations (run by the Marconi company under special contract) began transmitting a clean slate of government-sanctioned programming, and the brief era of grass-roots Egyptian radio was over... more
In a speech today from the White House, President Obama declared that the United States' computers and digital networks are strategic national assets and that he will personally appoint a cybersecurity coordinator to oversee the effort to protect this critical infrastructure. more
I gave a talk yesterday at Northwestern called A DNS in the Air. My idea is that, in order to scale, the emerging wireless Internet needs something analogous to the domain name system (DNS) -- the infrastructure that allows you to reach sites across the Net. Billions of mobile phones, and even more billions of connected sensors and other wireless devices will completely overwhelm our current spectrum management regime. AT&T Wireless estimates we will need between 250 and 600 TIMES the current wireless capacity in 2018, less than a decade from now. more
A very good friend of mine is an archivist with the Ontario government, and we share similar views on how technology is impacting modern life. He passed a really interesting item along that ran in yesterday's Washington Post. Some of you may be following this – Google's Book Search Settlement. I can definitely see how this has a direct bearing on the archive space, but also how it touches on a few tangents of my world – emerging communications technologies. more
As someone closely involved with the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) and many other fibre plans around the globe, I would like to provide an inside picture of the revolutionary developments that are taking place in the Australian broadband market. Australia's national broadband network will be an FttH-based open wholesale network -- a network that will connect (not pass) 90% of all Australians to fibre, with the remaining 10% of the population being linked to that network through technologies that are capable of delivering equivalent services. more
FttH networks had begun to arrive well before the financial crisis hit, but surprisingly it is the crisis itself that is now driving fibre beyond its first stage. This first stage was basically a continuation of the 100-year-old vertically-integrated telephone business model. This saw more of the same delivered at higher speeds and higher costs, and there was only a limited market that was willing to pay a premium for such a FttH service... more
A World-Renowned Source for Internet Developments. Serving Since 2002.