Today, the battle over the future of the Internet will be fought in Washington, DC. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in two cases: BrandX and Grokster, that could have deep repercussions. BrandX deals with the treatment of broadband. The FCC has tried to classify the cable modem platform as an “information service”, not subject to various regulatory obligations. The courts have, so far, taken a different view. Grokster ...

One of the least enjoyable aspects of two small kids at home is that everyone — and I mean, EVERYONE — gets sick a lot. The four of us have been ping-ponging colds and other sundry illnesses back and forth non-stop for at least a month. My wife was even in the hospital a couple days last week with pneumonia. She’s fine, back home and pretty much recovered, but going ...

Tom Coates, who works for the BBC, spins out a vision of the future of television that incorporates social software into the experience.

Adam Bosworth has a nice post linking together the “Web 2.0″ notion of the Web as an open platform for applications with search and syndication. Oh, and for good measure, he wraps in the vibe of tech conferences (ETech and PC Forum) as well as the challenges of privacy and spam. Adam — a really smart guy — was a senior technologist at Microsoft before co-founding a startup that was ...

The Economist has an article (subscribers only) quoting me about municipal WiFi networks, like the one Philadelphia is proposing. Local phone and cable companies have been fighting these proposals, even pushing legislation banning cities from deploying broadband connecting for their residents. The point I make in the piece is that a city-wide WiFi cloud in an urban area is not identical to the wired broadband networks companies like Verizon and ...

John Markoff has a piece today, based on O’Reilly’s ETech conference, about how the Grokster case could dampen innovation in areas well beyond music file sharing.

This is an example of the amazing things that happen when people can build on open platforms. It’s an app on top of the Flickr photo sharing service, that uses Flickr’s open protocols to auto generate a photo montage spelling any word you like:

So Kevin Martin has been named the new Chairman of the FCC. This is not exactly a surprise, although I’m a bit curious why it took so long — there must have been some Congressional horse trading in the background. As a told a reporter earlier this afternoon, Kevin has all the tools to be a successful FCC Chairman. He knows the agency and the White House, and he’s more ...