Archive for October, 2005
Monday, October 31st, 2005
Jeff Pulver tries to make sense of the FCC's broadband and VOIP policies... and fails. VOIP gets regulated, while broadband access gets deregulated, for seemingly contradictory reasons. Jeff wonders aloud if the FCC is simply engaged in "a simultaneous effort to twist words and statutes to suit ...
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Monday, October 31st, 2005
The traditional telecom pricing model is to charge for the basic service (voice connectivity), and you get other things on top for free. That model has largely been replicated on the Internet -- users pay access providers, and applications like Yahoo!, Google, and Amazon.com have to find ways to ...
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Sunday, October 30th, 2005
From a revealing BusinessWeek interview with SBC CEO Ed Whitacre (Emphasis added):
Q: How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG), MSN, Vonage, and others?
A: How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they ...
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Friday, October 28th, 2005
Today was the start of a small academic colloquium I organized on media and communications law. It was quite a stimulating afternoon. We're having dinner at Striped Bass, one of the best restaurants in Philly, and then back to presentations tomorrow morning.
I mentioned in the opening that it ...
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Friday, October 21st, 2005
When I wrote the other day about P2P file sharing being the justification for broadband access providers blocking or filtering certain Internet-based applications, even I didn't think it would happen so soon.
Hasta la vista, Internet freedom!
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Friday, October 21st, 2005
Why is it so shocking for eBay CEO Meg Whitman to say that users will expect voice phone calls to be free in five years? Does anyone today expect to pay for email messages or instant messages? One can quibble over the timing, but not the ultimate outcome.
So ...
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Thursday, October 20th, 2005
Today, it's the ISPs complaining -- understandably -- about the bandwidth demands of video file-sharing. Tomorrow, it will be the telephone and cable companies who dominate broadband access. And they will use it as justification for breaking the neutrality of the Internet, by throttling or blocking certain traffic. ...
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Thursday, October 20th, 2005
Venture capitalist Ed Sim laments the Web 2.0 hype wave:
I am starting to get extremely tired and frustrated about every pitch that I see now where a company claims they are a Web 2.0 company and lists their principal reasons for being Web 2.0. It reminds me of the ...
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Thursday, October 20th, 2005
Major publishers have joined the legal challenge to the Google Print service, arguing that it represents wanton copyright infringement. This as another battle in the ongoing conflict over intellectual property in the digital world, but I'm concerned it suggests something else: a challenge to the stability of the Internet ...
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Friday, October 14th, 2005
Om reports a reader's post that Verizon is literally removing the copper wires from homes that subscribe to its FIOS fiber optic services, making it impossibel for users to switch back to DSL. I wouldn't be surprised if this is true -- why should Verizon run the risk of ...
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