Before anyone gets too excited about AT&T’s network neutrality commitments in connection with its acquisition of BellSouth, read this from the statement of Chairman Martin and Commissioner Tate, the two Republicans involved in the decision: Importantly, however, while the Democrat Commissioners may have extracted concessions from AT&T, they in no way bind future Commission action. Specifically, a minority of Commissioners cannot alter Commission precedent or bind future Commission decisions, policies, ...

After much wrangling, AT&T and BellSouth have agreed to network neutrality conditions in order to secure FCC approval of their merger. The key provision of the agreement, which lasts two years, is the following: AT&T/BellSouth also commits that it will maintain a neutral network and neutral routing in its wireline broadband Internet access service. This commitment shall be satisfied by AT&T/BellSouth’s agreement not to provide or to sell to Internet ...

Helen Cheng of Seriosity has an interesting post

You know, I was just realizing how small the buzz about Microsoft’s new Vista operating system seems to be. There are the usual reviews and so forth, but no one seems to be particularly excited one way or the other. The non-story about Microsoft’s PR company giving out review laptops is getting play in the blogosphere because there’s not much else to talk about. (Earth to bloggers: tech companies have ...

As I mentioned, I’m trying out SpamSoap to cut down on the massive volume of spam I receive. Next week my free trial period ends, and I have to decide whether to start paying for the service at $25/month. I’m planning to pay for it. After some tweaking and whitelisting of various newsletters and mailing lists, plus a bit of configuration on my hosting account to exclude spam routed around ...

The LA Times included me (along with smart folks like Steve Ballmer, Chris Anderson, and Rafat Ali) in a package of predictions about what might be next year’s breakout online hit, ala MySpace and YouTube. Check it out for my answer….

Mark Cuban: “HDTV is the Internet video killer.” As usual, Mark makes some good points. There’s more to the video market than just eyeballs. Advertising is what makes the media world go around. And while there are good advertising opportunities for Internet video services like YouTube, plenty of dollars that will go elsewhere.

I think John Edwards will be the next President of the United States. I’m not saying he’s my personal favorite of the likely candidates; he’s not, although he has many positives. I just think that, when all is said and done, he’s in the best position to win the race. A lot can happen in two years, but that’s the way it looks right now.

So, Wikia, the company started by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, is launching a search engine, called Wikisari. I like Wikia — its CEO, Gil Penchina, spoke at Supernova earlier this year. Leveraging the collective knowledge of users for what my friend and colleague Yochai Benkler calls “peer production” is a powerful technique, as Wikipedia, Digg, and other sites have shown. And I’m completely on board with the claim that there ...

One of my Wharton colleagues just asked me what to call the scholarly field I’m in. It’s a good question. My work — and that of fellow academics like Susan Crawford, Phil Weiser, Christopher Yoo, Yochai Benkler, Barbara van Schewick, and Tim Wu — sits somewhere between telecommunications law (focused on regulated networks) and cyberlaw (focused on intellectual property and other rules governing online activities). One reason for the difficulty ...