Posts under ‘Open Networks’

HerdictWeb: “the first collaborative, real-time map of Internet accessibility and it needs your input.” This is a fabulous new Berkman Center project. Please consider joining the herd. Congrats to the team that put this together.

I’m a signer of a letter on a new site called “An Open Transition,” where a group of folks led by Larry Lessig: celebrates the incoming administration’s decision to put a Creative Commons license on its Change.Gov transition website, thereby allowing anyone to share, remix and otherwise reuse and copy the material there; and asks […]

Washington Post: Comcast Defends Role As Internet Traffic Cop. Comcast said yesterday that it purposely slows down some traffic on its network, including some music and movie downloads, an admission that sparked more controversy in the debate over how much control network operators should have over the Internet. The admission, after lying to the public […]

Techdirt: AT&T Does Nothing, Convinces Reporter It Has Now ‘Opened’ Its Network. Basically, absolutely nothing happened here except that AT&T’s marketing crew declared that AT&T’s network is now open, and convinced USA Today to report it as if it were a big deal. If there was any change at all within AT&T, it’s that retail […]

Cory Doctorow has a very smart analysis in Information Week about why he doesn’t fear Facebook taking over the world. Quote: Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee […]

The numbers are getting worse and worse, with a very few exceptions: FAS-FAX: Top 25 Daily and Sunday U.S. Newspapers. (Note: I own a small number of shares of two newspaper companies: New York Times and McClatchy.)

Timothy Carr, in “AT&T Gets Caught in its Own Spin Cycle,” notes the telecom company’s increasingly “slippery response” when confronted with evidence of snipping out political content on its webcast concerts. The company’s sleazy behavior is no surprise, but nonetheless telling in context of its push to decide what bits will reach customers’ computers in […]

Salon’s Farhad Manjoo, asks, “Is network neutrality a fake issue?” No, he says, at least for people in the U.K. who want to watch BBC videos online: As several British papers reported over the weekend, large ISPs have threatened to shut down people’s access to the BBC’s online videos — unless, of course, the BBC […]

David Weinberger: Delaminate the Bastards!. We should do to the carriers of Internet signals what we did to the carriers of telephone signals. Bust ’em up so that the companies that connect us to the Internet don’t also sell us services over the Internet. Providing connection and providing content and services can and should be […]

My Berkman Center colleague Jonathan Zittrain has written a piece for Harvard Business Review, “Saving the Internet.” Quote: The runaway successes of the Internet and PC with the mainstream public have put them in positions of significant stress and danger. Though the Internet’s lack of centralized structure makes it difficult to assess the sturdiness of […]