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Posts under ‘Open Networks’

AT&T’s Phony Concessions Win Plaudits

Tom Evslin explains how the alleged “concessions” by AT&T to get approval of its BellSouth buyout are a sham:

at&t’s IPTV is exempted from the neutrality provision. It is the TV “pipes” that at&t CEO Ed Whitacre thinks are his. Trouble is, there are no separate pipes on an IP network. at&t has left [...]

Big Telco Launching News Team

Terry Heaton reports:
Michael Rosenblum is launching a futuristic video news project with Verizon that ought to give the “trusted brand” crowd a shudder or three. He’s assembling news gathering units (what he terms “nodes”) in various cities that will make their content available via cellphone, web and cable, and he’s knee-deep in recruiting for the [...]

Low Power Radio, No License

AP: Pirate radio stations challenge feds. The rapidly proliferating scofflaws — and there are now hundreds of them broadcasting at any given moment in this country — are usually only audible within a few miles of their “home-brewed” transmitters. They find unused sections of the FM dial, fire up their mini-transmitters, raise their antennas and [...]

Self Destructive Newspapers

In Belgium, Google is prohibited from even linking to newspaper content. See this story in the International Herald Tribune.
It’s beyond idiotic for the newspapers to do this. Google is sending them customers.
No wonder the newspaper business is going in the tank. It has leaders who can’t understand fundamental reality.

Do Public Media Believe in the Public?

I spent part of yesterday at a small conference organized by WGBH, the huge Boston-based public broadcasting operation. The topic under discussion was “open media,” which means different things to different people.
The ground rules were no blogging, which presumably meant not covering what other people said. A few thoughts, however, about what I told the [...]

Future of Video Lies in Open Networks

The annual Aspen Institute Conference on Communications Policy starts today, and I’m participating. The basic mission is to take note of huge changes in the way video will move around the world in coming years, and then consider how to create “a regulatory regime appropriate to the new world of video.”
Needless to say, one [...]

Tom Evslin, Net Neutrality, Berkman Conversation

The Berkman Center luncheon series will feature Tom Evslin next Tuesday, in a conversation about network neutrality and ways to ensure that the owners of the data pipes don’t abuse their power.

Remixing Nonsense: Now It Makes Sense

So the folks at Public Knowledge put out an audio of Alaska U.S. Senator Ted Stevens’ astonishingly ignorant — and inadvertently hilarious — treatise on the Internet (and why he’s against Network Neutrality). That was helpful.
Now comes Boldheaded.com with this remix of the senator’s remarks. This is citizen-media commentary at its most original, and an [...]

Google’s Deep Pockets to Fuel Antitrust Lawyers?

Reuters: Google says bill could spark antitrust fight. Google warned on Tuesday it will not hesitate to file antitrust complaints in the United States if high-speed Internet providers abuse the market power they could receive from U.S. legislators.
Good for Google. As Congress prepares to give the big telecom players — the phone and cable companies [...]

Telecom Propaganda

The phone companies are behind a slew of anti-network neutrality TV ads I saw in Washington the other evening. It was unfortunate that their commercials, aimed at Congress and staffs on Capitol Hill, are designed not to enlighten but rather to obfuscate.
An honest debate is not what we’re getting, sorry to say. And with the [...]