In Brief

  • CircleID reports on Vint Cerf’s views regarding Government’s Role in Internet Broadband Access: “Perhaps the Internet should be treated more like the road system. You don’t have multiple roads going to your house for example. Instead, it is a common resource.”
  • ars technica discusses how bandwidth caps could lead to ISPs benefiting from piracy. But they predict that the profits to be made from charging high bandwidth users a premium will also create an incentive for ISP’s to filter content suspected of copyright infringement. They also cover the recent survey results by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Internet and American Life project suggesting that the US broadband market is edging towards saturation. The study suggests that there are still significant untapped
    markets for broadband – but they would require significant investments in
    infrastructure or lowered prices. 14% of those surveyed said they simply couldn’t get broadband in their area. By contrast, British Telecommunications (BT) claims more than 99% of British households have access to broadband, although speeds remain an issue for those in rural areas.
  • Dan Brickley talks about how the recent court decision requiring Google to turn over YouTube user logs in the Viacomm infringement suit has broader privacy implications. With the Social Graph API, a new Google service, personal information from YouTube accounts that
    was already public is increasingly accessible to automated processing.

One thought on “In Brief

  1. I think Vint's comments have been widely misinterpreted – what he was essentially saying is that without Government intervention many rural areas will continue to be underserved.

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