New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has announced an agreement with Sprint, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon, that will see them block subscriber access to newsgroups that distribute child pornography, and act to purge any images from them that are stored on their servers.
net neutrality
Conyers introduces Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act
U.S. Rep. John Conyers, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, has introduced legislation that addresses Network Neutrality’s fair trade aspects by labeling it an antitrust matter. Conyers’ H.R. 5994 would ban discriminatory network management practices by amending the Clayton Act.
The bill, labeled the Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act, would require carriers to promote competition and allow people to use any device they want to on the carriers’ networks. The bill makes exceptions for emergencies, criminal investigations, parental controls, marketing, and improvements to quality of service. Continue reading
CFP: IETF workshop on P2P Infrastructure – MIT – May 28
The Real-time Applications & Infrastructure (RAI) Area of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) will hold a workshop on P2P Infrastructure on May 28, 2008 at 50 Vassar St, Room 34-101 on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA USA. They are calling for papers to be submitted before May 9. Continue reading
Senate holds Future of The Internet hearing
On April 22 2008 the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation held a full committee hearing on that popular current topic ‘The Future of the Internet’. Amongst those testifying were Kevin Martin of the FCC and Larry Lessig of Stanford.
A RealVideo webcast is available which isoc-ny has transcoded to mp3 for convenience.
FCC Net Neutrality hearing webcast – Apr 17
Pulvermedia’s VON TV service will webcast the FCC’s en banc Hearing on Internet Practices at Stanford Law School on Thursday April 17.
The sessions run from (EST) 3pm-5.15pm and 6pm-10pm. Continue reading
Damian Kulash Net Neutrality Op-Ed in NY Times
Damian Kulash of Chicago band OK Go appeared at the recent house hearing on network neutrality where he argued forcefully for protection of open access to content. Much of the band’s popularity derives from exposure on YouTube, where one homemade video has been accessed over 30 million times. Damian succinctly sums up his thoughts in an Op-Ed piece in today’s New York Times entitled ‘Beware the New New Thing‘. Continue reading
Comcast and BitTorrent announce pact
Mar 27: Comcast and BitTorrent today issued a joint press-release where they announced a collaborative effort to move beyond the current ‘reset spoofing‘ hooha. While Comcast will migrate by year-end 2008 to a capacity management technique that is “protocol agnostic”, BitTorrent agreed to develop fresh “optimizations” that will promoted as application standards.
Both BitTorrent and Comcast expressed the view that these technical issues can be worked out through private business discussions without the need for government intervention. Continue reading
Hearing on Net Neutrality and Free Speech on the Internet
Today the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Antitrust Task Force will hold a Hearing on Net Neutrality and Free Speech on the Internet at 2pm. The hearing will be webcast live. (RealVideo) Continue reading
Has AT&T Lost Its Mind?
In a recent Slate article Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu suggests that the recent proposal by AT&T to monitor internet traffic for copyright violations is the equivalent of corporate seppuku. Continue reading
Flow Rate Fairness: Dismantling a Religion
Network engineer Richard Bennett’s new article for The Register: Dismantling a Religion: The EFF’s Faith-Based Internet explores the difference between the way the EFF wants to see the the Internet managed and current discussions under way in the IETF.
Bottom line: the Internet has never had a user-based fairness system, and it needs one. All networks need one. Continue reading
NET NEUTRALITY MAY NOT RESOLVE BITTORRENT V COMCAST
Comcast’s recent efforts to throttle file transfers using the BitTorrent protocol have led, perhaps predictably, to a renewed call for Congress to enact stiff Net neutrality laws. But even some supporters of new laws–meaning enacting antidiscrimination regulations aimed at broadband providers–are now reluctantly conceding that the proposals that have been circulating in Congress for more than a year may not do much to stop Comcast. Continue reading
EFF RELEASES REPORTS AND SOFTWARE TO SPOT INTERFERENCE WITH INTERNET TRAFFIC
In the wake of the detection and reporting of Comcast Corporation’s controversial interference with Internet traffic, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published a comprehensive account of Comcast’s packet-forging activities and has released software and documentation instructing Internet users on how to test for packet forgery or other forms of interference by their own ISPs. Continue reading
User Centric Internet
The User Centric Internet (UCI) is a new ISOC Public Policy program designed to reassert, in debates and discussions related to the future of the Internet, the importance of the design values and fundamental principles that have underpinned the Internet’s success.
The Internet Society believes that principles such as openness, user choice and control, edge based intelligence, etc., are central to a thriving Internet and, we believe, will be so for the foreseeable future. In focusing on user-centricity the Internet Society is seeking to ensure that the primacy of the user is not forgotten when it comes to new architectures, commercial offerings and policy making. Continue reading
CONGRESSMAN SEEKS TO REVIVE NETWORK NEUTRALITY DEBATE
Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) plans to introduce legislation in December to set the stage for congressional debate in 2008 on the ability of telecommunications companies to restrict content carried over their wireline and wireless high-speed Internet networks. His network neutrality measure would be part of a multi-pronged effort to shift the issue back into the spotlight. It is expected to include hearings in both chambers. Continue reading
VIDEO DISTRIBUTOR TO FCC: STOP ISP TRAFFIC ‘THROTTLING’
A distributor of online video content has filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission, asking the agency to stop broadband providers from blocking or slowing peer-to-peer traffic. The petition filed by Vuze, which uses the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol to distribute Web content, asks the FCC to set rules for network management by ISPs. Continue reading