The other big news after SOPA crashed and burned last week following online protests, was the shutdown of the website Megaupload for online infringement. The U.S. Department of Justice announced in a statement that a grand jury had indicted seven individuals and two corporations with running an “international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyright works.” Notably, law enforcement officials arrested top executives of...

Compartmentalization is one of the things people do best. Life is complicated, so it’s a lot easier to deal with its troubles and travails in little pieces. As Scarlett O’Hara said when she lost Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind: “I can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow.” Compartmentalization plays a large role in both engineering and Internet policy. Engineers and policy makers can influence the nature of the Internet in countless ways by developing...

An op-ed by Susan Crawford in last weekend’s New York Times Weekend Review paints a very peculiar picture of America’s broadband networks. Crawford claims, as she has for many years, that American broadband is a dire mess that can only be fixed by the government's enacting sweeping new regulations on the way the networking business is structured. In particular, she wants Congress to require each network owner to sell wholesale services at a price set by the FCC under a system of “structural separation”...

If you want to understand how problematic our spectrum allocation practices are in the United States, you need look no further than the kerfuffle around the transfer of Channel 55 licenses from Qualcomm to AT&T. The transfer should be a no-brainer: Qualcomm isn’t using the spectrum and AT&T has an immediate need for it. Qualcomm bought their licenses fair and square, and they’re happy with the price AT&T is willing to pay. The new use is similar to the old use in all the relevant technical...

One of the hottest issues in mobile broadband policy today is the nature of the national public safety network that’s been under discussion since the 9/11 Commission examined the shortcomings in the systems currently used by first responders.  The Commission’s report highlighted the incompatibility of emergency response networks used by the Fire Department of New York, the Port Authority, and the New York Police Departments, recommending improved information sharing. Subsequently, Congress and...

The FCC released an important new report Tuesday, Measuring Broadband America, which shows how actual broadband speeds compare to advertising claims. You can read the report and download the data the FCC collected here. The report is the result of a year of work by the FCC, its contractor Sam Knows, and a diverse group of people from the FCC, industry, universities, and public interest advocacy. The report follows a year after a quick snapshot of broadband speeds conducted during the development...

Broadband usage fees and limits are back in the news again: the New York Times editorialized against them recently, and the Washington Post’s Cecilia Kang reported that “experts” have concerns about them.  We covered this issue in a previous post on AT&T’s usage limits back in March, but it’s worth revisiting the issue to examine the latest round of complaints. Broadband usage caps or service tiers follow from the principle that the more of a resource you use, the more you pay. This principle...

I’ve written a column for CNET on spectrum policy, "Meeting the need for spectrum," addressing some of the arguments we hear about spectrum demand and supply. Some advocates insist that the demands of mobile broadband users for increased data capacity can be met without allocating the additional spectrum recommended by the National Broadband Plan, but that’s not realistic. While it’s certainly true that spectral efficiency has steadily increased for the past 100 years, the rate at which...

I enjoyed Charlie Sheen's performance in Major League, the movie where he played pitcher Ricky "Wild Thing" Vaughn. Wild Thing is an all-over-the-place fastballer who terrifies hitters as Ryne Duren did for Mickey Mantle's Yankees while wearing eyeglasses with lenses as thick as Coke bottles. Lately Sheen has been as erratic as Wild Thing's fastball, and I had to wonder if he didn't get control of the Free Press publicity machine when I read their reaction to the AT&T usage caps announced yesterday...

There’s a big fight going on in North Carolina over rural broadband. Representative Avila and Senator Apodaca have introduced bills that would place some fairly light restrictions on the business practices of municipal (government owned and operated) broadband networks that have drawn the ire of network equipment vendors and out-of-state muni broadband activists. Charges and counter-charges are flying fast and furious. Well-travelled muni broadband consultant Craig Settles says the authors are...