Scaling the intimacy. This is where Howard Dean failed. His online campaign was unable to give new recruits the same intimate experience he was able to give them six months earlier. His technology platform was wrong. He needed, not a blog, but a Community Network Service. There are many such projects in the open source […]
Is it possible? Could Internet advocates really win the network neutrality fight? It’s still an uphill battle. But the Bell attempts to kill municipal networks on the state level were turned around, after early victories against a backdrop of no publicity. Could the same be happening here? Some news from the front: Bell advocate Mike […]
Welcome to the flip side of Moore’s Law, the problem of abundance. The problem of abundance hit the PC industry starting in the late 1990s. Too many Hertz, too much storage, what can we do with it all? For many years Microsoft seemed to have answers (bloatware! multimedia! movies!) but in this decade even Microsoft […]
The first direct threat to the telephony business model has emerged in England. There The Cloud, a hotspot network, has begun offering a $20/month (11.99 pounds in real money) all-you-can-eat calling plan that could compete directly against cellular. Of course, I hear you say, hotspots are stationery, while cellular is mobile. But the company is […]
We have a new medium here, one that needs principles to assure its liberty. These are political principles. Principles worth fighting for. Principles that are being undermined, systematically, by the Bell companies and the copyright industries, to the ever-lasting economic detriment of the United States of America.
One hallmark of Amazon.Com, back in the 1990s, was their ethics. They had an "associates" program that let you make money advertising their wares, and it paid off. They were careful in their e-mail policies. And you knew what they sold. Those were the days. Amazon is now the Wal-Mart of the Web. They sell […]
The common view on Jimmy Carter is he was a poor President but a great ex-President, a decent man overwhelmed by events. The events of this decade demand a revision of that judgement. Jimmy Carter was a great President. The fault lay in us, not in him. He just didn’t lead a great country, only […]
By trying to appear "tough on crime" Democrats are undermining the open Internet. A Democrat, Diana DeGette of Colorado, is behind a move to mandate a full year of ISP data retention, thus raising a high wall against the creation of competitive ISPs. She is doing this in the name of "fighting child pornography." Republicans […]
The story has spread over the Internet this weekend like wildfire. Verizon has won a ruling that it can charge local calls to ISPs as toll calls. The issue specifically involves an outfit called Global NAPs, which acted as an "ISP’s ISP," offering a huge modem bank to several other ISPs for dial-up service. The […]
No. Neither are the cable companies. Phone and cable companies deliver last-mile Internet service, and phone companies own most of what’s used for backbone Internet traffic in this country. But if they both disappeared tomorrow, would the Internet die with them? No. The Internet is just a means of moving bits between networks. It is […]
