AT&T and Verizon are the enemies of America. That is the reluctant conclusion today of Gordon Cook, in The Cook Report, a vital piece of work you owe it to yourself to read. Because in just a few minutes, Cook will tell you why that is so. In this he quotes Vint Cerf, now with […]

When I first launched my blog at Corante one of my regular obsessions was what I called "The World of Always-On." By this I referred to wireless networking used as an application platform. In 2002 I was writing extensively about possible medical applications, inventory applications, home automation applications of Always-On technology. Well, there is an […]

I don’t know. The assumption on all sides remains that they will. But the level of criminality, of venality, of mass murder, that a Democratic Congress might uncover makes me wonder: An entire nation lies devastated, 100,000 or more of its citizens dead, no closer to freedom than the day we got there, and all […]

The problem with debating net neutrality is most of us have never experienced it. Doc Searls makes this point brilliantly in a Linux Journal article on the controversy. This is important. Most consumers have only experienced asymetric links, controlled by the carriers, without the ability to run our own Web servers and mail servers. (Port […]

I made a major decision today. I’m moving out on my own. After four years blogging with Corante, I’ve decided to run my own blog, hosted at Typepad, and visible at www.danablankenhorn.com. This is it. I want to thank Gordon Cook and Bruce Kushnick for their role in all this. I launched this blog a […]

America’s failure to deliver broadband — a failure that has become absolute due to the Bell-cable duopoly — also means the end of America’s capability to innovate. This was made clear to me recently by Ronald Baron Yokubaitis, who has been fighting (unsuccessfully) on behalf of competition for a decade. Innovation lost or gone abroad, […]

Sascha Meinrath (left) reports on two bills, just introduced, that could break the deadlock of Infrastructure (or Information, or Digital Futures) Held Hostage by encouraging the development of community WiFi networks. The full post is here. Major reform is afoot! Two bills were introduced on Friday that would radically improve unlicensed wireless access.  Both bills […]

Here is why Bob Frankston says Infrastructure Held Hostage is the best description of what we’re talking about: You are connected if … You are talking a walk and have a heart attack and don’t have to walk home to dial 911 … You aren’t captive to you cellular carrier. … You have a million […]

Recently members of our list have been having a discussion over what we should call ourselves in order to make ourselves better understood by the general public. The term "Infrastructure Held Hostage" sounds obscure, some feel. What about "Information Held Hostage?" Bob Frankston notes that this takes us back 10 years, to the "Information Superhighway." […]

Andy Oram of O’Reilly Media wrote the following for LX’er. It is cross-posted here with permission from the author. Read the full story. The rhetoric is whipping through the air in Washington and racing at a dizzying pace across the Internet, as highly publicized hearings on a "network neutrality" bill were held on February 7. […]