Ryan Singel at Wired News has a great article on the battle (has it really been ten years? My, how time flies) ten years ago over the Communications Decency Act. The article is entitled “They Saved the Internet’s Soul.” I highly recommend it, it’s only two pages long. This case went all the way to…
Category: Internet Governance
Is Google taking a free ride?
On Monday, a Verizon executive named John Thorne spoke before a conference celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. His message? That Google is freeloading on the companies that built the Internet backbone, companies like Verizon that own the fiber, without paying their fair share. For a deeper summary of what he…
First Google censors China, now Wikipedia censors Congress
Google’s recent announcement that it will comply with China’s demand for Google’s search results to be censored for users within China was only the beginning. Now, Wikipdedia is blocking edits to its pages from the entire range of IP addresses that belong to the U.S. Congress. Wikipedia editing has been in the news lately, ever…
CALEA Expansion Under Fire
As I wrote on September 30th, the battle over the expansion of the CALEA regulations (which stands for the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Agencies) is underway. A lawsuit filed on October 25, 2005 before the D.C. circuit asks for review of the FCC’s final order. Seven organizations, including the American Library Association, the Electronic…
Attention – Part III
Here comes the Attention Recorder! Introduced today by AttentionTrust.org is a Firefox extension that allows users to save their attention data and to share it with services that are als0 members of the Attention Trust. It doesn’t look like that there is anybody to share it with yet, I presume that the entry for “Acme…
Battle Lines being Drawn – Law Enforcement v. Internet Freedoms
I was referred to a nice article by Declan McCullagh outlining the implications of a new “Policy Document” released by the FCC late last Friday, Sept. 23rd. The FCC has come up with the following four pronged set of principles that will govern any new Internet policy it develops: Moreover, to ensure that broadband networks…
Attention – Part Two
Since the first post, I found an excellent summary of Attention from a practical point of view by Dare Obasanjo. Nick Bradbury has another good post. From an IP attorney’s point of view, Attention is interesting because it is an attempt to create a new property right in the aggregate of data. It’s different from…
Attention – Part One
My Attention was drawn by the recent Gillmor Gang on Attention, forcing me to listen to the whole thing three times in order to get a handle on where the Gang was coming from. Steve Gillmor is now the president of Attention Trust, a new non-profit group interested in advocating for the “basic rights of…
U.S. Government announces it won’t release DNS to ICANN
A small but important development in the relationship between the US Department of Commerce, which used to directly regulate the Internet’s top level domains (.COM, .NET and .ORG) and ICANN, the group currently charged with the task. ICANN is the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, the closest the Internet comes to having a…