The FCC just ruled to ban fast lanes for internet access. Consumers have already paid with their bills for bandwidth and they understood that cable companies were trying to double dip by also charging content originators for the same bandwidth. Such paid fast lanes would have deeply engrained existing incumbents and made competition and innovation in content and services much more difficult. Huge kudos to all the organizations that worked so diligently to inform individuals and policy makers ...

Yesterday FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler announced that he would be pursuing Title II classification for wired and wireless ISPs as a way to ensure net neutrality. This is potentially a big step forward on a topic that I have written a lot about here on Continuations. The devil is of course in the details and there is a big fight looming with some of the large cable companies. So we won’t know what we actually get for quite some time. In the meantime a this is a good moment to thank the organizatio...

The Internet is a most amazing thing that we are unfortunately taking for granted. At its core it is about connecting all of humanity with each other. With it we, the people, have the power to dramatically reduce the cost and expand the reach of education. To conduct research outside of the confines of academia or corporations. To collaborate on art projects and so much more. Yet precisely because it is so disruptive for existing power structures including large corporations and governments, ...

From a purely engineering perspective we can calculate the optimal amount of interference for a particular band of spectrum. We want just enough to achieve coverage. Any more is simply a waste of power. It is that knowledge of a hypothetically perfect solution that leads us down the path of saying that spectrum should be auctioned off with the network built out by the winning bidder. That, and the idea of using the money generated from the auction to help with the budget deficit. Both of thes...

My partner Brad has a post up this morning on the USV blog detailing our view why Internet Access Should be Application Agnostic. This is an important topic as it is central to continued innovation by startups on the Internet (see for instance my post titled Net Neutrality is Critical for Innnovation). Because some people will immediately go off saying things like “don’t regulate the Internet” or “regulation is bad for innovation,” I want to emphasize three critical points. First, this is not...

I have blogged in the past about threats to the open web and what to do about them. It is easy to be dismissive of concerns about Apple’s philosophy of control which necessitates a partially closed system. But there is a real danger in being so seduced by the sleekness of a device and its user experiece that one does not reflect on whether the trade-offs in terms of restrictions are actually worth it. That becomes all the more relevant as Apple is beginning to use control of the playing field...

Yesterday, I wrote about why the open web is under attack. Today, as promised, the follow up on what to do about it. I believe the single most important thing is to let Congress know that people actually care about this. Big companies are spending a lot of money lobbying, but good old fashioned calling and faxing (yes, faxing, at least so I am being told by folks from DC) can make a difference. Now “net neutrality,” while somewhat descriptive, is not a great term from a marketing perspective....

Yesterday I wrote about how it feels to me like the economic crisis is accelerating the transition to the information society. I believe that the government stimulus can play an important part here by investing in networks as the infrastructure for the information society. The two key networks are high speed Internet and the electrical grid (see also Sam Palmisano’s Op Ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal). Our existing electrical grid is in a dismal state because regulation for many years...