- Ethics and Economics — This paper looks at the evidence that suggests that ethical behaviour is good for the economy.
- FCC to Regulate Broadband — Two FCC officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski will announce Thursday that the commission considers broadband service a hybrid between an information service and a utility and that it has sufficient power to regulate Internet traffic under existing law.
- TCP/IP and IMS Sequence Diagrams — watch SYN, ACK, payload, etc. packets to and fro to understand what really happens each time you fetch mail or surf the web. This is what Velocity-type devops performance folks care about.
- How to Build a Time Machine (Daily Mail) — extremely readable article by Stephen Hawking about the possibilities of time travel.
"fcc" entries
FCC.gov poised for an overdue overhaul
FCC managing director Steven VanRoekel on participation and building platforms.
The Federal Communications Commission is prepping a significant reboot of its website. In this interview, FCC managing director Steven VanRoekel explains how citizen participation and open government are shaping the new FCC.gov.
Four short links: 6 May 2010
Ethics, Regulation, TCP/IP, and Time Travel
DC Circuit court rules in Comcast case, leaves the FCC a job to do
The DC Circuit didn't tell the FCC to turn back. It has a job to
do–promoting the spread of high-speed networking, and ensuring that
it is affordable by growing numbers of people–and it just has to find
the right tool for the job.
Google Fiber and the FCC National Broadband Plan
I’ve puzzled over Google’s Fiber project ever since they announced it. It seemed too big, too hubristic (even for a company that’s already big and has earned the right to hubris) — and also not a business Google would want to be in. But the FCC’s announcement of their plans to widen broadband Internet access in the US puts Google Fiber in a new context. The FCC’s plans are cast in terms of upgrading and expanding the network infrastructure. That’s a familiar debate, and Google is a familiar participant. This is really just an extension of the “network neutrality” debate that has been going on with fits and starts over the past few years.
Report from HIMSS Health IT conference: building or bypassing infrastructure
lectronic record systems need all kinds of underlying support. Your
patient doesn't want to hear, "You need an antibiotic right away, but
we'll order it tomorrow when our IT guy comes in to reboot the
system." Your accounts manager would be almost as upset if you told
her that billing will be delayed for the same reason.
Google Enters the Home Broadband Market
So That's What All of Google's Dark Fiber Was For
In a week already full of Google announcements, another bomb was casually dropped today via Google’s blog. The Borg from California announced that it was experimentally entering the Fiber to the Curb (FTTC) market, and that they planned to offer much higher speeds than current offerings (1Gb/sec) and competitive pricing. The announcement also talks about what, when you remove the marketspeak, is a commitment to net neutrality in their service. This, of course, is not surprising, given Google’s strong lobbying for neutrality to the FCC and congress.
Innovation Battles Investment as FCC Road Show Returns to Cambridge
Opponents can shed their rhetoric and reveal new depths to their thought when you bring them together for rapid-fire exchanges, sometimes with their faces literally inches away from each other. That made it worth my while to truck down to the MIT Media Lab for yesterday’s Workshop on Innovation, Investment and the Open Internet, sponsored by the Federal Communications Commission. The event showed that innovation and investment are not always companions on the Internet. An in-depth look at the current state of the debate over competition and network neutrality.
A Crowd-Sourced National Communications Census
The FCC is charged with creating a National Broadband Plan in 2010. But how can we plan for the future is we don't know where we are? Here, we propose a crowd-sourced National Communications Census.
FCC discusses broadband: the job is a big one
Around the time I submitted a proposal on the White House’s open government dialog site for local forums to implement high-speed networks, the FCC released a 77-page report (in PDF format) that casts some light on the proposal. Their report, titled “Bringing Broadband to Rural America: Report on a Rural Broadband Strategy,” covers a huge range of ground (and retells a lot of standard stories, including the reasons for universal service in broadband and a history of public infrastructure efforts). This post details some of the impressions I got relevant to local forums.