Friday, November 19, 2010

FCC Looks to "Lame Duck" Net Neutrality Push

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski is planning to take action on a network neutrality rule-making in December, during the congressional lame duck session, Politico reports.

Some 282 lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, already have gone on record opposing such a rule-making, and U.S. courts have in the past reined in on any FCC exerting power when there isn’t any explicit congressional authority, and despite the fact the courts recently have ruled specifically on the issue of whether the FCC has authority to impose such regulations, and decided against the FCC.

An attempt earlier this year by Congressman Rick Boucher (D-Va) to get congressional backing for a new law that would provide such direction to the FCC, and which might have been characterized by many observers as quite a decent compromise, failed to get any traction, and odds will be even worse in the new congress.

The FCC is said to be readying regulations that go further than the Boucher proposal did, basically including both wireless and wired networks in a "no packet shaping" regime. That ensures determined opposition by mobile providers. Verizon earlier had indicated it could live with "no packet shaping" rules for wired networks so long as wireless networks could be managed more intensively.

A reasonable person might wonder why the FCC would persist with a rule-making it recently has been told by the courts it doesn't have the authority to undertake.


Thursday, November 18, 2010

Are We in a Bubble, Again?

Venture capitalists John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins) and Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) talk about the state of both investing and the state of the web ecosystem at large.

While Wilson worries that we may be in the midst of the next “bubble”, Doerr thinks of it as a “boom”.

Broadband Gets Better, Globally

 Global broadband "quality" has improved by 50 percent in just three years and penetration of broadband continues to improve, with about half of the households (49 percent) of the countries investigated now having access to broadband (up from 40 percent in 2008), a study by a team of MBA students from the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and the University of Oviedo's Department of Applied Economics, has found.

Using data from 40 million real-life broadband quality tests conducted in May to June of 2010 on the Internet speed testing site speedtest.net, the researchers were able to evaluate the broadband quality of 72 countries around the globe.

Twitter on Making Money

Twitter exec talks about how the firm will make money.

Google's "20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web: E-Book

I'm not a fan of e-books, but here's Google's "20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web," a tutorial about those subjects.

http://www.20thingsilearned.com/home

What Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is Thinking These Days

Tablet PC shipments to reach 100 million units in 2013

Smartphones, tablet PCs and notebooks will all become mainstream terminal devices in the mobile Internet market in the future with smartphone shipments having a chance to reach 800 million units in 2013, up more than double from 2010, with tablet PCs at 100 million units and notebooks 300 million units, says Digitimes Research senior analyst Joanne Chien.

As smartphone shipments will reach 440 million units in 2011 and continue to see surging growth over the next few years, Chien believes tablet PCs will benefit from the opportunity as consumers will want to enhance their experience from smartphones and decide to choose a tablet PC.

However, since tablet PCs are unlikely to become as popular as smartphones, if tablet PC and smartphone shipments are combined, tablet PCs will only account for 10 percent to 12 percent of the shipments from 2011-2013.

Many Winners and Losers from Generative AI

Perhaps there is no contradiction between low historical total factor annual productivity gains and high expected generative artificial inte...