Happy Weekend. As I write this it’s already the 11th, so you have two shopping weeks left before Christmas. Oops, is it still legal on the Internet not to say Holiday?
Some quick hits for the weekend as we continue to wait on the FCC to explain itself and its plans for radical new Internet regulation.
George Ou points out that if Netflix gets to demand free peering with Comcast, then Netflix ought to demand free shipping over the postal service. After all, if neutral means free, then that’s the next step, right? Just shows how absurd the radicals really are in all of this. Network investment costs money and that money must be recouped with profit, or else that investment isn’t going to happen.
And again, if that investment stops happening, we all lose out.
FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn apparently wants to stick it to wireless providers despite wireless providers never being a monopoly. Monopoly utility providers were of course the original justification for regulation, because in theory you can only run so many wires to a person’s house. That justification never existed with wireless. Competition runs rampant. But the grabbing hands of the socialists grab all they can anyway. All for themselves.
CrunchGear is now off my reading list (and should be off of yours, too) because of serial, in your face bias with respect to Net Neutrality and Wikileaks, but they’ve made a startling admission about the FCC’s broadband propaganda. Americans have lower speed Internet than advocates want because Americans are choosing slower, lower speed plans on purpose. Remember that as people claim we “lag behind” and so regulation is needed.
Drudge Report is being sued for copyright infringement and in this Brave New World of criminalized copyright law, Righthaven LLC, a copyright troll form, is attempting to snatch the DrudgeReport.com domain. Great. Infringe on copyright, permanently lose your identity online. That’s the real identity theft crisis in America.
Every time the iPhone-to-Verizon rumors came around in the past, I dismissed them as false. My standard line was that Apple would not move to Verizon until they had a reason to do so, and that reason was going to be LTE, Verizon’s “4G” high speed access technology. Well, Verizon has gone live with LTE, and sure enough Now the rumor is is that Verizon may get the iPhone exclusively now.
iPhone 5 on Verizon exclusively would make good sense for Apple because the higher speed LTE network, which Verizon has gotten live ahead of AT&T’s LTE network, would make the iPhone look and feel like a more responsive tool. So for the first time, I’m saying iPhone on Verizon is a realistic thing to expect next year, with exclusivity not inconceivable.