I don’t want to go the full Jim Anchower on you all, but the end of the week has been a bit rough on my end. My Internet connection is going full on Neutral on me, by which I mean it’s been going offline as much as it’s online, including a big 8 hours of full downtime at one point. If it weren’t for my new iPhone 4 I’d be even worse off.
Maybe I should be like Netflix, who continues to ride the Net Neutrality fad to get its own subsidies. Yes, Netflix now wants all of us, everyone who pays for Internet access at home, to subsidize Netflix users. Hey, that’s good for me, since I’m a subscriber and even dropped to Internet-only as soon as it was available, but I wouldn’t feel right supporting it.
Some Obama administration notes: the FCC is exempt from the President’s order to review regulations. That’s right, digital libertarians: he’s going to be shoving his boot in your face, forever.
Meanwhile the FCC is making its expected challenge to Verizon’s appeal of Net Neutrality. The FCC has to try to counter Verizon’s arguments for being able to appeal “early” and to demand the appeal be handled by the DC Circuit. For now, we wait.
And as the forces of innovation and liberty fight the FCC, Mary Bono Mack is going the next step and taking on the UN, at least symbolically in the form of a resolution opposing UN regulation of the Internet.
Bayshore Networks thinks Eric Schmidt ultimately lost his job as Google CEO over security, suggesting Google should do more application-layer security (Layer 7 in the OSI Model) to work with the more-common network-layer security (OSI Layer 3). With better security the China network attack may not have happened, and Google may not have had to respond by ending cooperation with Chinese censorship, and then Google might not have lost market share in China.
Don’t get the idea that Google is anti-censorship though. Google is not search neutral, as the firm is actively censoring parts of its search service with no apparent option to turn off the filtering.