Markets work, folks. Americans have way more invested in our wireless than the rest of the world.. As a result, our wireless is the best in the world. This is why the broadband story is never completely told by the pro-regulatory faction: they need to “hide the decline” of socialized wireless.
Also, it’s beginning to look like Rand Paul is running for President (shocker, I know). Despite prominent wealthy California Democrats are, you now, Democrats, the Senator is trying to get support there. I suppose he’s trying to replace his father’s fringe base with left-libertarians. So he even talked to Wired and is cozying up to Silicon Valley industry. Will it translate to votes? Certainly not in the primary and I’m skeptical in the general. But if it works for him, it could be big.
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New York City’s ban on select beverages larger than 16 ounces struck many of us as a progressive nanny state running its due course. It was a senseless blow to liberty, expanding government in a pointless way, that also happened to affect less-wealthy New Yorkers disproportionately.
But as the city now turns toward enforcement of the ban, new developments in city government point to a disturbing revelation: New York City’s health department knows nothing about science, about testing, or about how to use calibrated instrumentation to make accurate measurements in restaurants.
In expanding the nanny state, Mike Bloomberg reveals New Yorkers probably aren’t very safe under its growing umbrella.
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Been a while since we started with some Google. Taking fire from two directions right now: I’ve pointed out that we need to watch them to see if they end up as politically even handed as they now claim to be. Microsoft is also after them by attempting to discredit their privacy policies.
Here’s the problem though. Microsoft’s ad campaign assumes people actually care about privacy. They don’t. Their actions in the marketplace indicate otherwise. That’s the real reason people don’t care about long privacy policies. Which is also why the only net effect of a California simplified privacy policy rule, would be to drive job creators out of the state.
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Twitter has a credibility problem on its hands, all of a sudden. Even as I’m getting blind link spam sent to me every single day on the site, Twitter has singled out a conservative activist group to have its accounts wiped out. Not only was the Empower Texans feed shut down, but every single employee’s personal feed was targeted as well.
Twitter’s response has been non-descriptive, and lacking in any support. Conveniently for Twitter, by blocking the accounts, it’s impossible for any observer to confirm or deny their allegations of Twitter rules violations. I can only conclude, in the absence of evidence, that somebody in Twitter has decided to get political. And that is Twitter’s problem to fix.
Follow FreeMQS for further developments. Update: Actually, don’t. I was misinformed on this one as the story developed last night.
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And we truly are back. Friday night was a night off thanks to some maintenance at RedState. It was nice because I could rest on a Friday night… but it’s not so nice now when I have a whopping 20 Firefox windows to sort through tonight. So here we go.
With so many big stories going on, it’s hard to pick which one to start with. So I’ll start with the one that may be under the radar more than the others. The FCC refused to declare the wireless market competitive in its annual report required by the [Correction: OMNIBUS BUDGET RECONCILIATION ACT OF 1993]. This is a ridiculous position to take. Despite obvious, quantifiable proof that prices are lower, service is better, and choices abound, the FCC has refused to admit the market is competitive for ideological reasons. After all, if the FCC finds the market competitive, it can’t give itself permission to regulate further. Just more proof we need FCC reform, joining the long list of existing reasons.
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Net Neutrality (which Mike Wendy calls a “Private Property Slap-Down”) may not be any longer the top issue on the Obama administration’s side of things, but questions still remain. And the funny thing: all the Net Neutrality advocates in the world working in the White House were no big deal. But all of a sudden it’s a concern that a former AT&T President going to the White House is a problem.
But yes, the FCC wants to change the subject. Now suddenly the press is to open up more bandwidth for wireless Internet access. Funny, I was assured during the Net Neut debate that wireless access didn’t effectively exist. Now the FCC wants to expand it. More spectrum isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we do have to watch how it is acquired.
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So Free Press and MoveOn.org decided to protest Google’s new stance with Verizon on Net Neutrality. They went to Mountain View and everything, but there’s just one catch: they only managed to bring 100 people.
(Photo via @mjterave.) Just more evidence that Free Press and MoveOn are the ones taking the radical fringe position on Net Neutrality.
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