Paul Kedrosky runs Infectious Greed, a consistently thoughtful and entertaining site devoted to financial affairs, with periodic forays into deepthink. In a recent post C-Beams Glittering Near Tannhauser Gate,* he takes up the issue of information overload and distraction: It’s  easy to be seduced into information overload. We all have a propensity for it, for ...

Craig Engler, GM and senior vice president of Syfy Digital, provides The truth about TV ratings, online viewing and sci-fi shows, debunking the idea that sci-fi gets shortchanged on the viewer count because a high proportion of its audience is tech savvy and uses alternatives to conventional TV. In fact, the counting systems are sophisticated, ...

Verizon’s action last Wednesday (Jan. 19) in filing an appeal of the FCC’s Net Neutrality rule caught the tech world by surprise. My post last Friday discussed some aspects of the situation, but a question remains, why did Verizon appeal and no one else? Surely others are aggrieved, so are they slow or is Verizon ...

Thirty years ago, a contentious agency rule would trigger a “the race to the courthouse.” Under the law at the time, whichever Court of Appeals received the first-filed notice of appeal got the case. But it would not do to file too early, because that rendered the appeal invalid. Wait, and some other interest would ...

Click for full size image Using a variety of sources, Pingdom has put together a list of numbers about the Internet. For example: 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010 (89% were spam). 255 million – The number of websites as of December 2010. 825.1 million – Internet users ...

A consortium of anti-public interest organizations (Free Press; Center for Media Justice; Media Access Project; Open Technology Initiative; New America Foundation; Presente.org) has just petitioned the FCC to act against a new package of 4G LTE services put together by MetroPCS, the nation’s fifth largest mobile phone carrier, which operates non-contract plans in nine major ...

By announcing that it is outlawing paid prioritization, the FCC is declaring that equal treatment is discriminatory. Even if a service is available to all at the same price, which some might think is the essence of NON-discrimination, anyone who does not want to pay for the extra can protest, and apparently have the service ...

It has long been obvious that suing copyright infringers and/or counterfeit goods purveyors one-by-one is a losing strategy in the era of Internet time and geographic reach, so efforts to protect intellectual property are increasingly focused on disrupting the infringers/counterfeiters Internet presence. As noted before in this space, the Feds are aggressively pursuing this option ...

At Alley Insider, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings discusses why he thinks those who short his stock are making a mistake. It is an interesting discussion generally, for its insight into how a shrewd executive views the development of content delivery via the Internet, but for purposes of Digital Society’s focus on Net Neutrality, the most ...

Free Press recently took the lead in drafting a letter to the FCC expressing concern that whatever Net Neutrality rule the agency issues next week will not be enough, and laying out its demands for true openness: Paid prioritization must be outlawed; wireless included; definitions made “loophole-free”;  any specialized services segregated from the bulk of ...