Nick R. Brown
Latest from Nick R. Brown
Gamestop Rolls On in Down Economy
GameStop, the video game retailer, has recently released their fiscal year 2010 report and business is a boomin’! The company announced a record sales year in the neighborhood of $9.47 billion. Profits increased to $237.8 million during the fiscal year. GameStop is looking to close 200 stores in areas that are over lapping, but also ...
Do Not TrackDoesn’t Need To Be Regulated, but Probably Will Be
Do Not Track, the application of using a http field that would require applications on the Internet to turn off their tracking features has been a hotly debated issue in tech circles and amongst privacy concerned citizens. The feature has now become a pawn in the high stakes battle between browser designers Microsoft and Mozilla. ...
Fat Pipe Dreams
Richard Bennett recently posted a blog on a recent skirmish occurring over a North Carolina bill, H129, on municipal broadband projects. The growing outcry has been that the bill is attempting to disallow municipal broadband and that the trend could continue into other states. (A copy of the bill can be found here.) However, Bennett ...
A New National Broadband Plan
James Goodmon, President & CEO of Capital Broadcasting Co. has introduced a new proposal for the National Broadband Plan to Chairman Julius Genachowski and the Federal Communications Commission. Goodmon claims that part of the current NBP that will reclaim and auction spectrum will produce only one time financial gains for the FCC and that ultimately ...
Top 10 + 1 Reasons to Say No to Government Takeover of the Internet
During the House’s Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology hearing on H.J. Resolution 37, Disapproving the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission with respect to regulating the Internet and broadband industry practices, Mr. Thomas DeReggi, owner of a small wireless ISP in Maryland, DC, and Virginia gave testimony providing 11 convincing reasons ...
Torrenting Establishing It’s Own Free Market
I had the opportunity to read a paper by several professors at the University of Madrid, Darmstadt University of Technology, and the University of Oregon a few weeks back on the subject of Peer to Peer (P2P) file sharing often referred to in passing as “torrenting”. I’ve been thinking about the paper, which is named ...
National Broadband Map Heavily Visited
The National Broadband Map was brought about by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in order to research communities across the U.S. to help create a visualization of broadband availability. The map launched within the last week and has seen a massive amount of hits (and can be found here). Geographic Information Officer, Michael Byrne, ...
Internet As a Public Utility is Dumb
I recently ran into a blog article by Jonathan at WhoIsHostingThis.com which is a web hosting review site. The article in question was calling for the Internet as we know it to become a public utility. This is a meme that crops up from time to time, but has definitely had some additional traction as ...
Free Market Solution to Video Game “Hate Speech”
I would think that most of us would agree that there are certain less than acceptable ways of talking in the public square. Now even less than acceptable language, even that of the coined “hate speech” variety of communication is still protected speech. The philosophy of deterring certain types of speech through government regulation is ...
Three Concerns on Facebook’s Coming Comment System
Athima Chansanchai has an expanded report on CNET’s Caroline McCarthy’s story on Facebooks move to take over the Internets commenting systems. The new product will be a heavy weight competitor to Disqus, Echo, and Intense Debate commenting systems that are used by many major news sites and blogs. Chansanchai points to a TechCruch article that ...