Spectrum policy is one of the most difficult policy issues that Congress has to deal with, and for that reason the Communications Act of 1934 established the FCC as a non-political technical expert to handle the implementation of Congressional policy in the communications sphere. As things have developed, the FCC has become increasingly political, as ...

Now that a detente of sorts has been reached with Congressional efforts to muzzle some of the most egregious criminal sites on the Internet, attention came resume on some of the other pressing tech policy issues.The spectrum crunch was at the top of the agenda before the anti-crime discussion began in earnest in December (why ...

Vint Cerf, one of the primary designers of TCP/IP and a man who’s among the “fathers of the Internet” has an Op-Ed recently in The New York Times arguing that Internet access is not a “human right.” This has a lot of people buzzing because it’s counter-intuitive. Why would someone whose entire career has been ...

A little less than a month ago, I wrote some effusive praise for the iPhone 4S on this blog and chronicled my buying experience. The 4S is a very impressive device in many respects, but my experience with it on a day-to-day basis has convinced me that it’s not for me so I returned it ...

PC Magazine broke a very interesting piece of news Saturday about a new system Verizon has developed for their wireless network. Briefly put, this system presents an API that allows applications to signal their bandwidth and latency requirements to the network, and allows the network to provide tailored service for a fee. It’s like have ...

There’s a story in today’s New York Times on the impact the iPad is having on hotel Wi-Fi networks. Conclusion: Expect hotels to implement volume-sensitive pricing for Internet access via Wi-Fi. The typical plan will give you enough data for e-mail and basic web surfing, but video streaming is going to cost you. Here’s part ...

A group of researchers at the Danish Cancer Society’s Institute of Cancer Epidemiology in Copenhagen and at the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon have concluded the first serious prospective study of a large population of both cell phone users and non-users over a long span of time. Put simply, the study finds ...

I bought my first iPhone Friday after bucking the trend for lo these many years. This was an upgrade from the Blackberry Bold 9000 that I’ve carried for nearly three years. The iPhone isn’t my first Apple product – I’ve got an original iPad and an Apple TV currently and had a couple of Macs ...

The Time Warner Research Program has published my essay on the Internet architecture, . The essay examines the issues that make it difficult if not impossible for the Internet to continue to grow and meet the challenges that innovation throws at it. The main issues, as I see them, are: IPv4 address exhaustion Routing scalability ...

Over on the Innovation Policy Blog I take a look at the FCC’s broadband speeds report and some of the reactions to it: The results are surprising to some because they contradict a widely-circulated myth to the effect that America’s residential broadband users were not getting what they paid for. The FCC’s previous study, based ...