National - Monday, October 26, 2009 11:10 - 6 Comments

Techno-Illiterate McCain Act Could Slow Traffic to Your Favorite Websites

Senator John McCain proposed a bill on Friday that would effectively bar the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from regulating communications.

McCain’s Internet Freedom Act of 2009 is a misnomer for legislation that would allow wireless and broadband service providers like AT&T and Comcast to unfairly regulate traffic based on their commercial interests, thereby eliminating net neutrality.

Net neutrality is the simple concept that all traffic is created equal and therefore service providers should not be allowed to prioritize access to certain websites over others. Service providers want to do away with net neutrality so they can charge sites that generate large amounts of traffic or slow traffic to websites that compete with their commercial interests.

In the past the FCC has restrained companies that attempted to infringe on net neutrality. In 2008, the FCC reprimanded Comcast for “throttling” peer-to-peer traffic (like BitTorrent). Though Comcast claimed to choke such traffic as a means of managing peak-congestion, the FCC found that Comcast did so during off-peak hours as well. If McCain’s bill passes, the Internet Freedom Act would make Comcast’s “traffic throttling” perfectly legal.
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National - Tuesday, December 2, 2008 6:00 - 0 Comments

Free Broadband Within a Year?

USA Today reported yesterday that the FCC will vote on December 18th to approve a plan to turn a currently inactive broadband spectrum (AWS-3) into a free wireless Internet network across the US. The plan would accept bids from service providers to run the network, at least 25% of which would have to be free. Users will likely be able to pay more for faster speeds.

Best of all, free broadband could be available in under a year. Continue…

Opinion - Thursday, September 18, 2008 0:00 - 4 Comments

Journalism Student Told Not to Report on Journalism Class

Last week, this post on the Journalism department by Alana Taylor caused a little bit of a buzz – you may recognize it from my post on a similar theme the next day.

In fact, Alana’s post turns out to have caused enough of a buzz that the teacher whose class she wrote about read it – and wasn’t too pleased.
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Opinion - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 0:00 - 1 Comment

Google: A Decade of Dominance

Ten years ago today, two Stanford grad students incorporated their fledgling online search engine, Google. They probably didn’t foresee it becoming the most used on the Internet, serving up more searches than every other provider combined.
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