Internet Under Attack: Latest News Stories

Censorship

Traffic

We've Entered The Age Of 'Fiber To The Press Release'
While Google Fiber has managed to get ISPs to compete in the areas it's deployed, the project has also managed to spawn a new, misleading but entertaining phenomenon I've affectionately labeled "fiber to the press release." In a fiber to the press release deployment, a carrier (usually one with a history of doing the bare minimum on upgrades) proudly proclaims that they too will soon be offering 1 Gbps broadband. The announcement will contain absolutely no hard specifics on how many people will get the upgrades, but the press will happily parrot the announcement and state that "ISP X" has suddenly joined the ultra-fast broadband race. Why spend money on a significant deployment when you can have the press help you pretend you did?

Europe

Europe's telecom tie-ups signal big shakeup
In what some industry observers are calling a "Back-to-the-Future" moment, the need for faster and wider pipes to deliver video and other data-intense applications is driving a raft of tie-ups between mobile and cable operators that is only expected to accelerate.
EU net neutrality vote would let ISPs charge for Internet “fast lane”

iophk: "It's not so much that it would create a fast lane, but that it creates artificially slow lanes which make once normal service look fast in comparison. Can the proposal be pruned of noxious riders or is it a poison pill for the otherwise consumer-friendly proposal?"

iophk: "Looks like certain interests are learning now to use riders on legislation."

Control

Lexingtonians Consider Municipal Network Options in Kentucky
Community leaders in Lexington are the latest to stand at a fork in the broadband road. In September, the franchise agreement between the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government (LFUCG) and Time Warner Cable expired, resulting in a month-to-month agreement continuation. As they negotiate a new contract, local citizens have called for consideration of a municipal network.

No, the U.S. Isn’t ‘Giving Up Control’ of the Internet"
On a sleepy Friday afternoon last week, the U.S. Department of Commerce dropped what seemed, to many, like a bombshell: It intends to transition its coordinating role over the Internet’s domain name system—those web addresses you type into your browser—to the global Internet community.

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