"News Corp dumps Microsoft for Google Apps," says this report's headline, shocking the world somewhat. So the Murdoch press itself (The Australian) announces that it is ditching Microsoft, and even more surprisingly for Google, which Murdoch famously hates (we covered many examples to that effect before, even a few years ago, noting Gates connections). Murdoch also hates net neutrality and the Internet/Web in general because it's competition (the Web has just turned 25 [1,2] and some worry about excessive control by few people [3,4], the erosion of basic principles [5], and the death of net neutrality in the US [6-10], rendering the Web not much more than a DRM and surveillance engine [11]). "I would have rather seen a move to Kolab or Citadel but this is a start," says iophk about the news. "They're still locked into Microsoft Office. It seems that LibreOffice should interest them."
As the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web approaches, 87 percent of U.S. adults use the Internet, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
The people conducting the ceremony are part of an organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN is responsible for assigning numerical Internet addresses to websites and computers and translating them into the normal web addresses that people type into their browsers.
Here’s a simple truth: the internet has radically changed the world. Over the course of the past 20 years, the idea of networking all the world’s computers has gone from a research science pipe dream to a necessary condition of economic and social development, from government and university labs to kitchen tables and city streets. We are all travelers now, desperate souls searching for a signal to connect us all. It is awesome.
And we’re fucking everything up.
Massive companies like AT&T and Comcast have spent the first two months of 2014 boldly announcing plans to close and control the internet through additional fees, pay-to-play schemes, and sheer brutal size — all while the legal rules designed to protect against these kinds of abuses were struck down in court for basically making too much sense. “Broadband providers represent a threat to internet openness,” concluded Judge David Tatel in Verizon’s case against the FCC’s Open Internet order, adding that the FCC had provided ample evidence of internet companies abusing their market power and had made “a rational connection between the facts found and the choices made.” Verizon argued strenuously, but had offered the court “no persuasive reason to question that judgement.”
The Internet service provider and the streaming video service announced on Sunday that they had struck a deal that speeds up streaming of Netflix content into the homes of Comcast subscribers. In a joint statement, Netflix and Comcast hailed this “mutually beneficial interconnection agreement” that provides “a more direct connection between Netflix and Comcast, similar to other networks, that’s already delivering an even better user experience to consumers, while also allowing for future growth in Netflix traffic.”
It was revealed over the weekend that Netflix and Comcast had struck a historic deal: for the first time the streaming-video service would pay the cable giant in order to ensure that the huge volume of data it was sending would arrive swiftly and smoothly in customers' homes. This came after months of Netflix traffic performing increasingly poorly on Comcast's network. Also at issue is the massive increase in the last few years of Netflix's size; it grew to encompass roughly one-third of all internet data piped across the United States during prime-time video-viewing hours.
Consumer groups and media watchdogs on Monday expressed “grave concerns” about Netflix’s landmark pact with cable giant Comcast for improved internet service.
Netflix, the world’s largest video on demand service, announced at the weekend that it had made an undisclosed payment to Comcast for direct access to the cable company’s broadband network, in order to ensure smooth delivery of its content.
It’s hard to believe the World Wide Web has already been around for 25 years — the time since Tim Berners-Lee proposed a system that would allow computers to access files on other computers via the Internet.