COVERAGE THAT we have found about net neutrality in the corporate media (media which is also in the business of cable, e.g. Comcast/CBS) has been superficial and deceiving, but almost nobody was as biased as Rupert Murdoch's media empire, as we already noted yesterday. Propagators of "trickle-down" and "free market" nonsense are truly happy this week, but they try to at least appear as though they're sympathetic with the public and they cannot just ignore the news (it would harm their perceived legitimacy). A lot of good coverage from bloggers and online rights groups is virtually being drowned out by disinformation from the corporate media. This is very bad. It may also affect a similar crossroad in Europe [1], which also debates net neutrality these days.
A few weeks before a crucial vote on the future European Regulation on the Single Market of telecommunication in Civil Liberties (LIBE) committee, La Quadrature du Net just sent the following email to all the members of this committee, inviting them to propose strong amendments in favour of fundamental rights to the lead committee on this dossier, the Industry (ITRE) committee.
The ruling this week by a federal court on the Open Internet (Net Neutrality) Order may turn out to be, as one commenter called it, "a terrible idea," or, as another observer put it, a source of "a lot of overheated rhetoric." Education, for its part, could well see major changes to how it's able to deliver learning content to students online while at the same time positioning itself to become a major alternative supplier of broadband in this country.
Almost everyone I've spoken to (on both sides of the net neutrality debate) more or less expected the ruling that came down this morning in the DC circuit, in which the appeals court struck down the FCC's net neutrality rules because the the FCC had no mandate under the rules it used to issue that ruling. Basically, this is exactly what lots of us said at the start of this whole process. I've seen a bunch of reports overreacting to this today, from people saying that it's "the death of the internet." It's not. There are problems on both sides here. The telcos absolutely do want to abuse things to effectively double charge both sides. And that could clearly create significant issues with the basic end-to-end nature of the internet.
When the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Order Tuesday—dealing what is being broadly interpreted as a fatal blow to net neutrality— it highlighted the urgent need for the FCC to develop a smarter and more assertive approach to protecting citizens and consumers in the digital age.
The court did leave it up to the FCC or Congress to refashion a net neutrality regime. The new FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, has made noises favoring net neutrality, but he also sounds like someone who's not so committed to the principle.
A court loss for “net neutrality” could mean either a new era of innovation or preferential treatment and higher costs.
Claims that the internet will "democratize" the global village are not supported by research published in the International Journal of Electronic Governance. Instead, non-democratic governments simply exploit the networks to spy on and control their citizens more effectively and efficiently than they did before.
Rupert Murdoch's media company NewsCorp has bought Storyful, an Irish "social media news agency".
The Dublin-based firm has been acquired for $25 million (€£15.3m).
Storyful specialises in licensing and distributing social media content to major news organisations such as the Wall Street Journal and BBC.
Days after he wrote a column endorsing the assassination of President Obama, Fox hosted Michael Scheuer to accuse Hillary Clinton of effectively murdering the Americans who died during the 2012 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya.