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Tech at Night: Net Neutrality, FCC, iPad

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 5th, 2011 at 12:30 AM  | 

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Tech at Night

Good evening, I wrote in my best Alfred Hitchcock impression. Top story as we go into the weekend: our friendly neighborhood House Republicans are pressing on with their oversight of the FCC and Net Neutrality in particular. The resolution disapproving of Net Neutrality is postponed, but instead we’re getting pressure on the FCC to justify its actions economically. Good on Greg Walden, Fred Upton, and Lee Terry!

Meanwhile, up in Vermont, we’ve got a case study going on demonstrating why we don’t want industrial policy in the volatile, constantly innovating telecommunications world. Government grants to favored firms tend to favor those firms and their investors, not the people intended to get the help. Vermont is trying to pump government money into Universal Access, and failing. Let’s not repeat that nationally, please.

And of course, besides all of the legal, Constitutional, and rights-based arguments against Net Neutrality, there’s always been one fundamental practical issue with it: the Internet is too complicated for the government to deal with effectively. I’ve been linking to Seton Motley in Tech at Night for a while now, and he found a great map of the Internet to illustrate this, with the perfect post title to go with it: “Ok, Apply Net Neutralty to THIS.” Indeed.

Going more generally, I just love Jim Harper at Tech Liberation Front’s story of the cough drops to refute the vastly overused socialist concept of Market Failure.

And back to some specifics: The California Board of Equalization may be one of the most socialist (but accurate) agency names ever, but it’s still not covering for the Democrats’ lies about the unconstitutional Internet Sales Tax or if you prefer, Amazon Tax.

So there’s a Nintendo 64 emulator for sale in Google’s Android Market. I think it’s perfectly fair to say that Google has a history of benefiting from or even facilitating copyright infringement. Where would YouTube be without mass copyright infringement, for example? Has the firm ever shown any interest in property rights for anyone but itself, though?

And now to close the night with some plain old personal opinion about a new product. The iPad 2 is going to be a success, as people without iPads will continue to buy them, but I don’t think the new model gives most users much reason to upgrade. Some will love the new cameras for FaceTime, but my own observations suggest it’s a niche application with little broad popularity. Others will get excited about having more memory and CPU power, but I think most users won’t notice the dual core processor once they finish reading the Tech Specs web page on the Apple site. There’s nothing exciting to see in the iPad 2 if you already have an iPad.

So if you don’t yet have an iPad then sure, pick up an iPad 2. The iPad is a great toy and traveling tool for email, webpages, and other tasks. The vast array of apps on the App Store will help you get many things done. But if you already have an iPad, I suggest waiting for Apple to improve something exciting like the screen.

I personally will wait for a “Retina” display to come to the iPad. The original and new iPad models both have the same 1024×768 resolution. I was hopeful that the iPad 2 would bring 2048×1536, but I have been terribly disappointed. Now I have the same hopes for the iPad 3. Don’t let me down, Apple. Please?

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  • videosavant

    The FCC has recently decided that it will more clearly define what it means by “bargaining in good faith” when it comes to negotiations between companies over retransmission fees.

    This, of course, is coming from the same folk who are now holding a 2+-week seminar in Wisconsin (and outlets in northern Illinois) on the elements and acceptable tactics of good faith bargaining.

  • http://www.hostmycalls.com jwaldrop

    This debate has become overrun with hype and hyperbole. Al Franken called net neutrality “the First Amendment issue of our time.” Is there any substance to support that extreme statement? To be fair, Michelle Bachman has a statement just as extreme. The rules passed by the FCC do not amount anywhere close to cencorship of the Internet.

    I am against Net Neutrality for two reasons. 1. A problem should exist before the federal government jumps in with rules and regulations. There were no serious net neutrality violations happening at the time of the rule making. Comcast and Level3/Netflix does not count. The conflict between those companies is not related to net neutrality at all. 2. When the FCC passed the net neutrality rules, they touched off a firestorm of debate and court action. That firestorm is a huge distraction from real Internet issues that affects all Americans such as increasing broadband competition and getting broadband deployed to rural areas. I like this article as well: h ://ww w.host myc alls.com/2 011/03/01/net-neutrality-%e2%80%93-the-pot-holed-road-to-nowhere/.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    Since you’re just here to shill for state subsidy of your firm, you’re gone.

  • http://www.ArchitecturalShots.com mdyou

    The state of California is now unashamedly telling it like it is: anything that hasn’t been taxed will be. Why? Because we want the money, and because we can.

    The Amazon Tax is only one aspect of these job destroying schemes. The state now is going after non-tangible items that were never subject to sales tax. This will be a HUGE additional expense (tax) on business owners. Here’s why.

    The eternal justification for charging a ‘use tax’ has always been that the state deserves a piece of the profits for the “transfer of TANGIBLE PERSONAL PROPERTY”, presumably because the state provides the business climate and protections thereof. Early on in the internet age, they ruled that delivery of files over the internet was non-taxable, since the product was not ‘tangible’.
    Well, the fact that they cannot tax iTunes sales gall the hell out of them. Unfortunately, removing this ‘tangible’ definition will apply to a whole host of businesses and drive up their costs. Think of software makers delivering downloadable programs in-state – they are currently not subject to sales tax.

    The problem is that, over the years, the Board of Equalization has ruled one item after another excluded from taxation under the concept of the ‘resale license’. Meaning that, items purchased as components of a finished item to be sold (naturally for a greater price) were not subject to tax. Think of a photographer buying film, chemicals, and processing to be delivered as part of a finished photography assignment. One by one, such items were ‘deemed’ to not be part of the eventual delivered product, and thus subject to tax at that level.

    This aspect might seem to many to be delving into the deep weeds of obscure tax policy, but believe me, this is the kind of thing that will exponentially drive up the costs of doing business, and ultimately increase the cost of virtually everything for consumers.

    Inflation and redistribution, quite a double-whammy.