Good evening. Here’s a bit I’d never expect to read from the San Francisco Chronicle about Sprint’s begging for the FCC to pick winners and losers, instead of just standing aside and letting AT&T and T-Mobile get together: At a time when wireless service is getting cheaper and more innovative, there is no reason for a Depression-era bureaucracy like the FCC to step in and | Read More »
Good evening. I’m not seeing anything huge as we pass the middle of the week. But, you never know what will become important, so let’s take a look at what caught my eye so far this week. Even as Mary Bono Mack seeks to legislate on the news, or at least introduces a bill to make people feel better, Apple explains that the “location tracking” | Read More »
By request, I took a look at this poll by PPP for Daily Kos and SEIU. Markos Moulitsas himself is hyping the poll as showing an enthusiasm gap, which of course was one big indicator of the electoral wipeout we saw in 2010. I think that he’s right, to a degree. However I read the figures as having two conclusions: First, the TEA party effect | Read More »
California’s Democrats, having refused to get tough with the unions who coincidentally will fund their re-election campaigns, are still determined to raise taxes. So they continue to push for an unconstitutional Amazon Tax on the Internet that just might cost the state more than it brings in, in the long run. They’re playing with “thresholds” to try to focus the bill on specific companies like | Read More »
It’s the calm before the storm. House Republicans have taken every ordinary measure to work with the President and get the regulatory excesses under control. The administration has refused though, and now the House is preparing to get tough. This buildup applies not just to the FCC, but also to the EPA and other runaway parts of the executive, but here I’m focused on the | Read More »
Good evening. Darrell Issa is stepping up the pressure on the FCC. He wants to tie spectrum reallocation incentives to Net Neutrality repeal. Many of us want to be able to reallocate spectrum from television stations to multipurpose wireless data, since we as a society are demanding more and faster data these days. If Darrell Issa makes the FCC’s ability to facilitate that, contingent on | Read More »
In a startling turn of events, I’m starting tonight’s edition of Tech at Night at 6pm, roughly 8 hours earlier than I have been starting it lately. Imagine that. Top story is a shocker. I mean, I had no idea the Democrats would get this far out there. Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, wants to pass a national sales tax solely on Internet transactions. The | Read More »
Happy weekend, all. To get personal, had some real excitement on my end. Preemptively replaced my chair before it fell apart, since the last one I let fall apart collapsed while I was sitting in it. I was lucky the only injury I took was a smack on each arm. But, the new chair had the LUMBAR PAD OF DOOM which started killing my back. | Read More »
That’s one of the most boring and least unique Tech at Night titles ever, but I’m going to war with the links I have. Slade Gorton’s priorities are horribly wrong. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. On Tuesday the Greg Walden subcommittee held hearings on “Use of Spectrum with Public Safety.” I’ve already explained why I think the D Block of wireless spectrum | Read More »
In case you missed the great news Friday, Net Neutrality was repealed in the House. The resolution now must go to the Senate, where under the Congressional Review Act it cannot be filibustered, so it only needs 51 votes. And while I do hope that the House will follow up by attempting to repeal the redistributionist data roaming regulations passed last week, other work must | Read More »
Today, the House of Representatives voted to repeal Net Neutrality. H.J. Res 37, a resolution invoking the Congressional Review Act to reverse the FCC’s Net Neutrality order, passed the House under H.Res 200 by a 241-178 vote. Republicans voted 236-0 for repeal, while Democrats voted 178-5 against repeal. The five Democrats? Boren of OK, Conyers of MI, Costa of CA, Peterson of MN, and Shuler | Read More »
Normally when I come across a poll to analyze, I’ll put on my impartial poll analysis hat and run it both at RedState and UnlikelyVoter. However seeing this new push poll by Public Policy Polling and the shamefully credulous response by Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway, I don’t want to hold back. I want to tell it like it is, and why unless some | Read More »
The final House vote is coming to repeal Net Neutrality via the Congressional Review Act. I’m pretty interested to see how many Democrats we can get in the House, because it may give a clue of how many Democrats we can get in the Senate. Remember: under the CRA we only need 51, not 60. I hope we don’t have to fire up the CRA | Read More »
The House of Representatives is likely to vote tomorrow, Thursday, on the repeal of the FCC’s Net Neutrality power grab. Using the Congressional Review Act, the repeal of the Net Neutrality order can be accomplished in an expedited way. In particular this means the bill cannot be filibustered in the Senate, so passing it means something. As Seton Motley said: This is our first opportunity | Read More »
I’m late. No excuses. Let’s go. So the courts threw out Verizon’s challenge of Net Neutrality, rejecting the very clever argument made by Verizon that it wasn’t premature. So now we wait for the actual publication of Net Neutrality to take place. Well, to a point. The Republicans aren’t waiting and will vote this week in the full House to repeal Net Neutrality under the | Read More »
So yeah, Tech at Night. I should start it at some point shouldn’t I? Hours of Spelunky are fun on a Friday evening, combining the action of a classic NES game with the exploration, power growth, and vindictive shopkeepers of Nethack, but I have things to cover tonight, so let’s go. We’ll start with my own post, going over how Eric Schmidt really stepped in | Read More »
Correction on the title of this piece: His campaign advisory role carried over to a ongoing Presidential advisory role, so “Former” isn’t quite accurate. Google Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt tried to use his influence within Google to gain privacy from searches about him, specifically trying to hide his political donations through secret “whitelists” whose existence has only recently been admitted. This revelation from | Read More »
Hello! As is my right, I’m going to start tonight by shamelessly promoting my own piece arguing for the assignment of the D block of wireless spectrum to civil defense and public safety. I keep calling it civil defense because we learned about the need for this after 9/11, and if the actions of the first responders after those attacks wasn’t wartime civil defense, I | Read More »
Remember the Digital TV transition? That was when we took advantage of improved technology by making all the broadcast TV stations give up their old, huge blocks of wireless spectrum, in exchange for receiving new, narrower blocks. By making the switch, we made room for new wireless technologies to bloom. That room was split into 5 “blocks.” The C block, for example, was auctioned off | Read More »
Remember when I seemed to write about Net Neutrality four times a week, which was really something when I was only posting three times? Well, the AT&T/T-Mobile deal is probably going to get that much discussion for now. Of course there’s nothing new yet. Discussion is all there is until government actually starts acting. My job is to find the interesting discussion, I suppose. So | Read More »
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