By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 10th at 12:30 AM  | 

Monday night, as promised, we still have some catch up work to do. So let’s start with those Amazon Taxes, those Internet sales taxes of dubious Constitutionality. Colorado’s got tossed in federal court and Illinois’s didn’t raise any money. Obeying the Constitution counts, folks. Pass a true interstate compact through the Congress first. Also as promised, there’s the matter of the Next Generation Television Marketplace | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 8th at 01:30 AM  | 

ACTA. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is Darrell Issa’s next project, as he’s not happy about the treaty. So, he’s put the treaty online for all to see. I still don’t know of any specific reason to oppose the treaty. My understanding is that it basically brings the west in on the DMCA. There may be details I’ve missed though. The best argument against the treaty | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 31st at 11:00 PM  | 

Last week I noted that the FCC is officially moving ahead with its new subsidy program. The administration will convert the Universal Service Fund – currently taxing the public and handing it out to rural telephone carriers – into a grab bag of Internet subsidies. The rural phone companies are unhappy, and everyone else is racing to get a cut. C Spire, apparently serving many rural southern customers, | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 5th at 08:30 PM  | 

Steve Jobs died today after a long battle with cancer. He was 56. Founding NeXT would have been enough to turn anyone into a cult hero in his field. Acquiring Lucasfilm’s Graphics Group and turning it into Pixar would have made anyone a respected business leader. But for Steve Jobs, those were feathers in his cap called Apple, the company he co-founded with Steve Wozniak, | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  July 30th at 02:30 AM  | 

I’ve been warning for ages that Universal Service Fund reform was coming, and that it would end up as an Internet tax. Well here we go: Plans are afoot. Oddly enough though, people seem fine with the America’s Broadband Connectivity Plan, which so far seems to be a plan to redirect funding toward greater Internet access. Free State Foundation is fine with the plans so | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  December 9th at 02:00 AM  | 

Oh boy, I’m tired tonight. It would be so tempting to give Tech at Night a pass tonight but I have clothes in the dryer anyway, so let’s go. Let’s talk about Net Neutrality. In fact, let’s talk about who’s funding the voices supporting Net Neutrality. Bob Parks of Black and Right and posting right here at RedState did some digging and found that CREDO | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  November 30th at 01:15 AM  | 

Hello! The big story that we’ve been following with Tech at Night since the beginning has been Net Neutrality, but right now we’re still stuck waiting on this issue. Republicans aren’t going to act on it until January at the earliest, and we aren’t going to know what (if anything) the FCC will do on the issue in December until they tell us. So we | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 19th at 02:00 AM  | 

Previously we covered Chris Bowers working over at Daily Kos on a linking scheme to manipulate Google’s search service. Now we come across a new attack on the company, a plan to manipulate click tracking the firm does to figure out what links are most interesting to its users. Of course, the Daily Kos folk want to smear Republicans using Google. Again, we look to | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  August 31st at 02:45 AM  | 

Good evening (it’s still Monday night for those of us in the west at least). Let’s start off tonight by remembering when Barack Obama and the democrats complained about so-called domestic spying under the Bush administration? Well, a team of organizations went after the FBI for watching possibly terrorist Islamic organizations. The FBI responded by saying they don’t need to already believe an organization is | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  August 18th at 11:30 PM  | 

Good evening. A story I expect to hear more about is this a proposed subsidy for radio stations and the RIAA both of some sort of legal requirement for new cellular phones to include an FM radio receiver. Such a requirement would raise costs on everyone, lower innovation and even basic differentiation options, and be nothing but a detriment to anyone who shops for cellular | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  August 3rd at 01:00 AM  | 

Good evening. It’s going to be short tonight, because I don’t actually have anything new to say about G—– or F— P—- tonight, as against freedom as they both are. But I will say this about Net Neutrality: competition from new technology is the way out of any problems we have with the ISP monopolies and duopolies that state and local regulators cram down our | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  July 29th at 02:59 AM  | 

A key story from today centers on John Dingell and his criticism of Chairman Julius Genachowski and the Obama FCC. Hillicon Valley reports that Dingell is criticizing the Commission harshly for failing to justify its Title II Reclassification plans to Deem and Pass Net Neutrality regulation of the Internet, and is telling them to stop and let the Congress do its job. Seriously, this is | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  July 27th at 03:28 AM  | 

Good evening. Sure, it’s technically morning, but when I went to post tonight I realized I had nothing queued up to write about, so I had to make a crash run through my news feeds before I could get started. But get started we shall tonight with Apple and the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress is apparently entrusted with setting rules for what | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  December 2nd at 06:11 AM  | 

In another triumph of openness for the Hopenchange™ administration, the secret negotations of the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting and Trade Agreement (ACTA) continue. And according to Wired, they’re not going well for the President. A note from the EU to the US was leaked and published to a European website, and it exposes two facts. First, Hollywood isn’t content to have gotten two expansions of copyright in | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  November 4th at 10:02 PM  | 

The last time a Democrat was in the White House we got the Communications Decency Act (since thrown out by the Supreme Court) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (still a weight on the neck of American innovators). This time we’re not only seeing “Net Neutrality” being used as cover for sweeping proposed regulation of the Internet like never before seen in this country, but | Read More »