By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  August 13th at 11:00 PM  | 

Time to defend Google: It’s unfair to attack them for excluding Youtube from its “anti-piracy” penalties, when they’re also excluding every other popular site driven by user-generated content. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Youtube are four sites that, whether Google-owned or not, need to be indexed and valued to a degree. The point of the penalty is to punish illegitimate sites, not legitimate sites with some | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  July 24th at 02:30 AM  | 

It’s easy to see why there’s sudden, strong opposition to the Marketplace Fairness Act, as yet another Republican governor, Terry Branstad, backs the bill. I again state my opposition to the lousy language backing the bill, including “fairness” and “loophole”. Yes, that language is being driven by marketplace losers, but both sides of this debate are ponying up cash. I favor the bill on its | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  July 21st at 05:00 AM  | 

Coordination stops the bad guys online. That’s why The Democrats are wrong in their push for a power grab, led by Barack Obama. We just need better information sharing. Pass CISPA or SECURE IT. Not Lieberman-Collins, the former Internet Kill Switch bill.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  December 15th at 03:30 AM  | 

Ordinarily I use Tech at Night to cover a variety of topics that come my way, and I have them in my queue for tonight. But with over 30 items to consider and integrate, most of them on SOPA, I’m shelving the rest for Friday, and discussing just one topic tonight: We must defeat SOPA in the House. It is entirely unacceptable, and I believe | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 27th at 01:00 AM  | 

Top story is easy to pick tonight. The legislation that’s been known in the Senate as PROTECT IP, the Internet censorship blacklist bill that promises to make a huge power grab online, Communist China-style, has come to the House. They’re calling it by two different names: E-PARASITES and Stopping Online Privacy Act, but by either name it’s just as bad. Even as the current laws | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 13th at 03:00 AM  | 

Oh for crying out loud. For all that Washington talks tough about getting Americans access to high speed Internet, the “supercommittee” wants to tax new spectrum licensees. That’s just what we need: make it more expensive to build out America’s wireless infrastructure in order to pay for the President and his Cabinet to hand out money to their friends and political supporters. Isn’t that special? | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 4th at 12:00 AM  | 

So, LightSquared. Some say that in some nebulous way, the firm is getting unreasonable and possibly illicit support from the Obama administration. I still don’t see it though, especially after listening in on a briefing of LightSquared’s today. The briefing discussed in depth the issues LightSquared has had with GPS manufacturers. LightSquared that they’re trying hard to be a “good neighbor” and have worked with | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  September 20th at 01:30 AM  | 

I’d like to start off tonight’s edition by saying that I enjoy some of the pushback I’ve been getting in this Tech at Night series. It’s fun when someone comes here, telling me I’m all wet, then ending up admitting they’re enamored of the whole Obama regulatory apparatus. It feels good to have my pro-liberty, pro-growth, small-government positions validated like that. So to the multifaceted | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  September 15th at 02:00 AM  | 

The FCC continues to stall national 4G wireless competition in America, as LightSquared continues to be stalled even after having to give up half its spectrum! Meanwhile the Net Neutrality power grab creeps closer to being official, at which time MetroPCS and Verizon will sue. I expect them to win and get the regulations tossed out, too, because the last time the FCC tried this, | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  September 6th at 02:30 AM  | 

As Labor Day winds up out here, we have a brief Tech at Night tonight. Something to watch: Eric Schmidt is downplaying talk of Google wanting Motorola’s phone patents after Larry Page pretty much said the opposite. Who’s in charge here? HP sues its own partner over its own idea. Who’s in charge there? A Dutch court only found Samsung phones, not tablets, to infringe | 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)  |  July 20th at 11:00 PM  | 

Twitter has a credibility problem on its hands, all of a sudden. Even as I’m getting blind link spam sent to me every single day on the site, Twitter has singled out a conservative activist group to have its accounts wiped out. Not only was the Empower Texans feed shut down, but every single employee’s personal feed was targeted as well. Twitter’s response has been | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 2nd at 03:30 AM  | 

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 »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 1st at 04:00 PM  | 

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 »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 19th at 03:30 AM  | 

Long week on my end, but thankfully it’s over as soon as I’m done writing this. But the top story is danger at the FCC. The regulator is still threatening to overstep its bounds and circumvent the Telecommunications Act, which strictly limits the amount of power the FCC has over Information Services. So now they want to redefine high-speed Internet access as something new and | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  January 28th at 11:30 PM  | 

I don’t want to go the full Jim Anchower on you all, but the end of the week has been a bit rough on my end. My Internet connection is going full on Neutral on me, by which I mean it’s been going offline as much as it’s online, including a big 8 hours of full downtime at one point. If it weren’t for my | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  January 22nd at 03:30 AM  | 

The big story as we close out this week is Verizon appealing the FCC’s Net Neutrality order. Verizon is choosing to go back to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, the site of the last Net Neutrality legal fight. That was the Comcast v FCC case, lost by the FCC because the FCC simply doesn’t have the legal authority to do it. Some say it | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  November 25th at 04:04 AM  | 

Happy Thanksgiving. I’ll be very brief, because it’s Thanksgiving. The FCC is going to vote on the Internet takeover next month. Defying the law and the courts, the FCC will make a power grab, or at least will try to. There’s still time to get loud, get people informed, and get enough popular opposition to this thing going that the FCC might back off. I’m | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 30th at 03:00 AM  | 

Good evening. Through the magic of Claritin, my favorite drug, I’m able to bring you tonight’s edition. On the Net Neutrality front, the progressive left is getting delusional. They’re pretending that it matters what their members of Congress think when their President has done not one thing to stop his FCC from going off on its own to break the law, defy the courts, and | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 28th at 03:30 AM  | 

Opinions differ on the Cato Institute, but they’re right on when it comes to the ACLU’s deceptive arguments on Net Neutrality. Case after case of alleged net neutrality “violations” are raised and demolished. And remember, this is the case being used to justify urgent action by the FCC in defiance of the law and the courts. It’s all a bunch of garbage.