By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 14th at 03:30 AM  | 

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 »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 8th at 08:00 PM  | 

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 »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 7th at 03:30 AM  | 

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 »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 6th at 01:00 PM  | 

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 »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 5th at 03:30 AM  | 

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 »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 31st at 03:30 AM  | 

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 »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 30th at 04:00 PM  | 

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 »

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

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 »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 24th at 03:30 AM  | 

So the top story this week is going to be the AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile USA. There’s a lot being said about it, about unions, about competition, but the story I’m seeing emerging is that this deal is about spectrum. AT&T sees in T-Mobile a way to get the spectrum it needs going forward. In fact, even power grabbing FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said to | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 21st at 11:30 PM  | 

So, read any good Tech posts lately? OK, I couldn’t think of a better way than that tonight to introduce a pair of RedState posts on the top story of the moment: AT&T’s announced plans to acquire T-Mobile USA from the Germans. It seems that there are two major conservative perspectives on this deal. One was described by LaborUnionReport on Sunday: if the non-union T-Mobile | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 21st at 09:00 AM  | 

In the fast-paced, highly-competitive market of wireless phone and Internet access, this announcement stands out. The wireless carrier with the second-most subscribers, AT&T, is to acquire the number four carrier, T-Mobile USA. Some would say that this is a grave threat to competitiveness, risks reducing competition and increasing prices on everyone, and so should be stopped by the benevolent masters of the Obama administration. I | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 17th at 07:30 AM  | 

This edition of Tech at Night is unfortunately delayed. It’s almost 4am now as I’m able to start this (7am eastern) because I had a bout of Net Neutrality to deal with. All websites loaded at the same speed on my DSL: zero. Total downtime. So, late or not, let’s go. As I warned on Monday, Net Neutrality is forcing ISPs like AT&T to impose | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 15th at 03:00 AM  | 

Good evening. I’m going to start tonight with a clarification from Friday. While I identified last week’s Net Neutrality push poll with Consumer Reports, the poll was actually signed on by CR’s publisher, Consumers Union, and conducted by the Consumer Federation of America. As that one television network says, I have now made a report, and you can decide for yourself what to make of | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 12th at 03:30 AM  | 

As I began work on tonight’s late Tech at Night, reports came out of an explosion at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima prefecture, Japan. As Japan continues to deal with an unimaginably strong earthquake and then a devastating tsunami caused by that quake, I hope nobody takes those special circumstances and tries to argue against clean, effective power generation technology in the general case. | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 10th at 02:30 AM  | 

I know nobody wants to talk about Net Neutrality right now when unions are the issue giving everyone warm feelings right now, but there were important hearings held Wednesday. Greg Walden’s House subcommittee held hearings on HJ Res 37, which disapproves of Net Neutrality to invoke the Congressional Review act and overrule the FCC’s power grab. On top of that, the FCC responded to the | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 8th at 12:07 AM  | 

Much to cover, and less time to cover it in! So many important things I don’t even know what to hit first. So, I’ll be biased and hit what I found out about from RedState. Google and the NLRB teamed up to promote unionization, with Google providing free ad space. That’s a problem for three reasons. First, the NLRB is supposed to be the impartial | Read More »

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

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 | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 2nd at 11:00 PM  | 

Welcome to the remarkably early Tech at Night tonight. When I have my initial preparation done by 6pm, I’m not going to stay up until midnight to do the actual writing. Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent. We start with some mild bad news: the resolution disapproving of Net Neutrality has been delayed. Fred Upton is getting recognition for his active work challenging the | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 1st at 03:30 AM  | 

Hello! There’s no one clear theme of things to discuss tonight. It’s a diverse list of topics, so let’s just muddle on through and see what’s going on. We’ve got some good news from what the Republicans in Washington are going. On the Senate side, the side we haven’t heard nearly as much about thanks to the Obama-Reid majority there, conservative Republicans are taking key | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  February 22nd at 01:30 AM  | 

I’m back. CPAC week came and went. Then another week came and went after the horrible cold I got at CPAC. But now I’m healthy again and it’s time to start catching up. Though there’s no way I’m going to post on every tidbit I’ve run across in the last two weeks, I can try to hit the highlights. And let’s start with the fact | Read More »