By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 7th at 02:30 AM  | 

Commerce. “The business of America is business.” Innovation online is growing business, and the most important takeaway you could ever get from Tech at Night is that we need to stay out of its way. BfA seems to agree. And some honest government action on spectrum could be a great start, but we probably won’t start down that road until after January 20, 2013 at | Read More »

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

Yup, CISPA is still the top story. It will improve our security, which matters in an age of Chinese and Anarchist Internet attacks. And unlike Lieberman-Collins, Which is the bill being pushed in the Senate, no government power grab is involved. So the House is right to challenge the President’s push for Lieberman-Collins. Lungren’s PRECISE Act is another bill that would create no new regulations. | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 17th at 12:00 AM  | 

How harmless is CISPA? Despite irrational attacks by association, because we’re apparently supposed to think Republican bills bad, even though the Democrats in the Senate had kept PROTECT IP alive months before Lamar Smith brought SOPA to committee, CISPA has already has been modified to remove mention of copyright infringement. And yet the rage continues. I figured it out, though. The reason CISPA, a previously | Read More »

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

It’s Monday, so it’s time for that weekly self promotion of mine. This week at the Daily Caller I discussed NISO, an information sharing proposal by Dan Lungren that would get government in a role of improving our security online without compromising liberty and innovation. And now back to SOPA. Now Eric Schmidt realizes we don’t want government to have a huge role online, complaining | 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 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)  |  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)  |  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 »

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 6th at 03:00 AM  | 

The new Congress is in session, and while some people are supremely interested in badmouthing the new Republican leadership, I’m more interested in trying to work with the Republicans to oppose the actual bad things being done by the Obama administration. I don’t have time to complain about past votes. Because guess what? Republicans who were previously bad under the Democrats can turn out good | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  December 23rd at 03:00 AM  | 

Tech at Night is starting a little later tonight than I planned. I ended up showing my brother The Greatest American Hero on Netflix. Oddly enough I had no trouble with that despite the Net Neutrality framework not having taken effect. But yes, the big story is that the FCC voted to regulate the Internet. This has been coming for a long time, but now | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  December 16th at 03:00 AM  | 

Once upon a time I used to be sleep at midnight. Of course, if I’d buckle down and get Tech at Night out the door a few hours earlier, then I’d be able to be asleep right now at midnight, I suppose. Regardless, here we go. The FCC’s Net Neutrality vote is still on for the 21st, that is, Tuesday. Of course they’d miss the | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  December 11th at 03:00 AM  | 

Happy Weekend. As I write this it’s already the 11th, so you have two shopping weeks left before Christmas. Oops, is it still legal on the Internet not to say Holiday? Some quick hits for the weekend as we continue to wait on the FCC to explain itself and its plans for radical new Internet regulation. George Ou points out that if Netflix gets to | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  December 2nd at 05:45 AM  | 

There’s a lot of heat and unfortunately not enough light being produced online with respect to the recent decision by Comcast to cut off its free peering deal with Level 3, thanks to the throwing around of the name Netflix. People like Netflix and want to know what’s going on. I even have a Netflix streaming-only account. So I’ll try to explain here what’s going | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  December 2nd at 05:30 AM  | 

Just as I was saying copyright was soon to replace Net Neutrality as the big tech issue of the moment, circumstances prove me wrong. Instead, regardless of the results of the December FCC meeting and the future of that whole Net Neutrality debate (more later), the coming issue now is going to be peering. Some will play word games and say it’s all covered under | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 26th at 02:00 AM  | 

Yes, we’re talking about Google again tonight. Of course they never did delist Daily Kos after the Chris Bowers manipulations, despite having gone after Kay Bailey Hutchison for breaking their rules. But we have more to ride them about: They’re blocking pro-life ads again. These ads are running on local television in DC for Republican Missy Reilly Smith who is challenging Delegate Holmes Eleanor Norton, | Read More »