By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  December 18th at 01:30 AM  | 

Hello again. Having been traveling from Wednesday to Friday for my employer, I did my best to get this out Friday night, but I crashed about a third of the way into my backlog of links. Then over the weekend my email server died. So, we catch up with Tech at Night on Monday!

We’ll start with the International Telecommunications Union. Reports came out that ITU anti-liberty proposals were backing off, but the effort is going in the wrong direction. A big chunk of the Anglosphere is against it, including the Obama administration.

The President is getting credit for this position from industry and House Republicans, but consider this: if the ITU’s secretary general didn’t see the Obama opposition coming then just how muted were Obama’s efforts to fix the treaty to begin with? This is a failure of the President to lead internationally.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 20th at 02:00 AM  | 

Remember when AT&T tried to get T-Mobile’s spectrum in order to give Verizon some more competition? And how Sprint opposed that because it would heighten competition? Well now it’s turnabout. SoftBank is attempting to buy a majority of Sprint, which will in turn take a majority of Clearwire. That will give Softbank control of a large amount of US Spectrum. So AT&T wants regulatory review. Heh.

To be clear, I think it’s a good thing that firms are doing what they can to get spectrum and compete, even if I laugh at the revenge attempt going on here. In fact I think it would have been very interesting to see Softbank/Sprint/Clearwire vs AT&T/T-Mobile vs Verizon. But we’ll see what shakes out in the end.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  September 3rd at 01:30 AM  | 

This is one of those weeks when all the important stuff happens at once, and there’s much to cover. I’ll start with the big national story. As I previously covered, The Eric Holder/Barack Obama Justice Department is coming after AT&T, using its own odd brand of economics to claim that the merger with T-Mobile would make the wireless market less competitive. When in fact, as | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  August 31st at 02:30 PM  | 

Updated below… Today it was announced that the Department of Justice will attempt to block AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile. The deal is needed for technical and regulatory reasons to allow AT&T to compete in the 4G wireless market with Verizon, Sprint/Clearwire, and with the upcoming competitor LightSquared. So why is the Department of Justice calling it bad for competition? Enter R. Gerard Salemme. It’s not | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  August 19th at 09:30 PM  | 

Happy Friday. We’ll start off this edition with Marsha Blackburn’s own post at RedState. There’s a reason I would like to see her rise higher on Energy and Commerce: she knows her stuff and is a fierce proponent of conservative values. I agree with her: government is not the solution to the privacy problem. I don’t agree with Joe Barton, whose plans for heavy-handed regulation | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  August 4th at 03:00 AM  | 

South Korea has Net Neutrality activists in an uproar as, guess what? The government is considering asking a high-bandwidth Internet service to pay its fair share for the government-subsidized Internet in the country. Just more proof that when the radicals say “Net Neutrality,” they really mean “free stuff paid for by the taxpayers.” The radical left’s push for freeloading continues in America too, as Public | 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)  |  June 30th at 02:00 AM  | 

Amazon’s not kidding one bit about punishing states that attempt to punish it. After Amazon sent a last ditch warning to Associates that all California Associates would be terminated in the event Governor Brown signed the budget with the Amazon Tax in it, the Governor went ahead and did it. So, every Amazon Associate in California just got terminated, including countless small businesses scraping by | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 18th at 02:30 AM  | 

So while there have been a number of genuine online attacks lately against the Senate, the CIA, PBS, Bioware, and more, the headlines have been full of reports of aftershocks. What seems to be going on is that existing account credentials leaked from previous attacks are being plugged into other sites, including Paypal. Anyone who reuses passwords is vulnerable to these secondary attacks. Be careful | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  June 4th at 03:30 AM  | 

I am so sick of California. While it’s good that the “privacy” bill didn’t make it out of the Senate, it’s not so good that the Amazon tax is going on to the Senate. Texas: Don’t be like us. Defeat your Amazon tax in SB 1. And the hacks go on: Anonymous attacks.. Iran?, its apparent offshoot lulzsec attacked PBS and Sony, but leaves itself | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  May 21st at 03:00 AM  | 

Ah, Claire McCaskill. Her not particularly active Twitter account said this week that she wants to be careful about regulation of privacy online, lest those regulations cause us all to have “less access to amazing stuff.” True statement I think. Too bad she refused to stick to her guns on the radical left’s key policy, Net Neutrality. On that issue, McCaskill told MyDD government regulation | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  May 14th at 04:11 AM  | 

House pressure on the FCC continues, with Friday’s hearings on FCC process reform, including testimony from all four active FCC Commissioners (Republican Commissioner Meredith Baker has quit the FCC). I associate myself with the remarks of Seton Motley on the preferred outcome of FCC Process Reform: “FCC ‘Process Reform’ Should Be About Reducing FCC Power. Oh, and making them obey the law.” Meanwhile, as much | Read More »

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

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 »

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)  |  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 »