By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  September 7th at 06:00 AM  | 

As I’ve previously covered, the Department of Justice is suing AT&T, claiming its planned merger with T-Mobile USA harms competition in America. My retort has been market reactions to the lawsuit suggest it is the lawsuit that is anti-competitive, benefiting the existing national 4G duopoly: Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless. That Sprint Nextel is jumping in with its own lawsuit now ends all doubt: the | Read More »

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)  |  September 1st at 01:00 AM  | 

So much going on suddenly this week. Barack Obama and Eric Holder’s DoJ has decided to come after AT&T for its plans to merge with T-Mobile, possibly doing the bidding of donors while hindering jobs growth in America as well as nationwide 4G wireless Internet competition. Sprint’s not doing much to keep Verizon in check; we need AT&T to have the spectrum needed to do | 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 16th at 03:30 AM  | 

Hello again to those I saw in Charleston over the weekend, and hope to see you next time to those who weren’t able to make it! While I return to California and get settled in again, it seems that some are leaving the state for good, and the hostile business climate is why. This includes the punitive Amazon Tax which has made it impossible for | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  August 6th at 03:00 AM  | 

The free market of Internet access, driven by constantly improving technology and heightening competition, is a driver of job creation and economic growth. Even Julius Genachowski, Obama’s FCC Chairman, has to admit that. This is just one reason we fight FCC power grabs. So when the government starts talking about new regulations in emerging fields such as “cloud computing”, just say no. And when Steve | 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)  |  July 26th at 12:00 AM  | 

It was mentioned in the previous Tech at Night’s comments, but here it is directly: the NAB has come out against incentive auctions to free up spectrum for wireless Internet. I say we should dismiss their concerns. Incentive auctions are voluntary and compensate the original spectrum holders. Rights are respected, as we get a superior spectrum allocation for American needs. For once, the FCC has | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  July 23rd at 02:00 AM  | 

Anonymous is starting to lose more than it wins. As I already mentioned on Wednesday, the FBI is racking up names to arrest, and moving on them. Anonymous responded by claiming to have broken into NATO systems. The world responded by trashing Anonymous’s AnonPlus website. Of course, when they’re in jail, that won’t matter much, but it’s fun to see. Good news: Early polling suggests | 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)  |  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 22nd at 08:00 AM  | 

I’ve said before that the case against the AT&T/T-Mobile deal makes no sense. Not only does the historical record suggest that the merger will increase competition, but the actions of key players are the opposite of what we’d predict if the merger were expected to reduce competition and raise margins. There’s something more to it, though. That something is astroturf pushing a basic agenda of | 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 »