By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  December 8th at 02:30 AM  | 

The FCC’s excuse for delaying the AT&T/Qualcomm spectrum deal was to work on the AT&T/T-Mobile deal. The latter has been withdrawn, so what’s the excuse now? AT&T and Sprint both get bad reviews. Sprint’s Nextel deal went through. AT&T’s T-Mobile deal is getting blocked. Hmm. Looks shady, which is why I support Chuck Grassley’s push for FCC transparency involving LightSquared, even though so far their | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  November 10th at 03:00 AM  | 

Why can’t the news come in even intervals, instead of batching up all at once? So yes, the Senate Net Neutrality vote is coming up. Credit where it’s due: Kay Bailey Hutchison moved the ball forward on this, no doubt about it. Credit also to Marco Rubio making headlines with his strong support of the repeal. And Rubio is right: the whole thing is ridiculous. | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 31st at 11:00 PM  | 

Last week I noted that the FCC is officially moving ahead with its new subsidy program. The administration will convert the Universal Service Fund – currently taxing the public and handing it out to rural telephone carriers – into a grab bag of Internet subsidies. The rural phone companies are unhappy, and everyone else is racing to get a cut. C Spire, apparently serving many rural southern customers, | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 28th at 11:00 PM  | 

Not much to say tonight, which is good because I think I’m getting sick again, and if I had a lot to say I’d probably just skip tonight’s Tech. It’s official: the race for FCC handouts is on, as the FCC voted to repurpose the old rural telephone subsidy, the Universal Service Fund (a fund that comes from your special tax dollars) into a grab | 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 25th at 01:30 AM  | 

Mary Bono Mack, pay attention: Here’s the model for any privacy ventures you should attempt: voluntary action by private individuals, educated by simple government actions. If you really must get government involved, teach the people to fish, so that they can protect their own privacy for a lifetime. Because if we insist on regulating the Internet problems of the moment, not only do we expand | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 18th at 12:30 AM  | 

Sorry if you missed Tech at Night on Friday. I was under the weather. But I’m back, and with so much to review. How about legislation, good and bad? Well, mostly bad. Senate Democrats continue to push for senseless regulation of 4G Internet speeds, hindering vital new technology to increase high-speed Internet competition in America. Worse, Democrat Anna Eshoo is piling on in the House. | 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 11th at 03:00 AM  | 

Columbus Day winds to a close, a cold slows me down, but Tech at Night marches on somehow. You know what’s also marched on? The New York Stock Exchange’s website. The anarcho-terrorists of Anonymous promised to take that website down (note: just the website, not the actual trading computers). Well, they failed, unless you count a two minute outage as success. Heck, RedState pretty much | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  October 8th at 03:00 AM  | 

Net Neutrality goes to court. Great news, too: Verizon’s preferred venue won the lottery, and the Net Neutrality fight will happen in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. This is, of course, the same circuit that slapped down Net Neutrality last time in Comcast v FCC. Oh, but here’s a big surprise. Despite the FCC claiming previously that “We look forward to defending our open | Read More »

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  August 2nd at 02:30 AM  | 

Frogmarch watch continues. Even as Anonymous has desperately tried to enlist unions into its anti-Paypal Jihad, Paypal funnels information to law enforcement to help catch the terrorists. I don’s use that word lightly, either. But when the gang is attempting to intimidate law enforcement, possibly as an answer to another high-profile arrest, I believe Anonymous and its subsidiaries like Lulzsec and Antisec have leapt far | 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 14th at 03:30 AM  | 

Sorry if you’ve been missing Tech at Night this week. Monday I just ran out of time as I had to do a whole bunch of housekeeping*, and tonight I’m running late. So let’s go. In classic Tech at Night style, let’s talk about the FCC. They took forever to get the ball rolling on Net Neutrality, but it’s coming now and it’s a vehicle | Read More »