The FCC Chairman has indicated that the commission is prepared to take action against Comcast and other broadband providers that block or limit traffic on their networks. Columbia Prof. Tim Wu said “There is such a thing as reasonable network management …. but not secret blocking.”
Coverage at the Washington Post, Business Week, AP, and Wired.
The New York Times reports on the FCC net neutrality hearing recently hosted by Harvard Law School. There are also some participant quotations at the N.Y.Times Bits blog, including Columbia Prof. Tim Wu, who said, “I went to law school here. I have this terrible fear we are going to have an exam after this on what is reasonable network management. And we are all going to fail.”
On Monday, February 25, Harvard Law School will host a hearing on the FCC investigation of Comcast. Free Press and SaveTheInternet.com filed a complaint against Comcast for interfering with peer-to-peer traffic on its network. Columbia Prof. Tim Wu will speak at the hearing, as will all five FCC Commissioners.
BusinessWeek’s Peter Burrows writes about the legality of DoubleTwist, a new program that makes it possibly to play media purchased from iTunes on non-Apple devices, even if that media is locked with Apple’s Fairplay DRM. Prof. Tim Wu comments, “They’re decrypting content and that’s definitely a gray area.”
The Huffington Post’s Timothy Karr writes about net neutrality hearings on Friday, including links to video of testimony by Columbia Prof. Tim Wu.
Ars Technica reports that some ISPs redirect misspelled URLs to their own sites. Columbia Prof. Tim Wu remarks, “I generally have no problem with good faith efforts by ISPs to help their customers. It’s when they try and manipulate the system that I am troubled.”
The WSJ Law Blog comments on the Harry Potter Lexicon case and Prof. Tim Wu’s Slate articles about it.
ABC News reports on the federal obscenity case against an author of pornographic fiction who published her work on a paid-access web site. Columbia Prof. Tim Wu called the case “astonishing,” saying, “We haven’t seen anything like that since the sixties.”