Blog
Senate Takes Up Privacy Protection with New ECPA Bill
Faced with a national consensus concerning NSA’s activities as a large-scale violation of citizen privacy and a court ruling declaring PRISM unconstitutional, momentum has been building slowly in Congress to legislate boundaries around future government attempts at data collection. U.S. Sens. Patrick Leahy (D–VT) and Mike Lee (R–UT) Thursday reintroduced a bill they had cosponsored […]
DFS and the right to gamble – even a little bit
With the baseball season in high gear and football training camps due to open next week, we can expect another uptick in interest in fantasy-sports leagues and their controversial offshoot, daily fantasy sports (DFS). The kerfuffle over DFS speaks directly to both our cultural and legislative ambiguity toward gambling. Fantasy sports wagering wasn’t a problem […]
Network Neutrality Would Have Killed Unlimited Bandwidth Plans
Network neutrality has been in the news again as, over the past two weeks, proponents have been marshaling forces against the Federal Communications Commission’s push to undo the most significant piece of Internet regulation fostered by the Obama administration. Not that it wouldn’t be a bad thing. Net Neutrality was the touchstone of Obama Internet […]
The FCC Targets Cable Set-Top Boxes—Why Now?
With great fanfare, FCC Chairman Thomas Wheeler is calling for sweeping changes to the way cable TV set-top boxes work. In an essay published Jan. 27 by Re/Code, Wheeler began by citing the high prices consumers pay for set-top box rentals, and bemoans the fact that alternatives are not easily available. Yet for all the […]
Realities of Zero Rating and Internet Streaming Will Confront the FCC in 2016
For tech policy progressives, 2015 was a great year. After a decade of campaigning, network neutrality advocates finally got the Federal Communications Commission to codify regulations that require Internet service providers to treat all traffic the same as it crosses the network and is delivered to customers. Yet the rapid way broadband business models, always […]