Regulation

Federal regulators are planning to meet on Friday and declare that Comcast violated Net neutrality principles when throttling BitTorrent traffic on its network. This would become the U.S. government's first Net neutrality-related ruling.

There's just one problem with the Federal Communications Commission's plans: They may not be quite, well, legal. In other words, the FCC may not actually have the authority to make its ruling stick.

In 2006, Congress rejected five different bills, backed by groups including Google, Amazon.com, Free Press, and Public Knowledge, that would have handed the FCC the power to police Net … Read more

A trio of politicians in the U.S. House of Representatives is continuing a campaign against the concept of Web monitoring to display advertisements, most recently with a series of letters this week exchanged with broadband provider Embarq.

Embarq provides Internet connectivity to about 1.3 million subscribers, making it the fourth-largest DSL provider in the country. It has acknowledged experimenting earlier this year with NebuAd, which intercepts and performs deep packet inspection of what's flowing through a company's network in hopes of delivering relevant, anonymized ads.

In two letters (No. 1, and No. 2) to the House … Read more

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has found a novel way to shake down law-abiding broadband companies: accuse them of harboring child pornography and threaten to prosecute them unless they do what he wants. That might just happen to involve writing Cuomo a hefty check.

The latest company to be honored by Cuomo's personal attention is Comcast, which received a two-page letter on Monday threatening "legal action" on child pornography grounds within five days, if its executives failed to agree to a certain set of rules devised by the attorney general.

In the letter (PDF), the Democratic … Read more

Collect scores of people in a room, ask them to talk about technology, and what do you get? A meandering experiment in the form of a public hearing that the Federal Communications Commission convened Monday in Pittsburgh.

It would take work to be more vague than the event's official title: "Broadband and the Digital Future." So speakers veered haphazardly between spam, pornography, media ownership, database privacy, computer prices, Net neutrality, mobile provider pricing, bandwidth caps, Webcasting official meetings, and piracy on peer-to-peer networks. And that was just in the last hour.

Because there was no focus, there … Read more

NebuAd has made few friends, thanks to a business built on monitoring broadband customers' Web surfing to deliver advertisements. It certainly found none on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based start-up was forced on the defensive during a hearing in which politicians charged that deep packet inspection of Internet traffic was far too privacy-invasive. Only if customers gave affirmative consent by opting in, they said, might the practice be acceptable.

Texas Rep. Gene Green called NebuAd's opt-out procedures "contemptible." To Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Doyle, the practice "goes against everything the country's been … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Bob Barr hopes his enthusiasm for electronic privacy will boost his Libertarian Party campaign for the White House. Call it a long-shot bid for the geek vote.

Absent Barack Obama and John McCain found in flagrante delicto with, say, Osama bin Laden and a 12-year old, Barr will not be the next president of the United States. But he is polling surprisingly well, with a Zogby poll last week putting him at 6 percent nationally, meaning he could siphon away enough limited-government votes from McCain to affect the November election.

Barr was a GOP member of Congress best known … Read more

Yahoo defended its planned advertising deal with Google at a U.S. Senate hearing on Tuesday, while Microsoft assailed it as anticompetitive and perhaps even "illegal."

The hearing before an antitrust panel replayed arguments that the three companies have made before: Microsoft is trying to raise antitrust objections as a way to derail the deal, and the two Silicon Valley firms say it's perfectly fine and a boon to competition.

One reason Microsoft is so irked is that the ad deal amounts to a poison pill that would raise the price of buying Yahoo by as much … Read more

The U.S. Senate is holding a hearing Tuesday on the antitrust implications of the Google-Yahoo ad deal, and the two companies, along with Microsoft, are testifying. You should expect sober, selfless discussions conducted with the public's best interests in mind.

Or not. In reality, Microsoft will offer fanciful claims about the alleged detrimental impact of a Google-Yahoo partnership, just as Google offered fanciful claims a few months ago about the alleged detrimental impact of a Microsoft-Yahoo combination.

According to his prepared testimony, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith will call the Google-Yahoo deal possibly "illegal under the antitrust … Read more

LAS VEGAS -- Whole Foods CEO John Mackey doesn't exactly disagree with Bill Gates' recent call for "creative capitalism."

Gates, of course, gave a high-profile speech in January that called for corporate executives to engage in "market-based social change" to to do "work that eases the world's inequities." The non-financial rewards? "Recognition" instead of, or in addition to, profits.

But Mackey doesn't completely agree with Gates either. At a speech here at a political conference on Thursday, the co-founder of the exclusive grocery chain sketched out a more free-market … Read more