Policy Blog

Prior to setting a cap on the amount of bandwidth a high-volume customer could use before having service terminated, Comcast instead cut off a set number of users regardless of how much bandwidth they used, according to documents released by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum.

Comcast announced at the end of August that it would impose the 250 GB usage cap on subscribers that had been hinted at for weeks. The cap, which takes effect Oct. 1, appears to cover uploaded material and downloads, given that Comcast’s example included the number of digital photos that could be uploaded.

In announcing the cap on its Web site, Comcast said: “We’ve listened to feedback from our customers who asked that we provide a specific threshold for data usage and this would help them understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive.” Comcast made its announcement on Aug.

Former eBay president and CEO Meg Whitman’s speech to the Republican National Convention on Wed. night (Sept. 3) was notable for what it didn’t say. Whitman is a giant in her field. She was the head of one of the largest, most successful, most culture-changing companies to emerge since the modern Internet came into existence.

She made lots of money for eBay and from eBay. That was why her speech was so disappointing. The word, “Internet” didn’t appear once. Neither did “innovation” or “technology.” She talked about the economy and lowering taxes and creating jobs and took some political shots at the Democratic ticket. But there was not one word for the medium that vaulted her and her company into American business history, the medium that is the greatest vehicle for innovation and consumer empowerment we have.

It wasn’t always this way.

This past Tuesday, I rushed home from work to download, install and test Google's new web browser Chrome, like the dutiful geek that I am. The next morning, Chrome was the talk of the town, with tech blogs far and wide falling over themselves to praise the latest open-source browser. It's fast! It has a built-in task manager! It sandboxes individual tabs and processes! Yes, yes, these things are all true and are all very exciting. However, just a scant few hours after Chrome's release and the fanfare that followed it, the honeymoon was all but over. Thanks to a carelessly crafted End User License Agreement (EULA), Google managed to turn a PR dream into a PR nightmare--and in record time to boot. It was an impressive demonstration of the speed with which a backlash can brew, even by Internet standards.

Thanks to Comcast and Verizon/AT&T, we now know a little more about the limits of “unlimited.”

Comcast announced that, starting Oct. 1, it will impose a 250 GB cap on usage. At the moment, the announcement is relatively benign, although there are lots of dangers lurking in the weeds.

Comcast has long complained that it needs to engage in legitimate “network management,” as opposed to the management techniques the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) found not to be so legitimate. One of the meat-cleaver approaches would be to lower the demands on the network as a whole. However, this new cap doesn’t appear to help Comcast meet its network management challenges.

A few days ago, I read an article on Ars Technica that described a new search site designed to help save the environment. Forestle, as it's called, is essentially a Google partner page that sticks a pretty green and white front-end on the same old Google search that you know and love. So, how exactly does it save the environment? According to the Germany-based non-profit organization that runs Forestle, all of the site's advertising income minus administrative costs is donated to The Nature Conservancy's adopt an acre program, which helps protect at-risk rainforests. Forestle's founder Christian Kroll told Ars that "0.1 square yards of rainforest are 'saved' with every single web search," and that within the site's testing phase, "more than 15,000 square yards of rainforest" had been saved.

Being the sort of person who performs a lot of web searches on the average day, I figured that there was no reason for me to not use Forestle in lieu of Google. After all, I would get the same search results and would be able to play an infinitesimally small part in saving the rainforests in the process. Keeping this in mind, I went ahead and installed Forestle's Firefox search bar plug-in, performed a few searches and then patted myself on the back for a deed well done. Little did I know, however, that Forestle wouldn't last long.

It didn’t take Comcast long to run away from its latest embarrassment. On Wednesday, Comcast Senior Vp Mitch Bowling told Bloomberg News that in an effort to control traffic, Comcast might slow down the transmission of packets from its heaviest users by “10 minutes to 20 minutes.” Here’s the story. PC Magazine had the same story.

Yesterday, a federal district court in San Jose refused to dismiss a suit brought against Universal Music for improperly demanding that YouTube remove a home video from its site.

In this case, Stephanie Lenz was sent a takedown notice for posting a home video on YouTube. Lenz had made a video of her toddler stumbling through her kitchen, then hearing and bobbing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy,” which was playing tinnily in the background on a countertop stereo. Despite the obvious fair use of the work, Universal sent a takedown notice to YouTube anyway. YouTube took the video down and notified Lenz that she had been accused of infringing copyright. After Lenz consulted a lawyer and issued a counter-notice, the video was put up again some six weeks later. After this, Lenz sued Universal.

Visual artists say they have a problem, that no one can find their work, or at least match them as the owner of their work. We’ve said it time and again, the Copyright Registry fails visual artists, because images are not part of the online registry—so users can’t search by image, or even see a sample image of the work they’re looking for.

We’ve promoted the idea of visual registries, to help owners upload digital images to a site like Flickr so that services like TinEye.com can index them and return meaningful comparative search results for users. Among the push-back we’ve had from the visual artists community with this idea, besides the cost and time issues of digitizing and uploading, is from the physical visual artists — like sculptors. Even though I believe that simply taking a few photos of the work would suffice to help users find the original owner, it hasn’t satisfied some.

Enter Microsoft’s Photosynth, which just went public this morning.

As folks may recall, the primary opponents of opening the broadcast white spaces for use, the broadcasters and the wireless microphone manufacturers — notably our good friend and radio pirate Shure, Inc. (official slogan:”We get to break the law ‘cause we sound so good”) — insisted that the FCC conduct field tests on the white spaces prototypes. Of course, because these are concept prototypes and not functioning devices certified to some actual standard, everyone knew this would leave lots of leeway for the broadcasters and the wireless microphone folks to declare the tests a “failure” regardless of the actual results. Which, of course, they did.

While there are a seemingly infinite number of ways to share and discover new music, few are as mythologized as the mixtape. From Nick Hornby's romanticizing of the format in High Fidelity to Library of America editor-in-chief Geoffrey O'Brien's assertion that the mixtape is "the most widely practiced American art form," no other amateur medium commands the same level of respect from fans and critics alike. While the general principles of mixtape making continue to live on in even the post-iPod era, with the exception of a few purist holdouts, most mixtape curators stopped using magnetic audiotapes long ago, in favor of the more convenient CD-R. Recently, however, even more advanced tools have emerged on the web, allowing would-be mixtape traders to widely disseminate their tastes while easily tapping into those of their friends.

One such site, Muxtape, allows users to upload, sequence and stream 12 MP3s in order to create virtual mixtapes. Web radio services like Pandora, meanwhile, allow users to discover new music--as mixtapes once did--based on their existing tastes. And social music sites like Last.fm allow users to broadcast their tastes automatically, by generating radio stations based on the user's listening habits. All of these technologies provide fans with new ways to interact with and discover music and have the potential to generate quite a bit of excitement for both independent and major label artists. That last fact seems to be lost on the recording industry, however, which, as usual, is too busy trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle to know a good opportunity when it sees one.