It was an unfortunate end to a long and laborious process when a coalition of more than 80 civil society organizations, including Public Knowledge, refused to endorse the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Communiqué on Principles for Internet-Policy Making.
While this may seem like an obscure process, it has large implications for Internet policy in the U.S. and abroad. 

In our last podcast of the year, we discuss per-app internet metering, what a non-neutral Internet would look like, and using Tubeify to turn YouTube into a jukebox.

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Public Knowledge recently celebrated its 8th birthday of defending citizens' rights in the digital culture. Unlike any other public interest group in Washington or elsewhere, we are dedicated to ensuring openness at every layer of our communication system, and that includes the content layer. That's why our work to ensure balanced copyright is so important - we cannot have an open Internet if large corporate copyright holders can exploit overly burdensome copyright laws to sacrifice legitimate speech at the altar of trying to stop piracy.

I discussed the clash of copyright and an open Internet at a talk that I gave to the Yale Law School Information and Society Project last week. Some in Hollywood, like Disney, were in favor of net neutrality in the late 90's because they knew well the powers that the network owner has.

All this talk of Internet surveillance is enough to cause intense bafflement. For the last couple of days, stories about the revolution Iran indicated that the government is able to keep track of the Internet doings of protesters by means of deep-packet inspection (DPI), a technology developed in the West that, like most dual-use technologies, has a good side and a bad side.

The good side is that it can be used to manage networks and deal with computer viruses and other nasties. The bad side is that it can be used to track computer messages, target insurgents, invade privacy, violate Net Neutrality and, as AT&T wants to do, target the use of copyrighted material online and have users thrown off of the Internet. Using DPI as the mother of all Internet filters would seem to be a non-starter, and yet the industry keeps pushing it, perhaps thinking that the U.S.