To some, Cox's forthcoming traffic discrimination is an unequivocal violation of net neutrality (NN). The network is the gatekeeper; its terms of use, the law. A bit is no longer just a bit, first come is not first served, and our communication space is ever less Free.

But to others, traffic discrimination just makes sense. If the network is congested then the network has to drop some packets. Some types of traffic need speed but not throughput, while others need throughput not speed. So customers benefit when the congested network drops packets based on whether it has to get out in a hurry to be valuable.

Both views are right.

Today we have some bad and good news. First the bad news: Cox Communications announced that it has a new way to manage it's network traffic; the problem is, Cox decides which packets go ahead of others. The story says Cox will prioritize the traffic it deems to be "time-intensive, like Web pages, streaming video and online games." Other services may be slowed: FTP, network storage, software updates, P2P, and Usenet.

One of the big announcements at this years CES was from smartphone manufacturer, Palm, which introduced their newest smartphone, the Palm Pre. Jef, Mehan and I were able to see a demo of the new device the day after it was announced in a swank meeting room that was backlit in an orange glow and foam couches and pillows were shaped like stream-smoothed pebbles for seating. The demo was given by one of Palm’s software managers.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to meet with representatives of the Presidental Transition’s FCC review team and a few like-minded public interest organizations to talk about what a broadband stimulus package should look like. The main question: if Congress allocates some stimulus money for broadband-related purposes, what would we propose to do with it and what would those proposals accomplish for the economy and our national broadband infrastructure? While a number of great ideas were discussed which would stimulate investment and create jobs, there were some underlying themes which we think any plan should embody: infrastructure improvement, competition, and openness.

George Ou, the former Technical Director of ZDNet, has found a new job where he continues to lead the technology sector by publishing innovative thoughts and ideas – sometimes not necessarily his own.

I'm the sucker who just over a year ago got up at 5AM to sit in a line until 6PM to buy an iPhone. There are a lot of people like me, I met many of them in line that long day. It was actually a lot of fun, but had I known that if I had just shown up at the Apple Store at 7PM that night, I could have walked out with the same iPhone, since there was plenty of supply, I think I would have done the latter. Since June 29, 2007, I have been incredibly in love with this new computing platform called the iPhone, and I've written about it a bit before.

The reason, incidentally, that I was in Korea last week wasn't just to attend the Seoul Ministerial, but to moderate a panel at the Civil Society Stakeholder Forum this past Monday. Due to the vagaries of the air transport system, I arrived a bit late to my panel—by about twelve hours or so.

I had been asked to introduce the topic of convergence, open standards, and network neutrality—a broad topic—and had prepped a short piece to open the panel and introduce the panelists—who, by all accounts, gave fascinating presentations that I would gladly have given up my hotel and meal vouchers to have seen.

For the past couple of days, I've been in South Korea, attending the OECD's Ministerial on the Future of the Internet Economy. Rather than try to give a blow-by-blow account, I've tried to package some of my thoughts in a series of posts. Here's one:

The OECD Ministerial has ended with the signing of the Seoul Declaration, a document signed by the member nations of the OECD, as well as the European Community and observer countries Chile, Egypt, Estonia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Latvia, Senegal and Slovenia.

Late yesterday afternoon, Sirius and XM filed a letter with the FCC that lays out the "voluntary commitments" the companies will abide by in exchange for the FCC approving their merger. As I predicted yesterday, the commitment to provide 4% of channel capacity set-aside for noncommercial, educational and informational programming falls a good bit short of what PK and others have asked for. While we're disinclined to fight over 1% of capacity (PK is asking for a 5% set-aside), there are other parts of this and other "commitments" that need change and clarification:

1. Channel capacity, not live, "full-time" channels, should be the metric for the non-commercial set-aside.

Disclaimer: I'm an Apple fanatic. I love its hardware, I love its software. I've evangelized the Mac platform to my friends, family and coworkers and I'm directly responsible for "switching" at least a dozen of them since becoming a believer myself in 2002. So, after you read this post, don't try to claim I'm an Apple hater, because nothing could be further from the truth.

So, yesterday the iPhone 2.0 software and iPhone 3G were announced at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference, and both will hit the streets sometime in early July. Both software and hardware get some significant upgrades: faster connectivity, more services to connect to, 3rd party applications, true geolocation with A-GPS, etc. These upgrades come at a significantly lower upfront cost to consumers: $199 and $299 for the different memory capacities, 8GB and 16GB respectively.

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