Verizon’s joint marketing pact with the cable providers may be facing some serious scrutiny, but Verizon and its partners don’t seem to have noticed. On Thursday, Time Warner Cable blithely announced they would launch bundled mobile and cable services together in five markets. Read more »
Is new legislation that is aimed at allowing startups to raise money from individuals really going to help the economy — or is it just going to increase the number of stock scams and help fuel a dangerous kind of bubble mentality around investing? Read more »
In an attempt to come up with better laws on copyright, Reddit is crowdsourcing the creation of a Free Internet Act, while Public Knowledge is trying to introduce its own alternatives. But will crowdsourcing work, or will it just add to the chaos and confusion? Read more »
Author Neil Gaiman said in an interview this week that the media industry is trying to “put genies back in bottles” with laws like SOPA and PIPA, and the Internet has fundamentally changed the landscape, just as Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press did. Read more »
If you’re just hearing about SOPA and PIPA, the complexity of these controversial bills can seem daunting. Here’s your quick guide to the proposed pieces of legislation and a one-stop shop of resources that can help you learn much, much more. Read more »
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) may be shelved by the U.S. House of Representatives, but the Senate’s PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) still looms and Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman just can’t believe the stupidity that got us all into this mess. Read more »
New laws such as the Stop Online Piracy Act threaten to give new powers to Congress and to content companies, and have serious implications for the web — they make it clear that content companies are in many ways fundamentally opposed to the way the internet works. Read more »
The US Senate this afternoon voted against a law to repeal new FCC rules that forbid internet service providers from favoring certain websit… Read more at paidContent »
A new copyright bill proposed in the House would give governments and private corporations unprecedented powers to remove websites from the internet completely, on the flimsiest of grounds, and would also force internet service providers to play the role of copyright police or face penalties. Read more »
Is Google evil? Members of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights tried to decide that today in a hearing on Google’s market power. The end result was the Senators requested Google make voluntary changes to its search ranking. Read more »
After years of finger-pointing by competitors, Google is finally coming under the scrutiny of federal antitrust regulators. But just like a similar investigation into Microsoft a decade ago, a federal inquiry into whether Google’s behavior is illegal is likely to be a giant waste of time. Read more »
The AT&T and T-Mo merger will be decided by a DoJ and an FCC playing by the old rules that don’t take into account the future needs of the mobile industry, nor how the relationship between the players in that industry have changed. That’s a problem. Read more »
The U.S. Senate has posted a notice for an upcoming Judiciary Committee meeting on mobile privacy, to be held May 10 at 10:00 AM EST in Washington, D.C. Apple VP of Software Technology Bud Tribble will provide testimony at the session. Read more »
In the latest salvo of privacy-related criticism to be directed at the social network, a group of four senators have sent a letter to Facebook asking the company to change some of its new information-sharing settings, and to stop enabling its sharing features by default. Read more »
At the Apple iPod event this past September, the iPod nano got a video upgrade, but despite rumors to the contrary, the iPod touch didn’t get a similar treatment. The Internet was ablaze with expectation thanks to the appearance of a number of iPod touch cases […] Read more »
