Regulatory
You are currently browsing the articles from the VoIP Digest matching the category Regulatory.
I am usually not one to advocate governmental regulation of personal behavior.
That said, I fully endorse the move of New York State Sen. Carl Kruger (D-Brooklyn), and shown at right- to introduce legislation today banning the practice of pedestrians looking down and dealing with their iPod, cell phone, BlackBerry, etc. while in the middle [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 8th, 2007 with no comments.
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What's interesting about Viacom's demand today that YouTube pull all of its 100,000 or so videos featuring Viacom content is that YouTube-owner Google already has a deal with Viacom to post some of Viacom's content for free.
The difference, of course, is that YouTube content is still the unlicensed Wild West, and mostly via third parties- [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 3rd, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Regulatory and Google and YouTube.
Several recent court decisions are, in my view, threatening the generally accepted notion that the Internet thrives on a "free to link" privilege between any two sites.
As rabid as some content creators, their lawyers and agents are, I fear that we may be headed into an era where these rights are challenged. Challenged to a [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 15th, 2007 with no comments.
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As The New York Times noted earlier this week, defunct video-on-demand company Intertainer filed a lawsuit asserting that Apple, Google and Napster are infringing on a 2005 patent that covers the commercial distribution of audio and video over the Internet.
Based on that information I decided to look at that patent and see if there [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 4th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on News and General and Regulatory and Apple.
Updated: Deal approved Friday afternoon. From Washington comes late word tonight that a compromise has apparently been hammered out that will clear the way for AT&T to acquire BellSouth for $85 billion.
That's the AT&T headed by "one-time," fierce net neutrality opponent Edward Whitacre, Jr. You're lookin' at him.
The compromise is said to be one [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on December 29th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Regulatory and BellSouth and SBC-AT&T and net neutrality.
From the Progress and Freedom Foundation's Center For The Study of Digital Property's IPCentral.info blog:
(High bandwidth Web hosting and distribution service) Akamai and Sony have struck a deal whereby Akamai will distribute Sony's PLAYSTATION Network. The news story, translated from Japanese, says:
Through the use of Akamai's distributed delivery services, unlike alternative offerings [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on December 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Regulatory and net neutrality.
Every time I don my headset and call up my Comcast Rhapsody Radio's New Age channel, I am thankful for the choice.
Or maybe I can select a channel where I can hear real old time cheatin' songs, or seek out a propulsive house beat guaranteed to fire up the writing part of my brain.
I could [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on December 14th, 2006 with no comments.
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You've heard of Big Brother right?
Well, he's here and his name is the Federal Trade Commission.
In a move that the agency says is aimed to crack down on deceptive, word-of-mouth marketing, the consumer protection agency will start to insist that online peer-to-peer communication in which a marketer is paying for promotional consideration must be [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on December 13th, 2006 with no comments.
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Earlier this week, the Federal Communications Commission said that broadcasters have "only limited First Amendment protection," that the V-chip is "ineffective," and that they have every right to mete out punishment for the use of swear words as indecent practice.
I don't know about you, but when I hear a government agency scoff at the First [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on December 8th, 2006 with no comments.
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When I first read my colleague Daniel Terdiman's article "IRS taxation of online game virtual assets inevitable" early this morning, my first reaction was "what the…"
Dan's positioning of this as a very real public policy came from a Saturday panel called "Tax and Finance" at the New York Law School's State of Play/Terra Nova […]
Written by Russell Shaw on December 5th, 2006 with no comments.
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In The Dark Side Of Second Life, an article that was posted yesterday on BusinessWeek.com., writer Catherine Holahan explores the apparently increasing unauthorized copying of Second Life "possessions," and what if anything can be done about it.
Catherine notes that Second Life developer Linden Labs is well aware of the problem, and that the company's [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on November 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
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That's "World Of Warcraft: Eye Of The Storm."
You may think this is a pretty cool experience, but try it on an Internet without net neutrality guarantees.
In one of the other places I hang my blogger hat, I wrote a post this morning about a study by technology consultancy Ramp^Rate that says online gaming would [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on November 21st, 2006 with no comments.
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Earlier this afternoon, Universal Music Group sued MySpace for copyright infringement.
The problem seems to be that Universal believes that MySpace facilitates conversion and upload of copyrighted videos and music files of their artists to unauthorized third parties.
No dollar amount on the suit yet, but Universal says that of the "thousands of links" it says it [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on November 18th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on News and General and Regulatory and YouTube.
Yesterday, the Canadian federal government announced it would overrule that nation's CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Communications Commission) and de-regulate VoIP.
Last year, the CRTC regulated VoIP by enacting pricing restrictions on traditional telephone companies and the rates they were able to chare without regulatory approval. The fear was that in a regulation-free environment, these services [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on November 17th, 2006 with no comments.
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And so, as Rich Tehrani reports, it played out in a Texas courtroom yesterday when Comcast successfully defended itself against a $2.2 billion lawsuit filed by Caritas Techologies.
Dave Farber, who is often cited as the "grandfather of the Internet," holds a series of VoIP-related patents. That was, and is, not in dispute.
What was in [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on November 15th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on News and General and Regulatory and Comcast.
I'm just back this morning from the ISPCON conference in Santa Clara, Calif.
This conference heavily draws from the ranks of Web hosting companies, small Internet Service Providers, and technology vendors who sell to each segment.
The event- which I cover here- took place in parallel time with this week's U.S. Congressional elections, and the news [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on November 11th, 2006 with no comments.
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I know that many advocates of meaningful Congressional action on net neutrality are hopeful that tomorrow's elections will result in a shift of power to a Democratic party that generally seems to be more sympathetic to pro-net neutrality arguments than the Republicans are.
There's two reasons why tomorrow's results are not going to shift things.
First, althought [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on November 7th, 2006 with no comments.
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By now, some of you know that after a 17-month battle, the Federal Communications Commission decided last week to let Continental Airlines provide Wi-Fi service at its Presidents Club facility at Boston's Logan International Airport. That's a peek at the Presidents Club.
Massport, which runs Logan, had claimed the service violated Continental's contract with [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on November 7th, 2006 with no comments.
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Rich Tehrani believes this.
I think he is right. Let me explain why. But first, a backgrounder.
Rich writes that at the last ITEXPO (in San Diego earlier this month) he asked hundreds of people attending the keynote if they care about net neutrality.
"Out of somewhere around 500-700 people," Rich writes, "2 or 3 people [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on October 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Yesterday, FBI director Robert Mueller expressed a preference that Internet Service Providers preserve customer Web use records for quite some time.
His reasons: to assist in terrorism probe investigations as well as child pornography and predator-related matters.
As my colleague Declan McCullagh reports:
"Terrorists coordinate their plans cloaked in the anonymity of the Internet, as [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on October 19th, 2006 with no comments.
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Memos and follow-up bouncing around between AT&T and the FCC appear (keyword-appear) to have AT&T pledging that if the FCC breaks its 2-2 deadlock and approves the acquisition of BellSouth, then AT&T will be good.
Broadband everywhere, free broadband modems handed out like Santa on Christmas morn, a pledge to hold the line on rate requests, [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on October 17th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Regulatory and BellSouth and SBC-AT&T.
Skype Journal’s Phil Wolff posts that after lots of brouhaha, San Jose State University’s Computing and Telecommunications department (SJSU UCAT) have said they will not ban Skype.
Apparently, a Monday meeting between SJSU officials and Skype-owner eBay’s governmental relations team did the trick.
Although Phil was not in on that meeting, he recommends that any [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on September 27th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and General and Regulatory and Security and Softphones.
Namibia is the latest nation to go absolutely convulsive over the prospect of some of its citizens bypassing the local phone monopoly by selling and using VoIP. Five people have been busted. Mike at TechDirt has the story.Then, as Mike also points out, there was a bust two years ago in Belarus, and there's an [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on September 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on News and General and Regulatory and International.
We're picking up conflicting signals on just what the copyright cartel would like to do with YouTube.Universal Music Group sounds like they are going to sue YouTube for copyright infringement- sooner rather than later.But just today, Warner Music announced a distribution and licensing deal with YouTube.It sounds as though those two companies are going in [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on September 18th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Regulatory and YouTube.
That's a 40-foot SeaRay. (Hmm, sure would be nice to win Powerball).But according to the Feds, Edwin Pena, 23, was able to pay for the SeaRay as well as three luxury autos by acting as a fraudulent wholesaler of VoIP services. The Feds believe that the Miami resident and a hacker conspirator, Robert Moore of [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on September 16th, 2006 with no comments.
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Just in case you think that AT&T and the other greedy broadband monopolists are starting to feel the urge of the common good and are starting to guilt-trip over a net that ain't neutral- I have news for you. Yesterday, AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre put the gauntlet down again.Or shot his mouth off, depending [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on August 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on News and General and Regulatory and SBC-AT&T.
As my colleague Greg Sandoval reported late yesterday, YouTube has been sued for copyright infringement.Complaintant Robert Tur has alleged that 1992 footage he took of the beating of trucker Reginald Denny in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots has been viewed for free over 1,000 times on YouTube, costing Tur potential income from selling [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on July 19th, 2006 with no comments.
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Last nite on Comedy Central's Daily Show host Jon Stewart did a hilarious skit about net neutrality- and how Senator Ted Stevens- one of the main lawmakers in this debate, thinks the Internet is a series of tubes.Funny, I always thought it was a truck. A big, huge truck.Excerpt from the segment:Stevens: I…just the other [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on July 13th, 2006 with no comments.
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The Hollywood Reporter notes that the Federal Communications Commission has asked broadcasters for "numerous" tapes from broadcasters that could include vulgar remarks uttered at live sporting events from coaches, athletes and even unruly spectators. The trade paper reported that the FCC requested tapes of some 30 live broadcasts from football games where participants [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on July 12th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on News and General and Regulatory.
Libertarian philosophy has a certain appeal to many techies. Keep the government out of the boardroom AND the bedroom, keep government small, and out of the way of innovative price enterprise. Nice if you are a 27 year-old code jock with a fancy sports car, nice stock options and income, and living with a partner [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on July 6th, 2006 with no comments.
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Uberblogger Robert Scoble, who has just left Microsoft for a neat gig with VC-funded PodTech, is at the Gnomedex geek-a-thon here in Seattle. Yesterday, Scoble did a bad, bad thing. He broke one of Second Life's cardinal rules by enlisting his 12 year-old son Patrick to build him part of his “office” (Second Lifers never [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on July 1st, 2006 with no comments.
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Yesterday was an absolutely rotten day for the concept of an open Internet free of roadblocks, slowdowns, under-the-hood obstacles to content from those content creators and services that won't submit to the broadband duopolists white hat (be our content partner) or black hat (stealth tweaks to deliver content partner- and your competitors- web services at [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 28th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on News and General and Regulatory.
As AT&T continues its battles with net neutrality proponents on Capitol Hill this week, I thought it would be interesting to see where AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre has been spending his own money this campaign and election cycle.I went to Opensecrets.org, and checked under "Whitacre." I found several donations, most of them to Net Neutrality opponents.These [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 25th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on News and General and Regulatory and SBC-AT&T.
AT&T Inc. (that's their CEO, Ed Whitacre) says that starting tomorrow it will revise the language of its privacy practices, letting customers know that AT&T owns their phone records and can hand them over to law enforcement on request. Not coincidental that these changes come at the same time AT&T and other telcos [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 21st, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Regulatory and Security and SBC-AT&T.
Yesterday, the FCC ruled that Internet phone companies that connect to the (PSTN) Public Switched Telephone Network to process these calls would have to pay a fee into the Universal Service Fund. The Fund helps subsidize the cost of Internet and cell access in poor and rural areas of the U.S. (such as [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 21st, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Vonage and Skype and General and Regulatory and trends.
In his post Is ESPN committing reverse Net Neutrality, ZDNet colleague George Ou looks at the case I've referred to in which ESPN360-delivered streaming video of each World Cup match is available only to subscribers of certain broadband providers- but not to those subscribers who access the Internet through Comcast, Cablevision, AT&T, and [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 21st, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Regulatory and trends and Comcast and Time Warner Cable and Cablevision and SBC-AT&T and Streaming media.
The Verizon patent infringement suit against Vonage, revealed today but filed last Monday in the U.S. Appeals Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, asks the Court to:"Enter a permanent injunction, pursuant to 35 U.S.C. 283, restraining and enjoining Defendants Vonage Holdings and Vonage America and their respective officers, agents, servants, employees, attorneys, customers and [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 19th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Vonage and News and General and Regulatory and Verizon VoiceWing.
Reuters reports that U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) will introduce a "compromise" Net Neutrality bill this week that would also create a complaint process through the FCC if consumers believe their access rights to Internet content were violated . The FCC would be empowered to hear complaints and assess penaltiesand the agency would [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 18th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Vonage and News and General and Regulatory and Comcast.
I'll get to the brilliant (and my sense is he wouldn't mind if you thought so, too) Dave Farber a bit down on this post. But first, some perspective. At the behest of Gerald Faulhaber, a professor of business and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School (where brainy [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 15th, 2006 with no comments.
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I've been eagerly following the TrackBacks to my line in the sand piece on why we need net neutrality. More importantly, I have been closely monitoring the broader debate. Earlier today I was wondering why reasonable people can so starkly disagree- to the point that neither side believes the other side is reasonable.Then I took a wider view at [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 13th, 2006 with no comments.
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I have buckets of respect for my ZDNet colleague George Ou. He is that rare technologist with a gift for peering through the haze, and offering concrete explanations of the conceptual and the opaque in the tech world. Yet George Ou's views skew more toward market-based solutions and remedies than proactive governmental and [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on News and General and Regulatory and trends.
Several of my posts this week have detailed a string of class-action shareholder lawsuits against Vonage. The consensus of these suits is that in their Prospectus, Vonage hasn't been entirely upfront about their IPO.This post is not about Vonage Vonage stock, or even Vonage, for that matter. It is about an experience I had [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Vonage and General and Regulatory.
Once again, I am not a securities attorney, nor an attorney of any kind. But part of my work involves watching Vonage very closely, and reporting on all aspects of the company. I'm also a Vonage customer. From these multiple perspectives I will now take a look at the Kahn Gauthier Swick [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 8th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Vonage and News and General and Regulatory.
The parade of law firms filing securities-related class action lawsuits against Vonage is getting longer. Wednesday saw two more. Each one of these is worth a post, and that's what you'll get. In this post, I'll review what has been charged in the Berger & Montague complaint. Then I will offer my [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 8th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Vonage and General and Regulatory.
As my colleague Dawn Kawamoto reports today, Net2Phone has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Skype and eBay. Net2Phone, which filed its lawsuit last week in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, alleges that Skype infringed on its patent, No. 6,108,704. The Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) patent [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 6th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and News and General and Regulatory.
The FCC is strongly considering requiring VoIP companies to pay into the Universal Service Fund.Although the move has been talked about for some time now, The Wall Street Journal reports that the initiative to extract money from VoIP providers for the phone service subsidy is now actively being explored by FCC Chair Kevin Martin.VON Coalition [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Vonage and General and Regulatory.
Wired Magazine has obtained, and has posted, the complete text of a document that attempts to chronicle how AT&T equipped a "secret room" at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco to track domestic and international phone calls made by American citizens and others. That's the entrance to the [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on May 24th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on News and General and Regulatory and Security and SBC-AT&T.
Now here's an idea that is needed, and may already be in the works.How about a bot that crawls YouTube videos for apparently unauthorized, copyright violations? The type of violations that given the ease of tv-to-PC digital transfer are easy to commit?Such as video clips of tv shows, such as "Lost?" Speaking of, that's a [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on May 17th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Regulatory and Research.
On the Vonage Forum (which is independent of Vonage itself) there's quite a debate going on about the right and wrong of the recently revealed National Security Agency program to obtain the phone calling records of tens of millions of Americans. Although Vonage says they would only hand over such records with a [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on May 15th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Vonage and News and General and Regulatory and Security.
As a visiting fellow at George Washington University's National Security Archive, who has just completed the first book of a three-volume history of the NSA, intelligence historian Matthew Aid probably knows more about the super-secret National Security Agency (NSA) than anyone outside of the agency.The NSA, of course, is the agency that, as has been [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on May 15th, 2006 with no comments.
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