This is great news for internet freedom.

France's highest court has inflicted an embarrassing blow to President Sarkozy by cutting the heart out of a law that was supposed to put France in the forefront of the fight against piracy on the internet.

The Constitutional Council declared access to the internet to be a basic human right, directly opposing the key points of Mr Sarkozy's law, passed in April, which created the first internet police agency in the democratic world.

The strongly-worded decision means that Mr Sarkozy's scheme has backfired and inadvertently boosted those who defend the free-for-all culture of the web.

more

h/t Primalfire

With a new President in favor of network neutrality, the presumptive FCC chair in favor of network neutrality, with every new Democratic member of the Senate in favor network neutrality, with the new chair of the relevant senate subcommittee in favor of network neutrality, with Henry Waxman chairing the Energy and Commerce committee in the House and with the chair of the relevant House subcommittee, Rick Boucher, fighting hard for network neutrality in the past, everything seemed to be in place to pass network neutrality legislation this year. But now, shockingly, Boucher has decided to delay net neutrality legislation, opting instead for more talks and even a possible non-legislative solution.

Grant Goss | January 28

IDG - Google and a group of partners have released a set of tools designed to help broadband customers and researchers measure performance of Internet connections.

The set of tools, at MeasurementLab.net, includes a network diagnostic tool, a network path diagnostic tool and a tool to measure whether the user's broadband provider is slowing BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P-to-P) traffic. Coming soon to the M-Lab applications is a tool to determine whether a broadband provider is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic, and a tool to determine whether a provider is degrading certain users or applications.

$6 Billion for broadband and wireless is in the stimulus package passed by the House; along with net neutrality requirements "to ensure nondiscrimination between network owners, content providers and consumers.”

A Democratic agenda is that Obama and Congress are to legislate net neutrality, and a copyright rewrite in '09; meanwhile, Republicans and telcom giants accuse Democrats of "sneaking" net neutrality rules into the stimulus package.

Meet Vint Cerf, the 'father of the internet', and find out what he thinks about net neutrality, spam and how we deal with use and abuse of the web.

W. David Gardner | September 4

Information Week - The sky isn't falling and the Internet isn't running out of capacity either.

In a report that should placate the Chicken Littles who believe the Internet is heading for a monstrous traffic jam, Internet monitor TeleGeography Research said international Internet traffic grew more than 53%, but Internet capacity grew even faster.

In a report released Wednesday, TeleGeography said Internet traffic grew 53% between mid-2007 and mid-2008, a drop from 61% in the preceding year. Internet capacity, however, grew faster than the total Internet traffic, which resulted in lower utilization levels on many Internet backbones.

"Broadband subscriber growth has been slowing since 2001, but the volume of traffic generated by each user [has] grown," Alan Mauldin, the market research firm's director of research, said in a statement. "Traffic growth is fueled by consumer demand for video, delivered via Web browsers, peer-to-peer services, or streaming protocols."

Traffic in the mature U.S. market rose a modest 47%, but in the new market between the United States and Latin America, traffic growth took off, surging 112% for the period.

The TeleGeography findings could be meaningful input in the ongoing debate involving U.S. service providers and consumers concerning the imposition of downloading restrictions on heavy users. Some service providers maintain they will have to impose limits on some users who use too much Internet capacity.


more at the source

Aug. 1 2008

Save The Internet - the Federal Communications Commission voted to punish Comcast for violating Net Neutrality and blocking your right to do what you want on the Internet.
This win is yours. Defying every ounce of conventional wisdom in Washington, activists, bloggers, consumer advocates and everyday people have taken on a major corporation and won.
Today's vote at the FCC is also a precedent-setting victory that sends a powerful message to phone and cable companies that blocking access to the Internet will not be tolerated from this time forward.

Rogers Cadenhead

Apparently AP's legal knickers are in a serious knot over Drudge Retort users links to its stories, contending that copyright is being violated.

Duplicate post, please comment here.

Peter Kaplan | Washington | May 29

Reuters - U.S. communications regulators are considering auctioning a piece of the airwaves to buyers willing to provide free broadband Internet service without pornography.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin is proposing to auction an unused piece of 25-MHz wireless spectrum, with the condition the winning bidder offer free Wi-Fi access and filter out obscene content on part of those airwaves, a spokesman for the FCC said Thursday (May 29).

Under Martin's proposal, the winner would be allowed to use the rest of the airwaves for commercial services.

The plan would address criticism from some consumer advocates, who say the the government has not done enough to get broadband service into more U.S. households. It also could win praise from anti-obscenity watchdog groups.

The main reason "Net Neutrality" is under attack is because of the rising case of identity theft. This problem is caused by dim-witted individuals, YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, using their credit cards to buy bogus products on illedgtimit websites. Because of these shit for brains, dumbasses our freedom to use the internet, which is possibly our last form of freedom in a so-called democratic world, is now at the mercy of men who think with their wallets. Now if you want to help, here's what you do:
Step 1: Ask around and try to find a person who is a victim of I.D Theft.
Step 2: Invite them into your house for a cup of tea and a few biscuits.

Kenneth Corbin | May 7

InternetNews.com - A House subcommittee held a hearing today to consider legislation that would codify broad principles intended to prevent Internet service providers (ISPs) from slowing or degrading the delivery of certain content over their networks.

Once again, all sides of the Net Neutrality debate lined up to stake their positions while the House debated how to treat the latest bill addressing how traffic on ISPs should be treated.

At this morning's hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet, ISPs warned that Net neutrality legislation could slow broadband deployment by imposing heavy regulations that would create uncertainties in the business model.

"The weak state of the economy is front pages news," said Walter McCormick, president and CEO of the U.S. Telecom Association. "But one of the bright spots is broadband," he added, warning that the law could put a "chill" on further investment in the sector.

If you are in the Stanford California area tomorrow. FCC hearing.
This is a huge deal coming down, as most Agonistas know. If you have
never been to a FCC hearing, it is well worth the effort.
http://www.savetheinternet.com/=stanford

Global Gridlock:
How the US Military-Industrial Complex Seeks to Contain and Control the Earth and it's Eco-System

by Dr. Kingsley Dennis
Global Research, March 31, 2008

Introduction

The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges once famously wrote of a great Empire that created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map itself grew and decayed as the Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire finally crumbled, all that remained was the map. In some sense we can say that it is the map in which we live; we occupy a location within a simulation of reality. Although semanticists say that 'the map is not the territory', within this digitised age the territory is increasingly becoming the map and the separation between the physical and the digitised rendition is blurring. In this context, to 'know the map’ gives priority to intervene upon the physical. In recent years many of us have been scrambling to get 'on the Net' and thus be 'mapped'; within a few years we may find that living 'off the Net' will no longer be an option.

Today I received an accusatory, threatening email from Cox Cable.

Cox's message accuses me of downloading something from a "bittorrent" site or something like that. Although a thorough search of my computer found no evidence of what they mentioned, what this letter does prove is that Cox Cable and the NBC company are engaged in an active, coordinated program of spying on the American public. These two companies appear to have joined AT&T in tracking and gathering information on American citizens.

How widespread is this scheme? I know they are spying on me; are they spying on you, too?

Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said that the company paid some people to arrive early and hold places in the queue for local Comcast employees who wanted to attend the hearing.

Some of those placeholders, however, did more than wait in line: They filled many of the seats at the meeting, according to eyewitnesses. As a result, scores of Comcast critics and other members of the public were denied entry because the room filled up well before the beginning of the hearing.

http://www.attytood.com/2008/02/comcastic_phillys_cable_giant.html

Submitted by lambert on Tue, 2008-01-29 09:52.

AT&T is planning to open “all packets” on the Internet, and examine them for intellectual property violations. Email, IM, everything. So, when Gizmodo writer Joel Johnson was invited onto AT&T’s Hugh Johnson Show to talk about gadgets, he decided to talk about that instead. The video:

Read more and watch the video at Corrente

Obama says what we want to hear:

Would you make it a priority in your first year of office to re-instate Net Neutrality as the law of the land? And would you pledge to only appoint FCC commissioners that support open Internet principles like Net Neutrality?"

Obama gave a resounding reply:

Peter Svensson | New York | October 19

AP - Tests confirm data discrimination by number 2 U.S. service provider

Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.

I think most regular readers here are already familiar with this theme, so I'll get right to the good stuff. A small startup ISP in Toronto is offering very different, very open web access. Read below to see (LINK):

Nomad does things a little differently. The company is subscriber-owned, volunteer-run, and open-source friendly. It offers a neutral Internet connection with no bandwidth caps or throttling, and it makes a point of creating wireless access points at the end of each DSL connection that can be used, for free, by the public.

http://zuma.theprawn.com/thedeclarationofindependence.txt

There is no mind/body split, nor any body/planet split, nor any Creation/planet split. As sure as the butterfly effect, everything is connected. Reality and it's consequences are their own record as sure as that in the light, as well as the radio waves, that emanates out from Earth every day.
That which is hidden is known to be hidden; the lump in the rug betrays itself. We see things as they plainly are.
To be at peace and productive and healthy, we must have civilization, between ourselves, and other nations, and with Earth herself. Earth on it's own is a model of self-cooperation, another aspect of Evolution Darwin apparently didn't emphasize (if noted at all).

New clause in AT&T contracts:

Have you taken a look at AT&T's Terms of Service for High-Speed Internet (HSI) lately? Some changes they've made are downright draconian. In the section labeled "5.1 Suspension/Termination," AT&T says the normal stuff about lack of payment and so forth. But clause (c) says they can terminate your service for conduct that AT&T believes:

(c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries. Source: AT&T Terms of Service

And then there's Verizon's clause (which, so far as I know, is not new):

Without prejudice to any other rights that Verizon may have, Verizon reserves the right and sole discretion to change, limit, terminate, modify at any time, temporarily or permanently cease to provide the Service or any part thereof to any user or group of users, without prior notice and for any reason or no reason.

Martin at Scholars and Rogues thinks this is about net neutrality, and in a neutral sense it is. But in a larger sense it's about oligopoly and monopoly - and about free markets. Let me start with a digression. I've been reading about Franklin Roosevelt lately, and what I just read about today, specifically, was the rural electrification of America. See, until Roosevelt, 9 out of 10 rural citizens didn't have electric power, though most of the cities did. Roosevelt desperately wanted them to have power and made very sincere efforts to convince them to provide it. But they weren't interested. It just wasn't "worth it" to them to do so and every farmer who was market efficient to serve was already being served, because of course the if there was a profit to be made, someone would have made it.

So the government went ahead and did it themselves, and in response, rather than letting the government grab them all up, the private companies suddenly started doing it themselves. Massive new electrical projects drove rates through the floor, by 1950 9/10 farmers had electricity, and the companies were even making profits off it (public and private companies.)

More After the Jump

Adam Liptak | Sept 27

IHT - Saying it had the right to block "controversial or unsavory" text messages, Verizon Wireless has rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon's mobile network available for a text-message program.

The other leading wireless carriers have accepted the program, which allows people to sign up for text messages from Naral by sending a message to a five-digit number known as a short code.

The dispute over the Naral messages is a skirmish in the larger battle over the question of "net neutrality" — whether carriers or Internet service providers should have a voice in the content they provide to customers.

UPDATE: Verizon Reverses Itself on Abortion Messages

Jim Puzzanghera | Washington | September 27

LA Times - A monthly phone bill of $50 now includes as much as $10 in taxes. And some in Congress warn that consumers soon could be hit with similar assessments for high-speed Internet access.

For nearly a decade, the lines carrying the Internet into homes and businesses have been a virtual tax-free zone. But that could change Nov. 1 when a federal ban on Internet access taxes expires.

Almost everybody agrees that the politically popular moratorium should be extended to encourage continued investment in the high-speed lines crucial to making new online activities possible, particularly video. But changing Internet usage has complicated the issue, threatening to derail an extension and raising the specter of local officials engaging in a land-rush-like race to enact new taxes for surfing the Web.

Washington | Sept 6

AP - The Justice Department on Thursday said Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic.

The agency told the Federal Communications Commission, which is reviewing high-speed Internet practices, that it is opposed to "Net neutrality," the principle that all Internet sites should be equally accessible to any Web user.

Several phone and cable companies, such as AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp., have previously said they want the option to charge some users more money for loading certain content or Web sites faster than others.

Is Net Neutrality really dead?
Revisit the original Agonist Net Neutrality Project ~qB

Declan McCullagh | September 6

CNN - If you haven't heard much about Net neutrality this year, you're not alone. It went from being the political equivalent of a first-run Broadway show, with accompanying street protests and high profile votes in Congress, to a third-rate performance with no budget and slumping attendance.

So what killed Net neutrality? Here's a list, in no particular order:

(see article at site for in-article links)

1. The Bush administration. Democrats may control Congress, but the White House and federal agencies matter. And the administration made it perfectly clear on Thursday that no new Net neutrality regulations are necessary. That gives the Republicans in Congress their marching orders, and a unified GOP front means the Democrats are more likely to expend ammunition elsewhere.