It would be a mistake to regard this as a defeat for the companies. Their decision to file an appeal at this point was a precautionary move taken because of the complex procedural tangle that surrounds issues of finality and appealability.  [For the details, see Which Court Gets to Hear the Net Neutrality Appeal? (Jan. 21); More on the Verizon Appeal of the Net Neutrality Regulation (Jan. 24); Update: Appeals of the FCC Net Neutrality Rule (Feb. 3).]

Had the companies failed to file, they would have left the door open for the FCC to argue later that they should have filed earlier, and that their failure to do so had forfeited the chance to argue that the appeal must be heard in the DC Circuit because it involves licensing. Now, that possible attack is barred, and the court’s opinion explicitly left undecided the issue whether the DC Circuit is the only appropriate forum for the appeal. The crucial language in the opinion is: “Regardless of whether the order is reviewable by way of a petition for review, 47 U.S.C. § 402(a), or a notice of appeal, 47 U.S.C. § 402(b), the prematurity is incurable.”

So the appellants are well-satisfied. They would have preferred an immediate and total win, of course, but that was never a likely or expected result.

My deepest thanks go out to Jon Henke for providing me the opportunity to come on board back in 2009.  The experience of working with Jon, George Ou, Mike Turk, James DeLong, Brett Swanson, and Steve Effros has provided tremendous insight and mentorship during my time here and is greatly appreciated as I move forward in my career.  I would also like to thank our readers at Digital Society for coming here day after day over the last year and a half to get some of the best free market based expertise on tech policy issues on the net.  We have an excellent audience that has provided fantastic feedback and quality additions and debate on the issues of the day and that experience will surely be missed.

I wish everyone the best in their future endeavors.  In the mean time, I will be blogging at nickrbrown.com (still slightly a work in progress, but it should be up and running by the end of the week).

Best,

Nick R. Brown, MPA

The topic is not on the usual DigSoc beat, but  common themes link issues of innovation in health and medicine with telecom, such as:

[O]nly the whinging culture of the liberal state could take one of the greatest opportunities ever presented to humanity – the astonishing progress in medicine and biology – and convert it into a cause for complaint and despair while at the same time taking one of the best-known issues in institution building — the over-use of a commons — and see it as an intractable problem beyond society’s capacity to address.

Image from PJM.

I would like to thank Jon Henke for this great opportunity to work with him and the rest of my Digital Society colleagues including Mike Turk, Nick Brown, James Delong, Brett Swanson, and Steve Effros.  It’s been a great team whose individual and combined intellect I value and I will continue to read their insight.

I also look forward to working with my new colleagues at High Tech Forum who are walking libraries of technical insight.  I enjoyed my time here at Digital Society and hope that my readers will add High Tech Forum to their list of sites to read.

In my paper Last-Mile Dilemma, I noted that,

“Neutrality of the Internet is rather the idea that individuals on differing systems of connectivity and differing speeds of delivery should still have the ability to communicate with each other without applications or locations on the Internet being blocked or the traffic purposefully slowed.  This is what Tim Berners-Lee was describing when he said, “If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.”

That seems to be a different sentiment than his new stance that the Internet should be “free” and that users should have open access to all types of content that exists on the net.  The idea that the principle of net neutrality is free and open access to anything on the Internet is one more notch in the belt of an ever changing definition of what net neutrality is.

Tim Wu has recently added an addendum to his ever growing list of Internet rules as well stating that the government should create “term limits” for successful technology and Internet companies.  And in his comments he makes no bones about his ideology of state socialism commenting that if a “company has clearly shown that it’s corrupt” then the federal government should “just nationalize their source code.”  Wu fails to explain who would be making these decisions or advocate the federal governments authority to carry out these decisions. Being a legal scholar it would seem that this would be an appropriate and rational step.

Both Berners-Lee and Wu seem to be opposed to the app model now booming on many Internet devices and additionally based on their comments find services that have a pay wall to be a violation of net neutrality principles being that certain groups, i.e. those that are not subscribed, are blocked access from that service.

Proponents of net neutrality regulation repeatedly proclaim the notion that regulation will improve and encourage innovation on the Internet.  What we have however are two individuals who have now been caught saying two different things.  Net neutrality regulation will encourage innovation, yet if the innovation is too good and uses a subscription wall then it is a violation or if it becomes too popular and ventures into a zone that, based on some arbitrary system, someone declares monopolistic and corrupt then it is in violation.

Clearly those are not safe market conditions that a company could work within taking risks and making investments, and it is certainly not a free market.  These notions are rather a utopian fantasy land in which companies operate under the whims of a federal authority and who would not be in the business of striving for financial success and profit, but rather offer all services free of charge and who run out to their money tree in the back yard whenever bills come due.

The U.S. rail model is of “vertical integration,” in which a railroad generally both owns the track and operates trains over that track. The efficient U.S. model has resulted in huge productivity gains, sharply lower average rail rates, and massive reinvestment by railroads back into their systems.

• In fact, from 1980 through 2009, U.S. freight railroads reinvested more than $460 billion — more than 40 cents out of every revenue dollar — back into their networks.

• The main alternative to the vertical integration model is the “open access” model, in which multiple railroads operate over tracks they do not own. The right-of-way is owned by the government or a government-approved manager.

• When Argentina and Mexico restructured their rail industries, an “open access” regime was initially considered but met with an overwhelmingly negative response from potential investors who were not interested in committing funds to railroads if competitors could appear at any time and capture the economic benefits of those investments. Investors realized that in a capital-intensive industry like railroading, “open access” simply entails too much risk for private investment.

• Investors also recognized that “open access” would make it more difficult to operate a railroad efficiently and profitably due to government interference and a lack of coordination between infrastructure investment decisions and operational goals.

• Where open access has been implemented, additional rail-to-rail competition has been slow to develop and problems have abounded. As Mercer Management Consulting, a firm deeply involved in rail restructurings all over the world, testified at a U.S. Senate hearing, “No country has been successful in implementing [open] access without providing significant and, in some cases, unexpected government subsidy of rail service.”

It may seem that transporting bits is a lot different from transporting coal and machinery, but there are many commonalities among different types of networks, and one of the failures of the net neutrality movement is its lack of interest in learning from experience in other areas.

Abandoned railroad tracks from scmikeburton’s photostream.

The 150 GB cap applies to AT&T’s slower DSL customers while the 250 GB plan applies to AT&T U-Verse and Comcast cable broadband.  Note that for customers not on U-Verse using the older DSL technology, it is unlikely that they have a 6 Mbps connection required for the 4.8 Mbps option because 6 Mbps U-Verse plan is cheaper.  Furthermore, normal DSL is effectively a little faster than 5 Mbps for actual data throughput because the 6 Mbps sync rate has protocol overhead.  I have tested 6 Mbps U-Verse accounts getting 7 Mbps of data throughput on speedtest.net.

Netflix doesn’t give offer a 2.2 Mbps HD option which works better than 4.8P 2.2 Mbps mode, but I’m fairly certain that 3 Mbps connection using the “best” mode could still watch “HD” at sub 3 Mbps speeds with slightly lower quality.  This is what I have confirmed on my home connection.

UPDATE – It should be noted that many of the movies in Netflix are not available in HD which means they’re low bandwidth to begin with.

The good news is that an application like this might bring some sense to people about the benefits of close proximity to cell towers.  People might realize that the closer they are to a cell tower, the weaker their cell phone transmits at.  And because cell phones are around a million times stronger to the person using it than a cell tower, anyone who wants to ignore the overwhelming scientific data that there are no measurable risk to cell phones usage and wants lower radio exposer will need to live near a cell tower.

So does this mean that living far from a cell tower or living in a shielded building is harmful because the cell phone must operate at peak transmit levels?  No, because peak transmit levels are already restricted by the FCC to safe levels.  That means the worst case reading from the Tawkon app simply means the phone is operating at the peak allowable SAR levels.  If it really scares a person that much, they should use a wired or Bluetooth headset.

Note that the sequential capacity measured in MB/sec is frequently confused with the broadband metric of megabits per second (Mbps).  1 MB/sec is 8 Mbps so these SSDs have sequential write speeds of 1760 Mbps.  Furthermore, the real benefit of SSD drives is the random read and write speeds where data has to be retrieved from different parts of the storage device.  Each of these SSD drives have the equivalent random speed of hundreds or thousands of conventional mechanical hard drives with rotating disks.

Profits increased to $237.8 million during the fiscal year.  GameStop is looking to close 200 stores in areas that are over lapping, but also intends to use information from their “PowerUp Rewards” program to open 200 new stores in unserved areas.

The company also plans to begin opening larger brick and mortar locations that will be able to house kiosks allowing consumers to purchase digital goods from within the store.  Goods can also be tied into various promotions to attract individuals into the store for either physical purchases or virtual purchases through these kiosks.

GameStop is a sign of one more business that plays a role in the digital economy that is proving that it can remain healthy in the down economy.