Let's take a little tour to see what real lobbying looks like, up close and personal as they used to say on TV. It's one thing to read about the massive lobbying power that industries have. It's in the news every day. There are stories about how much money the...

It's The Morning After for Big Telecom, and it ain't pretty. For the past dozen years or so, under deregulatory Democrats and compliant corporate Republicans, Big Telecom has written telecommunications policy, starting with the Telecom Act in 1996 and continuing in a pretty much unbroken streak, until very recently.

They...

Mount Indignant has erupted, spewing torrents of molten lava off of Capitol Hill, flowing down in angry, boiling rivers to the doorstep of the nondescript office building housing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Congressional Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives are sending hostile letters to the FCC all in the...

It is truly ironic that the debate over whether the Internet should legally be an open and non-discriminatory environment is taking place as Comcast, one of the biggest providers of Internet service, is in talks to buy control of NBC-Universal, one of the biggest providers of content. As the club...

Net Neutrality is a complicated-sounding term for something very simple. The companies that carry your Internet traffic shouldn't be allowed to play favorites. At its root, that's the deal. It's a concept that has been an integral part of communications (and transportation) law for more than 100 years.

And yet,...

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski didn't mention Net Neutrality when he went before a House subcommittee on Thursday (Sept. 17). The subject will be front and center on Monday (Sept. 21) when Genachowski is expected to give a speech announcing the Commission will vote in October to start...

We interrupt our normal discussions of broadband policy, mapping, copyright law, intellectual property and our other topics of interest for a special public service announcement:

Are you Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, one of the Facebookers who joined the Demand the TERMINATION of Communist Czars in our White House: Mark Lloyd...

Starting today (Sept. 10), the House Telecom Subcommittee is going to start looking at the broadband stimulus program and, perhaps next week, examine how the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is doing under the new management. The national broadband plan, required under the Federal stimulus program, should also be a topic...

Imagine a state is going through a bidding process for a contract. It happens all the time. The factors that normally are taken into account are price, experience, that type of thing. Under normal circumstances, then, a bid with a high price and no experience in a given state might...

Don't blame Barack Obama for serial backtracking, whether on health care or for continuing an civil liberties policy. Don't blame Senate Democrats for tanking on a "public option." It doesn't matter whether the issue is big, as in health care, or relatively small, as in my corner of the...

The Huffington Post exists because the Internet exists as a way for you, yes you, to read what you want without interference from the Internet Service Provider you're using to get you here. The Internet exists today so that the video on the HuffPo site runs the same as the...

Every once in a while, some powerful special interest will lift the curtain on how things work in Washington. It's not necessarily the press releases or the big stories. More often, it's on some technical issue, and the coverage centers on the issue, rather than on the larger concept of...

Just when you think a Washington institution has hit rock bottom, the bottom drops out. No, we're not talking about the woeful Washington Nationals. I wish we were. No, this is about the Washington Post, and it's this morning's sad tale.

Sarah Palin on the op-ed page "writing" about...

The chances are increasing exponentially that the government's $350 million stimulus program to track where high-speed Internet access is, and where it isn't, will become a massive boondoggle controlled by the very people with the most at stake in creating their own reality -- the telephone and cable companies.

That...

With up to $350 million in federal stimulus funds allocated for broadband mapping, an organization called Connected Nation is racking up the frequent flying miles in an effort to capture the lion's share of the money. The question that government officials will answer over the next couple of days is...

All this talk of Internet surveillance is enough to cause intense bafflement. For the last couple of days, stories about the revolution Iran indicated that the government is able to keep track of the Internet doings of protesters by means of deep-packet inspection (DPI), a technology developed in the...

Who says there is no cosmic irony in the bland world of telecom? On the day after thousands and thousands of pages were filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on a new national broadband plan, General Motors announced its new post-bankruptcy chairman -- Ed Whitacre, the former chairman of...

It is truly remarkable that we have a president of the United States who used the word, "phishing," and didn't mean going out to the creek on the ranch and throwing a line in the water. He used it in the proper way for that spelling, referring to online scammers...

It wouldn't have been surprising if there was a semi-panicked conversation in the corporate suites of Sony. Michael Lynton, the head of Sony studios, had just been quoted as saying "I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet."

Some marketing gal or PR guy...

It's hard to imagine an American industry as privileged and protected as the newspaper. Right there in the First Amendment to the Constitution, are the words: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of...