Free Federal Wireless Broadband For All Americans? Fuggedaboutit!
The United States government is not going to be providing free WiFi Internet access to consumers anytime soon. That news may surprise anyone who read a startling Washington Post story on Sunday that seemed to confuse a fairly esoteric telecom policy proposal about the use of so-called “white space” wireless spectrum with some sort of free national wireless Internet access plan. The “free WiFi for all” story, which was passed around uncritically by Internet blogs and news sites, set off a furor because the notion cuts to the heart of ongoing battles over access to the Internet, the “digital divide,” and federal policy decisions that could have major implications for the telecom, cable, and technology industries. But the story was wrong, as Ars Technica pointed out. On Tuesday, outlets that repeated the bunk story began walking their reports back, in some cases apologizing for giving bad information to the public. The episode, which provoked a strong pushback from tech ...
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Did Google’s Promise to ‘Do No Evil’ Convince the FTC to Do Nothing About Its Search Bias?
Has the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) been seduced by Google’s famous promise to “do no evil?” That’s the question a lot of critics are asking in the wake of the Internet search giant’s antitrust settlement with the FTC last week. The problem, critics say, isn’t simply that Google got off lightly; it’s that the FTC allowed Google to set the terms – both in defining whether the company’s behavior was harmful and in setting the terms of its punishment. “For critics of Google,” NYU Information Law Institute Fellow Nathan Newman writes on the Huffington Post, “[the] FTC decision is not bad news because we disagree with the results, but bad news because it reflects an enforcement agency failing to even ask the right questions.” (MORE: What Google’s FTC Deal Means for the Patent Wars) One of the central questions in the FTC’s antitrust investigation was how exactly to determine whether Google’s dominance in the search engine business has caused harm – and to ...
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Did Google’s Promise to “Do No Evil” Convince the FTC to Do Nothing About its Search Bias?
Has the Federal Trade Commission been seduced by Google’s famous promise to “do no evil?” That’s the question a lot of critics are asking in the wake of the Internet search giant’s antitrust settlement with the FTC last week. The problem, critics say, isn’t simply that Google got off lightly; it’s that the FTC allowed Google to set the terms – both in defining whether the company’s behavior was harmful and in setting the terms of its punishment. “For critics of Google,” NYU Information Law Institute Fellow Nathan Newman writes on the Huffington Post, “[the] FTC decision is not bad news because we disagree with the results, but bad news because it reflects an enforcement agency failing to even ask the right questions.” (MORE: What Google’s FTC Deal Means for the Patent Wars) One of the central questions in the FTC’s antitrust investigation was how exactly to determine whether Google’s dominance in the search engine business has caused harm – and to whom? ...
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