Words matter. These are the best Marvin Ammori Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There is just one exception to the FCC’s no-throttling rule – if a company can prove that throttling is ‘reasonable network management.’
Today, in 2011, I’m giving Secretary Hillary Clinton the nod as the Obama Administration’s improbable MVP in the technology realm.
‘Politico Magazine’ listed me among the top 50 ‘thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics’ for my work in coalitions advancing net neutrality.
Anyone unhappy with Google can use other search engines – including DuckDuckGo and Blekko, along with Bing or Yahoo.
Google pays advertisers based not just on payment per click but also by number of clicks. The interplay between the two sets the prices, so a government-regulated price for ‘equal access’ might be difficult to set.
The FCC should obviously not propose bad rules that will be struck down; it should propose good rules that will be upheld.
I find personalized search convenient – I read stories on my Facebook feed, my Twitter feed, daily email services, and my iPhone’s Flipboard app, and would love to be able to focus my searches on just those particular services.
Evidence and economic theory suggests that control of the Internet by the phone and cable companies would lead to blocking of competing technologies.
By definition, the Singularity means that machines would be smarter than us, and, in their wisdom, they can innovate new technologies. The innovations would come so quickly, and increasingly quickly, that the innovation would make Moore’s Law seem as antiquated as Hammurabi’s Code.
Congress created a safe harbor for defamation in 1996 and for copyright in 1998. Both safe harbors were designed to ensure that the Internet would remain a participatory medium of speech.
Net neutrality is the principle forbidding huge telecommunications companies from treating users, websites, or apps differently – say, by letting some work better than others over their pipes.
I have tried to help build a framework that recaptures the First Amendment as a principle to empower all Americans, politically and personally, through access to plentiful, diverse communications spaces.
Charter hired me – which, to be honest, took some humility on its part, since I have helped lead public campaigns against cable companies like Charter – to advise it in crafting its commitment to network neutrality.
‘Network neutrality’ is sometimes called ‘Internet freedom’ or ‘Internet openness’ and is a legal principle that would forbid cable and phone companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast from blocking some websites or providing special priority to others.
News seems to travel far more quickly on Twitter and Facebook than through search.
In the post-industrial economy, ideas and great minds often provide far greater return on investment than any other resources or capital investments.
Under the Constitution, federal law trumps both state and city law. But antitrust law allows states some exceptional leeway to adopt anticompetitive business regulations, out of respect for states’ rights to regulate business. This federal respect for states’ rights does not extend to cities.
A ban on paid priority is central to any real net neutrality proposal, beginning with the Snowe-Dorgan Bill of 2006. Indeed, the notion of ‘payment for priority’ is what started the net neutrality fight.
Net neutrality is the idea that Internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all traffic that goes through their networks the same, not offering preferential treatment to some websites over others or charging some companies arbitrary fees to reach users.
The FCC can’t enforce press-statement principles without adopting official rules, and those rules must be based on the legal theory of reclassification.
Internet users should be able to choose where to go online and which applications to use. Comcast, say, shouldn’t be allowed to block Skype just because it could siphon the communications giant’s telephone business.
Data can generally travel the speed of light unless networks are congested. When there’s congestion, usually the cheapest and best thing is simply to add capacity generally, not to prioritize certain sites over others.
Much of my work strikes me as pretty unified: as a lawyer, working in several areas, I have thought about how to promote freedom of speech broadly for everyone.
Without the ability to criticize unjust laws in powerful symbolic ways, we can’t change them. And the point of a democracy is that people should be able to convince other people to change a law.
The Supreme Court has crafted doctrines such as ‘fair use,’ which permits copying materials for criticism, parody, and transformative uses, and has ruled that abstract ideas are not subject to copyright, because courts will not punish people for merely using an abstract concept in speech.
Being a ‘monopoly’ is not illegal, nor is trying to best one’s competitors through lower prices, better customer service, greater efficiency, or more rapid innovation.
The Internet is one of the most revolutionary technologies the world has ever known. It has given us an entire universe of information in our pockets.
I have worked on open Internet, speech, and entrepreneurship issues for years.
In 1984, the Federal Trade Commission released a report that explained why taxis could charge customers exorbitant prices for dismal service. The simple reason, according to the 176-page study: lack of competition in the market. The culprit: local governments.
Free speech has remained a quintessential American ideal, even as our society has moved from the ink quill to the touch screen.
Liability limit has become a symbol of corporate greed in passing the risk of disaster to the U.S. government and U.S. citizens.
Google’s competitors argue that Google designs its search display to promote Google ‘products’ like Google Maps, Google Places, and Google Shopping, ahead of competitors like MapQuest, Yelp, and product-search sites.
The Startup Act should give all Americans, not just immigrants, a better shot at being tomorrow’s engineers and entrepreneurs. And that opportunity could begin at a young age with education in computer programming.
In software and many other online markets, even dominant firms face potential threats because of the low costs for competitors to enter those markets. Threats more easily emerge because of better or newer technologies leapfrogging older ones.
Regardless of the industry, antitrust law is meant to benefit consumers – not competitors.
The neutral and level playing field provided by permissionless innovation has empowered all of us with the freedom to express ourselves and innovate online without having to seek the permission of a remote telecom executive.
The current FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, is highly regarded, but some distrust him because he is the former head lobbyist of both the cable and wireless phone industries. He’s also made some statements suggesting he doesn’t understand or opposes network neutrality.
If someone has copyright over some piece of your stuff, you can sell it without permission from the copyright holder because the copyright holder can only control the ‘first-sale.’ The Supreme Court has recognized this doctrine since 1908.
A network neutrality rule could result in mere ‘slaps on the wrist’ or involve such expensive and difficult litigation procedures that no small company or consumer could ever bring a case.
The FCC banned throttling for good reason, namely that Internet service providers should not bias their networks toward some applications or classes of applications. Biasing the network interferes with user choice, innovation, decisions of application makers, and the competitive marketplace.
On the Internet, speed matters. According to research by Microsoft, Google, and others, if a website is even 250 milliseconds slower than a rival, people will visit it less often.
Public participation helped create the Internet, and it helps protect it. That’s worth celebrating and remembering.
I discover real-time news far more often on Facebook than on Google News or a regular Google search.
Default choices often remain unchanged for no reason other than being the default, either because of this lack of information or humans’ status quo bias.
To me, freedom of speech and debate are necessary inputs in solving any of our nation’s problems, from homelessness and economic inequality to banking, the environment, and national security. Freedom of speech is what Larry Lessig would call a ‘root’ issue; working on free speech is striking at a root issue.
Encourage public schools to teach American children how to code just after they learn to multiply.
Charter’s merger sales pitch is pretty straightforward: it argues that it has always been too small to bully Internet companies, TV makers, and its own customers, so it has’un-cable’ practices they hope to extend.
Net neutrality sounds wonky and technical but is actually quite simple. It would keep the Internet as it has always been – cable and phone companies would remain mere gateways to all sites, rather than gatekeepers determining where users can go and what innovators can offer them.
Any ‘network neutrality’ rule should be designed to forbid phone or cable companies from controlling the Internet.
The CEO of AT&T told an interviewer back in 2005 that he wanted to introduce a new business model to the Internet: charging companies like Google and Yahoo! to reliably reach Internet users on the AT&T network.
