Online Activities
Pew: Social networks are on the rise, but eMail and search continue to lead online activities; http://eicker.at/OnlineActivities
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Gerrit Eicker
FCC: Game Over for Net Neutrality?
FCC gives government power to regulate web traffic; http://eicker.at/FCC Wozniak: Keep the Internet free! http://eicker.at/Free
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Gerrit Eicker
WSJ: “A divided Federal Communications Commission approved a proposal by Chairman Julius Genachowski to give the FCC power to prevent broadband providers from selectively blocking web traffic. … The new FCC rules, for example, would prevent a broadband provider, such as Comcast Corp., AT&T, Inc. or Verizon Communications Inc., from hobbling access to an online video service, such as Netflix, that competes with its own video services. … The rules would allow phone and cable companies to offer faster, priority delivery services to Internet companies willing to pay extra. But the FCC proposal contains language suggesting the agency would try to discourage creation of such high-speed toll lanes. … The rules passed Tuesday are also likely to be legally challenged, and it isn’t clear if they will be upheld. Congress has never given the FCC explicit authority to regulate Internet lines, so the agency is using older rules to justify its authority.”
Wozniak: “Imagine that when we started Apple we set things up so that we could charge purchasers of our computers by the number of bits they use. The personal computer revolution would have been delayed a decade or more. If I had to pay for each bit I used on my 6502 microprocessor, I would not have been able to build my own computers anyway. … We have very few government agencies that the populace views as looking out for them, the people. The FCC is one of these agencies that is still wearing a white hat. Not only is current action on Net Neutrality one of the most important times ever for the FCC, it’s probably the most momentous and watched action of any government agency in memorable times in terms of setting our perception of whether the government represents the wealthy powers or the average citizen, of whether the government is good or is bad. This decision is important far beyond the domain of the FCC itself.”
Pethokoukis: “Milton Friedman had it right. Business is no friend of free markets. The Federal Communication Commission’s ‘net neutrality’ ruling is more evidence of this. What the FCC should have done is called it a year, went on holiday and left the Internet alone. – Instead, it found a solution in search of a problem. And that solution was more or less supplied by Verizon and Google last August. … The FCC’s new rules would ban providers such as Comcast and Verizon Communications from blocking or delaying lawful Internet traffic, such as online services offered by competitors. But the giant telecoms and landline providers would be allowed to sell faster service to content companies such as Google and Amazon.”
GigaOM: “The compromise is better than the original framework proposed earlier month, but it still has plenty of loopholes and rests on somewhat uncertain legal authority. That will ensure that the FCC is arbitrating network neutrality disputes for years to come and likely fighting for that power in the courts.”
ATD: “Why not focus on what is clearly the more important problem and without question in the national interest, and leave the finer points of how service providers and Web companies carry content to sort themselves out? Like it or not, a new, more legally complicated Internet is here.“
Gerrit Eicker
Net Neutrality and the FCC Framework
Borthwick on net neutrality, FCC: Access to broadband [is] the single most important driver of innovation; http://eicker.at/NN
Gerrit Eicker
Europe is Online, Britons Lead
Ofcom: Britons, a nation of early technology adopters, spend more online than any other European country; http://eicker.at/UK
Gerrit Eicker
LTE
Long Term Evolution (LTE) gains traction around the world: mobile carriers are switching on 4G globally; http://eicker.at/LTE
Gerrit Eicker
Web Defence
Berners-Lee: The Web is critical to the digital revolution, prosperity, liberty. It needs defending; http://eicker.at/TheWeb
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Gerrit Eicker
Berners-Lee: “The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles. – The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. … Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. … The primary design principle underlying the Web’s usefulness and growth is universality. … Decentralization is another important design feature. … Decentralization has made widespread innovation possible and will continue to do so in the future. … Social-networking sites present a different kind of problem. … Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. … Open Standards Drive Innovation – Allowing any site to link to any other site is necessary but not sufficient for a robust Web. The basic Web technologies that individuals and companies need to develop powerful services must be available for free, with no royalties. … Keeping the web universal and keeping its standards open help people invent new services. But a third principle – the separation of layers – partitions the design of the Web from that of the Internet. … Electronic Human Rights … A neutral communications medium is the basis of a fair, competitive market economy, of democracy, and of science. Debate has risen again in the past year about whether government legislation is needed to protect net neutrality. It is. Although the Internet and Web generally thrive on lack of regulation, some basic values have to be legally preserved. … Free speech should be protected, too. … As long as the web’s basic principles are upheld, its ongoing evolution is not in the hands of any one person or organization – neither mine nor anyone else’s. If we can preserve the principles, the Web promises some fantastic future capabilities. … For example, the latest version of HTML, called HTML5, is not just a markup language but a computing platform that will make Web apps even more powerful than they are now. … A great example of future promise, which leverages the strengths of all the principles, is linked data. … Linked data raise certain issues that we will have to confront. For example, new data-integration capabilities could pose privacy challenges that are hardly addressed by today’s privacy laws. … Now is an exciting time. Web developers, companies, governments and citizens should work together openly and cooperatively, as we have done thus far, to preserve the Web’s fundamental principles, as well as those of the Internet, ensuring that the technological protocols and social conventions we set up respect basic human values. The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.”
Ingram, GigaOM: “Not everyone agrees, however, that Google or Facebook are actually monopolies in any kind of legal sense, although they are definitely dominant players. And while Google is clearly a web giant, Yahoo and AOL were once web giants too, and they are shadows of their former selves now, displaced by completely new players. Even Facebook, which is now seen as one of the companies to be afraid of, is threatened in many ways by Twitter – a startup that barely even existed a few years ago and is now reportedly valued at close to $3 billion. … That said, it’s worth being reminded that large players often see it as being in their interests to restrict the freedom of their users, and that – as Berners-Lee warns in his Scientific American piece – this can chip away at the web’s core principles, which he says revolve around ‘a profound concept: that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere.’ … More critical to free speech than any other medium? That’s a strong claim – but there’s certainly an argument to be made that the web fits that definition.“
Gerrit Eicker
Two Internets?
Lasar: How will we know when the Internet is dead? Are we moving towards two Internets? http://eicker.at/TwoInternets
Gerrit Eicker
Gartner Hype Cycle: Technologies 2010
Gartner Hype Cycle: Microblogging, eReaders, virtual worlds on its way trough of disillusionment; http://eicker.at/n
Gerrit Eicker
Counter-revolution
Economist: The internet has been a great unifier. Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it; http://j.mp/a3Rwse
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Gerrit Eicker
Economist: “The first internet boom, a decade and a half ago, resembled a religious movement. Omnipresent cyber-gurus, often framed by colourful PowerPoint presentations reminiscent of stained glass, prophesied a digital paradise in which not only would commerce be frictionless and growth exponential, but democracy would be direct and the nation-state would no longer exist. One, John-Perry Barlow, even penned ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’. … First, governments are increasingly reasserting their sovereignty. … Second, big IT companies are building their own digital territories, where they set the rules and control or limit connections to other parts of the internet. Third, network owners would like to treat different types of traffic differently, in effect creating faster and slower lanes on the internet. – It is still too early to say that the internet has fragmented into “internets”, but there is a danger that it may splinter along geographical and commercial boundaries. … China is by no means the only country erecting borders in cyberspace. The Australian government plans to build a firewall to block material showing the sexual abuse of children and other criminal or offensive content. … Discussion of these proprietary platforms is only beginning. A lot of ink, however, has already been spilt on another form of balkanisation: in the plumbing of the internet. Most of this debate, particularly in America, is about ‘net neutrality‘. … If, however, the internet continues to go the other way, this would be bad news. Should the network become a collection of proprietary islands accessed by devices controlled remotely by their vendors, the internet would lose much of its ‘generativity’, warns Harvard’s Mr Zittrain. Innovation would slow down and the next Amazon, Google or Facebook could simply be, well, Amazon, Google or Facebook.“
Gerrit Eicker
4G Will Change Everything!
4G, 3.9G (LTE) to be serious, will give the Internet a boost like landline broadband did before; http://j.mp/9f0PEY
Gerrit Eicker 09:12 on 11. August 2011 Permalink |
According to Pew research, social networking is a daily activity for 65% of onliners in 2011, compared to 11% in 2005.
Pew: “Search and email remain the two online activities that are nearly universal among adult internet users, as 92% of online adults use search engines to find information on the Web, and a similar number (92%) use email. Since the Pew Internet Project began measuring adults’ online activities in the last decade, these two behaviors have consistently ranked as the most popular, even as new platforms, broadband and mobile devices continue to reshape the way Americans use the internet and web.”
Pew: “Email and search form the core of online communication and online information gathering, respectively. And they have done so for nearly a decade, even as new platforms, broadband and mobile devices continue to reshape the way Americans use the internet and web. Perhaps the most significant change over that time is that both activities have become more habitual. … Perhaps surprisingly for an online activity that has been around for a while, search is most popular among the youngest adult internet users (those age 18-29), 96% of whom use search engines to find information online. But even among the oldest internet users (age 65+), 87% are search engine users. … Email is similar to search (and many other online activities) in that the youngest online adults, the college-educated, and those in the highest income categories are more likely than others to engage in the activity.“