Broadband Advisor

With regard to the free exchange of information over the Internet, we, the people, have mostly managed to hold our ground. We can thank activists, hacktivists, legislators saying "no, thanks" to money from the entertainment lobbies, and forward-thinking artists and content distributors--I'm proud that writers and publishers took the lead on this--who recognise that reach is the currency of the digital age.

Largely due to the continued dumb statements and actions of a few apparently PR-challenged carriers, the network neutrality issue is alive and well in the United States. Since any issue like this seems to create a legislative void that must be filled, we now have at least two network neutrality related bills for Congress to consider. If one liked legislation-based solutions, merging these bills and tossing out a bit of Federal Communications Commission make-work would not be too bad, but there would still be some questions left unanswered.

Welcome to Beijing.

Elections aren't the only things in chaos in Pakistan these days. The country recently decided to censor YouTube. Unfortunately, Pakistan botched the technology: It issued BGP routes that leaked, causing a worldwide reroute of all YouTube requests to a black hole in Pakistan -- taking YouTube off the global Internet for a couple of hours.

Recently a retired AT&T employee named Mark Klein announced at a Capitol Hill press conference that he had evidence that "An exact copy of all Internet traffic that flowed through critical AT&T cables ... was being diverted to equipment inside the secret room."

I've written several pieces pointing out that the issue of net neutrality is more nuanced than either proponents or opponents want you to believe. But with their characteristic cluelessness, providers have pretty much succeeded in reducing the debate right back down to a sound bite -- and positioning themselves on the wrong side.

There is a NetApp lawsuit against Sun for IP infringement that has just erupted into near open marketing warfare.

It seems Comcast has been caught playing with its subscribers' naughty bits. In the latest scandal to spread like kudzu across the blogosphere, Comcast has been accused of killing off Bit Torrent file sharing, according to tests by geeks at the Associated Press.