When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, declaring that all men were created equal, he owned slaves. Women couldn't vote. But, throughout history, our abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights leaders called on our nation, in reality, to live up to the nation's professed ideals in that Declaration.
Marvin Ammori
Regardless of the industry, antitrust law is meant to benefit consumers - not competitors.
I have worked on open Internet, speech, and entrepreneurship issues for years.
Civil disobedience has almost always been about expression. Generally, it's nonviolent, as defined by Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and King.
One goal of law - as we learn in law school from the first day of contracts - is to deter bad behavior.
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.
In the post-industrial economy, ideas and great minds often provide far greater return on investment than any other resources or capital investments.
Ever since the end of Medieval feudalism, and the writings of John Locke, we have understood the importance of being able to buy and sell one's own property, including books and watches, both for reasons of economics and liberty.
The fights for media justice and racial justice have been intertwined since the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.
Encourage public schools to teach American children how to code just after they learn to multiply.
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.
From search and books to online TV and operating systems, antitrust affects our daily digital lives in more ways than we think.
Thinking about free speech brought me to media regulation, as Americans access so much of their political and cultural speech through mass media. That led me to work on the FCC's media ownership rules beginning in 2005 to fight media consolidation, working with those at Georgetown's IPR, Media Access Project, Free Press, and others.
A report released by the Partnership for a New American Economy and the Partnership for New York City predicts that by 2018, there will be 800,000 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) jobs in the United States that require a master's degree or higher - and only around 550,000 American-graduates with this training.
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.
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.
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.
The Internet freedom issue we need to focus on is network neutrality.
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.
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.
The FCC sided with the public and adopted extremely strong net neutrality rules that should be a global model for Internet freedom.
The first-sale doctrine reflects basic common sense - and follows from the logic of treating copyrights and other 'intellectual property' with no more protection than regular property.
Competitors argue that Google rigs its search algorithms to demote listings for competing search engines. Many of the allegations of demotion come generally from sites of pretty questionable quality, such as Nextag and Foundem. Some of Google's primary competitors in 'specialized search' clearly place well in search results - Amazon and Yelp.
A rule against paid fast lanes would encourage additional capacity; a rule permitting paid fast lanes would simply encourage cable companies to create congested slow lanes on the Internet so they could make money by selling fast lanes to big companies.
The FCC can't enforce press-statement principles without adopting official rules, and those rules must be based on the legal theory of reclassification.
In 2007, when I was a lawyer for the public interest group Free Press, I helped draft the complaint to the FCC against Comcast for secretly blocking BitTorrent and other technologies.
There is just one exception to the FCC's no-throttling rule - if a company can prove that throttling is 'reasonable network management.'
The Open Internet principles were not legal rules adopted by the FCC; they were effectively a press statement posted on the FCC website.
The Internet isn't just itself a revolution - it sometimes starts them, too.
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 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.
Today, in 2011, I'm giving Secretary Hillary Clinton the nod as the Obama Administration's improbable MVP in the technology realm.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Political institutions are fair game in political debates in a democracy. Nothing is more fair game, in fact, than political matters of public concern.
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.
President Obama is a big supporter of keeping the Internet open. During his presidential campaign, he pledged his support to net neutrality repeatedly.
In the early 1990s, Americans used their home phone lines to connect their desktop computers to the Internet via ISPs like AOL, Earthlink, or Netzero. Back then, the ISPs didn't have cost-effective technology to select particular sites for blocking or privileging.
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.
Without network neutrality, cable and phone companies could stifle innovation.
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.
As each year and debate passes, more broadband companies will start to see that their future lies not in restricting an open Internet but in betting on it.
President Obama's FCC Chairman, Julius Genachowski, has a reputation in D.C. of being a 'tepid' regulator. From reports of his net neutrality proposal, he's living up to that reputation.
Broadband companies can have great success offering access to the unfettered Internet.
Free speech has remained a quintessential American ideal, even as our society has moved from the ink quill to the touch screen.
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.
Google (and Bing and Yahoo!) don't 'owe' any company traffic. If a company has to spend more on advertising on Google, in addition to investing in search-engine-optimization, that is not a violation of any law.
