The net neutrality debate, already heating up here in Washington since FCC chairman Julius Genachowski’s speech to the Brookings Institution last week, got additional fuel on Monday when the Washington Post weighed in with an oddly snide editorial opposing the chairman’s proposal to regulate the way ISPs manage their networks.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski promised that his agency’s plan for regulating Internet service providers (ISPs) will be “fair, transparent, fact-based and data-driven.”
That’s nice. But Mr. Genachowski failed to convincingly answer the most important question of all: Is this intervention necessary?
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He and other proponents of federal involvement cite a handful of cases they say prove that, left to their own devices, ISPs such as Comcast Corp. and AT&T will choke the free flow of information and technology. One example alluded to by the chairman: Comcast’s blocking an application by BitTorrent that would allow peer-to-peer video sharing. Yet that conflict was ultimately resolved by the two companies — without FCC intervention — after Comcast’s alleged bad behavior was exposed by a blogger. Read more »
The nomination, who must be approved by the Senate, drew praise from both sides of the IP aisle. “Today’s appointment is the welcome culmination of many months of work toward a more streamlined approach to intellectual property enforcement by the federal government,” the Copyright Alliance 
Debating points will include the implications of the FCC’s net neutrality rulemaking for filtering and other online anti-piracy efforts, the French three-strikes law, Veoh’s recent court victory and its implications for UGC and the over/under line on when we’ll see the new White House IP Czar named. All packed into a fast-paced one hour. Plus bagels.
The idea isn’t new. Both Yahoo and Microsoft already operate online ad exchanges. But byopening its new display ad exchange to the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of web sites that are already part of its AdSense network for search ads Google will bring enormous new liquidity to what has been, up to now, a pretty small market. In principle, that should lead to more efficient price discovery for advertisers and higher inventory yields for publishers.
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