Sonia Arrison, director of technology studies at the Pacific Research Institute brings some context to the European Commission’s recent fine of $356 million against Microsoft for not complying with the EC demand that it make certain technology information available to its competitors as part of a 2004 antitrust ruling.

Never mind that the deadline for compliance hasn’t passed. European regulators, Arrison notes, just want to warp things up before they go on vacation. No telling how many Eurocrats used Microsoft’s offending products to book their travel. Technology may change, but in Europe, August still means everyone goes on holiday.

But I risk making light of an all-too-serious situation. Microsoft’s current penalty, coming on top of another $630.7 million fine over the bundling of Windows Media Player, represents one of the worst examples of judgment through venue shopping. To be sure, Microsoft has come under fire for using delay tactics and other forms of resistance in the wake of the ruling. The legal ramifications of digging in against an EC ruling have yet to play out, but on some level, you can’t blame Microsoft for its intransigence. The complaint was spearheaded by U.S. competitors in a European jurisdiction. Yes, we operate in a global economy, but that wasn’t the reason behind the choice of the EC. Sun and Novell went to Europe because their complaint has no traction in U.S. antitrust courts.

Continue reading "Microsoft’s European Inquisition" »

Posted by Steven Titch at 10:05 AM | Permalink

With the obvious intention of currying favor with carriers for free transmission of fromtheheartland.org faster than the speed of life; and - less toungue and cheek- at the risk of subjecting this blog to its first DOS (denial of sanity) attack from commentors and trackbacks: I feel compelled to point to the self-interested chatter that is supposed to qualify as argumentation on behalf of net neutrality.

I'm a big fan of alliteration, but somehow this one had escaped me until I fell across a rather cryptic reference by Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit.com. He seems to be buying into casting this as a battle between titanic telephone and bantamweight bloggers. When you're a lumberjack, everything looks like a tree, so it is unsurprising to see that the author of An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths would cast this as yet one more battle cry for the little literati to take up the sling.

It is not that internet architecture and the commercial interests of the relatively narrow band of broadband providers aren't worthy of discussion, but this appears to be an intellectual fait accompli, not a serious discourse. The vast silence in the grassroots blogosphere in the face of such a sweeping regulatory effort made me wonder: where has skepticism of government solutions gone? Apparently if forced to choose between Big Media and Big Government, Glenn Reynolds has thrown in his lot with the latter, or actually with both. The blogoshere ain't leading this charge, they're following the likes of Google's Guru Vint Cerf. The coalition for net neutrality operates under that typically 'understated' rubric of "Save The Internet".

Continue reading "Net neut[e]rality or the wild, wild web? I'm with the cowboys!" »

Posted by Brian Bishop at 07:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Apple, the company that teeters between radical innovation and insular reactionary business models has moved the debate over leaks to the private sphere.

An appeal of an order providing Apple with subpoena's over an e-mail provider was heard last Thursday. The anti-intellectual property Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is busy making bloggers into journalists to extend the imaginary journalists' shield - proposed by EFF to work like the shields on the starship Enterprise but having more in common with the cone of silence from Mel Brook's classic sitcom Get Smart.

Given the general state of journalism, I'd just as soon not be included. But a more interesting question is whether the EFF is, as they claim, defending freedom in the digital world, or defending cyber theft.

Continue reading "Are we journalists? does it matter? EFF broken clock?" »

Posted by Brian Bishop at 06:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

Two programming worms that specifically target the Apple OSX operating system have shaken the tight-knit world of Mcintosh users, who have long viewed their Macs as functionally superior to PCs running Microsoft Windows in every way.

Indeed, calls for legislation to mandate government purchase of open source software, often spurred by Mac and Linux users, routinely cite security flaws in Windows as a prime reason to seek alternatives. While Apple’s OSX is not open source, the operating system is based on Linux, is.

Continue reading "Security Threat Rocks Mac Users" »

Posted by Steven Titch at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Contrary to popular assertions, the phone companies are no longer sitting on legacy copper-based circuit-switched networks Vendors have seen significant uptick in sales of Internet Protocol (IP) and packet networking gear to carriers, reports Telephony Online, citing a new report from Infonetics, a market research firm.

At Cisco Systems, the world’s leading manufacturer of IP routers, service provider sales increased $300 million last year, for a total of $2.6 million. Even so, Cisco lost market share to Juniper Networks, which also saw a heavy increase in service provider business. Huawei and Alcatel also saw gains.

Meanwhile, sales of multiservice switches, which support legacy networks, continued to tail off, dropping to $1.98 billion. This compares to their peak sales of $5 billion in 2000.

The report, among the first since wholesale price controls dictating terms of telco line sharing were relaxed, supports predictions from free-market analysts that telephone companies would increase broadband deployment once regulators ended restrictions that limited their return on investment.

Full story here.

Posted by Steven Titch at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)