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Last week, after months of intensive wrangling, the House and the Senate finally agreed on a final version of the Higher Education Act (HEA). Buried in this massive bill, which touches on virtually every aspect of education, is a little provision requiring campuses to develop “plans to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including through the use of a variety of technology-based deterrents.” Those deterrent include bandwidth shaping and traffic monitoring, but also use of filtering technologies such as Audible Magic.

Last week, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee introduced S. 3325, the "Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008," a bill that proposes a number of alarming changes to copyright law. The bill is the Senate's gift to big content owners, creating new and powerful tools -- many of which will be paid for by your tax dollars -- for the entertainment industry to go after infringers.

A group of us filed formal comments with the FCC arguing that “free, filtered broadband,” as the FCC proposed to mandate in the AWS-3 spectrum auction, is not “Internet.” Comments here, in WT Docket 07-195.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have been quick to blame problems with service quality on so-called “bandwidth hogs.” According to AT&T, the top 5% of their Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) subscribers use 46% of the consumed bandwidth, and the top 1% of subscribers use 21%.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin sent a signal today that the FCC may issue an order against Comcast in the wake of the scandal over their use of packet forgery to interfere with BitTorrent, Gnutella, and other Internet protocols.

Online free speech has never been well received by the Iranian government, but now Tehran is just one step away from making blogging on certain topics into a capital crime.