In 2006, Aaron Patzer founded Mint. Patzer had grown up in the city of Evansville, Indiana—a place he described as “small, without much economic opportunity”—but had created a successful business building websites. He kept up the business through college and… Read More ›
Tag Archive for ‘Competition’
The FCC Is Opening up Some Very Important Spectrum for Broadband
Decisions about who gets to use the public airwaves and how they use it impact our lives every day. From the creation of WiFi routers to the public auctions that gave us more than two options for our cell phone… Read More ›
The FCC Is About to Raise Billions. Congress Should Invest it in Fiber Infrastructure
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has announced his plans to begin freeing up valuable airwaves within the C-Band, a part of the spectrum—the radio frequencies that our cell carriers, television stations, and others use to transmit services—historically used for satellite television…. Read More ›
alt.interoperability.adversarial
Today, we are told that the bigness of Big Tech giants was inevitable: the result of “network effects.” For example, once everyone you want to talk to is on Facebook, you can’t be convinced to use another, superior service, because… Read More ›
What Reporters Should Look For in Latest Facebook Document Leak
NBC’s latest release of 7,000 pages of leaked internal Facebook documents has revealed how Facebook treated user data as leverage with external developers and spun anti-competitive moves as privacy improvements. As members of the press and civil society continue to… Read More ›
Why Fiber is Vastly Superior to Cable and 5G
The United States, its states, and its local governments are in dire need of universal fiber plans. Major telecom carriers such as AT&T and Verizon have discontinued their fiber-to-the-home efforts, leaving most people facing expensive cable monopolies for the future…. Read More ›
Felony Contempt of Business Model: Lexmark’s Anti-Competitive Legacy
In 2002, Lexmark was one of the leading printer companies in the world. A division of IBM—the original tech giant—Lexmark was also a pioneer in the now-familiar practice of locking customers in to expensive “consumables,” like the carbon powder that… Read More ›
The FCC Is Siding With Landlords and Comcast Over Tenants Who Want Broadband Choices
In December of 2016, the city of San Francisco boldly enacted the “Occupant’s Right to Choose Communications Services Provider” ordinance (also known as Article 52) that hinders a payola scheme cooked up between big cable companies like Comcast and landlords…. Read More ›
California’s ISP Deregulation Law Allows Recording VoIP Calls without Consent
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been opposing A.B. 1366, legislation by Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, which would renew a law that effectively shields a huge part of the telecommunications industry from state and local regulation. Comcast and AT&T law backed this… Read More ›
Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today’s Monopolies
Today, Apple is one of the largest, most profitable companies on Earth, but in the early 2000s, the company was fighting for its life. Microsoft’s Windows operating system was ascendant, and Microsoft leveraged its dominance to ensure that every Windows… Read More ›