I’m late to the party, but I wanted to say a few things about the District Court’s decision in the Viacom v. YouTube case this week and. This will be a four-part post, covering: 1. The holding 2. The economic principle behind it 3. The next steps in the case 4. A review of the [...]
Larry Downes is a consultant and speaker on developing business
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FCC Votes for Reclassification, Dog Bites Man
June 17th, 2010
Not surprisingly, FCC Commissioners voted 3 to 2 today to open a Notice of Inquiry on changing the classification of broadband Internet access from an “information service” under Title I of the Communications Act to “telecommunications” under Title II. (Title II was written for telephone service, and most of its provisions pre-date the breakup of [...]
Updates to the “Media” Page
June 16th, 2010
I’ve added almost twenty new posts to the Media Page from April and May. These were busy months for those interested in the dangerous intersection of technology and policy, the theme of The Laws of Disruption. A major court decision upended the Federal Communications Commissions efforts to pass new net neutrality regulations, leading the Commission [...]
The Fallacy of “e-personation” Laws
June 11th, 2010
I was interviewed yesterday for the local Fox affiliate on Cal. SB1411, which criminalizes online impersonations (or “e-personation”) under certain circumstances. On paper, of course, this sounds like a fine idea. As Palo Alto State Senator Joe Simitian, the bill’s sponsor, put it, “The Internet makes many things easier. One of those, unfortunately, is pretending [...]
The Privacy and Security Totentanz
June 7th, 2010
I participated last week in a Techdirt webinar titled, “What IT needs to know about Law.” (You can read Dennis Yang’s summary here, or follow his link to watch the full one-hour discussion. Free registration required.) The key message of The Laws of Disruption is that IT and other executives need to know a great [...]
FCC Broadband Reclassification: Third Way or the Highway?
May 25th, 2010
The announcement yesterday from key Congressional Democrats of an effort to reform the Communications Act put me in a nostalgic mood. Here follows one of my longest efforts yet to bury the lede. One of my favorite courses in law school was Abner Mikva’s “Legislative Process” course, which he taught while serving on the D.C. [...]
Albert Gallatin and the First National Broadband Plan
May 10th, 2010
Over the weekend, I published an op-ed in The Des Moines Register encouraging the FCC to heed the lessons of the first national broadband plan, the one Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin sent to Congress in 1808. Gallatin was a remarkable figure in the early history of the federal government, and his accomplishments include [...]
Net Neutrality and the Inconvenient Constitution
May 5th, 2010
I appeared this afternoon on the inaugural edition of TechCrunch TV to talk about–what else?–Net Neutrality. Multiple media sources are now reporting that the FCC, contrary to reports from earlier this week, has decided to go ahead with an effort to change the classification of broadband Internet service from a Title I “information service” to [...]
There’s Something About ECPA
April 29th, 2010
I write in “The Laws of Disruption” of the risk of unintended consequences that regulators run in legislating emerging technologies. Because the pace of change for these technologies is so much faster than it is for law, the likelihood of defining a legal problem and crafting a solution that will address it is very slim. [...]
Reality Check: “Reclassifying” Broadband Would be Hard—Thank Goodness
April 19th, 2010
I have a long opinion piece on CNet today, arguing that much of the talk of “reclassifying” or “relabeling” broadband Internet access to bring it under the FCC’s regulatory authority is just that—talk. On April 6th, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled definitively that the squishy doctrine of “ancillary jurisdiction” provides no authority for [...]