Tag: pipes
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Why do sheep need Twitter?
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Spot the broadband user in this pictureA House of Lords committee this week declared that British taxpayers must foot the bill for an internet that nobody wants – unless perhaps they have a second home in the country.
Some observations by the committee may be accurate: Britain’s broadband is slower than its rivals. But this doesn’t seem to be what vexes our noble and learned friends. Observations don’t amount to a rational argument – what the Lords are making … Read More
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How to fix the broken internet economy
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How can we begin to unpick the tangled mess that the technology and creative industries have created?
There’s certainly no shortage of blame to go around. In the past every new wave of technology has delivered healthy creative markets – but today this is no longer happening.
Just 20 years since the birth of the internet economy, with the advent of the worldwide web, it’s worth asking why. It’s time we looked afresh at where both industries went wrong, and … Read More
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Our ‘digital economy’ is still a circular firing squad
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The British ISP industry has spent a small fortune of its customers’ money fighting the people who would, in a saner world, be its business partners – only to suffer a crushing defeat. On Tuesday Lord Justice Richards threw out BT and TalkTalk’s judicial review against the 2010 Digital Economy Act.
Yet as trench warfare goes, they may consider it worth every penny.… Read More
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A brief keynote to Westminster Digital Forum
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My name is Andrew Orlowski from The Register, I was looking for an illustration to try and bring a very old debate to have a fresh perspective, and I came across this in my library, which is an extraordinary book written by a gentleman called Yoneji Masuda. The book was written in 1980 and it was the Japanese plan to computerise Japanese Society on Cybernetic lines. It was a very modest project. It would have cost about $65 billion … Read More
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ISPs: beware of paranoid bloggers with a persecution complex, warns Ofcom
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Exclusive Ofcom will encourage ISPs to be transparent about traffic management, but won’t ask them to detail the information in a standard format, according to meeting notes seen by The Register. The regulator is sounding out opinion from ISPs and consumer groups on traffic management, which it sees as the only aspect of the US "Net Neutrality" debates applicable to the UK.
In the US, the debate was politicized and emotive; pressure from left-wing activists attempted to push both … Read More
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How neutrality locks in the web’s ‘Hyper Giants’
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By the mid 1990s it had become pointless to compete with Microsoft in operating systems and office software – and investment in potential competitors dried up. The best you could hope for as a software company was to carve out a niche as part of the Windows Office system; this was a very small niche indeed.
The same thing is happening today with web services. But what Google and other web giants are doing goes largely unnoticed, even by analysts, … Read More