A US appeals court ruling today said that cable companies do not have a First Amendment right to discriminate against minority-run TV channels. Charter, the second-largest US cable company after Comcast, was sued in January 2016 by Byron Allen's Entertainment Studios Networks (ESN), which alleged that Charter violated the Civil Rights Act of 1866 by refusing to carry TV channels run by the African-American-owned ESN. Allen, a comedian and producer, founded ESN in 1993 and is its CEO...

Democrats and Republicans can agree on at least one thing: The spam robocall situation has gotten entirely out of hand.

U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts, renewed his push for "net neutrality" protections Thursday, following reports that many major U.S. mobile carriers may be "throttling," or slowing down, certain services on their networks. Markey, who led the U.S. Senate push to overturn the Federal Communications Commission's rollback of net neutrality rules, said the findings from researchers behind the app "Wehe" underscore the need for the Obama-era internet rules.

The next generation of wireless technology, fittingly known as 5G, is just around the corner. If you ask Verizon, it's already here. One thing the entire industry can agree on is it's going to change our lives. The industry, of course, really wants 5G to be a thing.

The US Federal Communications Commission asked American to comment on net neutrality last year. Twenty-two million people responded. What people actually said hasn’t been entirely clear. Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS) decided to parse the millions of comments (pdf) submitted to the FCC, a public comment process allegedly plagued by fraud.

California has agreed to delay the enforcement of its “gold standard” net neutrality bill, according to a statement from the law’s sponsor Sen. Scott Wiener. The net neutrality rules were set to go into effect next year, but California officials have agreed to wait until the courts have resolved any pending litigation over the Federal Communications Commission’s roll back of the federal rules late last year.

After months of grueling committee proceedings, the California State Assembly on Thursday passed Senate Bill 822, all but ensuring that residents will soon enjoy the strongest net neutrality protections in the country. “Today’s vote is a huge win for Californians everywhere,” State Senator Scott Wiener, the bill’s principal author, told Gizmodo. Having been amended considerably, S.B. 822 will now return to the Senate, where it is expected to pass for a second time before being sent to Governor Jerry Brown’s desk for his signature or veto.

California’s legislature has approved a bill being called the strongest net neutrality law in the US. The bill would ban internet providers from blocking and throttling legal content and prioritizing some sites and services over others. It would apply these restrictions to both home and mobile connections.

Last year’s FCC decision to repeal net neutrality was arguably the most unpopular tech policy decision in the history of the modern internet. The repeal not only resulted in an unprecedented public backlash, but prompted numerous states to immediately begin exploring new state-level alternatives in the wake of the FCC’s retreat. Now, instead of one fight on the federal level, telecom giants like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast face countless state-level efforts to keep their monopoly power in check.

We’ve repeatedly tried to make it clear that while everybody tends to focus on the death of net neutrality itself, the Pai FCC’s “Restoring Internet Freedom” order killing net neutrality had a farbroader impact than just killing net neutrality rules. As part of the repeal, Comcast, Verizon and AT&T also convinced FCC boss Ajit Pai to effectively neuter FCC authority over ISPs entirely, making it harder for the agency to hold giant ISPs accountable on a wide variety of issues ranging from privacy to transparency (the recent fire fighter kerfuffle being a prime example).

Have you ever noticed web content performing poorly out of the blue? Video footage becomes blurry. Web pages take longer to load. If so, your internet service provider might be slowing down your data on purpose. It’s known as “throttling,” and it’s a way for a provider to ease congested network traffic. But when one type of network traffic—say, video streaming—is throttled more than another, this is called differentiation. And according to Dave Choffnes, assistant professor of computer and information science at Northeastern, differentiation is also “what most people would refer to as a net neutrality violation.”

A report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has confirmed what others have reported for years: that official data on internet access across the country greatly over estimates availability and competition. The report [PDF] is focused specifically on tribal lands – small semi-autonomous areas of the United States governed by indigenous tribes – but its conclusions are directly applicable to the rest of the country.

Reports today show that a DC District Court judge has ordered the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to disclose previously-unreleased information that will assist the public in understanding how millions of fake comments were submitted to the FCC using stolen names and addresses during the agency’s 2017 proceeding to repeal net neutrality.

The Federal Communications Commission's plan for spurring 5G wireless deployment will prevent city and town governments from charging carriers about $2 billion worth of fees. The FCC proposal, to be voted on at its meeting on September 26, limits the amount that local governments may charge carriers for placing 5G equipment such as small cells on poles, traffic lights, and other government property in public rights-of-way.

Millions of Californians are waiting for Gov. Jerry Brown to affirm their call for a free and open Internet. After Congress reversed the Federal Communication Commission’s 2015 Open Internet Order, states have had to step up to ensure that all traffic on the Internet is treated equally. Gov. Brown’s signature would make California the fourth state to pass a law offering net neutrality protections to its residents.

The new industry-backed regulations are likely to attract lawsuits from state and local government groups that worry they will cost them revenue, make it easier for internet providers to sue them and do little to address the digital divide. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved sweeping regulations on Wednesday for 5G wireless infrastructure, significantly curtailing the authority of states and localities.

California Governor Jerry Brown today signed net neutrality legislation into law, setting up a legal showdown pitting his state against Internet service providers and the US government. The California net neutrality bill, previously approved by the state Assembly and Senate despite protests from AT&T and cable lobbyists, imposes rules similar to those previously enforced by the FCC.

FCC plans to tilt a spectrum auction toward T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon.

Cities across the United States are warning of what they say is an illegal assault on the public’s right of way, facilitated by state and federal authorities on behalf of major telecommunications companies. At issue is the rollout of new infrastructure for the next generation of ultrafast wireless Internet. To operate this fifth-generation (5G) network, companies are developing fleets of antennas that need to be densely arranged and near the ground - around one per city block, often on light poles or traffic signs.

When T-Mobile and Sprint first announced their plans to merge in April, the companies didn’t mention any plans to offer in-home broadband internet services. But that changed in June, when the companies promised to grow into the nation’s fourth largest ISP, behind the likes of Comcast and Charter.

The Federal Communications Commission chairman slammed wireless carriers on Tuesday for failing to quickly restore phone service in Florida after Hurricane Michael, calling the delay "completely unacceptable." But FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's statement ignored his agency's deregulatory blitz that left consumers without protections designed to ensure restoration of service after disasters, according to longtime telecom attorney and consumer advocate Harold Feld.

For many students, net neutrality is an afterthought. But its effects, or lack thereof, impact us all more substantially than we think. “Net neutrality is essentially the rules of the road for the internet, and it gives equal treatment to all internet traffic,” said Kyle Wrather, a PhD candidate at UT who specializes in net neutrality. Internet Service Providers are unable to give priority to content by sources, giving users equal access to information. Unfortunately, these things are no longer the case.”

The FCC's rollback of net neutrality rules has sparked an ongoing battle over the future of the internet. The federal government is fighting with states, internet service providers (ISPs) and tech companies are joining the fray, and consumers are simply doing anything in their power to maintain some control and security over their digital lives.

For years, the key rationale given by broadband providers for implementing data caps was that it was the only way they could deal with "congestion." Of course, for years, independent researchers showed that this was bogus, and there was no data crunch coming. If you actually caught a technologist from a broadband provider, rather than a business person or lobbyist, they'd quietly admit that there was no congestion problem.

The nature of the telecommunications industry is obviously changing, and it's perhaps best illustrated with a look at these statistics that show the steep decline of the home landline. With a smartphone in your pocket that replaces a landline's capabilities and then some, it's no surprise to see that fewer and fewer people feel the need to hang on to an old-fashioned wire to ferry their communications back and forth.

Never before had an American telephone company employed this signal, says Roger Conklin, a telephone collector and historian. Until then, the leading telephone provider, the Bell System, relied on its corps of “hello girls” to connect lines at central switchboards so no dial tone was necessary.

Somali rebel group (and US-designated terrorist organization) Al Shabaab has reportedly banned the use of the Internet through mobile handsets and fiber optic cables throughout Somalia, giving telecommunications companies 15 days to comply with the order.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show extravaganza started off with a big announcement from AT&T: Customers of their wireless service can get around onerous caps on data usage if the company supplying, say, video, pays extra to AT&T for the privilege.

Voice-over-IP (VoIP) is nothing new, of course, but so far it's been regarded merely as an add-on to America's regular, analog-based copper and cellular voice networks - networks that are currently maintained as a matter of legal requirement. The FCC isn't necessarily such a stickler for tradition, however, as it is now encouraging phone networks to explore what would happen if VoIP replaced everything else.

Legislation introduced in the Kansas state legislature by a lobby for cable companies would make it almost impossible for cities and towns to offer broadband services to residents and would perhaps even outlaw public-private partnerships like the one that brought Google Fiber to Kansas City.

A scam that repeats itself in modified forms every few years is once again spreading throughout the United Sates. Don’t be a victim! Criminals target people simply by calling them. Intended victims receive a call on their phones from area code 473 which rings once and then disconnects, thereby arousing the call-recipient’s natural curiosity – “who just called me and from where?”

Robbo sez, "Dave Raphael of Dave's Blog has an interesting post about a conversation he recently had with Verizon support and discovered some uncomfortable - yet wholly unsurprising - truths about how Verizon is selectively limiting bandwidth to AWS services and adversely affecting the quality of Netflix. The open admission of this by Verizon support was unexpected - but the fact it is happening should be of no surprise to anyone but the ignorant and naive."

Move over, Republic Wireless: there's a new super-cheap cell phone carrier in town, although it has a huge catch. UppWireless, launching today in the U.S., offers 1GB of data plus unlimited calls and texts for only $15/month - but all of those calls and texts have to go through voice-over-IP apps.

Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, announced Wednesday that there would be new rules written to guarantee net neutrality. It’s a good thing any website can reach any person unimpeded by tolls, and it’s good that Wheeler still wants to make this possible. The Internet service providers will first work to dilute the new rules, of course, and then sue to overturn them.

A Northern California couple out walking their dog on their property stumbled across a modern-day bonanza: $10 million in rare, mint-condition gold coins buried in the shadow of an old tree.