Google Fiber Sparks Online Competition Between Cities Nationwide

It seems like every city in America wants Google Fiber. And who can blame them? Ever since Google announced its plan last month to bring ultra-high speed Internet connections (as in, up to 100x faster than what most of the country has today) to between 50,000 and 500,000 people, cities across the U.S. have been clamoring to curry the favor of the search giant. First there was Topeka, KS, which renamed itself by proclamation to Google, KS.

BIG BROTHER: UK to Mandate Personal Data Storage

In an age where privacy is becoming increasingly hard to come by, the British government is further hastening its demise for citizens in the UK. According to The Telegraph, all internet service providers and telecommunication companies will be legally required to store records of all personal communications for one year.

Ode to an Internet Patrolman

Dear Comcast, I hear you’ll be instituting a bandwidth cap of 250GB per residential subscriber. Well, that’s totally your call. You take that prerogative, bad boy. Nip those crazy downloaders where it hurts most. “No more of that HD nonsense for you bandits, BitTorrent or no BitTorrent, iTunes or no iTunes,” you’ll say to them come October. And you’ll be happy to have control of your network back again, I’m sure.

Uncertain Future For Some ISPs

ISPs throttle data. ISPs cap data. ISPs don’t like data. Or at least not very much of it anyway. You’ve heard the stories, you’ve read the commentary, you’ve weighed the pros and cons, and most of you have likely fallen on the no-limits side of the divide. For data consumption, that is. If nothing else, it's really just a whole lot less complicated than what Cox and others are proposing and implementing, which is to tell you the subscriber to eat your heart out, if only to a certain extent.