My article about the postal service got an unusually robust amount of play among the blogosphere, so I thought I’d respond to some of the comments. First of all, I think there’s wide agreement on the left that the postal service doesn’t actually have a funding problem at the current time. This recent default stems [...]

The US Postal Service will default on a $5.5 billion prepaid retiree health benefit payment today, and this will surely lead to calls for privatization or mass jobs cuts. But the default concerns the unusual way in which the USPS, unlike virtually any other company in the world, pre-pays its health benefits many years out. [...]

We’ve been waiting for this to come to pass, and it looks like the days of tiered broadband pricing are finally upon us: Here in South Texas, Time Warner Cable customers have been given the online equivalent of a scale in the bathroom, a “usage tracker” that adds up all the household’s Facebooking and YouTubing. [...]

The White House has issued a veto threat for any bill that seeks to overturn the net neutrality policy put in place by the FCC last year. This week, House Republicans will offer a “resolution of disapproval” to take down the FCC action. This kind of resolution only requires a simple majority vote in either [...]

It begins: Starting May 2, AT&T will begin implementing monthly usage limits for its U-Verse and DSL users and charge $10 fees every time a customer exceeds the cap. According to Broadband Reports, DSL customers will have a 150GB monthly usage limit, while U-Verse subscribers will get 250GB. AT&T will impose the $10 fee for [...]

You can say that the entire goal of Julius Genachowski’s pretend plan for net neutrality was to devise something that the telecoms could live with, while allowing him to make a defense that the Obama Administration fulfilled its campaign promise of Internet freedom. If they didn’t care about being taken to court over their plans, [...]

I want to co-sign to Chris Bowers’ argument that there is basically no constituency for the net neutrality rule approved by the FCC yesterday. Progressives see the rule and find it riddled with loopholes and damaging to the principle of non-discrimination and Internet freedom; conservatives see the rule and literally go insane. As Bowers says, [...]

The FCC officially approved rules that reportedly provide net neutrality protections to wireline Internet but not wireless services, and which include a host of loopholes for both types of service. We don’t actually know the full extent of the rules, as they have not been published (the FCC promises to do so this week). But [...]

Despite it being the week before Christmas, there are a couple huge deals coming down, even outside of Congress, which could ratify a nuclear arms reduction treaty. Tomorrow, the US Census will provide the preliminary results of their 2010 canvas, including the reapportionment of Congressional seats to the various states. So we’ll know which states [...]

The groveling session between the President and CEOs yesterday was a little hard to take, but interestingly enough, when the groveling stopped, a few CEOs made time to lobby Obama for their net neutrality giveaway: The controversial “Open Internet” agreement pending at the Federal Communications Commission got a vote of confidence from two CEOs who [...]

As if there weren’t enough things going to pot today, the FCC has decided to come out with a proposal to pretend to institute net neutrality regulations. In a speech he plans to give Wednesday in Washington, Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, will outline a framework for broadband Internet service that forbids both wired and [...]