It would be an understatement to say that net neutrality has been in the news quite a lot recently. One of the supposed arguments against it is that requiring all data packets to be treated equally within a connection will prevent companies from offering us a cornucopia of "specialized services." The main example cited is for medical applications -- the implication being that if net neutrality is required, people are going to die. Speaking at the Mobile World Congress that is currently underway, Nokia's CEO Rajeev Suri has come up with a novel variation on that theme, as reported by CNET (via @AdV007):

Suri emphasises that self-driving cars need to talk over wireless networks fast enough to make decisions with the split-second timing required on the roads. "You cannot prevent collisions if the data that can prevent them is still making its way through the network", said Suri, discussing Nokia's drive toward instantaneous low-latency communication across the network.

Yes, according to Suri, there are going to be terrible pile-ups on the roads unless we get rid of net neutrality. Leaving aside the fact that low-latency communications across the internet will come anyway -- if there's one thing that's certain in the world of digital technology, it's that everything gets faster and cheaper -- there's another problem with this argument.

Self-driving cars that are so reliant on such guaranteed, high-performance networks are hardly going to be very resilient in real-life situations -- and certainly not the kind of system that the public will want to entrust with the lives of themselves and their families. If self-driving cars are to be widely accepted, one of their key features must be the ability to work safely even with the flakiest of internet connections. Suri's attempt to use this emerging technology as a weapon against net neutrality instead undermines the argument for self-driving cars themselves.

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Capcom's never really had much of a consumer-friendly reputation. Between being all about SOPA and utilizing innovative DRM measures such as "You only get one save file per game cartridge ever at all," it would be tough for the company to claim some kind of goodwill dividend should it screw up and find the need for one. And, boy, could Capcom ever use such a dividend amongst PC gamers right now.

The screw up was advertising on Steam that the RE-reboot, Resident Evil Revelations 2, would include a local, split-screen co-operative mode, selling the game under the umbrella of that promise, and then revealing only after sales had begun that local co-op had never been planned for the PC version of the game.

Owners of the PC version of Capcom's action horror game Resident Evil Revelations 2 have discovered that, unlike the console versions, it does not include local co-op - despite advertisements claiming it would.

The game's Steam page had promised offline co-op as part of a bullet point list of features. However, the Steam page was recently amended to state the PC version does not support offline co-op play in the Campaign or Raid mode. (Raid mode, it should be noted, will support online co-op shortly after launch via a patch.) Confusingly, the "assistive co-op play" bullet point that mentions offline co-op remains on the Steam page.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm fairly certain that advertising a game to a passionate fan-base as having a much-wanted feature and then yanking the rug out from under those fans only after sales had begun is not only a PR nightmare, it's a legal no-no as well. And, of all people to pull this on, passionate PC gamers may be the worst targets. This is a group that expects to be treated as much like desired customers as console-owners and, because the PC gaming landscape is littered with differences between its games and those that appear on consoles, it's a group that tends to pay very close attention to the specifics about the features of the games they buy. Not the kind of group, in other words, that you could pull this kind of false advertisement on and actually get away with it.

Perhaps worse, the tone-deaf defiant and non-apologetic nature of Capcom's response isn't going to help matters.

Here's Capcom's statement in full:

"The PC version of Resident Evil Revelations 2 supports a variety of customisable visual settings and resolutions. The decision to prioritise a single local screen was made to ensure a stable user experience across a variety of different PC settings and devices. Raid mode will support online co-op shortly after launch when a free patch is available for players to download which adds this feature, but the main campaign on PC will only be available to play in single local screen."

Great, except none of that was the point or cause of the outrage. You told consumers there was a feature in the game at the time of purchase, then revealed that feature was not now or ever planned to be included post-purchase. That's shitty. Come out with refunds and an actual apology next time.

Readers of Techdirt have been hearing about corporate sovereignty -- the ability of foreign investors to sue governments directly in special courts over alleged losses, also known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) -- for a while now. For others who have yet to discover this particular feature of so-called trade agreements, Senator Elizabeth Warren has a good, approachable summary of the key issues in a Washington Post opinion piece. In fact, it was clearly so good that the White House Blog felt obliged to try to rebut its main arguments (there's also a great point-by-point response to that response by the Cato Institute's Simon Lester.). The White House Blogt post, written by Jeff Zients, Director of the National Economic Council, pretty much concedes that the criticisms of ISDS are valid, but would have us believe that everything has been fixed now:

ISDS has come under criticism because of some legitimate complaints about poorly written agreements. The U.S. shares some of those concerns, and agrees with the need for new, higher standards, stronger safeguards and better transparency provisions. Through TPP and other agreements, that is exactly what we are putting in place.

There are two massive problems with that assurance. First, the extreme secrecy of the TPP negotiations means that we have no idea just how strong those "safeguards" are. And secondly, in some sense it doesn't even matter: companies can use the mere threat of an ISDS action to cast a chill over future regulatory action. That's why the following comment is true but misses the point:

The reality is that ISDS does not and cannot require countries to change any law or regulation.

The ability to use ISDS to discourage governments from introducing inconvenient laws or regulations is no mere theoretical fear. As this important 2001 article in The Nation explains:

Carla Hills, the US Trade Representative who oversaw the NAFTA negotiations for Bush I and now heads her own trade-consulting firm, was among the very first to play this game of bump-and-run intimidation. Her corporate clients include big tobacco -- R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris. Sixteen months after leaving office, Hills dispatched Julius Katz, her former chief deputy at USTR, to warn Ottawa to back off its proposed law to require plain packaging for cigarettes. If it didn't, Katz said, Canada would have to compensate his clients under NAFTA and the new legal doctrine he and Hills had helped create [ISDS]. "No US multinational tobacco manufacturer or its lobbyists are going to dictate health policy in this country," the Canadian health minister vowed. Canada backed off, nevertheless.

Nor was that an isolated incident:

A former government official in Ottawa told me: "I've seen the letters from the New York and DC law firms coming up to the Canadian government on virtually every new environmental regulation and proposition in the last five years. They involved dry-cleaning chemicals, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, patent law.Virtually all of the new initiatives were targeted and most of them never saw the light of day."

Zients goes on to say that corporate sovereignty chapters are needed because foreign courts can't be trusted to provide justice:

U.S. investors often face a heightened risk of bias or discrimination when abroad.

But Warren already answered that with several extremely powerful points:

Countries in the TPP are hardly emerging economies with weak legal systems. Australia and Japan have well-developed, well-respected legal systems, and multinational corporations navigate those systems every day, but ISDS would preempt their courts too. And to the extent there are countries that are riskier politically, market competition can solve the problem. Countries that respect property rights and the rule of law — such as the United States — should be more competitive, and if a company wants to invest in a country with a weak legal system, then it should buy political-risk insurance.

Zients also tries to argue that since the US hasn't suffered as a result of ISDS cases in the past, it'll be fine in the future:

There have only been 13 cases brought to judgment against the United States in the three decades since we’ve been party to these agreements. By contrast, during the same period of time in our domestic system, individual and companies have brought hundreds of thousands of challenges against Federal, state, and local governments in U.S. courts under U.S. law.

We have never lost an ISDS case because of the strong safeguards in the U.S. approach. And because we have continued to raise standards through each agreement, in recent years we have seen a drop in ISDS claims, despite increased levels of investment.

But that line of reasoning ignores why there have been so few cases in the past: because corporate sovereignty provisions were mainly included to protect US investments in developing countries with weaker legal systems. By definition, such nations are unlikely to have the resources to make many or significant investments in the US, and therefore have few opportunities to use the ISDS system. That is what will change dramatically with TAFTA/TTIP, as this analysis by Public Citizen explains:

TAFTA would vastly expand the investor-state threat, given the thousands of corporations doing business in both the United States and EU that would be newly empowered to attack public interest policies. More than 3,400 EU parent corporations own more than 24,200 subsidiaries in the United States, any one of which could provide the basis for an investor-state claim. This exposure to investor-state attacks far exceeds that associated with all other U.S. "free trade" agreement partners.

In fact, the US may be about to find out about the modern reality of billion-dollar corporate sovereignty lawsuits, thanks to the 21-year-old NAFTA agreement, and the controversial Keystone XL project, which President Obama recently vetoed. Here's Politico's explanation of how corporate sovereignty could enter the equation:

President Barack Obama may decide to kill Keystone XL for good, but that could be no easy task -- thanks in part to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The 21-year-old free-trade pact allows foreign companies or governments to haul the U.S. in front of an international tribunal to face accusations of putting their investments at risk through regulations or other decisions. The CEO of Keystone developer TransCanada has raised the prospect as a potential last resort if Obama rejects the $8 billion project, although for now the company is focused on getting him to say yes.

Administration officials involved in reviewing the proposed Canada-to-Texas pipeline are aware of the potential for a NAFTA challenge and the importance of minimizing that risk in the event the president rejects Keystone.

So even though the President retains full powers to reject Keystone, it’s easy to see how the threat of a billion-dollar ISDS lawsuit might encourage him to approve it anyway. That would offer the perfect demonstration of how corporate sovereignty chapters can interfere with democratic decision-making -- at even the highest levels.

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Trademarks on generic terms and phrases make for the silliest, and often the strangest, battles. In particular, I find it detestable when companies that are serving small, niche groups of people who have every reason to band together in solidarity, instead bicker unnecessarily over even the most common kinds of language. This was the case when comic conventions went to battle over the now generic term "comic-con." It's been the case when game-makers have gone after other game makers over a phrase as generic as "would you rather."

And now, for reasons I can't particularly fathom, a company out of Florida called Gay Days Inc. has forced a gay pride festival in Southern California to change its name from "Gay Days" because apparently the LGBT community doesn't have bigger fish to fry besides bickering over insanely generic trademarked terms.

Organizers for the festival over Easter weekend changed the name from Cathedral City Gay Days to Cathedral City LGBT Days after a Florida company notified the city about a trademark it owns on the phrase "gay days."

Gay Days Inc., the company behind gay parties in Orlando, Las Vegas and Orlando, said in a Jan. 12 email from company President Chris Alexander-Manley it would take all necessary steps to protect the trademark "including, but not limited to, the institution of formal legal proceedings."

On the one hand, I suppose it's kind of a nice symbolic moment in the progression this country has undergone in how we look at the civil rights of the LGBT community that rather than focusing on solidarity, there are court fights over "gay days." On the other hand: what the shit? How does the USPTO even grant a mark on such a generic term, one that, by the way, has been in use long before Gay Days Inc. used it or was granted the trademark? Cathedral City, a wonderfully progressive city, appears to be asking the same questions.

The switch happened well before a major marketing push for the April 3-5 event got underway, said Chris Parman, spokesman and events manager for Cathedral City, a city that neighbors gay-friendly Palm Springs in California's Coachella Valley. The festival is set to include a bar hop, film screenings in downtown Cathedral City, a Saturday night disco party and Easter egg hunt on Sunday morning. It's taking place at the same time as the Dinah Shore Weekend in Palm Springs.

"To me the name ('gay days') is so generic. I don't see how on Earth anyone could have that be a trademarked phrase," Parman said. "It's no different than 'pride parade,' or 'pride' or 'gay pride.' I think if you look, all of them have tried to be trademarked at some point."

But, hey, this is America, after all. The land of the free to lock up language and use it against the very people who share your own interests unnecessarily. Progress of a kind, I suppose.

Carbon gets a lot of negative publicity because it's associated with carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, but the element itself is critical to life and has numerous fascinating properties. Carbon comes in a variety of allotropes, and we're discovering other carbon-based structures all the time. Here are just a few more examples.

• Volleyballene is a combination of carbon and scandium atoms that forms a volleyball shape -- analogous to how carbon can form a classic soccer ball shape (aka the 60-carbon atom buckyball). Okay, so this molecule hasn't been synthesized or observed, but computer simulations say it should be remarkably stable. [url]
• Penta-graphene is a sheet of pure carbon (yet another allotrope!) that hasn't been synthesized yet, but if it can be made, it might be useful as a semiconductor to complement electrically-conducting graphene. Simulations predict penta-graphene is stable, assuming anyone can actually make it. [url]
• Aerographite is a lighter-than-air material made of a carbon foam. It is extremely compressible, electrically conductive and is one of the least dense materials ever made. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

REM's music has found itself at the center of copyright disputes in the past, but those instances have mostly occurred in the more traditional sorts of disputes, such as accusations that one band copied another band and blah blah blah. It's part of a series of stories that are old, tired, and contrary to the way popular culture works these days, but at least they contain a shadow of relevance to the original purposes of copyright. However, this time what is on display is the result of a culture of permission run amok, as an Australian politician had his video reading mean tweets about him removed because an REM song was playing in the background.

On Thursday, Baird tweeted a video link of him reading mean tweets, a take-off of US talk show host Jimmy Kimmel’s popular videos. Everybody Hurts by REM played in the background as Baird read the hate mail, including a tweet that said: “You look like the ‘smiling assassin’. Your charming smile hides your black, Liberal heart.” But by Friday, YouTube had pulled the clip, citing a copyright claim by Warner Chappell, which publishes the US band’s music.

“Mean tweets video removed,” Baird tweeted on Friday. “Working with YouTube and Warner to resolve. Fact: everybody hurts, sometimes.”

Welcome to our world, Mr. Politician, where copyright and the culture of permission have been so twisted into insanely idiotic knots as to remove a funny video under the notion that a portion of an REM song somehow inhibits REM's ability to make new music. Picture, if you will, teleporting the original creators of copyright law into the present, sitting them down at a boardroom table, and having the executives over at Warner Chappell explain to them how the copyright provisions authored so long ago would result in this sort of thing. After those old guys were done accusing you of witchcraft for showing them the video in the first place, there would likely be much head-scratching over how this whole thing could have gotten so misused.

One can only hope that having this happen to a politician that deigns to have a personality such as Baird might be the impetus for some kind of reform, even if it's only local reform.

He appeared confused about a tweet that said “The Premier hates Justin Bieber”.

“Yeah, of course I hate Justin Bieber. Who doesn’t hate Justin Bieber?”

Or the current state of the application of copyright, for that matter. Because this kind of thing isn't what copyright was meant to be.

Here's a little bit more evidence to throw on the pile marked "You Don't Need to Destroy the First Amendment/Section 230 to Stop Revenge Porn."

Eric Chanson and Kevin Bollaert, proprietors of the revenge porn site YouGotPosted, are now on the hook for $450,000 each, thanks to a default judgment. This lawsuit rests heavily on the duo's violation of child pornography laws, so it's not a complete win for revenge porn opponents, but it does suggest a way out for minors who find themselves posted on sites operated by similar blights on humanity.

Defendants watermarked sexually explicit photographs of Plaintiff, a minor, with a “You Got Posted” logo and then posted them on the Website, along with identifying information including Plaintiff’s name and state of residence (California). Defendants did not take any steps to verify Plaintiff’s age before posting her photographs. Nor did Defendants obtain Plaintiff’s consent or that of her parents. According to the complaint, Defendants were aware that Plaintiff was a minor and that the images constituted child pornography when they posted the images on the Website. Defendants used Plaintiff’s photographs to advertise the Website and profited from using Plaintiff’s images.

Neither of the defendants mounted much of a challenge to the allegations. Chanson filed a motion for dismissal after being served but the court denied it nine months later. Chanson was deemed to have defaulted in June of last year, based on his lack of communication after his September 2013 motion.

Bollaert, on the other hand, was detained by more pressing matters -- like his arrest for extortion, online harassment and identity theft. All of the charges were problematic (especially the harassment charge, which somehow managed to bypass established Section 230 protections), but they did manage to keep Bollaert otherwise occupied as the lawsuit against him proceeded. Still, Bollaert was served two months before his arrest and had the option to file a response at any point, seeing as his conviction on the extortion charge (the most logical of the charges brought -- considering Chanson and Bolleart ran a side business taking down YouGotPosted material for a fee) didn't actually occur until February of 2015.

All in all, the pair's accuser was awarded $150,000 (from each) in statutory damages under US child pornography laws, along with $150,000/each in punitive damages and another $150,000/each for violations of California's ridiculous "publicity rights" law. It may seem slightly more palatable when it's being used to punish revenge porn site operators, but that still doesn't make that bad law any less stupid or easily abused.

It all adds up to $450,000 from each of the defendants and the option to pursue legal fees is still open.

If you're looking to shut down revenge porn site operators, this particular case doesn't have a whole lot to offer, other than the likelihood that pursuing a lawsuit could easily result in a default judgment if your allegations are solid. Judging from past events, it seems unlikely that many revenge porn site operators are interested in defending their actions in front of a judge. It also provides some comfort for minors whose photos and information have been posted at these sites.

On the other hand, easily-abused laws (with the exception of California's publicity rights statute) weren't abused to pursue these site owners. There was no suggestion that posting pictures without authorization is automatically copyright infringement or any desire expressed to punch holes in Section 230 protections. That's a plus for the internet in general. And the outcome shows there are a multitude of ways to approach the revenge porn problem that don't involve carving out chunks of the First Amendment.

Two very different stories, but both with some startling parallels.

First, Radley Balko's story about how police and attorneys in Louisiana apparently flat out lied to claim that a process server "assaulted" a police officer he was serving (in a police brutality case, no less). There are lots of details there, but suffice it to say, the process server, Douglas Dendinger, did not assault Chad Cassard at all -- even though he was soon arrested for it, and Cassard managed to present seven witnesses (including police officers and two prosecutors who witnessed Dendinger serving the papers on Cassard). Dendinger went through two years of hell because of this, before the case was dropped when cell phone videos made by Dendinger's wife and nephew showed that there was no assault at all. Police and prosecutors lying to protect one of their own? Sure, it happens. But now that it's been exposed, Balko has an important question:

Why aren’t the seven witnesses to Dendinger’s nonexistent assault on Cassard already facing felony charges? Why are all but one of the cops who filed false reports still wearing badges and collecting paychecks? Why aren’t the attorneys who filed false reports facing disbarment? Dendinger’s prosecutors both filed false reports, then prosecuted Dendinger based on the reports they knew were false. They should be looking for new careers — after they get out of jail.

If a group of regular citizens had pulled this on someone, they’d all likely be facing criminal conspiracy charges on top of the perjury and other charges. So why aren’t these cops and prosecutors?

I could be wrong, but my guess is that they’ll all be let off due to “professional courtesy” or some sort of exercise of prosecutorial discretion. And so the people who ought to be held to a higher standard than the rest of us will once again be held to a lower one.

Second, we have last week's story about Total Wipes sending an automated takedown notice to Google demanding tons of perfectly legitimate, non-infringing web pages be taken out of Google's index for infringement. Total Wipes blamed it on a "bug" in its program, which would be more convincing if it hadn't happened before.

This second story has Rick Falkvinge, quite reasonably, wondering why the penalties for false takedowns aren't equivalent to the penalties for infringement, saying that this is the way it works in other parts of the law:

The thing is, this should not even be contentious. This is how we deal with this kind of criminal act in every – every – other aspect of society. If you lie as part of commercial operations and hurt somebody else’s rights or business, you are a criminal. If you do so repeatedly or for commercial gain, direct or indirect, you’re having your ill-gotten gains seized. This isn’t rocket science. This is standard bloody operating procedure.

The copyright industry goes ballistic at this proposal, of course, and try to portray themselves as rightsless victims – when the reality is that they have been victimizing everybody else after making the entire planet rightsless before their intellectual deforestation.

The irony is that at the same time as the copyright industry opposes such penalties vehemently, arguing that they can make “innocent mistakes” in sending out nastygrams, threats, and lawsuits to single mothers, they are also arguing that the situation with distribution monopolies is always crystal clear and unmistakable to everybody else who deserve nothing but the worst. They can’t have it both ways here.

Of course, his claim that this is true in "every" other area is proven somewhat false by the first story above. But the underlying factors in both cases are nearly identical, and it actually goes back to a previous concept that Falkvinge has written about: the "high court" and the "low court." The "nobility" gets a special court when they break the law, with limited consequences. The lowly commoners have to go to the "low court" where the consequences are quite severe. Falkvinge's original point is that we still seem to have the same thing today, and that's clearly shown in both stories above.

If you're in power, you can lie about things to accuse others of serious things that can have serious consequences for them, and there's no real punishment. Instead, it's brushed off as not being important -- sometimes with expressions of understanding about how "these things can happen." I'm reminded of the phrase that we "judge ourselves according to our intentions, but others based on their actions," and that seems to be partly at work here as well (though I question the "intentions" of the prosecutors who lied above). The lies are written off as minor "mistakes," whereas those accused are given no such benefit of the doubt. It's a big problem in the copyright space, certainly, but it's true in many other areas of society as well.

Back in December, we noted that Google had gone to court to try to stop a ridiculously broad subpoena issued by Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood. For quite some time now, Hood has been publicly attacking Google, based on what appears to be near total ignorance of both the law and technology. Oh, and maybe it also has something to do with the MPAA directly funding his investigation and authoring the letters that Hood sent.

Either way, Google pointed out that the broad subpoena that Hood issued to Google clearly violated Section 230 of the CDA in looking to hold Google accountable for other's actions and speech. It pointed out other problems with the order as well -- and while Hood insisted that his subpoena was perfectly reasonable, it appears that a federal court isn't so sure. Today the court told Hood that he's granting a temporary injunction on the subpoena, noting that Google's argument is "stronger."

This certainly is nowhere close to over, but it does highlight that Hood's repeated arguments that he has every right to hold Google accountable for the fact that sometimes people use the search engine to find illegal stuff, isn't particularly convincing to at least one federal judge.

While the FCC may have buckled to public demand and voted to finally approve tougher net neutrality rules last week, if you thought that meant an end to the hysterical over-reaction to what appear to be some fairly basic consumer protections, you're going to be gravely disappointed. From editorials lamenting the FCC's attempt to "strangle startups in their cribs", to claims the agency is murdering "innovation angels", we're clearly entering an entirely new, bloody chapter when it comes to divorcing net neutrality reality from rhetoric.

At the vanguard of this assault are ISP-loyal politicians, who intend to throw everything but the kitchen sink at the FCC over the next few months in the hopes of if not destroying the rules -- at least delaying them -- while publicly flogging the FCC for good measure. That apparently starts with FCC Commissioners Ajit Pai and Michael O'Rielly lagging on providing their dissenting edits so the rules can't be released, followed by a gauntlet of at least five potential hearings over the next month aimed at shaming the FCC for destroying the Internet.

A letter from the House Judiciary Committee Members (pdf) to FCC boss Tom Wheeler complains that the FCC is pursuing the "most oppressive and backward regulatory option possible," which is odd since a growing list of companies that actually sell broadband -- like Cablevision, Frontier, Sprint and Sonic -- all say the rules won't impact their businesses in the slightest, since most of the heavier utility-components of Title II won't be applied. So why is the House Judiciary Committee fighting the rules? Because they're just super worried about the health of the Internet:

"We will not stand by idly as the White House, using the FCC, attempts to advance rules that imperil the future of the Internet. We plan to support and urge our colleagues to pass a Congressional Review Act resolution disapproving the “Open Internet” rules. Not only will such a resolution nullify the ‘Open Internet’ rules, the resolution will prevent the FCC from relying on Title II for any future net neutrality rules unless Congress explicitly instructs the FCC to take such action."

Of course any measure that makes its way to the President's desk will be vetoed -- and a Congressional Review Action still requires a presidential signature or enough votes to override a veto, both of which are extremely unlikely. The only real way to overturn the agency's new laws is either via lawsuit (which the FCC has gone to great length to avoid losing this time after the courts repeatedly told them they needed to classify ISPs as common carriers to be on solid footing) or through a party change (and therefore an FCC leadership shift) in 2016.

Until then, the House Judiciary Committee hopes to keep the hysteria momentum rolling by flinging around some now well-worn falsehoods, like claiming that the White House acted improperly when it publicly proclaimed it preferred Title II rules:

"We are also troubled by the manner in which the ‘Open Internet’ rules were formulated. On November 10, 2014, President Obama urged the FCC to impose Title II regulations on the Internet. Shortly thereafter, you began making statements in support of a Title II approach. Certainly, the timing of your support for Title II following the President’s recommendation calls into question the degree, if not the existence, of the FCC’s independence from the White House."

Yes, because the "timing" of things is enough to make them illegal, right? You'll note the letter falls well short of claiming the White House broke the law, because despite whatever disdain the White House has for the law on a wide variety of topics, they did nothing wrong here. As we've noted previously, it's perfectly routine and legal for the White House to express its policy desires to the FCC, and every President in the last thirty years has done so (like when George W. Bush pushed the FCC for weaker media consolidation rules, or Bill Clinton urged the FCC to ban hard liquor ads on TV).

Republicans were already planning a rewrite this year of the Communications Act, and you can be dead certain that effort will be rekindled with a keen and aggressive eye on making regulators as ill-equipped as possible when it comes to doing anything about the nation's stagnant telecom duopoly. You know, for the health of the Internet.