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Over at AOL News, Reason Associate Editor Peter Suderman takes a look at the joint Google-Verizon Net neutrality proposal, the FCC’s current position of weakness, and how both could shape the future of the Net : Earlier this week, longtime net neutrality supporter Google teamed up with longtime net neutrality opponent Verizon to offer a proposed framework for the regulation of the Internet. The proposal would prohibit Internet service providers from discriminating on wireline networks—like cable or DSL—but would also let ISPs charge some Web content providers more for speedier service.

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Reason Writers Around the Web: Peter Suderman at AOL News on Google, Verizon, and Net Neutrality

Over at AOL News, Reason Associate Editor Peter Suderman takes a look at the joint Google-Verizon Net neutrality proposal, the FCC’s current position of weakness, and how both could shape the future of the Net : Earlier this week, longtime net neutrality supporter Google teamed up with longtime net neutrality opponent Verizon to offer a proposed framework for the regulation of the Internet. The proposal would prohibit Internet service providers from discriminating on wireline networks—like cable or DSL—but would also let ISPs charge some Web content providers more for speedier service.

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Reason Writers Around the Web: Peter Suderman at AOL News on Google, Verizon, and Net Neutrality

A couple weeks ago on John Stossel’s show, I debated sex crimes with Wendy Murphy, the TV pundit and former assistant district attorney for Middlesex County, Massachusetts (where, like Scott Harshbarger and Martha Coakley, Murphy fought the release of Cheryl Amirault in the bogus Fells Acres sex crimes case). During the debate, Murphy threw out a statistic that only 2 percent of sex offenders are actually on sex offender registries. I’m still not sure where she got that figure.

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Cable News: Where Being Loud Makes Up for Being Wrong

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece , Richard Falkenrath, who served as deputy homeland security adviser in the Bush administration and now works for former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s consulting firm, explains why the BlackBerry ban that the United Arab Emirates announced last week “met with approval, admiration and perhaps even a touch of envy” from “law enforcement investigators and intelligence officers.” The ban is perfectly reasonable in light of the UAE’s legitimate security concerns, Falkenrath says, “because Research in Motion, the Canadian company that provides BlackBerry services, refused to modify its information architecture in a way that would enable authorities to intercept the communications of select subscribers.” In other words, the company declined to facilitate the authoritarian regime’s snooping on BlackBerry users—a position that strikes Falkenrath as plainly unacceptable: Monitoring electronic communications in real time and retrieving stored electronic data are the most important counterterrorism techniques available to governments today. Electronic surveillance is particularly vital in combating global terrorism, where the stakes are highest, but it is a part of virtually all investigations of serious transnational threats….

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Former Homeland Security Adviser Explains Why He Admires the UAE’s Dictators

Proposition 18, a ballot initiative that would have put California taxpayers on the hook for an additional $11 billion in water bonds, has been withdrawn by the state legislature. This effectively ends another of the many dreams Gov.

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Another Schwarzenegger Idea Runs Dry

The Washington Post discovers that haven for surprisingly effective pranksters, 4Chan : Corporations spend millions of dollars trying to understand and control traffic on the Internet, and more often than not they don’t succeed. 4chan has mastered the feat for free. Created seven years ago by a 15-year-old, 4chan is a vast web of anonymous, uncensored message boards.

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The Internet: Where Pranks Trump Villainy in Apparent Effectiveness

Earlier this week, Google, long one of the most vocal proponents of Net neutrality, and Verizon, one of Net neutrality’s most active opponents, announced that they had come to a broad mutual understanding about how they believe the rules and regulations governing web traffic ought to be structured. In a joint statement, the companies outlined seven key elements, which you can read here

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No More Net Neutrality?

…in government, that is. At the Freakonomics blog , Stephen Dubner observes that cash-strapped governments tend to loosen their morals once they realize the lucre in legalized vice. Congress may overturn a four-year-old ban on Internet gambling in order to tax it

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Poverty Breeds Immorality

Here’s a lovely piece in the Virginia Quarterly Review by the dual-passport Iranian-British journalist Kamin Mohammadi , about her long and mostly submerged affair with an Iranian lover from the countryside, and the complex web of pressure and release created by the government, technology, Islam, and more. Pretty hard to excerpt; here’s a chunk that focuses more than the overall essay does on Liberation Technology:   He also started to accompany me to the local internet café where I joined all those lined up at the banks of computers to connect with the outside world

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The End of the Affair, in Iran