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From BoingBoing, Memex, SaveTheInternet, TenPercent and TorrentFreak comes this story: Virgin Media’s new CEO, Neil Berkett, believes that net neutrality is “bollocks”. He wants to sell faster access on Virgin’s broadband network to the highest bidders - most likely large portals and advertisers.

Of course, Virgin Media could also use QoS (Quality of Service) protocols that are built into modern TCP/IP implementations to market a premium high speed service that would let subscribers get faster access to the entire Internet - for a price.

I discussed net neutrality in a billso.com post on 4 March 2008. It’s an important topic, especially as telecom firms and government look for new ways to squeeze more revenue out of subscribers.

There’s a long discussion thread at BoingBoing, with comments from several UK readers who want to break their Virgin Media contracts over this issue. Virgin Media is one of the largest providers of Internet broadband connectivity in the UK. It’s possible that the UK government will stop Virgin’s plans to shift almost all traffic to a lower priority.

Charlie Stross believes that Virgin Media, which used to be NTL/Telewest before a rebranding effort in 2007, is dropping packets for residential connections that use routers.

After the media attention regarding Phorm’s advertising cookies, which I discussed in a billso.com post on 9 April 2008, one would think that British telecoms would be a bit smarter than this.

UPDATED 20 May 2008: Kimberley Edwards has some additional comments in her 24 April 2008 article.

Google’s senior copyright counsel, William Patry, posted a long article about a whisper campaign that media giants are conducting. Patry’s article was also discussed on BoingBoing. and ArsTechnica.

The whispered rumor is that US Fair Use doctrine is so broad that it violates international law - specifically, the Berne Convention on copyright. If enough national governments agree with this interpretation, the US government might be required to replace the Fair Use doctrine with something far more restrictive and expensive.

Patry, who helped negotiate modifications to the Berne Convention when he worked for the U.S. Copyright Office, offers a lengthy and detailed response to the whisper campaign that can be summarized in one word: NO.

Why should students care?

A revocation of fair use might also destroy the online and retail used textbook markets. This would limit the opportunities to find used textbooks, and force more students to buy new textbooks for their courses.

Fair use is the doctrine that lets reviewers quote from the published works, and helps professors distribute sections of published works to their students. Without fair use, students and universities will have to pay more for the content they currently use.

The publishing and media conglomerates would love to kill fair use once and for all in the USA, to help the industries’ flagging revenues.

it’s unlikely that the US courts would allow the Fair Use doctrine to be overturned, even if the US Congress does manage to overturn it through new legislation.

The European Union is about to vote down a publisher-friendly three strikes proposal that would have let ISPs exile users from the Internet for repeated copyright violations, including P2P file-sharing. See this Electronic Frontier Foundation post for more details.

Related posts

For more information see my posts about copyright, including the following articles from billso.com:

• 24 March 2008: The used electronic textbook
• 21 February 2008: Copyright and fair use
• 4 February 2008: Better than free
• 13 November 2007: File sharing and campus security
• 5 October 2007: What’s wrong with copyright?
• 17 July 2007: A quick explanation of copyright law
• 6 February 2007: Steve Jobs calls for DRM-free music sales
• 29 September 2006: US copyright law in verse

From ZDnet: technology companies and restaurants are experimenting with electronic menus. These can be deployed as portable devices like electronic books, or built into a table-top display screen like Microsoft’s Surface technology. Customers could place an order with the electronic menu, play games, and monitor their order’s progress from the kitchen to their table.

Restaurateurs may see reduced error rates and lower expenses if order-taking becomes more automated. Electronic menus might be tied directly into kitchen, POS (point-of-sale) and inventory systems, allowing restaurant chains to develop more accurate real-time sales data.

Seasonal choices can easily be accommodate with an electronic menu. When the kitchen is running low of an item, the menu might indicate that there are only “x servings left” this evening. When the supply is exhausted, the menu suggests an alternative.

Electronic menus could also drive increased impulse sales of high-margin items like beverages and desserts.

The adoption curve for electronic restaurant menus resembles mobile phones in some respects. There may be several iterations of widely incompatible systems before consumers are interested enough to try the technology. Costs are likely to be high.

Waiters and other floor staff may reject the concept completely, especially in Europe. Someone still has to bring the food and beverages to the customer, and those employees may receive lower tips if they did not take the customer’s order.

Europe and Hawaii may be excellent regions to try a key feature of electronic menus. Just like e-books, an electronic menu could support any number of languages through Unicode and graphical displays. A tourist might order competently from an e-menu, instead of guessing at cognates and grumbling about the results. Happy customers are more likely to come back for more, and to tell their friends.

Motorola announced last month that it wants to sell its mobile phone unit, which is ranked third in global market share, according to Engadget.

No one’s buying. This month, several companies including Samsung and Dell have announced that they are not interested in laying out US$9 to 12 billion for the business.

It’s a bit of a shock. The Motorola brand name is well known, and the company has remained competitive. Certainly some up-and-coming manufacturer would want that nameplate! It’s the kind of play that made sense a few years ago, when Chinese manufacturer Lenovo purchased IBM’s personal computer business, including the ThinkPad name.

Motorola executives backpedaled last week at the Mobile World Congress, announcing that the company remains committed to the mobile handset industry.

Last Monday, Microsoft purchased Danger, the developer of T-Mobile’s Sidekick line. Om Malik estimated that Microsoft paid US$500 million for a mobile handset line that has a decent market share among the under-30 crowd.

Last Thursday, I posted a brief article about Internet problems in India, Africa and the Middle East. Two undersea cables had been cut in the Mediterranean Sea, near Egypt.

In the following days, two more undersea cables were damaged. The International Herald Tribune printed an article about the third cable cut, and Wired followed suit with its own article, including a helpful map.

This Tuesday, as Reuters was reporting that a repair ship had reached one of the cut cables, reports surfaced of a fifth cable cut in the same region. BoingBoing has been following the cable cut story, and linked to a report from a Dubai newspaper. CrunchGear also reported on the fifth cut, and added a global map of high-speed fiber-optic connections. Wired claims the fifth cut is actually a cable failure that occurred before the Egypt cuts.

Bruce Schneier has a brief article with several links that I’ve used in this article.

All of these cable failures can be repaired. Here’s a link to pictures of various cable repair ships.

In the meantime, attention is focused on something most Internet users take for granted: the fiber backbone that supports the Internet.