Alissa Cooper

Telecommunications policy issues rarely make news, much less mobilize thousands of people. Yet this certainly occurred in the United States around efforts to introduce net neutrality regulation. A similar grassroots mobilization has yet to develop in the United Kingdom or throughout most of the rest of Europe. My colleague Alison Powell and I have just [...]

It can be difficult to predict when and why particular technologies will attract attention from policymakers. A few years ago, it seemed like around every policy corner — whether it be privacy, Internet neutrality, copyright enforcement, or cybersecurity — lurked deep packet inspection, a technical capability that allowed ISPs to gain increased visibility into the [...]

With the news that AT&T will be introducing volume caps on its DSL and U-Verse broadband Internet service plans, a number of commenters (1, 2) have pointed out the contrast between AT&T’s move and the recent news from BT, which announced that it would be lifting its 300GB “atypical user” cap next month. The trouble [...]

It has been two whole weeks since the FCC issued its Internet openness rules, and with holiday celebrations out of the way there has been some time for the details to start to sink in. Some observers seem to be perpetuating a high-level debate about whether the FCC went too far or not far enough, [...]

The last decade’s worth of US policy work on broadband Internet openness – first open access, now net neutrality – has focused largely on the access links operated by individual residential ISPs. But the recent dispute between Level 3 and Comcast has served as a jolting reminder that the Internet is a network of networks [...]

Note: This was originally posted on the Center for Democracy & Technology blog. Without knowing all of the commercial details, it’s hard to know what to make of Level 3’s recent claim that Comcast is threatening the openness of the Internet by requiring Level 3 to pay Comcast a fee to deliver Level 3 traffic [...]

Today is the last day to file comments for the net neutrality consultation that Ofcom, the UK telecom regulator, is conducting. As I was reading the consultation document and reflecting about the state of traffic management in the UK — where different ISPs target different applications for throttling or prioritization at different times of day [...]

For the past 10 days or so, a debate has been raging (see CNET, Free Press, AT&T, and the IETF discussion mailing list) in the techiest, wonkiest corner of the Internet policy universe about whether the Differentiated Services (DiffServ) standards developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) were designed to facilitate the ability for [...]

It’s been awhile since I last surveyed the traffic management policies of some of the largest UK retail ISPs. The chart below is up-to-date as of this week. ISP Has traffic management policy? Hours of application Takes application-specific action? Apps/protocols targeted AOL Broadband Yes Typically applies in the “evenings” Unclear because policy lacks details BT [...]

While soccer fans across the globe have been captivated with the excitement of the World Cup during the last month, vendors of DPI-based technologies have been casting their focus there as well. I recently came across a number of different vendor reports and musings (from Arbor, Allot, and Sandvine) about the impact of World Cup [...]