ReadWriteEnterprise

Back in December 2006, as part of its agreement to merge with former regional Bell operating company BellSouth, AT&T made a pledge to the Federal Communications Commission. In that pledge, AT&T promised it would maintain a fair and neutral policy toward all Internet packet routing, applying no privileges based on packets' origin, content, or destination.

It's perhaps the clearest definition of net neutrality that has ever been devised. So a group of AT&T shareholders have been wondering why the company is running from it. Last month, they sought a shareholders' vote to effectively embed AT&T's 2006 net neutrality language as network policy. AT&T sought the Securities and Exchange Commission's permission to block that shareholders' proposal. Yesterday, after five Democratic senators weighed in, the SEC denied AT&T's motion, and the proposal now must go forward.

Last week's issuance by the Federal Communications Commission of rules to protect what some still call "net neutrality" was destined to be legally challenged by someone, on some grounds - that's the nature of regulatory government. (In a pre-emptive strike, Verizon filed its challenge last January.) But in the first of what will probably be several challenges since the order, the advocacy group Free Press makes one and only one argument.

It cuts to the quick, and then stops: The FCC can't adopt two sets of rules for a "mobile Internet" and a "fixed Internet," while pretending to uphold "one Internet" to the public.

The then-newly installed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, said in October 2009, "We are fast entering a world where mass-market mobile devices consume thousands of megabytes each month. So we must ask: What happens when every mobile user has an iPhone, a Palm Pre, a BlackBerry Tour or whatever the next device is? What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile broadband on their laptops or netbooks? The short answer: We will need a lot more spectrum."

Yesterday, a systematic and mathematical analysis of U.S. spectrum allocation blatantly called Genachowski's statement to the 2009 CTIA Wireless conference flat wrong.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating the privacy and security implications of cloud computing.

That could be quite an inquiry as the debate is still open about how to actually define cloud computing in the first place.