regulators

Lithium ion batteries aren't just for your laptop anymore. A group of truck-size battery banks are delivering quick bursts of power to the electricity grid in upstate New York.

AES Energy Storage, a subsidiary of power generation company AES, last week said that the first 8 megawatts of a planned 20-megawatt battery grid storage system are now online in Johnson City, N.Y. The full project is expected to be completed later this year.

The network of batteries is designed to keep an even balance between energy supply and demand in that portion of the New York grid. The … Read more

Editors' note: This is a guest column. See Larry Downes' bio below.

After more than a year of palace dramas worthy of a Shakespeare play, the FCC voted this morning to impose new rules on Internet access providers aimed at "preserving the open Internet."

Today's action is both anticlimactic and incomplete. Despite soap opera hand-wringing the last three weeks from fellow Democratic commissioners, there was little doubt that Chairman Julius Genachowski had the votes he needed to pass this most recent version of the so-called "Net neutrality" rules, which he introduced on December 5. The … Read more

WASHINGTON--In a small brownstone on a quiet tree-lined street in the shadows of the Capitol building, four people are plotting against the most powerful company on the Internet.

Tuesday is a busy day at the Washington office of Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group generally focused on health care and insurance companies but with a prominent sideline as arguably the most vocal critic of Google. Office is perhaps an overstatement: the space reminds me more of a college graduate's first apartment than an office. But it's a temporary home to Consumer Watchdog President Jamie Court and his disciples as … Read more

Imagine opening your wireless bill and finding a charge for $8,000.

That's exactly what happened to one family, who wrote to Ask Maggie for some advice. These victims of "bill shock" are not alone. The Federal Communications Commission said earlier this week that it gets nearly 1,500 complaints every year about outrageous phone bills. To help curb this problem, the FCC this week voted to consider new regulation that would require operators to provide alerts when subscribers are about to go over their voice, text, or data limits.

In this week's Ask Maggie I … Read more

McDonald's. Blockbuster. And now Facebook? The social network and its controversial privacy policies are teeming with new complications as regulators overseas increasingly start to regard them as a suspicious, Americanizing import.

This week, data protection officials in Hamburg, Germany, sent a menacing missive in Facebook's direction, accusing the social network of partaking in illegal activities by retaining data about people who aren't members of the site but whose contact information may have come into its possession through members' e-mail importer tools. Last year, the privacy commissioner in Canada put significant pressure on Facebook to simplify its privacy … Read more

The lack of regulatory consistency across Europe means that businesses and consumers are paying higher prices than necessary and that new telecommunications services are being held back, warns the European Commission.

The EC released on Tuesday the 15th version of its annual report on progress in the European Union's electronic communications market. It found that telecom regulation across the region remains nationally focused, with regulators often procrastinating over the introduction of EU laws.

Because of this, the key to growth in the telecom market, particularly for the creation of next-generation broadband networks, lies in consistent enforcement of legislation across … Read more

The Federal Communications Commission, which has been taking a beating on proposed Net neutrality regulations, is lacing up the gloves again, this time to do battle with wireless carriers.

While more than a few of the wireless carriers are the same companies going toe-to-toe with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski over Net neutrality, the latest scrap is over a very different issue: billing. More specifically, those shocking bills consumers say they get from time to time from their wireless providers.

The FCC has been looking into the wireless industry's billing practices and pressuring carriers over their early termination fees for … Read more

Editors' note: This is a guest column. See Lawrence Spiwak's bio below.

Despite his protestations to the contrary, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski is about to reverse a 25-year bipartisan tradition of removing heavy-handed public-utility-type regulations over new technologies and services.

Although Genachowski maintains that such regulatory interventions will be "modest," Genachowski's proposed approach is entirely disingenuous. Instead, for those of us who study this industry closely, it is readily apparent that the FCC now wants to regulate almost all aspects of the Internet.

In the past, the FCC, under both Democrats and Republicans, recognized … Read more

Update May 6, 7:51 a.m. PT: The FCC has released its statement. More coverage to follow.

Net neutrality regulations are likely to be imposed on broadband providers after all.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski plans to announce details of the plan on Thursday, a senior agency official said. The purpose is to circumvent a recent federal appeals court ruling saying the FCC had no legal authority to punish Comcast for throttling some BitTorrent transfers.

Stung by the recent unanimous ruling, Genachowski will outline a "third way" to implement Net neutrality regulations, the official said in … Read more