Greeting WOW Members and Web Professionals Everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters WOW and the WOW Technology Minute.
Its Web News Monday and here is what?’s shaping our Web world this week.
Website free speech is tested in San Francisco, CA last week. The LA Times reported that U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White reversed an earlier decision to shut down the watchdog website Wikileaks.org. According to the report, the judge said that he may have violated free speech rights lifting an injunction that had effectively shut down the website that publishes documents alleging corporate and government misdeeds.
Matt Zimmerman, attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights group focused on Internet liberties was quouted as saying that, “This was a home run for the 1st Amendment,” “The judge understood the serious 1st Amendment concerns and recognized the reality that in dealing with the Internet, it’s difficult for him to do anything of consequence.
In other news the Dow Jones is reporting that Comcast Corp. has found allies in its fight to convince the Federal Communications Commission that it was doing nothing wrong when it slowed customers’ access to certain applications on its high speed Internet network.
Broadcasters NBC Universal Inc. and Viacom Inc. filed comments at the FCC supporting Comcast’s right to engage in reasonable network management.
The companies argued that if Internet network operators are not permitted to manage their networks it will hamper their abilities to fight the flow of pirated content on the Web. “Reasonable network management practices are vital to combating the well- documented, unauthorized and illegal distribution of copyrighted material on the Internet,” Viacom said in its filing. Comcast has been accused by public interest groups, academics and software companies of slowing and even blocking subscribers’ access to peer-to-peer file sharing applications on the Internet. The applications allow the sharing back and forth of user-generated and other video content