Twitter has been ordered by a U.S. federal judge to turn over documents related to several people involved with WikiLeaks to the Justice Department.

Tonight, a Twitter spokeswoman responded to a request for comment on the situation:

“We’re not going to comment on specific requests, but, to help users protect their rights, it’s our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so. We outline this policy in our law enforcement guidelines.”

In an onstage interview I did with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo at a D@CES event last night in Las Vegas, he referenced the issue, but would not give any specifics.

While he said he could not talk about WikiLeaks specifically, he indicated that he disliked government mandates to keep things quiet and reiterated Twitter’s desire to connect people with useful information.

“We’re going to lash out at things that prevent us from doing that, as aggressively as we can,” said Costolo, who also used Twitter crackdowns in China as an example.

It might be a Herculean task to fight the federal government, which is aggressively going after WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

Some Web companies, such as eBay’s PayPal unit, have cut off WikiLeaks.

On the other hand, Twitter took legal action to unseal the court order, which allowed it to inform those involved, giving them 10 days to object. Otherwise, the San Francisco microblogging service would have had to turn over information without the knowledge of these users.

There will surely be more of these to other Web companies, with obvious candidates being Google and Facebook.

The order from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is ordering Twitter to fork over subscriber names, user names, screen names, mailing addresses, residential addresses and more of several people involved with WikiLeaks.

But you can read for yourself–here is the court order, as well as the unsealing order:

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Here are a few highlights:

• Half of all U.S. residential broadband connections fall below the minimum speed established by the Federal Communications Commission of four megabits per second down and one megabit up. That definition of what constitutes “broadband” is however all of six months old.
• The median download speed was three megabits per second and 595 kilobits up, and these have only improved a little bit since the 2009 survey. At the rate the U.S. is going it will take 60 years to catch up with South Korea, where broadband network speeds are legendary, averaging 34 megabits per second.
• Only one percent of broadband connections in the U.S. run at 50 megabits per second down and 20 up, meeting the FCC’s goal for the year 2015.

The report points out a few other findings from the FCC’s research: As many as 100 million people–roughly one in three–don’t have access to broadband at home, and of those, 24 million can’t get it if they want it, usually because they live on the wrong side of a seemingly arbitrary line on some map. Others say it’s too expensive or that they simply don’t know how to use it.

The 68-page report (PDF) goes on to break down the broadband situation in each state and a few U.S. territories.

The CWA released the report at a press conference in Washington, D.C., today, and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski was on hand to lend his support and talk about his plans to reform the Universal Service Fund so that besides funding telephone service in rural areas, which was the reason it was created, it can be used to help fund broadband deployments in markets where service is limited for one reason or another. He also talked about getting some of the hurdles out of the way of private companies, so that when they choose to build infrastructure they can move fast. Simply cutting red tape can reduce the deployment costs by 40 percent.

Below is a grab of the CWA’s speed map of the U.S. (Click on it to zoom in.)



Update: And here’s a video of today’s press conference at the National Press Club. Genachowski is the second speaker.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101215/if-speed-matters-why-is-american-broadband-so-slow/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20090102/ie-market-share-down-nearly-12-percent-in-two-years/ http://allthingsd.com/20090102/ie-market-share-down-nearly-12-percent-in-two-years/#comments Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:30:12 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=10483 The stock market’s performance this past year isn’t the only thing that’s charting historic lows. According to preliminary metrics from Net Applications, the share of the browser market held by Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer has slipped below 70 percent (click on chart above). IE’s market share topped out at 68.15 percent in December, down from 69.77 percent in November and 71.27 percent in October. Astonishing, given that it began the year at around 75 percent. Meanwhile, Firefox, Apple’s (AAPL) Safari, Google’s (GOOG) Chrome and even Netscape rose in share, with Firefox exceeding 20 percent for a full month, a trend that Net Applications expects will continue through December and beyond.

Now, Net Applications cautions that the December holiday season strongly favored residential over business usage, which increases the relative usage share of Mac, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. So perhaps the IE’s lower usage during the month was a bit more pronounced than it might otherwise have been. But that doesn’t change the fact that its reign is clearly in decline. In January of 2007, IE held nearly 80 percent market share; now it holds 68.15. Still, the lion’s share of the market, but a share that has slipped nearly 15 percent in just two years, (click on chart below) and given recent news, seems certain to slip further in the months ahead.


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