Lots of folks have been submitting the story that a Canadian MP has introduced "The Clean Internet Act" which is a bizarre bit of proposed legislation that is typical of other "protect the children!" laws that politicians love to propose without actually understanding what they're talking about. This one is pretty ridiculous, basically requiring anyone who provides internet service (including if you have a WiFi connection) to register with the government (hello, bureaucracy). Then it includes all sorts of impossible to obey rules about censoring and blocking users and content. ISPs won't be allowed to allow "past offenders" to access the internet. They have to block all sites "that promotes violence against women, promotes hatred, or contains child pornography." Failure to do so can result in jail time. Also, they have to (of course!) allow easy access for the government to search records of what users are doing. We're almost surprised he also didn't include in the bill demands that the earth stop spinning and the tides stop rising and falling. The MP in question probably would have found it more effective to have written a bill that just said "I demand all bad stuff on the internet go away." With that in mind, is it really that much to ask that those who are regulating the internet actually have some clue about the thing that they're trying to regulate?

For years, plenty of folks (including the Government Accountability Office) have been pointing out that the way the FCC measures broadband competition is very flawed. It simply assumes that if a single household in a zip code is offered broadband by provider A, then every household in that zip code can get broadband from provider A. In an extreme version of this, say provider A offers broadband to a single household, and provider B offers broadband to a different household and everyone else has no broadband at all. Under the current FCC measurements, that's an area that has full broadband competition. See the problem? For some reason, the FCC hasn't done much about this measuring problem, but it appears that the Commission is finally recognizing it has a problem and saying it needs to change the way it measures things. Commissioner Michael Copps points out: "Our statistical methodology seems almost calculated to obscure just how far our country is falling behind many other industrialized nations in broadband availability, adoption, speed and price." Of course, who knows if what comes next will be any better, but at least admitting you have a problem is the first step...