• Newsfeed
  • NextDraft

How The FCC Plans to Save The Internet and Other Fascinating News on the Web

5 minute read

1. Strife in the Fast Lane

According to several sources, the FCC is set to propose new net neutrality rules “that would allow broadband providers to charge companies a premium for access to their fastest lanes.” That’s decent news for deep-pocketed companies that can pay for faster connectivity and even better news for broadband providers that can charge more for a speedier service. It’s bad news for everyone else. Faster service for some means slower service for others. Many of today’s big internet companies got that way because they had access to a level playing field. The Internet let the little guy become the big guy. And now the big guy wants to have an unfair advantage with faster pipes. The hell with that.

+ Ryan Singel: The FCC plans to save the Internet by destroying it.

+ Tim Wu in The New Yorker: “It threatens to make the Internet just like everything else in American society: unequal in a way that deeply threatens our long-term prosperity.”

2. Don’t Bogart That Propylene Glycol

The FDA will soon introduce new regulations on the sales on e-cigarettes. The rules will set an age limit for buying e-cigs (18 and up), ban their sale in vending machines, and require warning labels. Meanwhile, we don’t really know what sucking on these devices means for our health. Here’s Thomas Glynn, director of cancer science at the American Cancer Society: “Seven years is a nanosecond in scientific terms. We don’t even know what the long-term effects of inhaling heated propylene glycol are.” Take a look at what the new rules do and don’t do.

3. The Shirt Off Your Back

It’s been exactly one year since the collapse of an eight-story garment factory in Bangladesh killed more than 1,100 people. How effective have efforts at reform been since that day? The results have been mixed. The shirt on your back still places the weight of the world on your shoulders

+ BloombergBusinessweek: The made in USA story doesn’t hold up.

4. Them Apples

While nothing can keep the doctor away, an apple a day has always seemed like a pretty good idea. But maybe that notion depends on which apples you’re eating. MoJo’s Tim Philpott on why American apples just got banned in Europe.

+ Vermont becomes the first state to require GMO food labels.

+ Be My GFF: Erika Lenkert (an accomplished food writer who has been gluten free for more than a decade and a is fellow parent at my kids’ school) is getting close to reaching her goal to start GFF Magazine. Be her GFF and support her Kickstarter campaign to launch GFF: Gluten-Free Forever Magazine.

5. This Stuff is Really The Shit

“Health officials are worried about people attempting fecal transplants on their own.” That may seem like an unlikely scenario, but fecal transplants have proven to be effective treatments for difficult bacterial infections. Welcome to the age of the frozen poop bank. (Isn’t that basically how everyone feels about their bank?)

6. Baby, You Can Drive My iPod

Car manufacturers are driving us towards vehicles that are “so fully wired that consumers never, ever, need to be unplugged from the internet.” (Just what we need. A mix of road rage and web comments at 65 mph.) Your car might also become a mobile telecom tower.

7. You Can Talk the Talk

“You can get people to think it’s nonsense at the same time that you buy into it.” The Atlantic’s Emma Green takes us on a trip back to the origins off office speak. (I’ve always wondered how fruit pickers refer to low-hanging fruit.)

8. Turn the Page

Business Insider: “Early in his career, [Steve Jobs] was petulant, mean, and destructive. Only by leaving Apple, humbling himself, and finding a second success — with Pixar — was he able to mature into the leader who would return to Apple and build it into the world’s most valuable company. Larry Page is the Steve Jobs of Google.”

9. Writing on The Wall

“Ideas are cheap. I have more ideas now than I could ever write up. To my mind, it’s the execution that is all-important … If I was a religious guy, I’d say it’s a gift from God, but I’m not, so I can’t say that.” Rolling Stone interviews Game of Thrones writer George R.R. Martin.

10. The Bottom of the News

Time is out with its annual list of the one hundred most influential people in the world. Or as one of its four covers suggests: Beyonce and some other people.

+ Syndicated from Kottke: We all know Michael Jackson invented the moonwalk on-stage during a performance of Billie Jean at the Motown 25th Anniversary show. What this video presupposes is, maybe he didn’t?

+ A hamster-sized deer. Even your cat video thinks this is cute.

+ If football is so dangerous, why do NFL players live longer than the rest of us?

More Must-Reads From TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com