So, the GAO recently released a report on the wireless industry and found that:
The biggest changes in the wireless industry since 2000 have been consolidation among wireless carriers and increased use of wireless services by consumers. Industry consolidation has made it more difficult for small and regional carriers to be competitive. Difficulties for these carriers include securing subscribers, making network investments, and offering the latest wireless phones necessary to compete in this dynamic industry. Nevertheless, consumers have also seen benefits, such as generally lower prices, which are approximately 50 percent less than 1999 prices, and better coverage.
Now, if you are a self-described “consumer advocate,” I would hope the bottom line here is pretty straightforward and refreshing:
Prices fell by 50% in 10 years. That alone is an amazing success story. But that’s not the end of the story. The more important fact is that prices fell by that much while innovation in this sector was also flourishing. Do you remember the phone you carried in your pocket — if you could fit it in your pocket at all — ten years ago? It was a pretty rudimentary device. It made calls and… well… it made calls. Now, think about the mini-computer that sits in your pocket right now. Stunning little piece of kit. It can text. It can do email. It can get Internet access. You can Twitter on it. Oh, and you can still make calls on it (but who wants to do that anymore!)
The point is, this is a great American capitalist success story that everyone —
especially “consumer advocates” — should be celebrating. So, what does Public Knowledge president Gigi Sohn have to say?
“These trends do not bode well for consumers, despite any benefits of the moment,” she told Ars Technica.
Wait, what? Continue reading →
I sometimes enjoy picking nits with or lampooning our friend Scott Cleland, but today write to point out what an excellent job he did of advocating against net neutrality regulation last week on the NewsHour.
The set-up piece is interesting because of its government-centric take. Net neutrality, it says, is “a set of principles adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in 2005 that limits the ability of Internet providers to treat sites differently.”
The better view, I think, is that neutrality is one of “a set of technical principles that have been implicit in [the Internet’s] design since it began life.” Hey, NewsHour, giving the FCC credit for the neutral engineering of the Internet is like giving the rooster credit for the sunrise.
There’s a telling omission in the NewsHour’s telling of the Comcast Kerfuffle. See if you catch it:
The case began with actions by Comcast in 2007 to interfere with an online service called BitTorrent, a file-swapping site that allows consumers to swap movies and other material over the Internet, files that use a great deal of bandwidth. The FCC then told Comcast it could not block subscribers from using BitTorrent under the commission’s net neutrality rules.
Left out: Comcast had ceased interfering with BitTorrent before the FCC acted due to a variety of market pressures.
But take a look at the piece and Scott’s good advocacy in the discussion that follows the set-up:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/js/pap/embed.js?news01n3ddfqe6c
Gigi Sohn, who I personally respect and who I agree with on many issues, reaches a bit far when she argues that Comcast degraded BitTorrent because it was a file-sharing site “unpopular with some folks in Congress and some folks elsewhere.” Collapsing net neutrality regulation and intellectual property issues may be good for Public Knowledge’s base, but it confuses many issues and weakens Public Knowledge’s arguments and support.
I think the record is pretty clear that Comcast degraded BitTorrent because of a conflict between the BitTorrent protocol and the DOCSIS protocol running on Comcast’s cable plant. (I know I can rely on comments to correct me or bring nuance to this claim.)
Neutrality was not a gift from government, and I don’t think making a mandate of a good engineering principle will improve the functioning of the Internet or the Internet ecosystem.
Today, Jim Harper and I took on Andy Schwartzman of Media Access Projects and Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge in this New York Times online debate about, “Should Consumers Fear the Comcast Deal?” Like other media critics, Schwartzman and Sohn adopt the gloom and doom tone that many worrywarts use when discussing the deal. Andy Schwartzman says “Comcast’s proposed acquisition of NBC Universal poses a genuine threat to free expression and diversity of speech in our democratic society.” And Gigi Sohn predicts that “With all that programming under its control, Comcast will have every incentive to take its shows off of the Internet and force consumers to buy a cable subscription to get online access to that programming.”
But as Jim Harper and I point out, we’ve heard such Chicken Little horror stories before. Whether it was AOL-Time Warner, News Corp-DirecTV, Sirius-XM, or whatever else, the story is always that a veritable media apocalypse awaits if the deals aren’t blocked. But it just ain’t so. As I note in my response:
Back in the real world, the sky never fell — except on the merging companies! Just two years after the deal was announced, AOL-Time Warner had lost over $100 billion and Time Warner has now spun off AOL entirely. The News Corp.-DirecTV marriage ended in divorce after just three years. And Sirius-XM flirted with bankruptcy earlier this year as listeners continue to flock to other audio options. The moral of the story: markets worked. Shareholders abandoned bad deals, new niche markets developed, and innovative digital technologies continue to revolutionize media.
And as Harper notes in response to silly claims about restricting access to content or communications, “Comcast-NBC can no more impinge on communications among Internet users than AOL-Time Warner did.” Which is to say, not at all. They would be doomed if they tried to play such games. You can’t make money or retain viewers or customers by cutting off access to content or conduit. Finally, “the genuine threat to free expression and diversity of speech” is not Comcast-NBC, as Schwartman suggests, but a government big enough to crush media companies and control media platforms as if they were their playthings.
For more details about the actual historical record, check out my recent PFF white paper: “A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria: From AOL-Time Warner to Comcast-NBC.”
Note: Here’s a second post I just put live at DrewClark.com. It refers to an upcoming conference, on Friday, October 3, sponsored by the Information Economy Project at George Mason University School of Law. It will be held at 8:30 a.m. at the National Press Club. Registration details are below.
In the United States, the regulation of broadcast radio and television has always been done under a different standard than the regulation of the print medium.
As Secretary of Commerce in the administration of President Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover declared: “The ether is a public medium, and its use must be for a public benefit,” he said at the Fourth National Radio Conference, in 1925. “The dominant element for consideration in the radio field is, and always will be, the great body of the listening public, millions in number, country-wide in distribution.”
When Congress created the Federal Radio Commission in 1927, it decreed that broadcasting was to serve the “public interest, convenience and necessity,” and this standard was re-affirmed in the Communications Act of 1934. Several Supreme Court decisions — albeit decisions that have been much criticized — affirmed that broadcasting could and should be treated differently than the traditional “press.”
This differential treatment for broadcasting — versus the print medium, and also cable television — was underscored by the decisions in
Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC (1969), which upheld the “Fairness Doctrine,” and also FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978), which upheld indecency rules for over-the-air broadcast television. The Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to grant reply time to those who said their views were criticized.
Continue reading →
Note: Here’s a post I just put live at DrewClark.com. It refers to an upcoming conference that might be of interest to Tech Liberation readers. Make sure to follow the link to the bottom of the post for registration information for this FREE conference, to be held tomorrow, Friday, October 3, at 8:30 a.m.
If all goes according to plan, on February 17, 2009, television broadcasters will power down their analog transmitters. They will be broadcasting their signal only digitally.
After more than 20 years in the long transition to digital television, this might be considered progress. Now, millions of Americans are collecting vouchers from the Commerce Department to subsidize their purchase of converter boxes. These are the electronic devices that take the digital signals — and convert them back to analog — so that viewers without high-definition televisions can watch broadcast TV on their old sets.
What about the bigger questions? Is there any benefit to the public, or to consumers, from the transition to digital television? What about the vaunted visions of hundreds of broadcast channels, through multi-casting? What would be the new public-interest obligations, if any, of broadcasters? This question has definitely not been resolved.
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.