Yesterday, AT&T backed away from its strong opposition to any sort of open access regulations in the 700 MHz spectrum auction, backing a proposal by FCC chairman Kevin Martin to apply open access rules to one block of spectrum while leaving the other blocks unregulated.
In this week’s podcast, Hance, James, Adam, Jerry, and I discuss the politics and economics of the 700 MHz auction. We discuss what the rules will look like, whether there’s enough competition in the wireless market, whether Google will bid for the spectrum, and how recent developments affect Frontline’s proposal.
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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With the National Governors Association meeting in Traverse City, Michigan, this weekend, the Detroit Free Press has seen fit to lay out some sensible thinking on the REAL ID Act:
[The governors] ought to do themselves and their states a service by serving a definitive notice on Washington that the Real ID Act is not just unworkable but unacceptable and ought to be repealed before it takes effect next year. . . .
Several states already have flatly said no to implementing Real ID. The NGA should, too.
Good stuff. The FreeP gets it.
Comm. Daily had a good article on July 16, “Republican Fairness Doctrine Measure Sidetracked,” concerning a measure that would have blocked the FCC from reinstating the Fairness Doctrine:
Durbin rejected an amendment to the defense authorization bill (HR-1585), offered by Republican Sen. Norm Coleman of Minn., that would block the FCC from reinstating the doctrine that was banned in 1987. Durbin favors reinstatement, which has provoked an uproar among Republicans fearful the doctrine would be used to shut down conservative talk radio, Coleman said. The fairness doctrine required broadcasters to present balanced viewpoints on controversial issues (CD July 2 p1).
Conservative talk radio has flourished because the market “says ‘I want to listen,'” Coleman said, and consumers have a choice — they can turn off the dial. But government should not be regulating content, he argued: Bringing back the Fairness Doctrine would be a “very, very bad idea.” Durbin said Americans should hear both sides of a story since the airwaves are public property: “What if the marketplace does not provide opportunities to hear both points of view?” Durbin mused whether a government role would then be appropriate.
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This has to be one of the sillier critiques of the wireless industry I’ve seen:
Murray suggests that termination fees make competition between wireless carriers virtually nonexistent, as people are often unwilling to switch from one carrier to another until their contracts are fully expired. Worse still, the long lock-ins don’t always provide any proper consideration for consumers entering those contracts.
“We want lower consumer prices,” Murray said when referring to the $600 price of the iPhone. “Consumers don’t get a single dime of subsidy on the new iPhone, but it’ll still get them locked into a two-year deal or penalty to leave the carrier.”
It’s nonsensical to say there’s no competition because consumers only choose a wireless carrier once a year (or even once every two years). Most people don’t buy computers, cars, or major appliances more often than that, yet no one claims that makes those industries uncompetitive. If consumers get crappy service during their contracts, they remember this fact and switch to a different carrier at the end of the contract period. And consumers comparison shop before they sign a contract, so phone companies have as much incentive to keep their prices low in a contract-based system as they would in a system without contracts.
Moreover, the major carriers all give consumers the option to take a risk-free 14-day trial period on their phone. So I don’t see how you can possibly say consumers don’t know what they’re getting into. If they want to, consumers can get cell phones from all four national carriers, play with all of them for a week, and return the three they like least. Consumers aren’t being railroaded into anything.
The iPhone point also strikes me as especially silly. The iPhone is expensive because it’s a cutting-edge gadget that’s been on the market less than a month. The fact that some of the cost comes in the form of a 2-year contract, as opposed to an up-front sticker price, is beside the point. If you think the iPhone, 2-year contract and all, is too expensive, buy a different phone. There are plenty to choose from.
The state-federal showdown on the REAL ID Act is going through its long slow build. REAL ID would have states issue nationally standard IDs (read “national IDs”) by May 2008. Numerous states have passed bills and resolutions rejecting REAL ID, what with its $17 billion (net present value) costs, administrative hassles, and privacy/security threats for state residents.
The hook the federal law uses is that drivers’ licenses and IDs from non-compliant states won’t be accepted for federal purposes after the May 2008 deadline. From a ComputerWorld story:
“I think residents of states that choose not to comply are going to be displeased with their leadership’s decision when we get closer to full implementation,” a DHS spokesman said. “They’ll no longer be able do certain things that carriers of state-issued drivers licenses take for granted today.”
But the main thing the federal government uses state-issued IDs for is airport checkpoints (even though they’re not technically required). When the REAL-ID day of reckoning comes, federal officials will be standing in the way of American travelers. Accordingly, federal officials will take the heat. Accordingly, the federal government will back down.
In fact, the feds will back down before it even comes to that. The outcome in this game of chicken is easy to predict.
The imagery that you see here on the TechLiberationFront site is a clever little rhetorical flourish, I think. We’re mostly free-market types, but our Maoist-Soviet-Che Guevara-ish imagery skewers the idea that the political left has a lock on revolutionary ideas, dissent, civil liberties, and – oh, I don’t know – gusto.
So I’m delighted to find a Web site in a similar vein from none other than the National Republican Senatorial Committee. They have a site up called StopLiberalCensorship.com, which carries a revolutionary (if partisan) message:
Free speech is under attack.
As Democrats in Congress eagerly line up to legislate what you hear on the radio it begs the question: what’s next? Newspapers? There’s no end in sight to their power grab.
It’s about the Fairness Doctrine, the idea of requiring media to apportion their messages and content based on political judgments and direction. James Gattuso and other TLFers have rightly criticized it in spades. Adam specifically called out Democrats’ abandonment of free speech here.
The site seeks people to sign a petition saying that “Republicans should do everything in their power to defeat the Democrats’ attempts to trample our First Amendment rights.”
It’s a welcome turn of the tables to see Republicans on the barricades – in berets, perhaps? – defending freedom. Viva la revolucion!
S. 1748, the Broadcaster Freedom Act of 2007 is the Senate bill to abolish the Fairness Doctrine.
Update: Here’s the vote on an amendment to prevent the Federal Communications Commission from repromulgating the fairness doctrine. Forty-seven Democrats (and the independent who caucuses with the Democrats) voted against it.
The MPAA comments in the FCC’s Net Neutrality proceeding cautions against taking steps that would interfere with the deployment of watermarking, filtering, deep packet inspection, and so on. What’s the connection exactly? Part of it is unknown–since the technologies are new, and are just being deployed. Part of it is known… much of the dispute about technologies being deployed to protect content (not just in the sense of protecting copyrighted content, but in the sense of security generally) is about who will pay for it. The content creator? The network infrastructure engineers? The developers of software used in distribution? The retailer? The CPE manufacturer? Insofar as net neutrality principles end up constraining who may charge whom for what, they may preclude otherwise desirable arrangements of who bears the costs. And insofar as net neutrality constrains one player on the net from blocking or interfering with another, it may hamper efforts to control piracy like spam, by impeding traffic carried by or through disreputable ports of call.
My blogging has been light the last couple of weeks because I’m busy finishing up a big study on eminent domain abuse in Missouri, which will be published by the Show-Me Institute. Obviously, most of that isn’t going to be relevant to a tech policy blog, but I have noticed an interesting parallel between the eminent domain debate and the software patent debate.
A bit of background: cities in Missouri (and in other states) have gotten used to a “clear cutting” style of real estate development in which the city council will declare an entire neighborhood “blighted” or in need of redevelopment, and then put out bids for a comprehensive re-development plan. Large developers submit re-development plans with price tags in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars specifying which properties will be demolished, what will be built in their place, and what kinds of tenants will be sought for the new buildings. Once a plan has been selected, the city will employ the power of eminent domain to help the chose developer seize the property of anyone who refuses to sell voluntarily (and “voluntarily” is a bit of a misnomer when property owners know their land will be taken whether they like it or not). Then the developer will bulldoze most of the old neighborhood and replace it with a shopping mall, condos, or whatever else was specified in the re-development plan.
Almost all of the redevelopment plans cities pursue are done this way. City officials are absolutely horrified at the thought of letting just anyone buy property in the development area and make improvements. After all, everyone knows that without a “master plan,” neighborhoods would descend into chaos. Besides, what incentive would a big developer have to start a major development project if some other guy could open a competing business down the street?
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C|Net’s News.com exists to make money. It pays reporters and editors to produce stories that will interest people and get them to read C|Net content, because that readership induces advertisers to pay them.
So it is no act of beneficence or altruism when a reporter goes out and asks 13 security companies whether government spyware used in investigations would be detected by their security software, or whether they would intentionally fail to report it. The results are interesting, and they’ve been reproduced verbatim by C|Net, in a calculated attempt to make money.
I’m having a little fun with the “greed” talk, of course, and don’t see anything wrong with seeking profit, because profit-seekers do a lot of good for others. In this case, a reporter is putting tough questions to software companies on our behalf – and putting those companies on notice that they should think twice before altering or degrading their products at the behest of law enforcement.
That’s a small but important help to our privacy protections. And it’s provided by the market for infotainment – which is as important, if not more important, than lobbying our representatives or trying to sue the government.
By Drew Clark
The National Association of Broadcasters likes to think of itself as the king of Capitol Hill. It carefully cultivates an invincible image. And some in the mainstream media buy it. The New York Times describes NAB as “the powerful trade lobby.” But in truth, right now television and radio broadcasters have never been weaker than in 1982, when Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., uttered these famous words: “The NAB can’t lobby its way out of a paper bag.”
Over the last 10 years, the NAB spent $55 million in lobbying expenditures – more than any other association – to disprove Packwood’s hypothesis. But still, the association is now getting hit on all sides. On radio, this year NAB is battling the proposed merger of XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio. Besting such a merger would normally be easy – if NAB hadn’t been arguing for the opposite of what it now seeks. And last month an alliance of performers and recording companies called MusicFirst decided to strike for a performance royalty from over-the-air radio stations. American copyright law exempts terrestrial broadcasters from paying for performances.
But the biggest deal is now heading into the spotlight: vacant television channels known as “white spaces.” Everyone covets them: technology companies like Dell, Google, Intel and Microsoft, wireless carriers like Sprint-Nextel, advocates for rural broadband, and non-profit spectrum utopians who look at white spaces and see decentralized community networks.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.