Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
WASHINGTON, July 3, 2007 – The Federal Trade Commission intends to monitor the information that telecom and cable companies provide about high-speed Internet service in the service plans they offer to customers, according to a report issued last week by the agency.
The FTC asserts in the report, released on June 27, that since it has jurisdiction over matters involving consumer protection, it “will continue to enforce the consumer protection laws in the area of broadband access.”
The podcast of my keynote speech at EDUCAUSE, “Mapping the Fault Lines in Telecom, Media and Tech Lobbying,” is now available an online podcast.
Here’s the blurb from the event:
The digital convergence of telecommunications, media, and technology is changing the landscape for policy makers and the industries that lobby them, as well as the users of computers, telephones, entertainment and knowledge. The Center for Public Integrity’s Well Connected project tracks each of the major telecom, broadcast, cable, news, entertainment, wireless, and computer companies. Americans can access this free database to see who owns the media and communications networks in their city by typing in their ZIP code. The project is also responsible for a freedom of information lawsuit to obtain data about local broadband deployment from the FCC. This session will address the need for the educational users of computing and communication to be attuned to the lobbying fault lines that affect all of these sectors, with a particular focus on recent developments in telecommunications and intellectual property.
TLFers may be interested to note that Jim Harper’s keynote podcast is also available.
Google’s public policy shop today officially joined the blogosphere, joining Cisco (February 4, 2005), Global Crossing (November 7, 2005), and Verizon Communications (October 2, 2006), each of which already have corporate policy blogs. The maiden post, by Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s director of public policy and government affairs, promises “public policy advocacy in a Googley way.” It’s one in which users will “be part of the effort” to help “refine and improve” the company’s policy positions. The blog already has 12 posts, done during the company’s internal test. The most recent – which I suspect provided the occasion to officially launch the blog – is a short summary of the official Google position on network neutrality.
WASHINGTON, May 24, 2007 – The National Association of Broadcasters has enlisted the recently re-minted lobbying firm of Bluewater Strategies in its quest to combat the proposed merger of XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio.
In a Wednesday filing at the Senate Office of Public Records, lobbyists Tim Kurth, Andrew Lundquist and George Nethercutt, former Republican representative from Washington, said they would represent the NAB on the merger and other issues.
Many in the press (NYT, AP) are commenting this morning about on how Google on Monday encouraged the Federal Communications Commission to design their forthcoming auction of radio-frequencies to take advantage of real-time airwaves auctions. It’s one more bit of news emerging from the 700 Megahertz (MHz) auction, which the FCC must begin before January 2008. In the words of telecom analyst Blair Levin, of Stifel Nicolaus, it is shaping up to be “a pivotal auction” that could provide “new blood for broadband… or [a] telco/cable sweep.”
But there was another noteworthy filing at the FCC on Monday. The White Spaces Coalition — whose members include Dell, EarthLink, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft and Philips Electronics — met with commission officials and provided them with a prototype device for operating in vacant television broadcast channels. Philips’ devices joins one previously submitted by Microsoft. (Look at page 3 for a picture of the “Microsoft TV White Spaces Development Platform.”)
Just as the 700 MHz band offers new hope for telecom and video competition, many technology companies are looking to the vacant TV bands. The reason is simple: television channels so scattered, principally because they were designed around the 1940s-era NTSC standard, named after the National Television Standard Committee. As a look at the broadcast band for the ZIP code 20006 demonstrates, using FCC metrics, no more than four of the 21 channels between 30 and 50 are occupied: 32, 45, 47 and 50. That leaves 17 available within the “white spaces” between the frequencies where those stations broadcast. The occupied channel numbers will vary from city to city, which is why advanced sensing capabilities are needed to even begin to complete utilizing the spectrum in the television zone for something other than broadcasting.
or
http://www.publicintegrity.org/telecom/telecomwatch.aspx?eid=2940
What is the position of the United States government on a proposed treaty, currently before the World Intellectual Property Organization, that would create a copyright-style protection for television broadcasts?
That is the key question that observers want answers for at the public roundtable discussion that will be held today, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., at the Copyright Office in the Library of Congress. The proposed treaty has been rife with controversy from the beginning. One reason is that it is being promoted as an update to the 1961 Treaty of Rome, which the U.S. never ratified.
During negotiations last year at WIPO in Geneva, the U.S. was the most significant government to promote extending the broadcaster treaty to cover webcasters. But the rest of the world balked at that. Failing that modification, the U.S. expressed dissatisfaction with the end-result.
In a column on the subject last September, I quoted PTO officials as follows:
“The U.S. does not believe that [the current treaty] provides a proper basis for going to a diplomatic conference, and intervened to say as much,” PTO spokeswoman Brigid Quinn said September 15. “The U.S. has always envisioned this treaty as one to provide the necessary protections for broadcast signals in the digital age.” As a result, she said, “there is no consensus and alternatives on at least half of the issues.”
WASHINGTON, April 11, 2007 – The wireless industry association CTIA has retained an economic consulting firm run by the former boss of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin to poke holes in proposals modifying a forthcoming auction of radio frequencies.
Furchtgott-Roth Economic Enterprises is run by Harold Furchtgott-Roth, a Republican FCC Commissioner from 1997-2001. Martin worked as a telecommunications attorney for Furchtgott-Roth from 1997 to 1999.
Some technology companies and non-profit advocacy groups have been coalescing around a proposal released in February by a new venture called Frontline Wireless. It would create a new wireless zone for public safety communications.
But CTIA and its major members – particularly Verizon and AT&T – have come out strongly against the Frontline proposal. On April 5, CTIA CEO Steve Largent, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, said in a letter to Martin that there were “issues involving the legality of the proposal.”
The wireless companies are also upset that seriously entertaining the Frontline proposal, which appears to be gaining momentum at the FCC, would delay the agency’s planned auction of spectrum frequencies in January 2008. “It is unclear how a resolution of the issues raised by the Frontline proposal could occur in time for an auction,” said Largent.
In my latest column on GigaOM, I speak to the meteoric rise of “patent reform” as an issue for Washington lobbyists. As Tim Lee points out in his latest entry, it isn’t always clear that patents=innovation. Irony note: it is Verizon — not Vonage — that is a member of the Coalition for Patent Fairness, which aims to reduce the burdens of patent litigation:
When Democrats took control of Congress last election, the lobbyists for all the big technology and telecom companies in Washington pulled out their wish lists, ripped them up, and re-arranged their legislative priorities.
Gone was the push for sweeping telecommunications legislation, hemispheric-wide free-trade agreements and limitations on Internet taxes. Only a Republican Congress and White House could agree upon those.
A new priority has emerged: overhauling the nation’s patent system. Seemingly out of nowhere, it is suddenly all the talk of Washington’s political-corporate machinations.
Paul Kapustka over at GigaOM has a piece about how Rick Whitt, Google’s new “Washington Telecom and Media Counsel,” attempted to tone down the fears — stoked recently by Google Senior Policy Council Andrew McLaughlin — that the Internet giant was going soft on Net Neutrality.
WASHINGTON, March 13, 2007 – The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Tuesday released a paper about the entertainment industry’s move to take copyright controls global.
The report is the result of EFF’s participation in a closed-door session of the Digital Video Broadcasting Project (DVB), the predominant global standard for digital television. (America uses a different digital standard that supports high-definition.)
EFF’s report documents the extent to which the DVB consortium has signaled its assent to copyright control technology. EFF called these a series of “unparalleled restrictions” on consumers’ rights to enjoy lawful digital content. These include “enforcing severe home recording and copying limitation,” “imposing controls on where you watch a program” and “dictating how you get to share shows with your own family,” according to EFF.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
