The FCC finally approved a long-overdue reform of anticompetitive video franchise rules by a vote of 3-2 after nearly a year of study. An Order will be issued sometime within six months. Grasping local officials won’t be able to drag out negotiations over franchise agreements with video service providers until the exhausted applicants capitulate to legal blackmail, a process which sometimes takes a year or two. Now, the negotiations will have to be completed within 90 days.
The deregulatory milestone is a victory for consumers, who will benefit from more rapid investment in competitive video offerings by AT&T and Verizon. It will also further reduce the possibility that broader telecom reform legislation will move through the next Congress, meaning fewer options to enact net neutrality regulation or pump up the current unsustainable universal service regime (which could lead to further taxation of Internet traffic).
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Most people are consumers of content, not creators. However, as Web 2.0-style social networking, photo sharing and blogging interactivity increases, more people are and will be producers – and they will want to share their works over the Internet. But as an interesting AP story relates, there’s an imbalance in Internet uploading and downloading – but fortunately there’s no call for net neutrality legislation to address this (at least not yet).
From the article:
The system is a hangover of the old mass media days,” said Paul Saffo, a technology analyst in Palo Alto, Calif. “Some consumers are uploading a tremendous amount of information and that’s the thing the establishment just doesn’t get.”
Cable and phone providers insist they are keeping up with demand, in many cases increasing both upload and download speeds, but they say they haven’t had a huge clamoring for symmetry.
I agree with both of the above views, and I think that the market is responding pretty well to the majority of consumers. Like almost all journalists, Anick Jesdanun, the article’s author, tries to create some sort of conflict or lack of parity – hence the title “Imbalance in Net Speeds Impedes Sharing.” And regarding the state of the marketplace, the author states:
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We learned back in August that I am not Timothy Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. I am, in fact, a “shill from an ideologically oriented corporate funded think tank” who makes “fake arguments.” Now, we learn that there’s another Timothy Lee trying to horn in on the lucrative pundit-shills-named-Timothy-Lee business. This one claims to be “an Arizona native and member of the Arizona and California Bar Associations” and “director of Legal and Public Affairs for the Center for Individual Freedom in Alexandria, Va.”
It seems that the vast right-wing conspiracy has decided that one deceptively-named Timothy Lee is not enough. So they’ve been scouring the country for anyone named Timothy Lee who can string together two coherent sentences. That way, even if I get hit by a bus, they’ll be able to trot out this
new Timothy Lee to fill in for me, ensuring that there will always be a right-wing Timothy Lee to comment on technology issues. The Hands Off the Internet coalition is already doing their part to raise the profile of this new and improved Timothy Lee.
Mr. Lee, incidentally, has some reasonable things to say about franchise reform and network neutrality regulation, so I encourage you to check out his article in the Tucson Citizen.
While in this country we’re debating whether the government should hand over to a single entrepreneur 30 of the 36 MHz of prime radio spectrum slated for auction after the digital TV transition, in the UK they’re doing things a little different. According to GigaOm:
British carriers might have spent over 20 billion pounds on 3G wireless auctions several years ago, but they will soon get a chance to spend even more for “the UK’s largest single release of radio spectrum”, says British regulator Ofcom. This morning Ofcom outlined a plan for wireless auctions, which will be technology agnostic, but could include spectrum for WiMAX, mobile TV, mobile broadcast and even 3G. Ofcom is asking for a consultation period until March 2007. Ofcom says the three bands that will be available are: 2010-2025 MHz, 2290-2300 MHz and 2500-2690 MHz, and a total of 215 MHz will be on the market. There will be two initial auctions which will be part of a bigger plan to sell off up to 400 MHz over the following years.
You heard right,
400 Mhz of technology agnostic spectrum. I invite my friends concerned about net neutrality to look at this. We all would like to see new competition in broadband, and spectrum reform seems to me to be the first obvious step in that direction.
HONG KONG, December 5, 2006–The convergence of telecommunications and media is posing problem for communications regulators all over the world, and many of them swapped stories here about the best way to cope with rapid technological change.
Most government panelists participating in two morning sessions at the International Telecommunications Union’s Telecom World conference here agreed on the need for a unified communications authority.
But they differed after whether competition policy could prove adequate to dealing with issues of telecommunications and media. In other words, would the need for communications regulation fade over time?
Officials from France and Hong Kong are both in the midst of re-evaluating their existing regulatory structures, which include two separate agencies. In each case, one agency is charged with overseeing broadcasting, and the other agency oversees telephone communications.
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HONG KONG, December 4, 2006–Global regulators had a mixed message for the telecommunications industry here on Monday: Governments should ease restrictions on companies in the presence of competition–but otherwise tighten them.
At the opening forum at Telecom World 2006, government officials from China, Hong Kong, the European Commission and International Telecommunications Union delivered a similar message, but with varying degrees of specificity.
Vivian Reding, the European commissioner responsible for information society and media, was the most direct: “Competition and open markets drive investment and innovation. Monopolies don’t.”
Reding and the other regulators spoke here at the triennial conference of the ITU, a hybrid international body based in Geneva, Switzerland, that is part of the United Nations. The union represents telecommunications companies as well as U.N. member states.
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CNET reports that Google has been contacted by cell phone carriers who don’t want their customers accessing Google Maps from their cell phones. One Google executive claims: “we’ve been getting notes from some of the telco carriers who are saying ‘look, you need to stop our customers from downloading this thing’.” If the report is true, it says a lot about whether or not we need heavy-handed government regulation to protect basic Internet freedoms.
Google Maps one of the best cell phone features I have ever used and I would be angry if my cell phone carrier tried to take it away. They could, of course. They’re under no network neutrality-type obligations. Any cell phone carrier could block access to Google Maps tomorrow. But if the media report is true, some have decided to appeal to Google instead. Maybe they fear a customer backlash if they take action on their own. Dissatisfied customers could jump ship. There are four major cell phone carriers to choose from. But existing customers are locked into service agreements, so one would assume the carriers are in a strong position. What they fear, I suspect, is bad press and resulting damage to the brand. They also may be afraid of provoking Washington. Either way, they already seem to feel there are limitations on what they can do even in the absence of net neutrality regulation.
This week I appeared on C-SPAN’s weekly program “The Communicators” and discussed a wide variety of communications and media policy issues including: the outlook for telecom & media legislation in the new Democratic Congress, the First Amendment treatment of new media technologies, Net neutrality regulation and the need for universal service and spectrum policy reform.
The video can be viewed here and I apologize in advance if I put you to sleep!
I’ve just finished reading a new report by a research firm called Ramp Rate about Net neutrality and the online gaming market. Now I’m accustomed to Net neutrality supporters employing gloom-and-doom, Chicken Little-esque rhetoric in support of government regulation of broadband networks, but I was shocked to see the same rhetoric laid on so thick in a study by industry consultants.
The sky-is-falling rhetoric kicks off with the very title of their piece: “Every Time You Vote against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills a Night Elf.” The authors go on to paint a picture of the coming apocalypse if we do not adopt Net neutrality regs right away:
“What will be murdered with no fallback or replacement is the nascent market of interactive entertainment–particularly online gaming. Companies like Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Sony Online Entertainment, and countless others, have built a business on the fundamental assumption of relatively low latency bandwidth being available to large numbers of consumers. … Killing off these blossoming networks, with their own economies (potentially taxable when converted into real-world cash), would result in drastic, irreparable harm to consumers, technology developers, the economy and tax revenue–and even the ISPs themselves.”
Murdered? Killed off? Oh my, who knew the end was so near?! Of course, the end is not upon us and the online gaming market is not about to be “murdered” because of a lack of Net neutrality regulation. In fact, just the opposite could be the case as I will explain below the fold.
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For the past few days, TLF’s Tim Lee and Brooke Oberwetter of the Competitive Enterprise Institute have been engaging in a, well, spirited discussion over net neutrality. The whole thing seems to have started when Oberwetter linked approvingly to one of Tim’s TLF posts. Proving that no good deed goes unpunished, Tim responded with a detailed criticism of Oberwetter. Such is the blogosphere.
You can see the whole gory mess here, here, here, and here. Oberwetter argues that tiered pricing for content delivery could potentially benefit consumers, by opening up another dimension of competition. Tim comes down hard on this idea–arguing that such a fee system is unlikely to develop, and in any case would be a bad thing.
At the risk of shattering the image of universal pan-TLF consensus, I have some problems with Tim’s easy dismissal of this potential market development.
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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.