Miscellaneous

And Don’t Trust Politicians With Government Either

by on August 19, 2010 · 2 comments

A favorite PR maven pitched me (and probably many of you) Senator Al Franken’s (D-MN) email suggesting that WiFi is threatened by the Google-Verizon “deal.”

“The Google-Verizon ‘framework’ was written so as not to apply to wireless Internet services,” says Franken. “If you use wi-fi or access the Internet on your phone, this is a serious problem.”

Kindamaybenotsomuch. WiFi is wireless, yes, but it’s not what they’re talking about when they say “wireless.”

But what caught my eye is Senator Franken’s somewhat inverted take on power arrangements in the federal government: “This evening, I’ll be speaking at an FCC hearing in Minneapolis. I’ll urge the commissioners to reject the Google-Verizon framework, stop the Comcast/NBC merger, and take action to keep the Internet free and open.”

Folks, Article I, section 1 of the United States Constitution creates the United States Senate, with section 3 describing the Senate’s makeup and some procedures.

The Federal Communications Commission is not a constitutional body. The best view is that Congress has no authority to establish an FCC like we have today. The better view is that Congress should not maintain the sprawling FCC we have today. And the only correct view is that FCC is a creation of Congress, beneath it in every relevant respect.

Senator Franken is supposed to be the boss of the FCC, not a supplicant “urging” the FCC to do x, y, and z.

Does it matter a lot? No. Senator Franken is mostly making a symbolic appeal to gin up constituent support. But he’s also symbolizing the abasement of the legislative branch to an independent agency that has no constitutional pedigree.

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Rural Broadband Subsidies: Another Iraq?

by on August 10, 2010 · 1 comment

In a 3-2 vote, the Federal Communications Commission recently decided to jack up its official definition of “broadband” from 200 kbps download to the 4 mbps dpwnload/1 mbps upload used as a benchmark in Our Big Fat National Broadband Plan. The three commissioners in the majority also declared that the definition of broadband will continue to evolve as consumers purchase faster connections to utilize new applications.

Several months earlier, the FCC launched a proceeding to figure out how to convert universal service subsidies for rural telephone service into universal service subsidies for rural broadband service.  Put these two decisions together, and it looks like the majority on the FCC is hell-bent on establishing rural broadband subsidies as a perpetual entitlement program that will never “solve” the rural availability problem because the goalposts will keep moving.

The current USF program taxes price-sensitive services (long distance and wireless) to subsidize a service that is not very price sensitive (local phone connections).  If the FCC takes a further step on the funding side and starts collecting universal service assessments from broadband, it will diminish broadband subscribership by taxing a service that is even more price sensitive: broadband connections. (I explained this a few months ago here.)

It’s time to get off this merry-go-round. The solution was suggested by MIT economist Jerry Hausman back when the FCC first started creating the current universal service programs in response to the Telecom Act of 1996: use revenues from spectrum auctions. 

Instead of having the FCC perpetually collect assessments from broadband or telephone services to subsidize broadband buildout in rural areas, Congress should earmark revenues from the next spectrum auction for one-time buildout grants in high-cost areas. The grants should be awarded via a competitive procurement auction that would force subsidy-seekers in different locations to compete with each other for the federal dollars. And Congress should explicitly wind down the universal service telephone subsidies in high cost areas and prohibit the FCC from using universal service assessments to fund broadband deployment in these places.

Using revenues from spectrum auctions would avoid the distortions and perverse consequences caused by ongoing universal service assessments on broadband or telephone services. One-shot deployment grants would ensure that the availability problem gets solved, so the federal government can declare victory and get out of the perpetual subsidy business.

Of course, some locations in the US are so expensive to serve that the potential revenues might not even cover the operating costs of broadband. But it does not follow that operators in these places need an ongoing stream of subsidies. When preparing their subsidy bids, they will have to calculate how large the one-shot payment needs to be to induce them to take on the capital costs and the ongoing operating costs. In other words, they can bank some of the one-shot subsidy and use it to cover the difference between revenues and operating costs.

This modest proposal does not address all aspects of the universal service fund. But it would achieve a clear objective — bringing broadband to rural areas — while allowing the FCC to extricate itself from the business of distributing $4.6 billion a year in subsidies. Let’s see a timetable for withdrawal!

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What Do Prince and H.R. 1586 Have in Common?

by on August 9, 2010 · 3 comments

Give up?

Both have adopted highly unconventional names in their lifetimes. In Prince’s case, it was the adoption of a symbol to protest Warner Brothers’ artistic and financial control of his output.

Following suit, H.R. 1586 has adopted the name, the “______Act of____,” apparently because of the haste with which the Senate wanted to pass the bill last week.

The Senate’s substitute amendment on this $26 billion spending bill had a placeholder bill name, and it could not take time to replace the placeholder. The House is expected to return this week and pass the Senate amendment, sending it to the president.

As reported on the WashingtonWatch.com blog and cnet news, this highly unconventional name may be what goes into law. With the Senate out of town until September, there is no chance to pass a correcting amendment in both houses. The constitution requires both to pass identical bills, so the House must take up the “______Act of____” and pass it as such.

If it does, the “law with no name” will stand as a lasting tribute to the inattention Congress gives its work. Spending billions of taxpayer dollars is a hurried and casual affair for our lawmakers.

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The Horses are Gone—So Let’s Close Some Other Barn Door

by on July 23, 2010 · 7 comments

The White House and the Federal Communications Commission have painted themselves into a very tight and very dangerous corner on Net Neutrality.  To date, a bi-partisan majority of Congress, labor leaders, consumer groups and, increasingly, some of the initial advocates of open Internet rules are all shouting that the agency has gone off the rails in its increasingly Ahab-like pursuit of an obscure and academic policy objective.

Now comes further evidence, none of it surprising, that all this effort has been a fool’s errand from the start.  Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica is reporting today on a new study from Australia’s University of Ballarat that suggests only .3% of file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol is something other than the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works.  Which is to say that 99.7% of the traffic they sampled is illegal.  The Australian study, as Cheng notes, supports similar conclusions of a Princeton University study published earlier this year

Continue reading →

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Digital, Electronic, and Online—Each is Different

by on July 23, 2010 · 3 comments

The Economist has gotten on the wrong side of a favorite pet-peeve of
mine: confusing “digital” with “electronic.” Fear the blog post, Economist.

When I read in the story “Digitisation and Its Discontents” that the works of the Beatles are “scarcely available digitally,” I was struck. How does that square with the Beatles CD I have in my CD collection? All the others for sale on Amazon? Is this some mass bootleg operation?

No, what’s going on is that the Economist is confusing the words “digital” with “electronic” or “online.”

What digital means, in the context of modern technology and communications, is “converted to digital form,” as in a series of 1s and 0s that contain the meaning of the original analog version. The random online dictionary I just selected has “representing data as numbers” and “representing sound/light waves as numbers” as its top two definitions. It does allow “of e-commerce” as a third definition, but—ugh—I think we’d be smart to distinguish carefully between digital, electronic, and online, each of which mean different things.

Lots of Beatles works are available digitally—on CDs. Just now, I was waiting in line at the pharmacy staring intently at the prescription I was trying to fill—not because I’m near-sighted, but because it has a digital watermark in it, thousands of dots arranged in patterns. These dots are undoubtedly arranged to contain signals that will frustrate forgery of the prescription pads. This was information in digital form, but not electronic and not online.

Electronic means “using valves, transistors, or silicon chips” or, secondarily, “by computer.” If electricity is used in a communications process, it’s probably electronic, but that says nothing about whether it was digital or not. A bullhorn is electronic, but not digital, and it’s not online.

Online, of course, is “operating under the direct control of, or connected to, a main computer” or “connected by computer to one or more other computers or networks, as through a commercial electronic information service or the Internet.” Most online stuff is going to be digital and electronic, but lots of things that are digital and lots of other things that are electronic are not online. The Beatles works are available digitally, as are several of the other works discussed in the story. They’re just not available online yet.

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Google Street View/Wi-Fi Privacy Technopanic Continues but Real Cybersecurity Begins at Home

by on July 8, 2010 · 12 comments

Congressmen working on national intelligence and homeland security either don’t know how to secure their own home Wi-Fi networks (it’s easy!) or don’t understand why they should bother. If you live outside the Beltway, you might think the response to this problem would be to redouble efforts to educate everyone about the importance of personal responsibility for data security, starting with Congressmen and their staffs. But of course those who live inside the Beltway know that the solution isn’t education or self-help but… you guessed it… to excoriate Google for spying on members of Congress (and bigger government, of course)!

Consumer Watchdog (which doesn’t actually claim any consumers as members) held a press conference this morning about their latest anti-Google stunt, announced last night on their “Inside Google” blog: CWD drove by five Congressmen’s houses in the DC area last week looking for unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. At Jane Harman’s (D-CA) home, they found two unencrypted networks named “Harmanmbr” and “harmantheater” that suggest the networks are Harman’s. So they sent Harman a letter demanding that she hold hearings on Google’s collection of Wi-Fi data, charging Google with “WiSpying.” This is a classic technopanic and the most craven, cynical kind of tech politics—dressed in the “consumer” mantle.

The Wi-Fi/Street View Controversy

Rewind to mid-May, when Google voluntarily disclosed that the cars it used to build a photographic library of what’s visible from public streets for Google Maps Street View had been unintentionally collecting small amounts of information from unencrypted Wi-Fi hotspots like Harman’s. These hotspots can be accessed by anyone who might drive or walk by with a Wi-Fi device—thus potentially exposing data sent over those networks between, say, a laptop in the kitchen, and the wireless router plugged into the cable modem.

Google’s Street View allows you to virtually walk down any public street and check out the neighborhood Continue reading →

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A Speed Bump on the Road to Universal Broadband?

by on July 7, 2010 · 0 comments

The Federal Communications Commission has an open proceeding in which it seeks advice on how to repurpose universal service subsidies for phone service in high cost areas to subsidize broadband instead. The FCC apparently wants to subsidize broadband with a minimum download speed of 4 megabytes per second (mbps) and upload speed of 1 mbps. These are the goals proposed in the commission’s National Broadband Plan.

I’m no lawyer, but I wonder if the FCC can do this legally. Section 254 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 lays out criteria the FCC is supposed to consider when it decides whether to provide universal service subsidies for new services in addition to phone service. One of the criteria is that the new service must be subscribed to by a “substantial majority” of residential consumers.

Sixty-five percent of Americans have broadband at home. (National Broadband Plan, p. 167)  But a minority of residential customers subscribe to broadband that meets the FCC’s 4 mbps/1 mbps definition. According to the FCC’s Omnibus Broadband Initiative technical report on the “Availability Gap” (p. 43), 48 million subscribers have download speeds of 4 mbps or higher. More subscribers – 53 million – have broadband download speeds of 3 mbps or lower. And 35 percent of Americans have no broadband at all. These figures imply that a “substantial majority” of Americans have not subscribed to broadband that meets the National Broadband Plan’s proposed definition.

Based on figures in the technical report, I calculated that approximately 59 percent of Americans subscribe to broadband with a download speed of 768 kbps or higher. Perhaps this figure qualifies as a “substantial majority,” but surely the 4 mbps/1 mbps definition does not.

A reasonable person might also question whether even 59 percent counts as a “substantial majority” for the purpose of declaring broadband a service eligible for subsidy. Surely Section 254 requires a “substantial majority” in part to ensure that consumers who have chosen not to subscribe to a service do not bear the injustice of having to subsidize the provision of that service to others. It is clear from the FCC’s figures that most of the 35 percent of American households without broadband have it available but choose not to subscribe. Therefore, subsidizing even 768 kbps broadband would force many consumers to pay universal service assessments to provide others with a subsidized service that they themselves have decided is not worth the cost.

Wait and see how the FCC addresses this issue once it starts creating a universal service program for broadband.

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Watch it, Study it, Think About it, Watch it Again, Pass it Along

by on July 7, 2010 · 0 comments

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This is a test. Please ignore.

by on June 30, 2010 · 2 comments

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Joe Biden is No Friend of Tech, So Tech Should Give to Joe Biden

by on June 30, 2010 · 2 comments

Politics and extortion share a similar logic: Give to the one who can hurt you the most.

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