I came across an article last week in the AV Club that caught my eye. The title is: “The Telecommunications Act of 1996 gave us shitty cell service, expensive cable.” The Telecom Act is the largest update to the regulatory framework set up in the 1934 Communications Act. The basic thrust of the Act was to update the telephone laws because the AT&T long-distance monopoly had been broken up for a decade. The AV Club is not a policy publication but it does feature serious reporting on media. This analysis of the Telecom Act and its effects, however, omits or obfuscates important information about dynamics in media since the 1990s.

The AV Club article offers an illustrative collection of left-of-center critiques of the Telecom Act. Similar to Glass-Steagall  repeal or Citizens United, many on the left are apparently citing the Telecom Act as a kind of shorthand for deregulatory ideology run amuck. And like Glass-Steagall repeal and Citizens United, most of the critics fundamentally misstate the effects and purposes of the law. Inexplicably, the AV Club article relies heavily on a Common Cause white paper from 2005. Now, Common Cause typically does careful work but the paper is hopelessly outdated today. Eleven years ago Netflix was a small DVD-by-mail service. There was no 4G LTE (2010). No iPhone or Google Android (2007). And no Pandora, IPTV, and a dozen other technologies and services that have revolutionized communications and media. None of the competitive churn since 2005, outlined below, is even hinted at in the AV Club piece. The actual data undermine the dire diagnoses about the state of communications and media from the various critics cited in the piece. 

Competition in Telephone Service

Let’s consider the article’s provocative claim that the Act gave us “the continuing rise of cable, cellphone, and internet pricing.” Despite this empirical statement, no data are provided to support this. Instead, the article mostly quotes progressive platitudes about the evils of industry consolidation. I suppose platitudes are necessary because on most measures there’s been substantial, measurable improvements in phone and Internet service since the 1990s. In fact, the cost-per-minute of phone service has plummeted, in part, because of the competition unleashed by the Telecom Act. (Relatedly, there’s been a 50-fold increase in Internet bandwidth with no price increase.)

The Telecom Act undid much of the damage caused by decades of monopoly protection of telephone and cable companies by federal and state governments. For decades it was accepted that local telephone and cable TV service were natural monopolies. Regulators therefore prohibited competitive entry. The Telecom Act (mostly) repudiated that assumption and opened the door for cable companies and others to enter the telephone marketplace. The competitive results were transformative. According to FCC data, incumbent telephone companies, the ones given monopoly protection for decades, have lost over 100 million residential subscribers since 2000. Most of those households went wireless only but new competitors (mostly cable companies) have added over 32 million residential phone customers and may soon overtake the incumbents. The chart below breaks out connections by technology (VoIP, wireless, POTs), not incumbency, but the churn between competitors is apparent.

Further, while the Telecom Act was mostly about local landlines, not cellular networks, we can also dispense with the AV Club claim that dominant phone companies are increasing cellphone bills. Again, no data are cited. In fact, in quality-adjusted terms, the price of cell service has plummeted. In 1999, for instance, a typical cell plan was for regional coverage and offered 200 voice minutes for about $55 per month (2015 dollars). Until about 2000, there was no texting (1999 was the first year texting between carriers worked) and no data included. In comparison, for that same price today you can find a popular plan that includes, for all of North America, unlimited texting and voice minutes, plus 10 GB of 4G LTE data. Carriers spend tens of billions of dollars annually on maintaining and upgrading cellular networks and as a result, millions of US households are dropping landline connections (voice and broadband) for smartphones alone.

Competition in Television and Media

The critics of cable deregulation completely misunderstand and misstate the role of competition in the TV industry. Media quality is harder to measure, but its not a stretch to say that quality is higher than ever. Few dispute that we are in the Golden Age of Media, resulting from the proliferation of niche programming provided by Netflix, podcasts, Hulu, HBO, FX, and others. This virtual explosion in programming came about largely because there are more buyers (distributors) of programming and more cutthroat competition for eyeballs.

Again, the AV Club quotes the Common Cause report: “Roughly 98 percent of households with access to cable are served by only one cable company.”  Quite simply, this is useless stat. Why do we care how many coaxial cable companies are in a neighborhood? Consumers care about outputs–price, programming, quality, customer service–and number of competitors, regardless of the type of transmission network, which can be cellular, satellite, coaxial cable, fiber, or copper.

Look beyond the contrived “number of coaxial competitors” measure and it’s clear that m ost c able companies face substantial competition. The Telecom Act is a major source of the additional competition, particularly telco TV. Since passage of the Telecom Act, cable TV’s share of the subscription TV market fell from 95% to nearly 50%.

The Telecom Act repealed a decades-old federal policy that largely prohibited telephone companies from competing with cable TV providers. Not much changed for telco TV until the mid-2000s, when broadband technology improved and when the FCC freed phone companies from “unbundling” rules that forced telcos to lease their networks to competitors at regulated rates. In this investment-friendly environment, telephone companies began upgrading their networks for TV service and began purchasing and distributing programming. Since 2005, telcos have attracted about 13 million households and cable TV’s market share fell from about 70% to 53%. Further, much of consumer dissatisfaction with TV is caused by legacy regulations, not the Telecom Act. If cable, satellite, and phone companies were as free as Netflix and Hulu to bundle, price, and purchase content, we’d see lower prices and smaller bundles. 

The AV Club’s focus on Clear Channel [sic] and now-broken up media companies is puzzling and must be because of the article’s reliance on the 2005 Common Cause report. The bête noire of media access organizations circa 2005 was Clear Channel, ostensibly the sort of corporate media behemoth created by the Telecom Act. The hysteria proved unfounded.

Clear Channel broadcasting was rebranded in 2014 to iHeartRadio and its operations in the last decade do not resemble the picture described in the AV Club piece, that of a “radio giant” with “more than 1200 stations.” While still a major player in radio, since 2005 iHeartRadio’s parent company went private, sold all of its TV stations and hundreds of its radio station, and shed thousands of employees. The firm has serious financial challenges because of the competitive nature of the radio industry, which has seen entry from the likes of Pandora, Spotify, Google, and Apple.

The nostalgia for Cold War-era radio is also strange for an article written in the age of Pandora, Spotify, iTunes, and Google Play. The piece quotes media access scholar Robert McChesney about radio in the 1960s:

Fifty years ago when you drove from New York to California, every station would have a whole different sound to it because there would be different people talking. You’d learn a lot about the local community through the radio, and that’s all gone now. They destroyed radio. It was assassinated by the FCC and corporate lobbyists.

This oblique way of assessing competition–driving across the country–is necessary because local competition was actually relatively scarce in the 1960s. There were only about 5000 commercial radio stations in the US, which sounds like a lot except when you consider the choice and competition today. Today, largely because of digital advancements and channel splitting, there are more than 10 times as many available broadcast channels, as well as hundreds of low-power stations. Combined with streaming platforms, competition and choice is much more common today. Everyone in the US can, with an inexpensive 3G plan and a radio, access millions of niche podcasts and radio programs featuring music, hobbies, entertainment, news, and politics.

The piece quotes the 2005 report, alarmed that “ just five companies—Viacom, the parent of CBS, Disney, owner of ABC, News Corp, NBC and AOL, owner of Time Warner—now control 75 percent of all primetime viewing.” Again, I don’t understand why the article quotes decade-old articles about market share without updates. There is no mention that Viacom and CBS split up in 2005 and NewsCorp. and Fox split in 2013. The hysteria surrounding NBC, AOL, and Time Warner’s failed commercial relationships has been thoroughly explored and discredited by my colleague Adam Thierer and I’ll point you to his piece. As Adam has also documented, broadcast networks have been losing primetime audience share since at least the late 1970s, first to cable channels, then to streaming video. And nearly all networks, broadcast and cable, are seeing significant drops in audience as consumers turn to Internet streaming and gaming. Market power and profits in media is often short lived.

The article then decries the loss of local and state news reporting. It’s strange to blame the Telecom Act for newspaper woes since shrinking newsrooms is a global, not American, phenomenon with well-understood causes (loss of classifieds and increased competition with Web reporting). And, as I’ve pointed out, the greatest source of local and state reporting is local papers, but the FCC has largely prohibited papers from owning radio and TV broadcasters (which would provide papers a piece of TV’s lucrative ad and retrans revenue) for decades, even as local newspapers downsize and fail. 

The article was a fascinating read if only because it reveals how many left-of-center prognostications about media aged poorly. Those on the right have their own problems with the Act, namely its vastly different regulatory regimes (“telecommunications,” “wireless,” “television”) in a world of broadband and convergence. But useful reform means diagnosing what inhibits competition and choice in media and communications markets. Much of the competitive problems in fact arise from the enforcement of natural monopoly restrictions in the past. Media and communications has seen huge quality improvements since 1996 because the Telecom Act rejected the natural monopoly justifications for regulation. The Telecom Act has proven unwieldy but it cannot be blamed for nonexistent problems in phone and TV.

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign released a tech and innovation agenda. The document covers many tech subjects, including cybersecurity, copyright, and and tech workforce investments, but I’ll narrow my comments to the areas I have the most expertise in: broadband infrastructure and Internet regulation. These roughly match up, respectively, to the second and fourth sections of the five-section document.

On the whole, the broadband infrastructure and Internet regulation sections list good, useful priorities. The biggest exception is Hillary’s strong endorsement of the Title II rules for the Internet, which, as I explained in the National Review last week, is a heavy-handed regulatory regime that is ripe for abuse and will be enforced by a politicized agency.

Her tech agenda doesn’t mention a Communications Act rewrite but I’d argue it’s implied in her proposed reforms. Further, her statements last year at an event suggest she supports significant telecom reforms.  In early 2015, Clinton spoke to tech journalist Kara Swisher (HT Doug Brake) and it was pretty clear Clinton viewed Title II as an imperfect and likely temporary effort to enforce neutrality norms. In fact, Clinton said she prefers “a modern, 21st-century telecom technology act” to replace Title II and the rest of the 1934 Communications Act.

It’s refreshing to see that, regarding broadband and Internet policy, there’s significant bipartisan agreement that government’s role should be primarily to provide public goods, protect consumers, and lower regulatory barriers, not micromanage providers, deploy public networks, and shape social policy. (Niskanen Center’s Ryan Hagemann similarly agrees that, with the exception of Title II, there’s a lot to like in Clinton’s tech agenda. )  In fact, 85% of the text in Clinton’s broadband infrastructure and Internet policy sections could be copied-and-pasted to a free-market Republican presidential candidate’s tech platform and it would be right at home.

It’s difficult to know what to make of her pledge to defend and enforce Title II. I suspect it represents a promise she won’t reverse the Title II determination of the FCC, not that she’s particularly enamored with Title II. Clinton (and President Bill Clinton ) seem to prefer a more hands-off approach to the Internet.

The Good

The document emphasizes that all types of broadband should be encouraged, including “fiber, wireless, satellite, and other technologies.” It’s nice to see this flexibility because many advocates are pushing a fiber optics-only agenda that is simply infeasible and tremendously expensive. (Professor Susan Crawford has said bluntly that governments should “refuse to fund last-mile solutions that aren’t primarily fiber.” )  The reality, acknowledged by Google and others, is that fixed wireless and satellite broadband are needed to affordably connect households in rural and suburban areas for the foreseeable future.  A fiber-only policy, because it’s impractically expensive, would have rather regressive effects and Clinton’s all-the-above strategy is commendable.

There’s also a recognition in the document that broadband networks are not natural monopolies and can be competitive, especially if the federal government works to lower entry barriers. Government policy for several decades was that telephone and cable networks were natural monopolies. Increasingly, broadband is competitive, especially as consumers go wireless only, but we’re still living with the negative side effects of past policies. The Clinton document emphasizes the need to reduce local regulatory barriers, streamline permitting, and allow nondiscriminatory access to conduits, poles, and rights-of-way controlled by local governments.

Spectrum policy is critical to any technology agenda and it’s a priority for Clinton. She emphasizes the need for more spectrum and identifying and reclaiming underutilized federal spectrum, a subject I’ve written about. The federal government uses spectrum worth hundreds of billions of dollars and pays very little for that asset, so there’s significant consumer gains available.

Clinton’s call to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement in technology and telecommunications is also noteworthy. Though the DOJ and FTC can overreach, they are better equipped to handle broadband and tech competition issues than the FCC.

The Not So Good

In the “Close the Digital Divide” item, there are some problems. In a word: the right goal with the wrong tools. The legacy broadband subsidy programs, which Clinton wishes to retain and expand, are fragmented and poorly designed. They essentially function as corporate welfare programs and should be eliminated in favor of consumer-focused subsidies.

One item says that by 2020 “100 percent of households in America will have the option of affordable broadband.” Literally connecting all American homes to the Internet is impossible today because millions of Americans simply don’t want the Internet. According to Pew, 70% of non-adopters are just not interested, and many would not subscribe no matter the price.  (Relatedly, after over a century of telephone’s existence and tens of billions in federal universal service funding, US phone subscribership has hovered around 95% for 20 years. )  

To accomplish the expansion of broadband access, Clinton promises to fund the FCC’s Connect America Fund (CAF), the Ag Department’s Rural Utilities Service Program (RUS), and the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP). They differ somewhat in purpose and strategy but their major flaw is the same: they primarily fund and lend to broadband providers, not subscribers.

As I’ve noted before,

A direct subsidy plus a menu of options is a good way to expand access to low-income people (assuming there are effective anti-fraud procedures). A direct subsidy is more or less how the US and state governments help lower-income families afford products and services like energy, food, housing, and education. For energy bills there’s LIHEAP. For grocery bills there’s SNAP and WIC. For housing, there’s Section 8 vouchers. For higher education, there’s Pell grants.

By subsidizing providers, not consumers, there’s immense waste, corruption, and featherbedding. For instance, last year, Tony Romm at Politico published an in-depth investigation about the RUS program, funded by the stimulus. The waste in the RUS broadband program is appalling and the program will serve only a fraction of the subscribers that were promised. As one GAO researcher said about the program, “We are left with a program that spent $3 billion and we really don’t know what became of it.”  “ Even more troubling,” Romm explained “RUS can’t tell which residents its stimulus dollars served.”

Similarly, Clinton cites E-rate as a model for connecting “anchor institutions” like libraries and schools. E-rate likewise primarily benefits telecom and tech companies, not the intended recipients. As OECD researchers have found regarding EdTech government investment,   

The results…show no appreciable improvements in student achievement in reading, mathematics or science in the countries that had invested heavily in ICT for education.

Rather than the E-rate model, a smarter policy is to provide block grants to schools and institutions to give them more flexibility to optimize according to their own perceived technology and education needs.  The federal government already started doing this to a limited extent with Section IV of the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act, which allocates $1.6 billion annually in block grants to states for tech-focused education spending. Policymakers should eliminate the expensive, dysfunctional E-rate program, which is funded by regressive fees on telephone bills, and expand the block grants somewhat to make up the shortfall.

Altogether, there’s a lot to like in Clinton’s broadband infrastructure and Internet policy agenda. There are hiccups–namely Title II enforcement and retention of broken broadband and tech subsidy programs–and hopefully her advisors will reexamine those. Given Clinton’s past statements about the need for a modernized Communications Act in place of Title II, she and her advisors have developed a forward-looking telecom agenda.

In December, Reps. Upton and Walden announced that they intend to update the Communications Act, which saw its last major revision in 1996. Today marks the deadline to submit initial comments regarding updating the Act. Below is my submission, which includes reference to a Mercatus paper by Raymond Gifford analyzing the Digital Age Communications (DACA) reports. These bipartisan reports would largely replace and reform our deficient communications laws.

Dear Chairman Upton, As you and Rep. Walden recently acknowledged, U.S. communications law needs updating to remove accumulated regulatory excess and to strengthen market forces. When the 1934 Communications Act was passed, there was a national monopoly telephone provider and Congress’s understanding of radio spectrum physics was rudimentary. Chief among the Communication Act’s many flaws was giving the Federal Communication Commission authority to regulate wired and wireless communications according to “public interest, convenience, and necessity,” an amorphous standard that has been frequently abused. If delegating this expansive grant of discretion to the FCC was ever sensible, it clearly no longer is. Today, eight decades later, with competition between video, telephone, and Internet providers taking place over wired and wireless networks, the public interest standard simply invites costly rent-seeking and stifles technologies and business opportunities. Like an old cottage receiving several massive additions spanning decades by different clumsy architects, communications law is a disorganized and dilapidated structure that should be razed and reconstituted. As new technologies emerged since the 1930s—broadcast television, cable, satellite, mobile phones, the Internet—and upended existing regulated businesses, the FCC and Congress layered on new rules attempting to mitigate the distortions. Congressional attempts at reforming communications laws have appeared regularly ever since the 1996 amendments. During the last such attempt, in 2011, the Mercatus Center released a study discussing and summarizing a model for communications law reform known as the Digital Age Communications Act (DACA). That model legislation—consisting of five reports released in 2005 and 2006—came from the bipartisan DACA Working Group. The reports addressed five areas: 1. Regulatory framework; 2. Universal service; 3. Spectrum reform; 4. Federal-state jurisdiction; and 5. Institutional reform. The DACA reports represent a flexible, market-oriented agenda from dozens of experts that, if implemented, would spur innovation, encourage competition, and benefit consumers. The regulatory framework report is the centerpiece recommendation and adopts a proposal largely based on the Federal Trade Commission Act, which provides a reformed FCC with nearly a century of common law for guidance. Significantly, the reports replace the FCC’s misused “public interest” standard with the general “unfair competition standard” from the FTC Act. Despite the passage of time, those reports have held up remarkably well. The 2011 Mercatus paper describing the DACA reports is attached for submission in the record. The scholars at Mercatus are happy to discuss this paper and the cited materials below—including the DACA reports—further with Energy & Commerce Committee staff as they draft white papers and reform proposals. Thank you for initiating discussion about updating the Communications Act. Reform can give America’s innovative technology and telecommunications sector a predictable and technology-neutral legal framework. When Congress replaces command-and-control rules with market forces, consumers will be the primary beneficiaries. Sincerely, Brent Skorup Research Fellow, Technology Policy Program Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Resources

Digital Age Communications Act (DACA) Working Groups Reports.

JEFFREY A. EISENACH ET AL., THE TELECOM REVOLUTION: AN AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY (1995).

Raymond L. Gifford, The Continuing Case for Serious Communications Law Reform, Mercatus Center Working Paper No. 11-44 (2011).

PETER HUBER, LAW AND DISORDER IN CYBERSPACE: ABOLISH THE FCC AND LET COMMON LAW RULE THE TELECOSM (1997).

Adam Thierer noted in mid-December that the FCC was considering allowing the experimental use of cellphone jammers in prison.  The FCC just issued (PDF) a Special Temporary Authorization to allow the DC Department of Corrections to test a cell phone jamming technology.

This technology sounds like an excellent solution to a serious problem:  The illicit use of cell phones inside correctional facilities by prisoners across the country.  In particular, the technology appears to be “directional,” meaning that unlike traditional jammers, which simply block signals within a certain radius around the jammer, this technology appears to be capable of blocking signals inside the confines of a particular room or building.  In fact, I’m sure millions of Americans would love to see such technologies implemented in cinemas, theatres, and other performing arts venues across the country.  I, for one, am tired of having the exquisite acoustic delicacies of Bach interrupted by annoying ring tones, such as  the (painfully) immortal “Who Let the Dogs Out?”

So Much for The Rule of Law

But there’s one important problem: The FCC isn’t waiving a rule here against cell phone jammer. unless I’m missing some subtle statutory quirk, they’re essentially “waiving” a statute—specifically 47 U.S.C. 333:

No person shall willfully or maliciously interfere with or cause interference to any radio communications of any station licensed or authorized by or under this chapter or operated by the United States Government.

You don’t need to be an administrative lawyer to know that agencies can’t just ignore acts of Congress—no matter how good the policy reason for the waiver is. That’s a big part of what the “rule of law” means.  Period.  Do not pass ‘Go’.  Do not collect $3,101.09 (today’s equivalent of $200 in 1935, when Monopoly debuted).

Fortunately, as noted in the WSJ article Adam cited, at least one legislator realizes this and thinks it’s worth fixing:  U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady (R., Texas) told the Journal that his office is “drafting the necessary legislation to remove this outdated FCC roadblock.”  The FCC, of course, sped right past that particular roadblock.  But then, what should we expect from an agency that has, under its outgoing (and none-too-soon!) chairman Kevin Martin, simply disregarded statutory limits on its authority when it found Comcast in violation of the agency’s non-binding net neutrality principles this summer?  (My PFF colleague Barbara Esbin has eloquently condemned this violation of the rule of law in, “The Law is Whatever the Nobles Do: Undue Process at the FCC” (PDF).)

Now, when Congress considers this question, let us hope that they draw the right lesson from this episode:   Whatever the wisdom of outright bans on particular technologies, writing such bans into statutes is a really bad idea.  At least if such decisions were left up to regulatory agencies, they would have the flexibility to decide when to depart from a general ban.  Thus, the best approach would be to repeal the ban altogether.  The FCC probably already has the authority to ban jammers under Section 302a, which provides that:

The Commission may, consistent with the public interest, convenience, and necessity, make reasonable regulations:

(1) governing the interference potential of devices which in their operation are capable of emitting radio frequency energy by radiation, conduction, or other means in sufficient degree to cause harmful interference to radio communications…

A Legislative Solution

Now, if Rep. Brady wanted to establish an orderly procedure for replacing Section 333’s outright ban on cell phone jammers with a more reasonable, and flexible, rule, the bill repealing Section 333 might also simply give the FCC the authority to issue Special Temporary Authorizations like the one the FCC just issued to the DC Department of Corrections—but also require that the agency complete a rule-making proceeding within, say, a year to establish new regulations specifying precisely which jammers would be banned.  At a minimum, the new regulations could achieve legally what the FCC is trying to achieve illegally:   banning cell phone jammers except for use in correctional facilities and only subject to certain technical requirements intended to ensure that the jamming was sufficiently “directional” not to obstruct cell phone reception nearby such facilities.

But if such directional jamming is really possible, why not allow the use of jammers in performance venues?  Of course, some consumers might not actually prefer to suffer through a few stray ring-tones during a movie if it means being able to receive calls on vibrate or text messages or email in case of emergency.  But I’d rather leave that decision to private property owners and consumers.  These are not questions Congress should attempt to answer:  Those answers would necessarily be enshrined in statute, and therefore very difficult to change.  Instead, these decisions should be left up to the FCC and resolved through the normal rule-making process.  If the initial rule-making bans private uses of jammers, at least there would be an established procedure whereby the rule could be more easily changed in the future, as technology develops.

A Future Without a Jammer Ban

With all such technologies banned today, there is probably little incentive to develop better jamming technology that can be more carefully tailored.  But if at least some uses of jamming technology were allowed, there would be a market that could drive the development of better jamming technologies in the future.  So if the FCC’s concern were that today’s jammers caused unacceptable levels of unintentional interference to cell phone networks, that problem might yet be solved through technological innovation.

Lest anyone argue that once any use of jammers was allowed, the “cat” would be “out of the bag”—resulting in the disruption of cell phone networks by pranksters, criminals or even terrorists—let me simply suggest Googling “cell phone jammer.” It may not be legal, but Americans can already buy cell phone jammers.  The reality is that, without a global totalitarian state, or at least completely sealed borders (an impossibility), completely banning any technology is impossible.

Since today’s ban—and harsh penalties—seems to work well enough to protect cell networks from widespread disruption—or even occasional disruption sufficient to attract attention—it’s not unreasonable to think we might get by just fine if we kept those same penalties in place under a new rule that carefully circumscribed which private users would be allowed to use which technologies.  Perhaps then we might all be able to enjoy a movie, concert or other performance in peace—if we chose to.

The Alternative

Many people would probably prefer that solution over the alternative:  incorporating into cell phones the kind of  “digital manners policy” (DMP) technology recently patented by Microsoft that would allow a DMP transmitter to order all devices within range that have a DMP receiver to turn off their ring tones, etc.  There’s something to be said for Microsoft’s solution from a technical perspective:  The DMP could be set to allow me to continue to receive text messages, use the vibrate setting for calls, or use the wireless data network.  So a DMP transmitter would certainly be a less blunt instrument than a cell phone jammer.  But it wouldn’t be entirely effective unless every cell phone had a DMP chip, which means that the only way to “make the ringing stop!” would be to mandate the adoption of such technology by cell phone managers, banning the sale of non-compliant cell phones, and—if we really wanted to be thorough—sending out the cell-phone Gestapo to round up all the old, non-compliant cell phones out there.

I’m not suggesting any nefarious intent on Microsoft’s part.  Like Hamlet (” There is nothing either good or bad, but  thinking makes it so“), I don’t believe a technology can be inherently evil.  Indeed, even partial adoption of DMP technologies in cell phones would certainly help solve our “crisis of digital manners.”  But I’m more than a little uncomfortable with the idea of creating this kind of architecture of control, by which a third party (not me or the carrier) could manipulate the settings of my cell phone.  The potential for abuse of that technology seems even scarier than the potential for abuse of jammers.  Even if Microsoft limited the DMP chip’s interface with the cell phone to controlling, say, ring volume or vibrate settings, I’d have to wonder what a good hacker could do with that kind of technology.  So while I wouldn’t suggest banning DMPs either, I would hate to see DMP technologies become industry standard merely because the FCC refused to reconsider its decades-old outright ban on radio jammers.

Rep. Brady, our nation turns its lonely eyes (and even more annoyed ears) to you.