700 MHz C block reserve price met
This is big - Blair Levin’s Stifel Nicolaus report is saying that the reserve price of $4.6 billion has been met for the C Block.
For the upper band C Block, the FCC mandated that any winning licensee have in place “no locking” and “no blocking” provisions conditioning its use of this spectrum:
Licensees offering service on spectrum subject to this section shall not deny, limit, or restrict the ability of their customers to use the devices and applications of their choice on the licensee’s C Block network, except:
(1) Insofar as such use would not be compliant with published technical standards reasonably necessary for the management or protection of the licensee’s network, or
(2) As required to comply with statute or applicable government regulation.
The no-locking, no-blocking requirements were hedged in by substantial limitations: the winning licensee would be able to lock and block devices and applications as long as they could show that their actions were related to “reasonable network management and protection,” or “compliance with applicable regulatory requirements.” The license winner would not be required to adhere to open-platform requirements on its other spectrum bands, would be allowed to continue to use its own (non-standardized) certification standards and processes to approve uses of devices and applications on their networks, would be allowed to protect the “safety and integrity” of their networks against non-carrier applications and devices, and would be permitted to restrict use of its network to devices “compatible with [the carrier’s] network control features.” Additionally, carriers would have the ability to deny interconnection to handsets and applications that were unable to provide location-information via the carrier’s E911 system (a system that is controlled by the carrier itself). In other words, as long as the discrimination could be shown to be connected (however indirectly) to some vision of “network management,” it would be permitted. These exceptions arguably provide any incumbent carrier that wins this C Block auction with ample slow-roll capability.
But it’s still important - very important - that this has happened. Particularly if Google is the winning bidder, something we may not know for a month or so.
Even without a wholesale access requirement, the incremental change to the wireless ecosystem made by these limitations is important. It’s important as a signal, it’s important as a stake in the ground, and it’s important in connection with the Skype petition - perhaps that will be viewed more favorably now by the FCC. It’s a victory for the public interest groups and for Google that any limitations at all were placed on this auction. It’s a victory for the legislators who pushed the FCC at the iPhone hearing. It means that we value, as a country, more interoperable wireless uses, the ability to use devices of our choice, and the ability to access applications we care about.
Research needed
The State of the Net conference seemed to be a big success - lots of people, lots of great panels.
Two research questions for the future:
Can we learn what requests for data are made of companies by European governments? There may be a tension between the public position (”we are enormously solicitous of privacy”) and the non-public position (”tell us what you know, and don’t tell anyone you’re telling us — and keep all your data for three years.”) It would be very interesting to study this.
The Clean Feed reach is broader than I thought - it’s not considered “politically expedient” to oppose it in Australia at this point, and it’s used in several Northern European countries as well as the UK. No one knows exactly what is being filtered out, and ISPs can’t say what they’re doing. The systems all have different standards. And something like this will reach our shores soon. Another good subject for inquiry.
busy day
I’m in transit today to the State of the Net conference in DC. Long train ride ahead.
I have just one data point to share with you today: 40% of Yale undergrads take Robert Dunne’s course in Computers and the Law. Forty percent. That’s a lot.
I’ll try to do some live-blogging tomorrow.
700 MHz and the D block
I want to applaud Harold Feld for writing energetically about what has happened to the planned public-private partnership for creating a dedicated public safety network. Key post is here.
The FCC paired the upper band D block (a single 10 MHz nationwide license) with 10MHz of public safety spectrum located next to the D block, and conditioned the D block license on an obligation to negotiate with public safety representatives towards the construction by the D block licensee of a nationwide public safety network. The idea was that a robust, dedicated public safety network would be built to the specifications of the public safety community, and in exchange the commercial licensee of the D Block would be permitted to use the public safety spectrum (in addition, of course, to the D Block spectrum) when it was not otherwise needed. Absent this private participation, funding for a shared public safety network was unavailable.
Frontline Wireless, a privately held company headed by former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, submitted a proposal along the lines eventually adopted by the FCC for the upper band D block. In the event of an emergency, Frontline proposed that public safety would have immediate, preemptive use of the entire network. Frontline won a substantial victory when the FCC decided to allow the D Block licensee to obtain “designated entity” small business bidding credits even if the licensee planned to operate on a wholesale basis. Frontline dropped out before the auction, however, apparently unable to convince investors of the certainty of the enterprise.
Now Harold tells us that the leader of a competitor to Frontline may have scuttled Frontline’s chances by (in his capacity as a contractor to the public safety entity) purportedly telling “Frontline’s investors that it would cost $500 million over ten years as a flat fee to access the [public safety] spectrum.” That appears to have driven Frontline away.
So now we have an auction in process. How’s the D block doing? Nothing going on. Apparently there is no one even approaching the reserve price for that D block, and no other bidders in the offing. All that planning is down the drain, and Harold’s position is that the auction should be stopped by the Commission while staff investigates what happened.
Meanwhile, two bidders appear to be fencing over the much-discussed C block. Maybe it’s Verizon and Google. We won’t know for a while. I still think Verizon will win in the end, but it would be fine to be proved wrong.
The D Block plan always seemed a distant prospect at best, and both Frontline’s plans and rhetoric were high-flown. But surely it shouldn’t have been blocked in this particular way from the auction - if indeed that’s what happened. And we’re facing a lot of questions: if this block is re-auctioned, what rules will govern it? what will be the basis for those rules if indeed a public-private partnership is unworkable?
One in two million
This week’s New York Review of Books has a piece on blogging by Sarah Boxer (”the author of Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web, an anthology to be published this month.”) It turns out that when I started blogging in September 2003 there were only two million blogs online - now there are 100 million or more.
Boxer’s piece seems surprisingly backward-looking. She’s filling in her audience on what blogs are, and she’s saying that bloggers get to be superheroes when they blog - sticking it to the Man, deflating puffery, telling it like it is, and then retreating to their regular lives. Boxer is “pretty sure that bloggers have fouler mouths, tougher hides, and cooler thesauruses than most of the people [she’s] read in print.” She winds up by saying:
Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that.
I’m sure Boxer is right in some way, and she’s a fine writer, but she’s taken a pretty limited approach to bloggers and what they do. She’s focused on the edgy, fame-seeking part of blogging. That’s interesting, sure, and funny too - but it doesn’t capture the daily rhythm of having a voice. It doesn’t get to this fundamental change from central broadcasting to cascades of individual commentary.
Look, I can’t claim that Boxer is selling blogs short. She’s flogging a book about blogs, and I’m blogging her flogging. The form does seem so primitive, and the quality of blogs varies so wildly. But we do seem to have changed the way we approach communications media. Surely that will still seem noteworthy for another five years or so.
FISA and immunity
Great work today on the OpenCongress.org blog, telling us that (1) Sen. Specter wants to have the government step in as defendants in the tens of cases pending against cooperative telcos involved in violating FISA and other laws; (2) Sen. Feinstein wants the secret FISA court to decide the question of immunity; (3) Sen. Leahy’s amendment removing immunity from the telcos has been rejected and Sen. Dodd has vowed to filibuster.
As of tonight, it appears the Senate has delayed further consideration of the issue until Monday. Sen. Reid is blaming the Republicans. And an interesting sidenote: the Senators now have access to the requests for data given to the telcos and the President’s authorization of the warrantless wiretapping.
Under the version of FISA in place at the time the wiretapping was authorized, 18 U.S.C. 2511(2)(a)(ii) said that
Notwithstanding any other law, providers of wire or electronic communication service. . . are authorized to provide information, facilities, or technical assistance to persons authorized by law to . . . conduct electronic surveillance, . . . if such provider . . . has been provided with. . . a certification in writing by . . . the Attorney General of the United States that no warrant or court order is required by law, that all statutory requirements have been met, and that the specified assistance is required. . .
The cases so far keep running up against the State Secrets Doctrine (except for Hepting), and so we never get to the application of this statutory exception. But if we ever get there, and the AG provided this certification, then why wouldn’t the cases be dismissed? Maybe because this would mean that the AG himself acted unlawfully - because all the statutory requirements weren’t met. (How could they have been? This was a blatantly unlawful program.) Or maybe the certification doesn’t meet this standard.
I hope we see these certifications and authorizations someday soon. Most of us don’t want immunity for the telcos. I’d like to see the lawfulness of the surveillance program reviewed by an ordinary federal court, myself - that’s probably more important than money damages at this point.
Valiant
They turned all the lights off in the hall. (”It’ll be more poetic that way,” I heard one of the presenters say.)
The floodlights, when they were turned on, were trained on a simple blond chair, standing on a black stage. Suddenly, the chair energetically threw itself to the ground, in pieces. Legs, seat, back, all apart - one of the legs even fell off the stage entirely.
Then the seat rolled in a circle, by itself, 360 degrees of quiet grinding sound. It appeared to locate a leg. It oriented itself toward the leg, propelled itself towards it, and attached itself to the leg. Leg number two went through a similar attaching process. Leg three had to be nudged by the seat to get it in the right position, and leg number one abandoned so that leg three could be attached.
One of the presenters took pity on the chair at that point, and threw leg four back up on the stage. Almost showing off, the chair patiently rolled towards leg four and attached itself to it. Then the back - that wasn’t easy, but the back popped up onto the seat and there was a flat chair, all four legs splayed out on the stage.
This was the magic moment - when the four legs worked together to raise the chair up into - a chair again, a whole, standing in its simplicity on the stage. Just for a moment. Valiant, steadfast, purposeful. The crowd laughed and applauded.
And then the chair threw itself forward, breaking up again into pieces on the stage.
No one’s in charge of that chair - it keeps finding itself and pulling itself together. I watched the presenters, and their eyes were fixed affectionately on their creation. They were curious, each time, to see how the chair would solve the puzzle of putting itself together. I bet they’re quite emotionally attached to that chair.
At the end, after many questions, the chair lay in lifeless, separate pieces on the stage.
You had to be there.
Looking at it, you could believe that time’s arrow can be made to run backwards. Or you could believe that almost anything can be accomplished with the help of a few motors, a well-placed camera, and some carefully-engineered parts. Either way, it was a magical and optimistic presentation.
700 MHz auction time
There was a mock auction today just to test the equipment for submitting bids. The real thing is on Thursday beginning at 10am.
Chairman Martin has been urged to let the auction for Block D (the public-private partnership) play out. Given the roiling stock markets around the world and the high reserve prices that the FCC set, it’s unlikely that the reserve prices will be met - particularly the $4.6 billion reserve price for Block C, the block for which mild no-locking, no-blocking requirements were drafted. If that block doesn’t command that reserve price, we’ll be back to smaller paired blocks of 5 or 6 MHz each, much reduced geographic areas, and no open platform limitations. (As for the D Block, the Commission set a reserve price of $1.33 billion. If that reserve isn’t met, the FCC will decide whether or not to re-auction it on the same or different terms.)
It seems like an uncertain week during which to bid a few extra billion for the privilege of a world in which the C Block conditions exist. Frontline is already out of the picture for the D Block. If you’re one of the big incumbents - Verizon or AT&T - you’d be happy for those restrictions to go away.
And our own government doesn’t care much about infrastructure (did you see this story in the Post?) - even infrastructure that makes new ideas possible.
I’ll still be following the auction results closely (not that we’ll hear much until it’s over), but I have a sinking feeling that we won’t see much that’s newsworthy. Brough Turner thinks otherwise. We’ll see. Maybe I’m just affected by the weather these days.
Two cultures
Someone at some point started sending me Seed magazine. I’m still grateful every time a copy reaches me. Thank you, whoever you are.
The Dec. 2007 edition includes Jonah Lehrer’s “The Future of Science…Is Art?.”
[O]ur sciences must get past their present limitations. How can we make this happen? My answer is simple: Science needs the arts. We need to find a place for the artist within the experimental process . . . . The current constraints of science make it clear that the breach between our two cultures is not merely an academic problem that stifles conversation at cocktail parties. Rather, it is a practical problem, and it holds back science’s theories. If we want answers to our most essential questions, then we will need to bridge our cultural divide.
It’s a beautiful article - I hope you will read it in full.
The divide between the traditional understanding of “communication” (Shannon-esque, managed channels, devoid of context, quantifiable, testable) and the actual human experience of online interaction could be characterized as a “two culture” issue. How to bridge the gap? Through art, music, understandings of emergent phenomena - and understanding how the traditional “communication” metaphor (connoting conduits, transport, objects) masks and misses so much.
Institutional design
It’s Friday, a day to tie some threads together. There were three announcements/events this week that are connected in a non-obvious way.
1. US Intel Chief Wants Carte Blanche to Peep All ‘Net Traffic. (Via ArsTechnica, reporting on a Wall Street Journal story and a New Yorker profile.) Our government wants the authority to look at all emails, web searches, file transfers, you name it. And it doesn’t want to be bothered by warrants, judicial oversight, or limits of any kind.
2. Leaked memo: Time Warner Cable to trial hard bandwidth caps. (Via ArsTechnica.) Time Warner wants to try billing on the basis of user bandwidth consumption.
3. We need vision for next-generation broadband, not complacency. (Via The Guardian, with thanks to Dirk van der Woude.) A clear statement of disappointment with Ofcom’s approach, characterized as (paraphrasing) “investment in highspeed Internet access will happen in good time, as and when companies like BT find a commercial case.”
These three elements go together in creating a picture of US policy towards Internet access at the beginning of 2008.
Rather than seeing the Internet as an engine for economic growth, creativity, innovation, and new jobs - and as the converged communications medium for the next generation - current policy is to wait for private companies to decide when investment in access makes sense for them. Those private companies have plenty of incentives to shape access to suit their own business plans. As Harold Feld points out, metered bandwidth (as in the TWC plan) is perhaps better than blocking, but ultimately similarly destructive to the Internet ecosystem.
Not only is current policy shortsighted when it comes to the future of access, it’s dramatically tilted towards the desires of law enforcement. We’ll take all kinds of astonishing steps in order to further surveillance - we’ll consider extending CALEA to every single packet, we’ll do all we can to help telecom companies who have acted as private arms for over-reaching, illegal law enforcement activities, and more. Now we’ll succumb to the desire to inspect the content of everything that happens online. An uproar would be appropriate right about now.
That inspection would inevitably be easier with cooperative/fewer Internet access providers with strong relationships with law enforcement. That inspection won’t work as well with unbundled facilities and competitive providers. Indeed, that inspection is inconsistent with the desire to have truly highspeed Internet access.
So that’s our vision right now - control, complacency, inspection, and fear. Not very encouraging. As The Guardian piece says about the UK regulator,
This is where Ofcom’s complacency really grates. While observing that some countries may be ahead, it says: “We do not yet see evidence that the UK will be significantly disadvantaged economically or socially as a result.”
OK, we do not yet see hard empirical evidence - mainly because it does not yet exist. But in three years, five years or 10 years, it will.
It’s shortsighted to have the idea that it doesn’t matter if the US has a complacent or non-existent highspeed Internet access policy in place - or a policy that emphasizes surveillance over every other factor. Of course it matters. We’re monkeying destructively with our future. What’s the institutional design that we’re missing? Why is access to the Internet viewed as something terribly tricky that must be left to private vertically-integrated decisions? Why don’t we have the intellectual infrastructure in place within government agencies to allow for more courageous or visionary thinking?