Another Friday filing by the FCC: 146 pages on program access.It’s a classic on-the-one-hand-on-the-other item. This time around it’s even worse for the public, because the underlying competitive reality of the wires that run to American homes is being hidden, in two ways: First, the entire discussion is focused on the market for pay-TV, because [...]
The advent of the commercial Internet in 1995 was a big deal, a major transformative shift. Now we’re going through another, quite different, but equally enormous shift: Fiber. Asian and Northern European countries are upgrading to fiber connectivity. One strand of fiber has thousands of times more bandwidth capacity than any of the last generation [...]
I’m a Comcast internet access customer, and I don’t have a television here in Ann Arbor. There, I’ve said it. I remember thinking when other people used to say they didn’t have televisions that they were just being sanctimonious cranks. I swear I’m not being a sanctimonious crank. With a good internet connection, and a [...]
It’s the ad hoc nature of U.S. communications law these days that gets depressing. It seems only federal courts can help – except when they refuse to get involved. Four very quick snippets of stories to watch: 1. Warshak. The Sixth Circuit said back in June that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in [...]
One of my students asked whether his television set, connected to a cable system but with no set-top box, would be able to receive digital television after February 17, 2009. So I decided to try the experiment of being a consumer with this question. I was happy to see the NCTA has this site with [...]
I remember being told three years ago that, in general, internet backbone issues weren’t really a subject for regulatory involvement, and didn’t need to be. Although the last mile was a problem, the upstream fat-pipe relationships weren’t – they were all competitive and thriving. Or at least that’s what people thought. Over the last couple [...]
