Over the next year or so, there will be skirmishes in Congress about video regulations. On the surface, they may sound technical – men wearing ties will bandy about terms like “compulsory license” and “local-into-local” – and it will be very easy to ignore the whole thing. But there are giants moving on the face [...]
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 [...]
The cable guys have their way of saying it:: “What do you want to do, nationalize our businesses?” Another way of seeing this issue is:: We have a very few very large providers of highspeed internet access in this country. They have sufficient market power to decide how and when to prioritize internet communications. And [...]
1. More passive content from network providers. Comcast announced that it’s going to be providing 3,000 high-definition video-on-demand programs for subscribers to its highspeed Internet access services. “Comcast is the largest purchaser of TV content and now we are bringing that content over to the Internet” [Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, at CES today] Comcast is [...]
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 [...]
This AP story makes clear that Comcast is pretending to be part of online conversations in order to frustrate users who want to use particular online applications. This happens all the time in the name of “traffic shaping” — it’s the kind of thing that China does to interfere with internet use. What’s different and [...]
I arrived in DC in the middle of last night without a phone charger, having left mine in Manhattan last weekend. So this morning my first stop was a Verizon Wireless store downtown. Right in the store, in a corner, I plugged in my phone and called back someone who had a lot of questions [...]
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 [...]
