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 [...]
Back in early July, we heard that the McCain tech policy (eight months behind the Obama tech policy) was going to be released in… July. It’s August, it’s humid, and no policy. We can predict to some extent what the in-process policy will say. The bottom line: Sen. Obama sees the promise of technology. He [...]
When should a court defer to an agency’s interpretation of its governing statute and/or its own regulatory actions? I got interested in this question because deference by a flummoxed Supreme Court gave us Brand X, with its ahistorical “this looks really tricky so we’ll let the FCC categorize highspeed internet access” approach. In this week’s [...]
About 16 months ago, I heard Ed Richards of Ofcom speak at a CITI conference at Columbia, and blogged about it here. I remember thinking that Richards didn’t seem to think that highspeed access to the internet was all that important. The market had to demand it, and the market wasn’t being demanding. Also, he [...]
More than 40 years ago, the FCC was worried about telephone companies using their power over communications to control the then-nascent (and competitive) data processing marketplace. The Bell System at that point was already banned from providing services that weren’t common carriage communications services (or “incidental to” those communications services). In Computer 1, the Commission [...]
This is the first time I’ve been able to attend Supernova, and it seems like a fine conference. It’s all being made available online: Conversation Hub: http://www.conversationhub.com Live video stream: http://www.mogulus.com/supernova2008 IRC Chat: irc://irc.freenode.net/supernova2008 Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/supernova2008 Yahoo Pipe: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=055fe30a2c9cbcfc197e494d6db2885a In a back-and-forth this afternoon between David Morin of Facebook and Kevin Marks of Google, [...]
The news that Comcast, Time Warner, and AT&T are all considering capping use of their networks – so that “overuse” would trigger a charge – has prompted intense discussion of just why these network operators are moving in this direction. One camp suggests that these operators have to do *something* to manage congestion, and because [...]
In The Deal of the Century, the 1987 classic account by Steve Coll of the breakup of the Bell System, one of the Bell local operating company presidents (pre-breakup) is furious about MCI’s attempts to build microwave private lines for companies. Here he is, arguing to the AT&T chairman that MCI has to be stopped: [...]
The new Clearwire could be game-changing, but the rules of the game may not be quite as Clearwire presents them. I have been wondering since last July whether something significant would happen in the Google/Sprint world. The deal announcement earlier this weekseems to be that key development. (Here’s the press release and here are slides [...]
In response to my post a couple of days ago about the possibility that VZ might not plan to comply with the 700 MHz “open platform” rules, someone wrote: would you have the FCC mandate that every mobile device must be capable of running every operating system? If Verizon sells me a BlackBerry, should the [...]
Last Friday (HT:: IPDemocracy), Google filed a petition [PDF] asking that the Commission ensure that Verizon understands what those “open platform” requirements for the C Block really mean. Verizon has taken the position in the past that its own devices won’t be subject to the “open applications” and “open handsets” requirements of the C Block [...]
Going backwards upside down. That’s what we’re doing with telecommunications policy in the U.S. The Comcast affair should prompt a re-examination of many decisions the FCC, Congress, and the courts have made over the last few years. When the FCC reports on its reactions to Comcast’s activities, the right response will be “You’re asking the [...]
