Monthly Archives: October 2007

FON: Cringely to Spain to Britain to U.S.?

logofon.png Cringely claims credit for wireless craze:
Several years ago I wrote a column describing a system I had thought up for sharing Internet hotspots that I called WhyFi. Among the readers of that column were some entrepreneurs in Spain who went on to start the hotspot sharing service called FON, which now has more than 190,000 participating hotspots. Those Spaniards have been quite generous in attributing some of their inspiration to my column. And now this week FON signed a deal with British Telecom that promises to bring tens of thousands more FON hotspots to the UK and beyond. This isn’t FON’s first deal with a big broadband ISP — they already have contracts with Speakeasy and Time Warner Cable in the U.S. among others — but it is one of the biggest and points to an important transformation taking place in the way people communicate.

— You Can’t Get There From Here: The myth of bandwidth scarcity and can Team Cringely really make it to the Moon? By Robert X. Cringely, Pulpit, PBS, October 5, 2007

Much like really fast broadband in Japan, FON is an American idea that people in another country adopted and ran with. Continue reading →

Google v. Verizon v. FCC + Lobbyists

lock.png Verizon is suing the FCC about the watered down rules the FCC passed recently. Now Google has filed a complaint with the FCC about that. And apparently Verizon has been having private meetings with FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. Could this be one source of the illegal leaks the GAO finds the FCC providing to lobbyists?
While Verizon’s court case proceeds through the legal system, the company’s competitors have grown unhappy with the way that Verizon has handled its FCC lobbying. Frontline Wireless has gone so far as to ask the FCC to bar Verizon from the auction because Verizon has allegedly not disclosed some of its lobbying contacts with the agency quickly enough or in enough detail.

Despite Verizon’s reticence to spell out exactly what it has been talking about with FCC Chairman Kevin Martin in private meetings, Google believes that it has pieced the conversation together. Google’s understanding is that Verizon wants the FCC to impose the open access requirements only on the network, not on the devices. That is, Verizon could still sell handsets that are locked and controlled by the company, but its network would have to be open to unlocked handsets from any operator.

According to Google’s new public statement on the issue, “From our perspective, this view ignores the realities of the U.S. wireless market, where some 95 percent of handsets are sold in retail stores run by the large carriers. More to the point, it is simply contrary to what the FCC’s new rules actually say.” Those rules focus on customer freedom to access content and applications from any device.

In a filing with the FCC, Google asks the agency to stick to its original plan. The company points out that while the open access rules might make the spectrum less attractive to Verizon (and thus might bring in less money at auction), the rules actually make it “more attractive, not less” to Google.

— Google attacks Verizon’s attempt to water down 700MHz “open access” rules, By Nate Anderson, ars technica, October 04, 2007 – 11:11AM CT

Silly Google! Verizon is part of the incumbent duopoly, and you’re not!

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Howl! Still Censored After All These Years

howl.gif Irony lives:
Fifty years ago today, a San Francisco Municipal Court judge ruled that Allen Ginsberg’s Beat-era poem “Howl” was not obscene. Yet today, a New York public broadcasting station decided not to air the poem, fearing that the Federal Communications Commission will find it indecent and crush the network with crippling fines.

— ‘Howl’ too hot to hear, 50 years after poem ruled not obscene, radio fears to air it, Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer SFGate.com, Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Personally, I think by focussing on the “dirty words” ( some of which FCC Chairman Martin himself used recently on the FCC’s own web pages) the FCC misses (or suppresses) the more currently-applicable parts of the poem, for example:
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman’s loom,

…

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,

— Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg reading, including Howl, Internet Archive, (August 9, 1975)

The FCC also finds time to approve more media mergers, to water down open access provisions for 700Mhz bandwidth, and to leak information to lobbyists. Maybe it should be called the Less Communication Commission.

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GAO: FCC Leaking to Lobbyists

rccc3mo.png Could this have anything to do with RCCC stock going up just before the FCC 700Mhz auction decision?
From giant phone companies to small consumer advocates, the Federal Communications Commission is supposed to treat every group equally. But congressional investigators have found some companies and trade groups have received special treatment.

FCC officials tipped them off to confidential information about when regulators planned to vote on important issues — a clear violation of agency rules that provided an unfair lobbying advantage, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office released today. Other interested parties — generally consumer and public-interest groups — did not get such favorable treatment, the report said.

“It is critical that FCC maintain an environment in which all stakeholders have an equal opportunity to participate in the rulemaking process and that the process is perceived as fair and transparent,” the report said. “Situations where some, but not all, stakeholders know what FCC is considering for an upcoming vote undermine the fairness and transparency of the process and constitute a violation of FCC’s rules.”

— FCC accused of unfairly aiding some firms, Some groups or companies got inside information on crucial votes, investigators say. By Jim Puzzanghera, Los Angeles Times, 9:30 AM PDT, October 3, 2007

It does seem to go beyond just mergers plus bad regulation into illegal leaks. Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission remains the only major agency or department that does not announce new materials via RSS, and the only notice the public has of a 2 November hearing is rumors. Why do they prefer back channels to transparency?

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FCC: Media Consolidation in November

coppshi_1.jpg Last year the FCC rushed through approval of the AT&T-Bellsouth merger at the last minute in December before the new Congress was convened in January. This year the rush is on reducing ownership of the majority of media in the U.S. from 50 owners to 5 in the past two decades wasn’t enough already.
The Federal Communications Commission is responding to critics’ complaints that the agency isn’t giving them enough time to examine the scientific studies prepared for the agency’s media ownership review.

The FCC’s Media Bureau today extended the deadline for comment by three weeks, citing the request of Free Press, Consumers Union and the Consumer Federation of America.

Nearing the end of its examination of media ownership rules, the FCC on July 31 released 10 studies of various issues of media consolidation and indicated they could help form the basis of any rule changes. The studies included examinations of the impact of consolidation on news content, opinion, advertising and programming and also looked at minority ownership trends.

FCC Extends Deadline for Comments on Media Ownership Studies, By Ira Teinowitz, TV Week, September 28, 2007

Various groups complained, so the FCC made an extension:
The FCC said comments that were to have been filed by Oct. 1 now may be filed through Oct. 22, with responses now due by Nov. 1.
That’s right: three more weeks to study an issue that will affect news, politics, government, and, well, basically everything for the indefinite future. Or, to be more specific, to study studies picked by the FCC.

Some observers are relatively confident of concessions, apparently not taking into account that some previous concessions have already fallen by the wayside: Continue reading →

Japan Beating U.S. At Own Game: Faster, Cheaper Fiber

1003-biz-BROADBANDweb.gif Japanese Internet connections are not only faster, but far cheaper per unit speed than in the U.S.:
The United States may be the world’s largest economy, but when it comes to Internet connections at home, many Americans still live in the slow lane. By contrast, Japan is a broadband paradise with the fastest and cheapest Internet connections in the world.

— Unlike U.S., Japanese Push Fiber Over Profit, Ayumi Nakanishi, The New York Times, 5 Oct 2007

The NYTimes article goes on to discuss how Japanese companies will go for longterm improvement while U.S. companies go for short-term profit.

What it doesn’t say is that this can be used as an argument for why certain areas of the economy need to be regulated. Communications infrastructure by its nature affects the whole society and uses scarce local connection resources, and thus needs some forms of regulations, much like shipping ports. The market economy itself could not exist without certain forms of regulation. Yet we don’t hear of Wall Street wanting to do away with property rights, contract law, or even stock exchange oversight. Why would Wall Street want to shoot itself in the foot by doing away with the regulatory infrastructure that would permit U.S. telecommunications to be competitive in a global market? Continue reading →

Os Invasores: Brazilian Malware Education Videos

img-video02.png At the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) meeting in Pittsburgh, one common theme was that people still fall for scams like phishing, and have little comprehension of the various forms of malware that phishing uses.

The Brazilian Computer Emergency Reponse Team, CERT.br, has one possible solution: animated videos from antispam.br. So far they’ve got a pair. Navegar e Preciso explains how the Internet works, and goes as far as firewalls. Os Invasores explains viruses, trojan horses, worms, bots, and spyware (keylogger and screenlogger). Both videos are in Portuguese, but it’s pretty easy to follow what’s going on. Spanish translations are already in progress, and other languages will probably follow.

A virus looks like a little purple crab with yellow eyese and welding torch. A worm has google eyes and a long cable-connector tail. A bot looks a bit like a worm, but with shady Doonesbury eyes, a mechanical-looking tail, and in the foreground in hand with a toy remote control. I wonder how long before somebody makes mass market toys out of these characters?

Unfortunately, I couldn’t watch these videos in Pittsburgh, because the hotel Internet “high speed” connection was so slow. Ironic, isn’t it? The most innovative approach to user education I’ve seen lately comes from Brazil, and back in the U.S. of A. there’s difficulty finding fast enough bandwidth to watch it. At the moment I’m elsewhere on a cable connection, which works, although the larger version of Os Invasores (22.4Mb) takes several minutes to get here.

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Redesigning the Internet: Ports and Society

Spheres_01_3h.jpg I’d heard about the NSF’s Future Internet Design (FIND) project, but hadn’t really paid attention to it. There was a panel at TPRC, with Dave Clark and other participants. My thoughts here are perhaps in some way derived from what somebody said, but no panel participants should be held responsible for what I write here.

Many interesting issues include what do do about firewalls: redesign to upgrade them or to eliminate the need for them?

How could you eliminate the need for firewalls? Well, they filter by ports, and they need to do that because well-known ports are the way Internet clients traditionally find servers. That’s sort of a historical accident. The MIT CHAOSNet protocols did not have well-known ports. Xerox’s network protocols used random numbers for rendezvous.

But if a firewall can’t filter on ports, haven’t you made it worse? Continue reading →

Faster Speeds Enable More Applications, Competencies, and Participation

appspeed.jpg The figure shows new applications becoming possible as speeds increase, starting with electronic mail at the lowest speeds, through VoIP, also at a pretty low speed, and on up through multi-player games, video on demand, virtual reality, and telepresence. A few big ones seem to be missing, such as file transfer and the world wide web, but maybe those were available at too low speeds to mention. This point of speed enabling new applications is important, but even more so is what people do with those applications.

As Sharon Strover says, perhaps we should frame the discussion more in terms of competencies, rather than speeds. Or, as IIA says:

Business use of video conferencing is expected to increase as rising fuel prices, business continuity planning for possible avian flu pandemic or terrorist attack, environmental concerns and the provision of greater work/life balance for employees, begin to build pressure for workforce decentralisation. The Australian Telework Advisory Committee in its final report also recognised the productivity benefits that teleworking can deliver to business.11 These factors will see businesses require more broadband capacity and performance.

Overall, we anticipate that users will demand a mix of simultaneous or near simultaneous services to be accessible. As a guide, we would expect access services to be able to support concurrent uses of some or all of the following VoIP, gaming, multichannel streaming and video on demand (including HDTV quality), music, legitimate P2P file sharing, and browsing. The figure below illustrates the individual bandwidth requirements for a range of services.

— 2010 National Broadband Targets: Maintaining Australia’s Competitiveness, p. 10-11, Internet Industry Association, 31 July 2006

Notice that many of these applications are participatory, and more intensely vivid methods of participations such as telepresence become available at higher speeds. However, electronic mail (one-to-one communication), mailing lists (one-to-many) and USENET newsgroups (many-to-many) were participatory at speeds most users would sniff at these days. Yet it takes higher speeds to do graphically-oriented multi-user roleplaying games such as World of Warcraft. Such games have hordes of paying users, especially in countries such as Korea with high access speeds. Participation breeds revenue, which fuels speed. Business and recreation aren’t the only uses of participation. Continue reading →

Net Neutrality Won’t be Fixed by Anti-Trust: B. Cherry

CherryTPRC2007p13.gif At TPRC Sunday, Barbara Cherry walked through the evolution of bodies of law in the U.S., and made some fascinating observations, including:
  • Net neutrality is a manifestation of moving from a Title II industry-specific business legal regime under the Communications Act of 1934 to a Title II-based regime and greater reliance on a general business regime of antitrust and consumer protection laws, as the FCC did in August 2005 for wireline broadband access service to the Internet and in 2002 for cable modem access service.
  • Simply mMoving among traditional and deregulatory legal regimes for transportation carriers does did not strip common carriage status; it merely changesd the legal overlay that enforcesd it.
  • FCC stripping broadband of common carriage was a radical departure: nothing classified as common carrier has ever been declassified before.
  • Anti-trust doesn’t automatically cover problems from previously addressed in the Title II industry-specific regime when a business is moved to the Title II general business regime. Anti-trust needs modification to do this.
  • Liability is also different between regimes. Without tariffs some legal protections for limited liability constraints are gone, and common carriers are now potentially fully liable for damages. The final filed rate doctrine should have no applicability to a detariffed world.
The above is, I think, a reasonably close paraphrase of some of her points.

I infer from this that the economists and politicians and telco and cableco executives who say that we shouldn’t regulate because we don’t know what will happen and anti-trust will catch problems if they occur are not taking into account that anti-trust doesn’t automatically apply to or address problems in the new legal regime into which broadband has been thrust.

In other words, people see things in the context of what they know, and economists don’t usually know about legal evolution.

Telco and cableco executives, on the other hand, may well have business and political reasons for claiming there’s no need for regulation, whether or not they know that existing anti-trust law is inadequate. doesn’t apply.

You can’t have markets without some form of property rights of contract law. There is also basic legal infrastructure you need for communication infrastructure.

I see little or no understanding of these points in FCC, FTC, or Congress.

Prof. Cherry’s whole paper is well worth reading: Consumer Sovereignty: Redrawing the Boundaries Between Industry-Specific and General Business Legal Regimes for Telecommunications and Broadband Access Services, by Barbara A. Cherry, TPRC, 30 Sep 2007

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PS: Markup for increased accuracy kindly supplied by Prof. Cherry.