Author Archives: John S. Quarterman

Canadian Wireless ISP Co-op

nomad_founders.png This works for local electric companies; why not for ISPs:
Some ISPs simply discourage end users from offering WiFi connections to neighbors; most explicitly rule it out in their terms of service. But a small Canadian ISP called Wireless Nomad actually requires it.

Nomad does things a little differently. The company is subscriber-owned, volunteer-run, and open-source friendly. It offers a neutral Internet connection with no bandwidth caps or throttling, and it makes a point of creating wireless access points at the end of each DSL connection that can be used, for free, by the public. Bell Canada this is not.

— Sticking it to l’homme: Canadian co-op forms own ISP, By Nate Anderson, ars technica, October 10, 2007 – 11:58PM CT

Sort of a local FON.

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Political Blocking by MySpace?

myspacelogo210.jpg
prisonplanet.gif
A self-described anti-war website alleges MySpace blocks it:
Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace has been caught in another act of alternative media censorship after it was revealed that bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet.com were being hijacked and forwarded to MySpace’s home page. MySpace has placed Prison Planet on a list of blocked websites supposedly reserved for spam, phishing scams or virus trojans.

— MySpace Censors Anti-War Websites, Prison Planet blocked as the model for government regulated Internet 2 gets a dry run, Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet, Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Prison Planet says it’s certain this is deliberate, because it observed it going on for more than two weeks and multiple people have observed it. However, it doesn’t give any evidence that MySpace is blocking this particular site because it’s anti-war, nor of any other anti-war sites being blocked by MySpace. Nor for that matter that Rupert Murdoch had anything directly to do with it.

Now I wouldn’t be surpised if MySpace or some other social networking site took it upon itself to block anti-war sites, but I don’t see this case proven, and it’s the only one (the article mentioned InfoWars, but that’s a Prison Planet affiliate). For that matter, is being against the Iraq war even controversial anymore? Continue reading →

Revive OTA?

OTA_seal.png Just last week I was talking to somebody who used to work for the Office for Technology Assessment, which was a bipartisan Congressional research group that brought in various outside experts to help out. She recognized me from various times I showed up.

Serendipitously, Susan Crawford says “OTA: You Are Missed“.

Nearly a decade ago, Congress closed its Office of Technology Assessment. The president of the Federation of American Scientists, a former OTA employee, called the closing the “equivalent of a self-inflicted lobotomy.” Between 1974 and 1995 OTA produced 750 thorough reports about a wealth of scientific and technical studies.

Since then, the Congressional Research Service (thanks, CDT!) has been providing Congress with quick summaries of issues, but CRS doesn’t have the deep technical expertise that OTA did, or the resources to do sustained studies. The National Academies have the time and the resources, but they take too long and they have too many constituents to serve.

In re-writing the Telecom Act and jumping into having the FCC regulate the internet, it would be good to have a neutral, expert, bipartisan group advising Congress about the consequences of their actions.

For example, such a group might have told Congress that current antitrust law isn’t well positioned to deal with problems of lack of competition since broadband was wrenched from one legal regime into another.

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FCC, Telcos, Congress, and FISA

court_rules.gif The FCC won’t investigate possible illegal telco activities:
The head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission declined to investigate reports that phone companies turned over customer records to the National Security Agency, citing national security concerns, according to documents released on Friday.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin turned down a congressional request for an investigation as a top intelligence official concluded it would “pose an unnecessary risk of damage to the national security,” according to a letter National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell sent to Martin on Tuesday.

— FCC won’t probe disclosure of phone records, By Reuters, October 6, 2007, 4:00 PM PDT

It seems unlikely the FCC will investigate active wiretapping, either. National security: the root password to the Constitution.

But Congress won’t let the telcos off the hook, well, not completely:

House Democrats have refused to submit to Bush administration requests to save telecommunications companies that assisted in a warrantless wiretapping scheme from lawsuits or prosecution, and they want to require judicial approval for future efforts to spy on Americans.

…

Under the new law, the Attorney General or Director of National Intelligence would be authorized to receive blanket warrants to eavesdrop on several foreign intelligence targets who could call into the United States, but the bill would restore FISA court reviews of targeting procedures and steps taken to “minimize” Americans’ exposure to surveillance. If an American is to become the “target” of surveillance, intelligence agencies would be required to seek an individualized warrant from the FISA court.

— Proposed FISA update would not give telecom companies legal protection, by Nick Juliano, RawStory, Tuesday October 9, 2007

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court already is so secretive that although its court rules say it has a seal, there’s no image of it available anywhere on the web that I could find, and it already lets intelligence agencies apply within a few days for retroactive authorization for wiretaps.

Of course, this bill would have to pass the Senate and get signed by the president or get enough votes to override a veto. But at least the former law didn’t retroactively immunize the telcos, and this bill doesn’t, either.

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700Mhz Owners and Uses: Public Safety Counts, Too

700owners.gif There are other issues in 700Mhz spectrum allocation than AT&T’s bottom line:
“It is a life or death issue,” said Harold Hurtt, Houston Chief of Police and President of Major Cities Chiefs, an organization that represents 63 of the nation’s largest police organizations. Hurtt made his comments in a video interview distributed during the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) International 71st annual convention in Denver.

— 700 MHz On The Line by samc, dailywireless.org, Monday, September 5th, 2005 at 1:00 pm.

And some of that spectrum has already been allocated. AT&T just cherrypicked the biggest previous 700Mhz spectrum holder, Aloha Partners, but there are more than a dozen others. Don’t be surprised if some of those get gobbled up, too.

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AT&T Goes Around FCC with Aloha 700Mhz

aloha.jpg Why wait for the auction when there’s another way?
AT&T announced today that it has purchased 12MHz of spectrum in the prime 700MHz spectrum band from privately-held Aloha Partners for close to $2.5 billion. Aloha purchased the spectrum in Federal Communications Commission auctions held during 2001 and 2003, but hasn’t done much with the licenses since the auctions ended.

The licenses to the spectrum cover around 196 million residents of the US and 72 of the 100 largest metropolitan areas, including the ten largest markets in the US. AT&T isn’t divulging much in the way of specifics for the bandwidth, other than saying that the company will use it for voice, data, and video. “Aloha’s spectrum will enable AT&T to efficiently meet this growing demand and help our customers stay connected to their worlds,” said Forest Miller, AT&T’s group resident for corporate strategy and development.

— AT&T surprises with beachfront 700MHz spectrum purchase By Eric Bangeman, ars technica, October 09, 2007 – 12:29PM CT

And since Aloha got this batch of 700Mhz spectrum in a previous auction with no open access strings attached, AT&T can thumb its nose at Google about that. For the particular geographical locations that Aloha covers.

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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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