Author Archives: John S. Quarterman

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.

Benton, Universal Service, TPRC, Social Contract

bentonfoundation.png Many good papers on aspects of universal service at the Benton Universal Service Project:
As Congress and the FCC put universal service reform at the top of its telecom policy agenda, the Benton Foundation is supporting a series of papers advancing a new vision for Universal Service — for making broadband as universal as telephone service is today and a pathway for retaking the lead as a broadband leader. This project outlines the policy rationale, the pathway forward, and the 12 key steps for advancing universal broadband and modernizing the universal service program for the information age.
Many of the authors of the papers are on a panel this afternoon at TPRC, including topicssuch as
The social contract implicit in telephony universal service versus the social contract implicit in broadband universal service.
Hm, maybe Verizon could learn from that one?

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Verizon Blocks and Unblocks Pro-Choice Group

hp_naral_logo.gif Here’s what happens when you have a telco thinking the Internet is subject to its internal policies and political predilictions:
Saying it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” text messages, Verizon Wireless last week rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program.

But the company reversed course this morning, saying it had made a mistake.

“The decision to not allow text messaging on an important, though sensitive, public policy issue was incorrect, and we have fixed the process that led to this isolated incident,” Jeffrey Nelson, a company spokesman, said in a statement.

“It was an incorrect interpretation of a dusty internal policy,” Mr. Nelson said. “That policy, developed before text messaging protections such as spam filters adequately protected customers from unwanted messages, was designed to ward against communications such as anonymous hate messaging and adult materials sent to children.”

Mr. Nelson noted that text messaging is “harnessed by organizations and individuals communicating their diverse opinions about issues and topics” and said Verizon has “great respect for this free flow of ideas.”

— Verizon Reverses Itself on Abortion Rights Messages, By Adam Liptak, New York Times, September 27, 2007

Is the Internet a public network, or isn’t it? If it is, I don’t see why any ISP should be blocking messages based on content. (Spam is a different matter: spam is unsolicited.) There are various opinions as to what laws, if any, cover text messages. But the main point isn’t even legal. If the telco-provided network isn’t a public network, it’s not the Internet.

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Why Amazon Won’t Get Its Own Channel: Amazon MP3 Without DRM

mp3-logo-200x90._V25853857_.gif Amazon has started a DRM-free music store:
Every song and album on Amazon MP3 is available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. This means that Amazon MP3 customers are free to enjoy their music downloads using any hardware device, including PCs, Macs™, iPods™, Zunes™, Zens™, iPhones™, RAZRs™, and BlackBerrys™; organize their music using any music management application such as iTunes™ or Windows Media Player™; and burn songs to CDs.

— Amazon.com Launches Public Beta of Amazon MP3, a Digital Music Store Offering Customers Earth’s Biggest Selection of a la Carte DRM-Free MP3 Music Downloads, Amazon.com, BusinessWire, 25 Sep 2007

Interesting how they didn’t mention Linux or Unix or any other free software platform.

Still, this is probably enough to keep Amazon from getting its own channel on the telco and cableco-planned closed Internet.

PS: Seen on BoingBoing.

Content Protect v. Internet Freedom

content_protection.png Here’s another view of what the telcos and cablecos have in mind for us, or, rather, what they want in our minds: approved content. This is substantially different from the Internet freedom we have today to look at whatever we want to and to publish our own content.

Remember:

AT&T Inc. has joined Hollywood studios and recording companies in trying to keep pirated films, music and other content off its network — the first major carrier of Internet traffic to do so.
Get ready for the Amazon Channel or settle for Internet Base Service. Continue reading →