Category Archives: Net Neutrality

Postal Radio?

What’s the point of a free press if it can’t be delivered?

To the surprise of many independent publishers, in February the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC), the body in charge of determining postal rates, rejected a rate-hike plan that was submitted by the U.S. Postal Service, the people in the business of delivering the mail for the past 215 years. This plan was widely understood to call for an approximate 12 percent increase that would have hit all publications more or less equally.
Instead the PRC adopted a revised version of an extremely complicated proposal submitted by media conglomerate Time Warner that included a number of possible discounts favoring the largest publishers.
— Postal Rates = Free Press, Rate hike pushed by media conglomerate Time Warner threaten small and medium-circulation publications, By Robert W. McChesney, In These Times May 17, 2007

Why Time Warner? Continue reading →

Stalking Horses?

This make me wonder:

This is in response to (apparently) poisonous language from Verizon (and others), saying that “Frontline is a stalking horse for net neutrality and other unprecedented and unjustified mandates.”
— Open Access, by Susan, Susan Crawford blog, Thu 07 Jun 2007 06:25 PM EDT

I wonder why Verizon and the few other members of the duopoly are able to frighten anyone into changing their language? Continue reading →

Big Ed Retires

“Who else they gonna listen to? The public?”

Savetheinternet.com produced a memorable satire on the policies of just-retired AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre. We’ve already seen that new AT&T CEO Randal Stephenson isn’t steering a much different course, and Time-Warner CEO Ed Parsons seems to think the cablecos and telcos are the original natives of the Internet and will win at Little Big Horn. Meanwhile, the FCC has time to try to regulate Cher. Maybe the FCC needs to hear some different opinions.

-jsq

TV451

Ray Bradbury didn’t go collect his Pulitzer special citation because winners aren’t permitted to say anything, so he created a press event instead:

He says the culprit in Fahrenheit 451 is not the state — it is the people. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, in which the government uses television screens to indoctrinate citizens, Bradbury envisioned television as an opiate. In the book, Bradbury refers to televisions as “walls” and its actors as “family,” a truth evident to anyone who has heard a recap of network shows in which a fan refers to the characters by first name, as if they were relatives or friends.
— Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted, L.A.’s august Pulitzer honoree says it was never about censorship, By Amy E. Boyle Johnston, Wednesday, May 30, 2007 – 7:00 pm

Yet the state, or politicians, can leverage that opiate for their ends just as well, perhaps even better, than if the government sold the drug directly. Continue reading →

No Blocking, No Throttling

Big telcos have been blocking calls by conference call services that route through places such as Iowa that have low rural rates for backhaul. Now one of them, freeconferencecall.com, is declaring victory:

As most of you know, we have been engaged in a battle with several major telecom carriers over the last few months. While we continue to take every precaution to safeguard our customers, several have undoubtedly been affected by the carriers’ strong-arm battle tactics. Their decision to block incoming calls to our conferencing and voicemail numbers interrupted thousands of users including small businesses, non-profits, universities and entrepreneurs alike. We have taken this issue to the courts, the government and the press, but the pivotal difference has been the outcry and support from our customers. The Federal Communications Commission, the State Attorney Generals and the telecom giants heard your collective voice and agreed to stop all call blocking. We would like to thank you for getting involved and colleague. Together we can redefine the communications industry!
—Freeconferencecall newsletter, 27 May 2007

I don’t know about redefining the communications industry, but they do seem to have won this round. Even the FCC agrees. Continue reading →

Chief Parsons

This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. Time-Warner CEO Richard Parsons says:

“The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the Sioux Nation. They will lose this war if they go to war. The notion that the new kids on the block have taken over is a false notion.”
— The Fighting Sioux, by Gunnar Peterson, 1 Raindrop, 11 May 2007

Which is amusing enough. Time-Warner thinks the cablecos and telcos are the original natives of the Internet? I beg to differ. Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, etc. are much more in the spirit of the original creators of the Internet technology and of the people who originally commercialized and privatized the Internet. Continue reading →

Fire Participation

Now here’s an interesting use of the web:

InciWeb is an interagency wildland fire incident information management system. The system was developed with two primary missions: The first was to provide a standardized reporting tool for the Public Affairs community during the course of wildland fire incidents. The second was to provide the public a single source of information related to active wildland fire information.
A number of supporting systems automate the delivery of incident information to remote sources. This ensures that the information on active wildland fire is consistent, and the delivery is timely.
— About InciWeb, Accessed 13 May 2007

The small map is for the Bugaboo fire that started near Waycross Georgia and burned more than 300,000 acres through the Okefenokee swamp into Florida, as of 12 May 2007, with two interstates closed (I-10 and I-75). Sure you can read about it on CNN and other mass media; when they realized much of Florida was closed, they picked up on the story. Continue reading →

Content-Delivery Supply-Chain Usefulness

Susan Crawford hits the broadband nail on the head:

What content-delivery supply-chain usefulness is broadband providing?
—For, by Susan Crawford, Susan Crawford blog, 9 May 2007

That’s the question you get if you’re in a corporate strategy meeting trying to decide where this broadband thing fits in with your core competences. That plus they’ll be thinking purely in terms of broadband, because that’s their product, not the Internet. There’s nothing wrong with that, except when there are only a couple of first-mile ISPs deciding the answer for all their users. And the answer in such cases tends to be “video on demand” or “IPTV” or “our search engine”. Corporations are designed to maximize their own profits, not to think in terms of a supply chain that delivers participation, innovation, and prosperity for the general welfare. Continue reading →

Internet Neutrality

Derek Woodgate makes a very basic point that what we really need is Internet neutrality, not “non-internet services carried over broadband networks”. After all, the whole point of having an internet instead of the original ARPANET was to have a network of networks, run by many different parties. Derek is a futurist, and he understands the technical underpinnings of the Internet, and he understands their importance in “[P]reserving the internet as an open platform for speech and innovation without gatekeepers or centralized control”.