Category Archives: Regulation

Internet Radio: Live Air?

header_mic.gif Sunday was when Internet radio was supposed to turn into dead air, after even an emergency court hearing had failed. However, during a Congressional hearing Friday,
…Jon Simson, director of SoundExchange – the label-affiliated organization responsible for setting royalty rates – told Congress that the group would not enforce the new royalty rates and would continue to work on negotiating new rates with the Digital Media Association (DiMA), who are acting on behalf of webcasters. “This is definitely a step in the right direction,” Pandora founder Tim Westergren, told us this morning. “At this point, provided there’s good-faith negotiations, they’re not going to go after people.”

— Public Outcry Staves Off Destruction of Internet Radio, Evan Serpick, Rock & Roll Daily, Rolling Stone, 7/13/07, 12:54 pm EST

Is this any way to run a regulatorium? All the regulatory bodies stonewalling, the courts not listening, and only one man deciding not to proceed? Continue reading →

AT&T’s Striped Bass

ph_striped_bass.jpg You may recall that the FCC at the last minute in 2006, after the elections and before the electees took office, agreed to some conditions on the merger of Bellsouth with AT&T. Among them was a $10/month DSL plan.
The merger commitment specifies that the plan had to be offered. That means to me that it has to be put forth as an option!!! (If there’s a fifty pound striped bass somewhere out there in the ocean, that’s not an offer of fish!)

So I don’t think AT&T is honoring its $10/month commitment.

— Is AT&T Honoring its Merger Commitments? David Isenberg, isen.blog, Friday, July 06, 2007

This is the same $10/month service USA Today announced AT&T was developing back in January. Maybe they’ll just keep “developing” it until the 48 month time limit expires, or make it available to a few people and claim they’ve honored their commitment.This is what SBC used to do: claim availability if one person per ZIP code could get a service, and the FCC let them get away with that.

Isenberg asks:

Do you think the FCC will investigate?
Continue reading →

A Cisco Way

bio_100x125_jeff_campbell.jpg Cisco has a policy blog, in which they back no regulation before market failure:
In other words, there is no reason to rush to impose burdensome Net Neutrality regulations in the broadband market. If there is one thing that we have learned from 70+ years of communications regulation, it is that regulation has significant costs and unintended consequences. The FTC clearly recognizes that government should react to actual problems, not hypothetical ones.
It’s funny how the Internet grew up with net neutrality, but now it’s “burdensome.” Maybe innovation and competition are burdensome to incumbents.

-jsq

Market Failure?

bruegel_babel2_grt.jpg Here’s an interesting directive from the White House:
The order requires federal officials to show that private companies, people or institutions failed to address a problem before agencies can write regulations to tackle it. It also gives political appointees greater authority over how the regulations are written.

— House Balks at Bush Order for New Powers, By Jim Abrams, The Associated Press Tuesday, July 3, 2007; 8:16 PM

How does this work?

Continue reading →

Broadband Produces Employment

crandall.jpg
lehr.jpg
Litan.jpg
Many have assumed that broadband is good for the economy; now here’s a study with rivets:
More specifically, for every one percentage point increase in broadband penetration in a state, employment is projected to increase by 0.2 to 0.3 percent per year.

— The Effects of Broadband Deployment on Output and Employment: A Cross-sectional Analysis of U.S. Data, By Robert Crandall, William Lehr and Robert Litan, Brookings Institution, 2007

Of course, this is like saying every state in medieval Germany that had a printing press produced employment in the printing industry. There are economic and social effects far beyond mere employment. What should be done?

The paper has a few recommendations:

The surest route to lower prices is provided by increasing competition in the delivery of broadband services.
Continue reading →

The Tree of Liberty

On this day in the United States we celebrate the Declaration of Independence with
Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfire and Illuminations
as John Adams recommended in 1776.

The Declaration laid out a “a long train of abuses and usurpations” and referred to “certain unalienable Rights”, which the former colonials went on to spell out in a written Constitution (the oldest in the world today) to which they added a Bill of Rights. Is their work done? Continue reading →

FTC: What, Me Worry?

majoras.jpg The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says there’s no need for net neutrality:
FTC Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras said that without evidence of “market failure or demonstrated consumer harm, policy makers should be particularly hesitant to enact new regulation in this area.”
So in a “market” where the average customer has at most two choices, we’re supposed to wait for a market failure? Continue reading →

Giant Beasts Gently Swatting

gz.jpg Susan Crawford pithily describes the current Internet access market:
The duopoly is something like Shamu and Godzilla on hire for televised wrestling – giant beasts gently swatting at one another for the cameras. They aren’t competing, these giants. There is a clear failure in the market for highspeed internet access in this country.

— Moving Slowly in the Fast Lane by Susan Crawford, Susan Crawford blog, Tue 19 Jun 2007 10:29 PM EDT

What is to be done? Continue reading →

Internet Deconstructs Spin?

joe_trippi.jpg Joe Trippi thinks the Internet changes politics from spin to something better:
Internet activism is spelling the end for the age of spin, the online campaign guru Joe Trippi will warned two British politicians, suggesting that the rules for dealing with “old media” no longer apply.

…

“Command and control … [is] a disaster in the peer-to-peer social network world.”

— Does the Internet Spell the End of Political Spin? By Tania Branigan, The Guardian. Posted June 15, 2007.

Dave Weinberger suggests more or less the same thing, somewhat less optimistically, Continue reading →

Media Ownership

media-ownership.gif While we’re on the general subject of postal and Internet rates and a free press,, let’s look at who owns the U.S. media:
In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. … When the 6th edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market. More than 1 in 4 Internet users in the U.S. now log in with AOL Time-Warner, the world’s largest media corporation.

In 2004, Bagdikian’s revised and expanded book, The New Media Monopoly, shows that only 5 huge corporations — Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) — now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric’s NBC is a close sixth.

— Number of corporations that control a majority of U.S. media, Media Reform Information Center, accessed 21 June 2007

This might be worth remembering the next time you hear that the market will sort out any problems and there’s no need for regulation. Would that there were a market so that that could be true.

-jsq