Policy Blog Entries by Art Brodsky

The rules of the road for the $7.2 billion broadband stimulus package announced today (July 1) hit a lot of high notes, putting public policy in favor of an open and non-discriminatory Internet front and center for projects that would bring the Internet to unserved and underserved areas.

“Without a non-discrimination condition, network operators could give preferential treatment to affiliated services, or charge some application and content providers for “fast lanes” that would put others at a competitive disadvantage,” the document said.

With up to $350 million in federal stimulus funds allocated for broadband mapping, an organization called Connected Nation is racking up the frequent flying miles in an effort to capture the lion’s share of the money.

Connected Nation, headquartered in Washington, D.C., is a non-profit organization that represents the interests of the telephone and cable industries in broadband mapping by obtaining contracts from states to do the work while also protecting the “confidentiality” of deployment information that may be deemed “proprietary” by the companies supplying the information In return, Connected Nation charges up to millions of dollars for mapping and, in some occasions, to organize local teams to assess demand.

From Austin to Boise, Honolulu, Oklahoma City and even up to Wasilla, Alaska, and many points in between, Connected Nation has pitched its services to state governments, with impressive results in either setting up t

All this talk of Internet surveillance is enough to cause intense bafflement. For the last couple of days, stories about the revolution Iran indicated that the government is able to keep track of the Internet doings of protesters by means of deep-packet inspection (DPI), a technology developed in the West that, like most dual-use technologies, has a good side and a bad side.

The good side is that it can be used to manage networks and deal with computer viruses and other nasties. The bad side is that it can be used to track computer messages, target insurgents, invade privacy, violate Net Neutrality and, as AT&T wants to do, target the use of copyrighted material online and have users thrown off of the Internet. Using DPI as the mother of all Internet filters would seem to be a non-starter, and yet the industry keeps pushing it, perhaps thinking that the U.S.

Who says there is no cosmic irony in the bland world of telecom? On the day after thousands and thousands of pages were filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on a new national broadband plan, General Motors announced its new post-bankruptcy chairman – Ed Whitacre, the former chairman of AT&T.

It was Whitacre who set off the Great Net Neutrality Storm of 2005-2006, when he took control of the Internet on behalf of AT&T, putting forth the unique view of the world that Google, Yahoo and other Internet companies were using his company’s telecommunications network “for free,” and he wasn’t going to allow that. The fact that those, and many other, companies were paying millions of dollars for telecommunications didn’t seem to matter.

The issue was one of control – Whitacre had it, and he wasn’t going to give it up without a fight. Of course, with General Motors, Whitacre will be able to get back to his original model.

It is truly remarkable that we have a president of the United States who used the word, “phishing,” and didn’t mean going out to the creek on the ranch and throwing a line in the water. He used it in the proper way for that spelling, referring to online scammers soliciting information from unwary Internet users.

Even beyond the news value of President Obama’s cybersecurity speech, the change in zeitgeist is stunning.

It wouldn’t have been surprising if there was a semi-panicked conversation in the corporate suites of Sony. Michael Lynton, the head of Sony studios, had just been quoted as saying “I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet.”

Some marketing gal or PR guy in the Sony eco-sphere probably realized, hey, our audience lives on the Web. How would it look for our top exec to go around trashing the Net?

It’s hard to imagine an American industry as privileged and protected as the newspaper. Right there in the First Amendment to the Constitution, are the words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” No other industry is mentioned in the Constitution.

The rights of journalists, working in print or electronic media, have been protected down through the years. While ordinary citizens might be liable to be sued for libel, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964 set a higher standard in Times v. Sullivan so that a newspaper could be sued only if it could be proved the paper knew ahead of time that what it was printing was false.

In any other industry, the concept of competitors combining operations might be anathema to rigorous antitrust law (admittedly a stale concept after the past eight years).

It was nice that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) acted yesterday to facilitate what little competition there exists for consumers in the wired sector of the telecom world. The Commission ordered telecom providers to take only one day to process changes when consumers want to switch services. The requirement had been four days.

It was just about a month ago that PK and Consumers Union wrote to Acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps asking for the Commission to get moving on the number portability issue.

In our April 17 letter, we noted that we had written to then-chairman Kevin Martin a year earlier, asking the Commission to move “as expeditiously as possible.” After all, the Commission had considered the issue since 2003, taken three rounds of comments and issued a proposed rule 16 months ago.

With the announcement earlier today (May 13) that Verizon is spinning off 4.8 million rural access lines in 14 states to Frontier, the debate should end about fiber being a ubiquitous, robust competitor in the market. The nonsense about “platform competition,” with fiber as the poster child, is over.

As part of its strategy to concentrate on wireless, and, for the lucky ones, fiber-based FIOS, Verizon is prepared to leave 10 million customers it currently serves out in the non-fiber cold. By the end of 2010, when the company’s fiber build-out will largely be complete, about 17 million homes will have FIOS, Verizon Exec. Vice President John Killian said on an analyst call Wednesday. With the fire sale to Frontier, Verizon will be left with about 27 million lines, give or take. That’s not the end of the story. Verizon is cutting loose another 750,000 customers who Killian said would have been eligible to receive FIOS, but are now part of the Frontier transaction.

If the news industry was as adept with its technology and finance as it is with its corporate whingeing and pleading, we would all be a lot better off. Not content with the Associated Press (AP) and Rupert Murdoch picking fights with Google over links to stories, the Newspaper Association of America trotted up to Capitol Hill to claim ownership of facts and to demand payment for them.

James Moroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News, claimed a “quasi property right” over facts that were being used for “commercial gain,” not by readers but by “someone else.” Search engines and other aggregators receive “a free ride,” he told the Senate panel on behalf of newspaper grade group. Moroney was aided and abetted by David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun reporter who is now a TV (pardon me, it’s not TV, it’s HBO) writer and producer.