Tag: Bandwidth Caps

Public Knowledge just filed comments urging the FCC to pay close attention to a study (PDF) it commissioned on broadband unbundling. The study, written by Yochai Benkler and his team at Harvard’s Berkman Center, examined international broadband regulatory practices.

This was not just another study chronicling the United States’ decline in Internet prowess. Instead, the Berkman Center team examined broadband markets in a number of different countries. They then tried to figure out what types of regulatory policies were the most effective at increasing broadband penetration and access.

On the eve of the FCC’s upcoming Network Neutrality rulemaking, Canada has now settled its definition of “reasonable network management” and set rules for traffic throttling. Amazingly, the rules the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) settled on for “reasonable network management” look a lot like the standard our own FCC settled on in the Comcast/BitTorrent Order, but even stronger on the notice and transparency side. Hopefully, the FCC is paying attention here as it considers its own rulemaking on the definition of “reasonable network management.”

You can read the CRTC press release here and the detailed order here.

During the discussions that PK has been involved with around the National Broadband Plan, video has been a reoccurring theme. Everyone seems to agree that the next big thing to drive broadband (adoption, speeds, capacity, whatever) is the delivery of video over the internet. Someone will point to Netflix streaming, to Hulu, to Amazon, to Boxee, to YouTube, and say that they are merely the tip of the iceberg. Soon everyone will be sending and streaming video all over the internet, which is why we need more capacity.

In every one of these conversations, no matter what the context, there is always a point where people start to discuss what the video actually will be.

Earlier this week, Art called attention to the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009, a bill introduced in Congress by Representatives Ed Markey and Anna Eshoo. The bill, which you can read here (PDF link), marks the latest front in the Net Neutrality battle--the ongoing fight to ensure that the Internet remains an open, nondiscriminatory platform. Seeing how this bill is likely to rekindle the Net Neutrality debate once Congress returns in September, we thought that a quick rundown of the text of the bill was in order.

Time Warner and Comcast have announced a new pilot program for their TV Anywhere initiative. The 5,000 customers in the pilot will get access to cable programming content not otherwise available online — as long as they prove they subscribe to a subscription video service — or “MVPD” — like cable or FIOS. (MVPD stands for “multichannel video programming distributor” and means anything that sells you a whole bunch of cable channels.

Sometime back, I warned that the deal between ESPN360.com and Verizon would have consequences in terms of internet fragmentation. Now, the American Cable Association, which represents small cable operators (who often have very different concerns from their larger cousins in the National Cable Telecommunications Association) is complaining that Disney wants to charge them for access to ESPN.com.

Note, this does not mean put stuff behind a pay wall and charge viewers. It means replicating the cable model and charging the ISP on a per-subscriber basis.

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.

Quietly, last night, AT&T revised its wireless plans. In the latest changes to the service terms, it looks like AT&T is trying to exempt its own video services but prohibiting services like the Slingbox.

Sound familiar?  I wrote it on April 3rd.  iPhone and PDA users literally felt their significant investment get less valuable.  They complained and AT&T removed the offending language by the next day, calling the language a mistake. 

Guess what?  It's back!

Sometime in the past 24 hours, AT&T changed the TOS again: