Tag: Competition

Watch Art debate Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation about competition and the National Broadband Plan.

So now we’ve had National Broadband Plan Day!. And, despite undeniable flaws and places where the Plan Drafters wussed out/”avoided controversy,” The Plan looks pretty damn good, actually.

Let me stress that: Pretty … Damn … Good!

Background: Public Knowledge is one of 14 parties asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to consider changing the rules governing the terms and conditions under which broadcast stations are carried on cable networks. Others asking the Commission to come up with new rules for so-called “retransmission consent” include Time Warner Cable, Verizon, DirecTV, Dish Networks, American Cable Association, New America Foundation and others.

The following statement is attributed to Gigi B. Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge:

“Public Knowledge is pleased to join with a broad coalition of companies and non-profit groups to ask the FCC to establish new rules to protect cable customers. That is our only interest. The petition to the Commission shows that the current rules no longer work.

Just as it has sought to offset slower CD sales with its digital music store, Walmart—the nation’s largest DVD retailer—is looking to insure against lower DVD sales by purchasing the online video company Vudu.

But Vudu isn’t just another Internet video company with a loopy name offering a pure over-the-top video service. Like Sezmi, its delivery method is an interesting hybrid. While Sezmi leverages free over-the-air TV, leased spectrum, and broadband (with ample local storage as a force multiplier), Vudu uses a hybrid peer-to-peer model. Content is both delivered to a Vudu device through a standard client/server model, as well as peer-to-peer between different Vudu devices. Additionally, content is pre-positioned at the edge of the network to increase the number of peers.

The Pew and the American Life project came out with a pretty scary report last week. The words, “Pew” and “scary” aren’t often used together, but in this case the description is apt.

Pew’s latest study on the future of the Internet asked in technical terms whether the Internet over the next 10 year will be controlled by consumers. The specific question was: Will the Internet still be dominated by the end‐to‐end principle? The “end-to-end principle” that was built into the Internet at its early stages means that consumers at one end of an Internet connection had a direct, one-to-one relationship with the online destination – a chat site, music site, shopping site, news site, whatever you want and wherever you want to go without interference or influence from the company making that connection for you – the Internet Service Provider (ISP).

If the rumors are true, the FCC may be about to take a big step towards embracing its goal of being data driven, and could open the door to a more competitive Internet Service Provider (ISP) market.

According to reports, the FCC is considering requiring big telecommunications companies to lease their infrastructure to smaller competitors. This, of course, is not a new idea. Back in the day, forcing phone companies to allow competitors to access their wires resulted in thousands of dial-up ISPs competing for business.

Public Knowledge, along with five competitive telecom carriers, today released an important economic analysis showing that decreased regulation of local telephone companies has resulted in less investment by those companies – not more as the companies claimed would happen.

The study, “Regulation, Investment and Jobs: How regulation of wholesale markets can stimulate private sector broadband investment and create jobs,” found that that investment rose in the five years immediately following the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, as did employment in the telecom sector. However, the study found that in the years since 2001 when many of the competitive policies put in place were negated, principally the rules that required telephone companies to allow competitors to use their networks.

Sherwin posted last week about the amended Google Books settlement and our amicus brief expressing our opposition to the settlement as written and our concern that it would lead to a monopoly on providing access to orphan works. The DOJ’s Antitrust Divison has once again weighed in on the settlment (their previous brief is here, with our analysis here). Their conclusions appear to be largely the same as ours: “Although the United States believes the parties have approached this effort in good faith and the [Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA)] is more circumscribed in its sweep than the original Proposed Settlement, the ASA suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: it is an attempt to use the class action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the Court in this litigation.”

Comcast and NBC Universal don’t see online video as a competitor to cable. In their world, it’s just something that people use in addition to the bundled package of hundreds of channels that they’re so happy with. It’s an irrelevant little side issue, hardly meriting the big stink we and others have been making about it in the context of the proposed merger.

Today is the last day for commenters and objectors to weigh in on the amended Google Book settlement before the district court in New York that’s overseeing the case. Yesterday, Public Knowledge filed its amicus brief in opposition to the new settlement.

Our concerns are the same as they were when the settlement deal was first announced—that, if approved, it would result in Google becoming the only company that can sell access to orphan books without risking a massive lawsuit.