Today, Public Knowledge, joined by a wide variety of consumer, civil rights, and civil liberties groups, urged the FCC to immediately pass rules that would prevent local authorities from ordering a shutdown of wireless services the way that BART did earlier this month. As Harold’s earlier blog post points out, we don’t even need to get to the (extremely pressing and important) First Amendment issues to find that BART’s actions violated the law—the Communications Act, to be precise.

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p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in; line-height: 200%;">One of the biggest pieces of news in the gaming industry this past month involved Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D, a title released for Nintendo’s new 3DS handheld system. The game itself was not that unusual; at first blush, it’s just your typical “run around shooting zombies” affair. What got everyone talking (and some others very, very upset) was a feature developer Capcom put in the game, acknowledged only in small print in the game’s instruction manual: In RE: The Mercenaries 3D, once the player initially boots up the game, his/her progress is automatically recorded to the game card and cannot be deleted. Ever.

On today's podcast we update the status of the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger, walk through the intricacies of politicians licensing music for their campaigns, talk about IP protection surrounding attempts to 3D print a cube from the movie Super 8, and mark the death and life of social networks.  We also discuss the decision of civil society organizations to pull out of international open internet discussions at OECD and consider the ramifications of this week's Supreme Court ruling on minors' access to violent video games.

You can download the audio directly by clicking here (MP3) or stream it using the player below:

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So after a year of process, what has the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) accomplished on network neutrality? I will not say “nothing,” and I understand why FCC Democratic Commissioners Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn regard it as better than nothing. But specifics prove damned elusive. And therein lies the problem for this Order (at least as we understand it).

On every single important and controversial question on what an “open Internet” actually means, -- such as whether companies can create “fast lanes” for “prioritized” content or what exactly wireless providers can and cannot do -- the actual language of the rules is silent, ambiguous, or even at odds with the text of the implementing Order. The only way to find out what protections consumers actually have will be through a series of adjudications at the FCC.

Net neutrality means that consumers have the right to use lawful applications and devices on their broadband connections.  With its secret blocking of BitTorrent, Comcast has shown that it doesn't think much of application freedom. Today, as a complaint by Zoom Telephonics to the FCC spells out, it's clear that Comcast doesn't think very highly of device freedom, either. (Here’s a link to a PDF of the complaint.)

It’s not at all difficult to look at all that went on over the last couple of weeks and wonder if the Open Internet was only a grand dream that never existed, or was a phenomenon that appeared all too briefly and then was gone.  Either way, there are more losers than winners.

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

“Fox has said it is not allowing customers of Cablevision's Internet access service to connect to Fox Web sites or to Fox content on Hulu.com.

“It's bad enough that millions of consumers in New York and Philadelphia are being deprived of programming distributed by cable.  Blocking Web sites, however, is totally out of bounds in a dispute like this.

“This case shows the dangers of unchecked media consolidation and of a retransmission consent regime badly in need of reform.  Consumers should not have their access to Web content threatened because a giant media company has a dispute over cable programming carriage.  The anti-competitive aspects, particularly when it comes to online video programming, are glaringly obvious.

I occassionally suspect my colleagues in the Public Interest community lack a sense of humor -- although perhaps it is simply that I am in a more relaxed frame of mind after my annual vacation from the 21st Century. I am neither surprised nor outraged at the recent news that members of the Information Technology Industry Council (ITIC) are picking up where the FCC "secret meetings" left off and trying to come up with a net neutrality consensus framework. To me, it seems rather sad and funny. My only surprise is that even in Washington, the notion of an industry trade association working with its members is anything unusual or significant. I mean, that's what industry trade associations do after all.

This summer has been one of the most exhausting in recent memory.  First, there has been a constant barrage of record heat and humidity.  Second, there is the continuing battle over whether and how to preserve the FCC's authority to protect broadband consumers and ensure universal broadband access.  While the former is somewhat predictable for Washington, the latter has been like a soap opera, with lots of plot twists, make-ups and break-ups and nearly a few tears (of utter frustration).