Tag: brand x

Archaic Telecom

Snowed In with the FCC’s Open Internet Rules

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After burning off my holiday calories shoveling out of Snowmageddon 2010, I was ready to settle down with a good book and a flagon of mulled cider. Perhaps I was still looking for more Sisyphean exercises, so instead of Harry Potter, I reached for my MacBook and downloaded the FCC’s complete Report and Order in the Matter of Preserving the Open Internet, otherwise known as the Net Neutrality rules.

Published on Friday, this 87-page document, excluding appendices and the commissioners’ separate statements, contains over 400 footnotes. A lot of work was expended, so kudos to the FCC’s paper-meisters.

Spoiler alert: the good part starts at Section IV ( paragraph 115, page 62), “The Commission’s Authority to Adopt Open Internet Rules.”

I am all for the Report’s net neutrality rules for transparency, no blocking, and no unreasonable discrimination. But after reviewing the FCC arguments in section IV, along with the usual relevant cases, I don’t think this dog will hunt.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Brand X and Information Cooties

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With pre-election talk of new telecom laws and in the aftermath of the Comcast decision, I was hoping to not revisit the spooky crypt containing moldy Supreme Court decisions and worm-eaten FCC regulatory rulings for a few months. But I was dragged back into this basement last week, when I received an email about a new study commissioned by “Broadband For America.”

BfA is “dedicated to making broadband available to all Americans” and counts former FCC commissioner Michael Powell as an honorary co-chairman. There’s not much else about the organization on their web site, besides a list of, ahem, grass-roots organizations that make up its membership. You can read more about BfA in the reference section.

Written by University of Pennsylvania law professor, Christopher Yoo, “Reclassifying Broadband as a Title II Telecommunications Service” takes the view that because the FCC’s third-way approach is in contradiction of statutes, rulings, Supreme Court decisions, and plain common sense that it can not possibly pass legal muster..Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Non-innovative ISPs

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A article in Wired by Ryan Singel does a nice job of explaining why the cable ISPs need regulation. As this blog has also been saying, reclassification of their services as telecommunications, the current FCC strategy, undoes a bad course steered by the Powell FCC with help from the Supreme Court.

Here’s the money quote:”The broadband barons don’t want to provide you fast internet. It’s too close to being a utility for their tastes (that’s boring and lacks huge profit margins) and requires too much investment.”

What he said! The broadband cable providers’ business model is about restricting the possibilities of the Internet. For example, I suspect your ISP is like mine (I’m stuck with Comcast) in redirecting bad URLs (“404” errors) to their own highly-skewed page of alternative suggestions. Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC Notice of Inquiry on Broadband Reclassification

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Let the games begin and ex parte filings flow! The FCC formally opened its proceedings yesterday on the classification of broadband Internet.   The agency released a 64 page, footnote-chocked Notice of Inquiry, Framework for Broadband Internet Service, to set this round in motion.

The document nicely explains the recent  history that led to the agency’s third-way approach and the policy considerations at stake (universal service, privacy, public safety).  I reviewed parts of this thing, especially the section covering recent legal history, and it all stands as a sobering reminder of how the FCC (under Chairman Powell) went completely off-course in 2002.

In the FCC’s 2002 Declaratory Ruling that cable modem was an information service, it called broadband cable a  “single, integrated service that enables the subscriber to utilize Internet access service,” and that telecommunications component (the transmission part) was “not . . . separable from the data processing capabilities of the service.”

Even in 2002 that clearly wasn’t the case.Continue reading