Category: Regulatory
March 7th, 2008
Over WiFi at DIA, free speech is DOA
SI model Jessica Gomes, 
if you must know.
Our own Maggie Reardon expands on a Denver Post story that notes the Denver International Airport has chosen to block Wi-Fi access to such sites as boingboing.net, the website of Vanity Fair magazine, and even the web link to Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue.
Maggie notes that the airport’s spokesman Chuck Cannon told the Associated Press on Wednesday that he would rather “weather infrequent complaints about access than handle angry parents whose children might see pornography.”
Well, excuse me. Aren’t magazines with far more “pornographic” sold at DIA newsstands? And how many children would be Web surfing via WiFi at any airport?
Well, I suppose that if you and a couple of your kids are at the gate, waiting on a plane, and a guy sits next to your brood and directs his Wi-Fi enabled notebook to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue landing page, well, would your kid is on the road to ruin.
One more note of hypocrisy. Some of the same parents who presumably would complain about access to the SI swimsuit issue over airport WiFi might be proud of their son, nephew, sister, husband, etc., for fighting for “our freedoms” in Iraq.
March 4th, 2008
Score one for the little guy: FCC entirely backs consumer in Sprint slamming case
The meme that this FCC
is highly partial to the interests of large broadband service providers and telcos has often been hammered home on these screens.
While I am certainly not ready to contradict those overarching feelings, I nevertheless feel enthusiastic and obligated to tell you about those FCC decisions in which the consumer wins.
One of those just crossed my disk this morning.
In rather strong language (”it is ordered,” “absolution,” etc.) the FCC has just come down on the side of a consumer in a forced carrier change (”slamming”) case.
Joy rules.
As the FCC said in their order:
In this Order, we consider the complaint alleging that Sprint Communications Company, L.P. (Sprint) changed Complainant’s telecommunications service provider without obtaining authorization and verification from Complainant in violation of the Commission’s rules. We conclude that Sprint’s actions did result in an unauthorized change in Complainant’s telecommunications service provider and we grant Complainant’s complaint.
The next section of this ruling indicates the statutes that the FCC cited as the reason for this decision:
In December 1998, the Commission released the Section 258 Order in which it adopted rules to implement Section 258 of the Communications Act of 1934 (Act), as amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (1996 Act). Section 258 prohibits the practice of “slamming,” the submission or execution of an unauthorized change in a subscriber’s selection of a provider of telephone exchange service or telephone toll service.
In the Section 258 Order, the Commission adopted aggressive new rules designed to take the profit out of slamming, broadened the scope of the slamming rules to encompass all carriers, and modified its existing requirements for the authorization and verification of preferred carrier changes.
The rules require, among other things, that a carrier receive individual subscriber consent before a carrier change may occur.
Pursuant to Section 258, carriers are absolutely barred from changing a customer’s preferred local or long distance carrier without first complying with one of the Commission’s verification procedures. Specifically, a carrier must: (1) obtain the subscriber’s written or electronically signed authorization in a format that meets the requirements of Section 64.1130; (2) obtain confirmation from the subscriber via a toll-free number provided exclusively for the purpose of confirming orders electronically; or (3) utilize an independent third party to verify the subscriber’s order.
If you want to read on about the FCC’s siding with the consumer in this case, well, then, just make with the “click-y.”
March 3rd, 2008
No Government rules on packet throttling, blocking, colleague says on Capitol Hill
Colleague George Ou, who is not a proponent of most net neutrality regulations, stated his opinions before a Congressional staffer-panel on Network Management sponsored by iGrowthGlobal.
That outfit, whose board is full of board members who have served in a similar capacity on the Pox on consumer rights that is the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a group that declares as part of its goal that:
governments resist the temptation to regulate, tax and control. Government has important roles to play in society, including protecting property rights and individual liberties, but its tendency is to reach beyond its legitimate functions in ways that harm consumers, burden citizens and slow progress.
OK, so now that you know of iGrowthGlobal’s heritage as a group that is afraid of tech regulations that will help consumers here and now, you might be further sensitized to a perception that George’s honest feelings and related testimony, fit this hesitant-to-regulate, free market template.
In Goerge’s own post this morning, he points to his testimony as noting that because today’s broadband networks have modest capacity, some Torrent throttling is necessary as a traffic management tool. And that necessity means that it preferable that throttling, on the part of say, Comcast, should be a practice judged by the free market, rather than ruled by “Goverment.”
George said:
Then I explained that Cable networks and Wireless networks are shared-medium networks that are constrained in capacity and that they weren’t built nor sold to be content servers for the rest of the Internet. Wireless networks are even more scarce in terms of capacity because of the scarcity of spectrum and many of the smaller ISPs would be put out of business if the Government made rules banning P2P throttling or P2P blocking.
Without those smaller wireless ISPs that cover the rural areas that the larger companies don’t want to cover, those Americans living in rural America would be cut off from the Internet and possibly even their phone service. We have plenty of choices on getting content but few choices on broadband carriers and the Government must keep this in mind when making network management policies.
A network management guru and diligent researcher as well as an esteemed colleague, George tends to favor market-based solutions. That’s fine, but I don’t.
Left lightly or non-regulated in the packets- preference realm, I fear the broadband Internet monopolists will strike deals with preferred content providers, and feel unrestrained to nickel and dime consumers with every fee their share-price boosting, avaricious nature will countenance.
Loading ...February 29th, 2008
Vonage spent nearly $1.4 million to lobby Feds in 2007
The Associated Press reports that Vonage spent nearly $1.4 million to lobby the federal government in 2007.
Vonage’s key lobbying activities were related to telecommunications competition and consumer issues.
That’s according to a disclosure form posted online Feb. 13 by the Senate’s public records office.
You are looking at selected portions of the form at the top of this post:
Much of the need to lobby seems to be directly mappable back to issues raised in several patent disputes Vonage participated in last month, as well as in 2007.
Specifically, the AP notes that in January, Vonage settled litigation with Nortel Networks, the latest in a series of multimillion-dollar patent settlements with traditional telecommunications companies. Last year, the Holmdel, N.J.-based company agreed to pay AT&T Inc. $39 million to settle a patent suit. Vonage also settled lawsuits with Verizon Communications Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp. for a total of $200 million in 2007.
According to its most recent filing, Vonage spent more than $601,000 in the second half of the year lobbying on those issues.
Under a U.S. Federal law enacted in 1995, lobbyists are required to disclose activities that could influence members of the executive and legislative branches.
February 29th, 2008
Should software be patented? This site would like the practice stopped
A new website entitled End Software Patents is attempting to galvanize public support to accomplish that goal.
Here’s the core of their argument:
Patents differ from copyright in one key manner: independent invention is a valid defense against claims of copyright infringement. That means that if you happen to write something that looks like the writing of somebody else, then you can’t be sued, unless the other author can prove that you directly copied his or her work.
Conversely, a patent holder can sue anybody who has written a composition similar to a patented composition. The holder of a software patent need only spend a few minutes with an Internet search engine to find somebody to sue—which is why “software companies” like the Green Bay Packers and Tire Kingdom are being sued: their web site evidently implements something that seems to match one out of the above-mentioned thousands of patents.
Is your company, school, or organization infringing any software patents? If it has a computer on hand, then the answer is almost certainly yes.
So software patents have created liability for everybody. But have they spurred innovation? Nobody can find any evidence that they have; see the Resources for economists page for the list of pro-software patent scholars who have searched for evidence of benefit and failed.
The site then tries to make the case that one of the key reasons why software patents have thrived despite their ineffectiveness is because of the self-perpetuating Patent bureaucracy- namely that of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Here’s what End Software Patents has to say about the USPTO and the software patent culture:
Imagine a government agency with the scope to inspect and grant a monopoly on every line of computer code written by anyone in any part of the economy, and you’ve got the US Patent and Trademark Office.
As you can imagine, granting so many monopolies requires a lot of resources: the PTO has grown out of its buildings and continues to expand, to the tune of 1,200 employees per year for the next five years. Even so, it will still have to stretch to catch up to its backlog of 1.3 million uninspected patents
1,200 new employees over five years equals 6,000 new hires. Coincidentally, the PTO in 2000 was about 6,000 people. So the PTO hopes to grow to more than double its size in 2000.
The irony of this effort to create a federal bureaucracy to oversee everybody’s computer code is that, as above, nobody has any proof that this computer code bureaucracy has spurred innovation. Even coders themselves oppose this government ‘service’—see the what practitioners are saying page.
I’m not sure all software Patents should be abolished, but I will grant that an unfortunate culture of patent trolls has been spawned by software patents.
What do you think?
Loading ...February 27th, 2008
Attn. Stanford students, Palo Alto street peeps: FCC Comcast Torrent-thwart hearing to Stanford?
Valleywag is hearing that a “do-over” of yesterday’s net neutrality-overlayed FCC hearing about Comcast’s thwarting of Torrent packets may be headed to the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto.
I wonder how happy Comcash will be to face the citizenry’s champion of net neutrality and reasonable copyright. I am talking about Larry Lessig, praise be unto him. Being a Stanford prof. he presumably could walk to such a hearing.
BTW at yesterday’s hearing Comcast admitted they hired several dozen people off the street to pack the seats.
I wonder if Comcast will try that stunt in Palo Alto. I often glimpse plenty of unemployed grad students walking and cycling along and hear University Avenue.
February 27th, 2008
9-1-1 VoIP passes Senate, but that's far from a complete solution
The IP-Enabled Voice Communications and Public Safety Act of 2007 has just been passed by the U.S. Senate.
The hill amends the Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act of 1999 to irequire interstate VoIP providers to provide enhanced 9-1-1-services.
Not only that, but the bill authorizes the FCC to dictate that these providers have right of access to 9-1-1- service elements. That includes direct access to PSAP (Public Safety Answering Pint) facilities.
Additionally, the bill allows the FCC to delegate relevant 9-1-1 access to state agencies charged with overseeing local emergency communications networks.
These are major steps toward the credibility of VoIP, but there remains one hurdle.
Innerrant point of presence detection for IP calls made over notebooks and handsets. True, there are some GPS-based solutions, but without boosters, GPS is primarily an outdoor medium.
And don’t tell me about indoor boosters and adapters. The way it seems to me, the VoIP user who does not take the time and care to register a temporary location (say at his aunt’s) isn’t going to be the one to rig up a solution that will bring the presence-detecting aspects of GPS inside.
February 26th, 2008
Comcast hires these people off the street to help fill gallery for FCC Torrent-thwart hearings
Seems as though Comcast wanted to ensure a sympathetic gallery crowd for yesterday’s FCC hearings about the broadband Internet giant’s habit of thwarting BitTorrent packets and connections.
So what better way to do just that than getting some warm bodies off the street and then paying them to sit there and “hold spaces” for local Comcast employees who were “invited” to show up.
The photo shows several of these warm bodies, captivated with the passionate discourse in the hearing room on the Harvard campus.
NOT!!
Portfolio.com’s Sam Gustin reports:
Comcast spokewoman Jennifer Khoury said the company paid some people to arrive early and hold places in the queue for local Comcast employees who wanted to attend the hearing.
Some of those placeholders, however, did more than wait in line: they filled many of the seats at the meeting, according to eyewitnesses. As a result, scores of Comcast critics and other members of the public were denied entry because the room filled up well before the beginning of the hearing.
Khoury said the company didn’t intend to block anyone from attending the hearing. “Comcast informed our local employees about the hearing and invited them to attend,” she said. “Some employees did attend, along with many members of the general public.”
That was not enough to satisfy Comcast’s critics.
Craig Aaron, a spokesman for Free Press, which was one of the groups that filed the complaint against Comcast, denounced the company’s tactics.
“The sad thing about this is that literally hundreds of people who were not paid to stand in line, or paid by their employer to attend, were prevented from even entering the building,” Aaron said.
Our democracy at work..
February 18th, 2008
BlackBerry-Motorola patent infringement fight makes little sense to me
Just within the last few days, BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion and Motorola have sued each other for Patent 
infringement.
Motorola’s big issue seems to be a feeling that in most of its 8xxx series models, RIM’s method of storing contact info in wireless emails, and its ability to recognize incoming phone numbers are tantamount to infringement.
RIM fired back, accusing, by implication, Motorola’s Q email phone of offering thumb keyboards awfully similar to several BlackBerry models.
RIM also says that Motorola’s patent royalty fee structure is “exorbitant.”
I have to tell you that some of the capabilities each company is suing each other about seem rather established, and yes, generic to me.
Hate to use the “t” (as in troll) word, but this really sounds like a neh-neh fight you sometimes see in and around sandboxes.
What do you think?
February 15th, 2008
Poll: If the U.S. Presidential election were held today, who would you vote for?
Presidents appoint cabinet officers and regulatory members who execute technology policy.
Plus, this is President’s 
Day weekend in the U.S.
So IMHO, appropriate time to ask:
Loading ...February 15th, 2008
Jane Fonda just used the unbleeped "C" word on Today Show: what's next?
During the Today show, well, today, guest Jane Fonda talked about “The Vagina Monologues” with host Meredith Viera.
While referring to the play, Jane let a word slip out that rhymes with what U.S. football teams often do on fourth down.
And the bleeper didn’t catch it either.
So why am I writing about it on this blog?
I just know that this remark will be political fodder for more regulation of broadcast television. And with so many broadcast and cable shows available on the Internet and on your mobile device, what legal liability would retransmitters of content with such language incur?
Forget “wardrobe malfunction,” and Janet Jackson’s exposed breast. Now we have Jane Fonda- a controversial figure in her own right, saying a word that, frankly, most of the women I know are more offended by than the gutteral term for incestuous intercourse.
And it’s morning hours, and the kids could have been watching? Can Western civilization stand this “vulgarity?”
Or in conversations that probably are going on as I type this:
“Mommy what’s a …”
Gasp.
February 14th, 2008
Google on Markey net neutrality bill:let's stop the "gatekeepers"
Without mentioning Comcast’s broadband Internet throttling by name, Google’s Public Policy analyst and blogger Derek Slater has just made a post resoundingly in favor of the net neutrality legislation introduced this week by Congressmen Ed Markey and Chip Pickering:
Today, Rep. Ed Markey and Chip Pickering introduced bipartisan legislation to help preserve Internet freedom and explicitly make “net neutrality” a guiding principle of U.S. broadband policy. The bill would affirm that the Internet should remain an open platform for innovation, competition, and social discourse, free from unreasonable discriminatory practices by network operators. It would also require the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to solicit input on the nation’s broadband policy from ordinary Americans by conducting eight “broadband summits” around the country and seeking comments online.
As we’ve discussed before on this blog, innovation has thrived online because the Internet’s architecture enables any and all users to generate new ideas and technologies, which are allowed to succeed based on their own merits and benefits. Some major broadband service providers have threatened to act as gatekeepers, playing favorites with particular applications or content providers, demonstrating that this threat is all too real. It’s no stretch to say that such discriminatory practices could have prevented Google from getting off the ground — and they could prevent the next Google from ever coming to be.
While regulations on certain types of discrimination is one way to help preserve the Internet’s openness, other remedies including expanding broadband competition and market-based initiatives may be important complements. Rep. Markey’s legislation sets a sound course towards properly putting all the options on the table, by adopting the proper general principles and asking the FCC to address the right kinds of questions.
As important, Internet users themselves will get a chance to answer those questions. From the start, the heart and soul of the movement for net neutrality has been the grassroots — the thousands and thousands of ordinary Americans who have already spoken up for Internet freedom on sites like Save The Internet and beyond.
Net neutrality is too often painted as just about particular companies’ competing interests, but that’s missing the point. Rather, net neutrality and broadband policy are — and should be — about what’s ultimately best for people, in terms of economic growth as well as the social benefit of empowering individuals to speak, create, and engage one another online using the wide panoply of innovations available to them. In other words, broadband policy should come from the bottom up.
Before some of you go off saying this guy is just a cog in the wheel, I inform you that Slater is often called upon by senior Google execs to advise on- rather than just mouth- company policy.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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