Year: 2006

FCC Spikes Report Undermining Deregulation

, , , , , , ,

Author’s note. I have significantly reedited this story in light of the fact that Michael Powell denies seeing the report or ordering it purged and that the only source on record states only that the order came from “a senior FCC official.” It is entirely possible that Powell never saw the study, and that someone much lower down the chain took action on his or her own. But this is why we need a thorough investigation.

“Unfortunately, many have turned this critically important policy debate into a political one, substituting personal ideology and opinion for the facts. If we are to craft responsible media policy for the 21st century, everyone involved in this debate must set aside the rhetoric, put the public interest before political interest and focus on ‘just the facts.’”

So wrote Michael Powell in an Op Ed in USA Today in January 2003. Powell was talking about the FCC proceeding to review its media ownership rules. He believed the facts would prove that deregulating the mass media would not harm local news. If anything, I expect Powell believed it would improve it. Doesn’t deregulation make everything better?

But according to this story by the Associated Press, The FCC conducted a study on the impact of deregulation of the media on local news, only to suppress it when it proved deregulation significantly hurts local news.

I do not believe Kevin Martin knew this report even existed before Senator Barbra Boxer (D-CA) sprung it on him yesterday. But I do think Martin has an obligation to investigate and make the results of the investigation known. If the FCC did suppress the report, then it needs to take steps to ensure that such things will not happen again. Because, while Powell was wrong about the impact of deregulation, he was right about one thing: “Only the facts will enable us to craft broadcast-ownership restrictions that ensure a diverse and vibrant media marketplace for the 21st century.”

A bit of back story below.

Continue reading

I'm Speaking Tomorrow (9/13/06) On the Hill

, , ,

We’ve been down a few days for technical problems. Sorry and welcome back.

Tomorrow (9/13/06), I’ll be speaking at an event sponsored by Americans for a Secure Internet on what to do about ICANN, the Internet Governance Forum and upcomming meeting in Athens, and what’s wrong with making the rest of the world dance “the macarena” or lose their ccTLD. (Although you can get more recent information from the Internet Governance Project, or ICANNWATCH, or Susan Crawford’s bog but none of them reference the macarena!)

The event is scheduled for 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m. at the House Rayburn Building B-340. I append the information from the flyer below. Here are a few links to my other ICANN blog entries:
Tiering, It’s Not Just for Telcos Anymore
My Take on WSIS and DNS
The Verisign Lawsuit: More Than Just Sitefinder
If ICANN Regulated Cars (real old)
______________________________________________________
AMERICAN FOR A SECURE INTERNET

Buffet Lunch and Panel Discussion

Does the U.N. Want to Govern the Internet?

Hosted by Americans for a Secure Internet

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

12:30-2 PM

Rayburn B-340

Last November, the Congress passed a Joint Resolution affirming that the current structure of Internet management—with U.S. oversight—was working well and should be maintained without interference from the United Nations.

But the UN is not so easily dissuaded. They’re meeting in Athens at the end of October to plan an array of new initiatives that could clash with ICANN’s management of the Internet.

Join Americans for a Secure Internet for a lunch buffet and panel discussion on Wednesday, September 13, to learn how changes to current Internet governance could compromise the integrity of its infrastructure, and the continued growth of eCommerce.

Topics include:

* The U.N.’s IGF and its plan for a prolonged campaign to gain control of the Internet and remove America from its dominant position
* How the IGF’s proposals create real barriers to eCommerce by turning the Internet over to a collection of foreign governments, including those that practice massive censorship like China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia
* How the Internet needs a “manager” and not a “governor”—and the difference between the two
* The current ICANN arrangement and how it allows for distributed control of the Internet
* The threat to technical development and improvement of the Internet by trapping its management inside a multitude of new agencies and programs

Get to know these issues that will be discussed at the IGF meeting and the potential effects. All Congressional staff involved in technology and eCommerce issues should attend.

Panelists include:

Ambassador David Gross
Ambassador, Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs
U.S. Department of State

Harold Feld
Senior Vice President
Media Access Project

Brian Cute
Vice President, Government Relations
VeriSign

Steve DelBianco (moderator)
Executive Director
NetChoice

RSVP
If you plan to attend, please RSVP to Melissa Moskal at mailto:mmoskal@actonline.org or 202.420.7484.

About ASI
Americans for a Secure Internet is a coalition of trade associations, public policy think tanks, businesses and individuals who share a deep concern about the future of Internet security. Visit www.protectingthenet.org for more information.

What the FAA?

, , , , , , ,

How the heck did the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) get into regulating the wireless industry (both licensed and unlicensed)? The FAA has proposed requiring pretty much any wireless service with an antenna to fill out a form for every antenna and antenna change. Right now, only services with big antennas (like broadcasters) near airports fill out FAA paperwork.

As the FCC gently points out in its own filing, the FAA does not seem to understand just how much this would increase paperwork for the industry — and for the FAA to process. Given that the FAA does not seem to have any reason to think that these antennas will cause rampant interference and bring planes out of the sky, maybe the FAA wants to rethink this?

Other industry groups, such as the National Association of Broadcasters, the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, and various professionals have all stopped by to politely sugest to the FAA that, perhaps, the FAA HAS LOST ITS BLEEDIN’ MIND AND DOES NOT KNOW WHAT THE HECK IT IS TALKNG ABOUT.

What’s interesting for me is that this is yet another demonstration of how the various components of the Bush administration just don’t seem to ever speak to each other. During Katrina, the FCC outshone just about every other federal agency in the competence department. But as the FCC’s Katrina Report (and testimony from my friends in the wireless community who came down to help in the crisis) shows, there were huge problems getting the other government agencies to respect FCC authorized damage control teams and FCC licensed services. Meanwhile, we have the Patent and Trademark Office negotiating a major overhaul of broadcaster rights at a WIPO treaty, with apparently no involvement from the FCC or any other potentially impacted agency. The Chair of the Federal Trade Commission has announced it will set up its own task force on net neutrality — again without any apparent involvement of the FCC.

And that’s just the stuff in my own little corner of the world. Look around Washington these days and you see little effort by the Bush administration to require any kind of cooperation among the various agencies. We get overlap, paralysis and turf wars galore. But we don’t seem to be getting much done.

It’s not all bad, of course. Traditional relationships, like between the FCC and the National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) appear to be working just fine. But something is seriously wrong when the FAA just decides to issue a notice about all antenna structures in the United States, and apparently does not even think about picking up the phone first and calling someone at the FCC and saying “Hi there, we’re thinking of doing a rulemaking on stuff that impacts industries you closely regulate; can we get together and chat first so we don’t horribly embarass ourselves?”

Stay tuned . . . . .

How the FCC Made Star Trek Possible

, , , ,

Today marks the 40th Anniversary of Star Trek, now referred to as Star Trek: The Original Series (or just ST:TOS). I make no secret of my love for ST:TOS, and credit it with (among other things) imbuing me with a sense of idealism and optimism against the odds. But few realize how FCC regulation of broadcasting made the creation and syndication of Star Trek possible — and why deregulation has made it so much harder for something like Star Trek to hapen today.

Continue reading

Path to 9/11: KMRFSIA

, ,

In re: “The Path to 9/11”, the right-wing mockumentary loosely based on some actual events but with plenty of made-up shit to fill in “the space between the comercials”, I would like to say to ABC, Disney, and to all the political goons of any stripe attempting to capitalize on the upcoming anniversary of the horrible deaths of so many of our fellow citizens– although it must be said that the Disney/ABC goons in this instance are Republican goons — anyway, in the spirit of the Finno-Scots-Irish people I would like to say that ABC/Disney can kiss my royal Finno-Scots-Irish ass.

With a tip o’ the cap to Mike Moran, whose drunken eloquence at the Concert for New York City, which I watched on TV, was so wonderfully cathartic.

ABC Wins First Ever ToTSF “Sleaze Whiz” Award

As you might have heard, ABC will join the “Cynically Exploit 9-11 Crowd” and provide us with a “dramatization” of events that culminated in the attacks called The Road to 9-11. That wouldn’t win any awards, as just about everyone is doing something to cash in on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. What wins ABC special recognition, as reported in the San Jose Mercury is claiming to base the “dramtization” on the 9/11 Commission Report, then including a whole bunch of stuff not in the Report and fiercly denied by the historic participants. It gets sleazier when it turns out that (a) all the new “drama” stuff tilts toward making the Clintons and Dems generally look like wussy screw-ups interfering with out noble covert ops forces who could have “taken out” Osama before 9-11 happened; and (b) carefully pre-screening it to conservative pundits and bloggers to generate positive buzz, mobilize an army of defenders, and guarantee a huge audience share.

By happy coincidence for the Republicans and their true believer audience (who, thanks to Disney’s clever marketing strategy, will now watch this TV show in unprecedented droves), a depiction of the Clinton Administration and Democrats generally as standing in the way of our our heroic covert forces (portraying the Dems as such craven traitors to America they even refused to give the go ahead to our noble covert ops heroes to “take out” Osama Bin Laden over such silly qualms as the morality of assisination and operating cladestine ops on foreign soil — WUSSSES!!!!) is coming out when? Why, it’s coming out right before the mid-term elections! What a lucky break!

See, now this is the kind of multi-win sophisticated sleaze that rises above mere cynical exploitation or standard corporate suck-up to the powers in charge. It cries out for recognition! So please join me below as we give Disney/ABC the first ever Tales of the Sausage Factory “Sleaze Whiz” Award.

Continue reading

FCC loses a good one

, , , , , , , ,

Lest you think I only speak ill of FCC staff, I was quite sorry to see on Mike Marcus’ Spectrumtalk blog that Alan Scrime, Chief of the Policy and Rules Division of the Office of Engineering and Technology, is leaving the FCC to take a job with the Army close to his home in New Jersey.

In the time I’ve been working on unlicensed spectrum issues (which OET handles), Alan has always been a pleasure to work with. A smart fellow who has been just as interested in what the non-commercial folks are doing as he has been with the established players or well-funded start ups, Alan has also displayed considerable patience and willingness to explain things to non-technical folks such as myself.

Sorry to see Alan go, and wishing him luck with the Army.

Stay tuned . . . .

Christofascists on the march

,

I just finished reading Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming, the Rise of Christian Nationalism. It’s a short and scary book and I highly recommend it. Goldberg, a reporter for Salon, immersed herself in the Christofascist world over a period of a year, going to their churches, talking to leading preachers and ordinary “believers” in the pews, reading the works of their so-called theologians. She also documented Christofascist ties to the Bush administration, ties that affect everything from stem cell policy to choice of judicial nominees to the enormous ongoing wealth transfer (mostly from — no surprise here– “blue states” to “red states”) under the rubric of the Faith-Based Initiative.

Goldberg does not use the word Christofascism; that’s simply my preferred term for the phenomenon she discusses: a paranoid, anti-intellectual, patriarchal, hate-driven, war and death-loving syncretic cult, nominally Christian, that has an elaborate mythology and symbology derived from crackpot eschatology and an idiot-Disney invented history of the United States of America. This multifaceted cult, which boasts hundreds of prominent, sometimes competing, sometimes cooperating ayatollahs like Pat Roberston and Jerry Falwell, and tens of thousands of lesser clerics, claims George W. Bush (who swore an oath to preserve and defend the Constitution against all enemies) as an adherant, despite having the avowed goal of replacing our constitutional republic with a corporatist theocracy. “Christofascism” may not be the best term for the Christian Nationalist movement, but I can’t think of a better one, and since we’re all going to be bombarded with the Islamofascism “I-word” every day until either the Second Coming or the end of the war on terra (whichever comes first) anyway, I figure I might just as well trampoline off of it.

Goldberg’s tone is reportorial, God love her, but I can’t talk about this stuff in a neutral tone. Something about malevolent sanctimonious kitsch kinda brings out the invective from me.

Continue reading

Just When I Think They Can't Get Any More Patheticly Lame

, ,

I cannot lower my expectations enough for the advertising on the anti-network neutrality advertising. Behold the latest well reasoned argument from the cable industry!

“Net Neutrality is bad, because we tell you so.”

I’m the last to underestimate the effectiveness of industry ad campaigns at confusing the issue, but this just blows my mind with new levels of idiocy. Desperation has clearly set in.

Stay tuned . . . .