Wall St. J. reports the court was fairly deferential to the FCC’s predictive judgment. That’s good. But it would be nice if the D.C. Circuit were less of a crap shoot. What makes the FCC’s “predictive judgment” better on program access and on inside wiring than on cable ownership or telco forbearance? Makes it rather Hell to do policy one way or the other.
Stay tuned….
This is five minutes of live demo and eight minutes of discussion at an Under the Radar conference last spring. It is a very info-dense presentation before specialized industry insiders. (There are lots of side references all around to Google and others.) The intense Enterprise and VC jargon is quite meaningful and right, not random bullshit. I am particularly struck by the discussion of use cases like yesterday’s Project Collaboration and Saturday’s Operations Center, although I think the emphasis on high-value uses cases is misleading. (Under the Radar is all about qualifying truly new tech scenarios: high-value or large-new-market uses always get the first attention by the investors. That doesn’t mean that less extreme scenarios are not just as relevant for the people involved in them.) I also like the characterization they arrive at in which hosted/cloud/Software-as-a-Service is equated with repeatable off-the-shelf workflows, while VPN/behind-the-firewall/custom installations are equated with specialized internal crown-jewels applications.
Yesterday I posted an example of a Virtual Operations Center, which is turning out to be one of the classic enterprise use cases for virtual worlds today. Above is a tiny blurb representing another, more common case: Project Collaboration. Not a great video, but in its short 1.5 minutes it touches on how other uses cases such Operations or Training tend to merge into or be utilized within Project Collaboration.
David Smith made this video a year ago, showing how you could have:
I saw the movie Julie & Julia last week & liked it very much. It interweaves the story of how Julia Child, the wife of a USian diplomat stationed in Paris, came to write Mastering the Art of French Cooking with the story of how Julie Powell, a twenty-nine year old woman who worked on a telephone hotline for people affected by the World Trade Center attack, came to prepare all 524 dishes in Child’s book over the course of a year and blog about doing it.
Over coffee the morning after seeing the film I noodled around the internets reading reviews and was surprised by a theme that cropped up in many of them–that the parts of the film featuring Meryl Streep as Julia Child were engaging, as was their subject, while the parts featuring Amy Adams as Julie Powell were a bore, and their subject (Powell) was at best negligible, and at worst, a narcissistic leech. Many of these reviews (some of them written by “professionals” on major sites, others by bloggers on less well-traveled sites) were distinctly snotty in tone. Roger Ebert, for example, started his review
“Did you ever want to take a three-day bus trip sitting next to Julia Child?”
and the guy at Cinema de Merde entitled his review “Get your own life” and summarized Julie and Julia thus:
[It compares] a modest woman of inner resources who accomplishes something monumental through hard work, and another who feels a lack in herself because she’s not as accomplished as she thinks she should be, and ends up accomplishing something entirely trivial that is made possible by our culture of paying attention to meaningless personal drama.
Robert Wilonsky’s review in the Village Voice is called “In praise of the Julia half of Julie and Julia”; in it he praises Streep & Child and deposits mild scorn on Powell (while tossing a crumb or two to Adams). In SFGate, Mick LaSalle goes gaga over Streep/Child and says things about Powell that I consider too churlish to repeat here.
Unlike many reviewers, I liked both the Julia story and the Julie story; I liked the entire movie, and indeed I liked both women.
Below, a few observations on the Julie/Julia story (but not a movie review proper) intermixed with some grand philosophical musings on The Meaning of Life, Snotty Reviews, Reactions to War, George Plimpton, My Own Delusions & Narcissistic Compulsions & What They Have Cost Me and Others, Roger Banister, and Writing.
UPDATE: Since originally posting this I’ve made a minor edits for clarity and emphasis. I may make a few more.
Next week, the D.C. Circuit will hear oral argument on the FCC’s 2007 decision to extended the program access rules another five years. What surprises me is how few people seem to have considered the possibility that the D.C. Circuit will reverse this decision and vacate the rule, as they did last month with the 30% cable horizontal ownership limit.
Part of that is the way people tend to make analysis based on conventional wisdom. “Everyone knows” that without the program access rules, competitive providers would be toast because the largest cable incumbents can control programming, just as “everyone knows” that we don’t need a 30% cable ownership limit because the MVPD market is so wildly competitive that the largest cable incumbents can not possibly influence cable programming. As Comcast and Cablevision pointed out to the DC Circuit, however, the conventional wisdom in this regard is not entirely consistent. If, as the court found last month as a matter of law, the MVPD market is wildly competitive and consumers switch willy-nilly from one to the other rendering it impossible for a cable provider to block a rival programming network from emerging, how on Earth can cable programmers below the 30% limit exercise foreclosure?
There are, of course, sound answers to that in both law and economics, although the biggest single deciding factor is likely to be the absence from the panel of Douglas Ginsburg, a man who believes membership in the Federalist Society substitutes for an actual understanding of economics and has published an academic article yearning for the “good old days” when the courts made economic regulation unconstitutional and concluding that courts should not defer to agency efforts to create “synthetic competition.” (An offense in the eyes of the Gods of the Marketplace.) I believe the panel is Sentelle, Griffith and Kavanaugh, which is not exactly good news for the program access rules but isn’t death on wheels like Ginsburg (or Williams or Edwards). Sentelle and Griffith, who were both on the imaginary competition outweighs real competition decision back in June overturning the FCC’s decision not to grant Verizon a forbearance petition, and Kavanaugh, who was on the cable ownership panel and therefore presumably agrees that switching costs aren’t real and cable operators are in such fear of youtube clips they would never make programming decisions based on affiliation. On the flip side, Kavanaugh actually wrote the somewhat more deferential special access opinion from July. Unfortunately for those who rely on program access, none of the judges who affirmed the Inside Wiring Order are on this panel.
Of course, there is something to be said for actual law and analysis of the underlying FCC Order, even in the D.C. Circuit. So below, I shall provide a brief outline of the program access rules, how we end up in court, the likely arguments, and what happens if the D.C. Cir. overturns the rules (which even I give a low probability to, but do not discount — especially given the panel) — including why that might actually be the best thing to happen to cable regulation in the long run.
More below . . .
N.B. One is the loneliest number, and it’s not even prime! Suck on that, France!
Quiet Earth has some posters for the maybe kinda possibly Neuromancer movie that may or may not manifest itself in 2011, depending on how the greed probability waveforms collapse. Anyhow, one of them seems oddly bee obsessed (well, OK, wasp obsessed, which I vaguely recall has some relevance to the book someplace…). But it just reminded me of another oddly-bee obsessed novel.
As folks in broadband policy land know, thanks to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the FCC needs to present a National Broadband Plan to Congress by February 2010. The FCC has been holdng a bunch of workshops on various aspects of the plan as part of the inputs. I spoke last week at the Benchmarks Workshop. As I remarked to the sparse crowd, you can tell this is the deep uber-wonk stuff that only a handful of us find terribly interesting and vitally important while the rest of the world zones out and watches videos in their minds. For the short version, I include my latest “Five Minutes With Harold Feld.” Those more interested can watch the entire panel or read my written statement here. My more snarky comments (including my assessment of the panel) below.
More below . . .
