He’s had it with you people! He’s tired of you people!
Just like Ann Romney in 2012!
I guess us people are just too irritating.
Stay tuned, we’re working on something more substantive. It does take us people a while to get ourselves organized, sometimes.
[Editor’s Note: Because I’ve published books under three middle names and created a variety of fictional “John [$variable] Sundman” personae, I find myself in the unusual position of stating that the obituary that follows is for a quite real person, my father, who died last Monday. The newspaper obituary is here. A longer version follows below the fold, with a few comments by me at the end of it. You’ll note that my father’s father was also named John Sundman. I suggest we blame him for any confusion — jrs.]
John E. Sundman
Dad in green polo shirt at LBI.
No one outside the small world of telecom policy cared much that the Federal Shutdown would close the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Other than the hope that closing the FCC would open the door for Joss Whedon to slip in some full frontal nudity and cussing on the next episode of Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D., most people don’t think of the FCC as having much impact on their lives.
It turns out, however, that the shut down of the FCC may very well delay the sale of new tech toys scheduled for release this Christmas season. And I don’t just mean the obviously FCC things like new cellphones. Every toy with a computer chip, every TV set, every microwave oven, and just about everything else that produces “radio frequency emissions” needs an FCC certification before it can get shipped to stores for sale.
Why? Because things that draw a lot of electric current that oscillates rapidly, like a computer chip, produces radio interference. If you have something that shoots short bursts of high powered radio waves, like your microwave oven (aka “radarrange oven” for you spectrum trivia buffs), you want to make sure the device won’t ‘leak’ into neighboring spectrum and cause interference with things like cordless phones. Also, if your cell phone or wifi chip gets the power jacked up too high, it can microwave your ear off or something.
So to keep your microwave from interfering with your cellphone, and to keep your cellphone from microwaving your face, federal law requires the FCC to certify all devices that produce radio waves (either intentionally for communication or just incident to use). Most of the actual testing is done by outside laboratories, and the process as a whole is fairly well streamlined. But with no one at the FCC to review the lab reports and process the paper work, the backlog is starting to mount and all the tech toys for this year’s Christmas season are stuck in Santa’s workshop, aka storehouses Singapore, waiting for certification so they can get to U.S. stores in time.
The FCC on average processes a little over 1000 applications for certification a month. They process them in the order they arrive. But not only is no one at home right now processing the ones that were already filed, you can’t file new ones. If you are a manufacturer, you now have absolutely no idea if your product will be on shelves on Black Friday. Worse, your competitor’s product could be there a week or two weeks ahead of yours, getting all the reviews and becoming The Hot Tech Toy of The Season while your product languishes on loading docks.
And it’s even worse for us Jewish people. Chanukah hits at Thanksgiving this year. Thousands of disappointed little Jewish boys and girls will be stuck with all the Uncool Last Year’s Models, while all their non-Jewish friends can still get the latest models on the 24th of December. Our last Thanksgivingukkah for the next millennium, ruined by the federal shutdown!
Will this be the Shutdown That Ruins Christmas? Or will the spirit of peace on Earth and goodwill to all men come back to Washington, and get those hardworking, lovable little federal elves back to the FCC branch office at Santa’s workshop in time?
Stay tuned . . . .
The Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA) became the latest trade association demanding that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the states stop working to solve the Rural Call Completion problem. IIA also called for state and federal agencies to stop working on Next Generation 9-1-1 issues, apparently deciding the recent report by CalNena about the declining reliability of mobile 9-1-1 location information was nothing to worry about. The new report preemptively called for an end to any effort to deal with the growing problem of caller i.d. spoofing and related vulnerabilities in voice-over-IP (VOIP) services. Finally, IIA demanded we eliminate the “legacy rules” that limit the ability of the government or companies to read your call records. You can read the report here..
Granted, the report didn’t say that explicitly. Instead, the IIA repeated what has become the standard industry refrain about how the key to transitioning our phone system from traditional technology to Internet protocol (IP) and wireless is to totally eliminate all federal or state authority over the new phone services. But it amounts to the same thing. A demand that we end the FCC’s authority under “legacy phone regulations” that allow it to address Rural Call Completion translates rather directly into consigning Rural America to telephone purgatory — especially when you give no indication of what should replace it.
The IIA Report is only the latest in what appears to be a never-ending series of white papers, opinion pieces and typical Washington blather on how the bestest thing we can do to transition the phone system is get rid of “legacy regulation.” Because although the market is apparently already so totally going there that we don’t need to worry about the 100 Million people and millions of small business that rely on copper (the one third of the market that still has a traditional copper line), pernicious legacy regulation is sadly holding things back so much we must eliminate it right away. Try not to think about this contradiction too hard.
If the IIA talking points sound familiar, it’s because they are exactly the same as those used by Verizon to explain why Voice Link was just the medicine Fire Island needed to recover from Sandy. If we want the PSTN Transition to get the same reaction that Fire Island residents gave Voice Link, by all means let us continue down this path. If we would prefer to avoid a crash and burn that makes the opening days of the Affordable Care Act look like smooth sailing, I highly recommend industry groups like IIA stop trying to leverage this for regulatory arbitrage and start coming up with some real proposals on how to upgrade our policies while we upgrade our phone system.
More below . . . .
I just pledged $7 to Jeremy Bornstein’s kickstarter project.
My reasons for so-doing after the fold.
The Tea Party/Libertarian/Generally Anti-Net Neutrality Crowd were dancing in the streets after the network neutrality oral argument and declaring total victory! This seems not only premature, but short-sighted. Until the oral argument, the anti-net neutrality crowd had predicted that the court would utterly reject the FCC’s efforts to extend its authority to broadband access on either statutory or First Amendment grounds. But, as I noted previously, the entire panel seemed comfortable with Section 706 providing some level of authority over broadband access. Also, no one seemed terribly interested in the First Amendment argument except Judge Silberman. So – given the usual caveats that one can never really know how things will come out after oral argument – it seems the FCC will come out of this with some authority after all.
OTOH, it is certainly fair to say that two of the three judges on the panel indicated the “Common Carrier Prohibition” (aka, the thing Tatel made up in the Data Roaming Case) applied to at least the “no discrimination” rule and possibly the “no blocking rule.” As the two together constitute the heart of network neutrality protections, getting those struck down would certainly constitute a big win for anti-net neutrality folks. It would also create a fine muddle of confusion around the scope of the FCC’s overall authority.
There are, however, a range of possible options and outcomes that could still happen, ranging from the unlikely extreme of total affirmance for the FCC (if Rogers persuades one of her colleagues) to total reversal on some other grounds (if Silberman persuades one of his colleagues on First Amendment or Administrative Procedure Act (APA) grounds). I explore these (and what they might mean for the long term) below . . . .
In an article called “Why Verizon and AT&T Are More Innovative Than ‘The Left’ Thinks,” Economist Jeff Eisenach makes some observations on his ascendancy to head the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) new Center For Internet, Communications and Technology Policy. Among these, Jeff says that I would attribute Comcast’s effort to block BitTorrent back in ’08 as motivated by a desire to leverage their broadband market power to protect video. “That’s the story Harold Feld would apply to Comcast and BitTorrent. I think it’s far-fetched to believe that Comcast thought BitTorrent was a competitive threat.”
Except, of course, I said exactly the opposite in this blog post back in 2008 when Comcast filed its full disclosure document with the FCC. What I actually said was: “it appears to me that Comcast did not block P2P for anticompetitive reasons.”
This did not, of course, make Comcast’s conduct acceptable. As I went on to explain:
“Rather than invest in upgrading its network, Comcast opted for the cheapest solution from its perspective without waiting for significant congestion to occur. It used the Sandvine equipment to block (“delay”) P2P transfers and (according to the Florida AG) targeted the top 1000 users per month, no matter what capacity these users actually consumed. This provided an effective means (from Comcast’s perspective) for managing potential congestion, even if it sucked rocks from a consumer perspective.”
While I like Jeff, this does not look like the sort of rigorous research one would hope for from a scholar of Jeff’s caliber and AEI generally – if they want to be taken seriously.
This brings me to my broader point. While I’m flattered that Jeff Eisenach regards me as the face of the ‘Left,’ and I enjoy the opportunity to tweak him over this, it highlights a broader problem among neo-conservative economists (or, as we might generalize, the ‘Right’). They have stopped listening to people who disagree with them. As a result, they keep saying the same thing over and over again – largely to each other and their Republican groupies.
I explore this a bit below . . . .
One of the more common and frustrating problems in Policyland is when a debate over something vital and important gets hijacked for broader agendas. Or, as we call this in Washington, any day of the week on any issue.
Case in point, AT&T’s much debated proposal to do some form of trial or pilot program (or series of same) to move forward as part of AT&T’s plan to upgrade its networks from traditional TDM-based copper to VOIP in some spots and to retire copper in favor of wireless only in other places. This debate over whether to conduct trials has become the proxy war for AT&T and its allies who want carte blanche to move forward with the conversion without much regulatory supervision (and use the conversion to eliminate most regulatory oversight) on the one hand, and those who see the the conversion of the PSTN primarily as a bid by AT&T to eliminate all regulatory oversight on the other.
The problem with the usual fun and games is that, as anyone following the Fire Island Voice Link Debacle should realize, this is much too important to play around with the usual fun and games. This stuff needs to actually work. Meanwhile, FCC Staff, who are actually doing their job, get crapped on by both sides as either standing in the way of progress by moving too slowly or being handmaidens to AT&T for moving at all.
My PK Colleague Jodie Griffen tried to make this point politely a few weeks ago by expressing our disappointment with AT&T’s failure to put forward a substantive detailed proposal, and providing some general principles for what we actually need to see in a real proposal. I am going to be much more blunt: we need to stop dicking around on this. AT&T needs to actually put in a real proposal that passes the laugh test or stop pretending this is an actual effort to gather real information. On the flip side, opponents of AT&T’s deregulatory efforts need to stop thinking that conducting any kind of trial is tantamount to totally deregulating the phone system so it must be resisted at all costs.
More ranting, and the kind of trials I think we need to start doing, below . . . . Continue reading
At long last! After nearly 3 years, a panel of the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (or, as we legal folks abbreviate it, the D.C. Circuit) heard oral argument in Verizon’s appeal of the FCC’s “network neutrality” rules. And believe me, after spending the month of August refighting the same annoying retransmission fights of the last 10 years, there is nothing I wanted more than to sit for two hours watching other people re-arguing the same arguments around network neutrality that we have argued for the last ten years — it’s like Groundhog Day for policy wonks.
You can listen to the 2+ oral argument here. I have a shorter and less snarky summary on the PK Blog. But for you fellow telecom wonks who want the gory details with a healthy side order of snark directed at Judges Tatel and Silberman, see below . . . .
As regular readers know, Verizon and I have had considerable differences about Verizon’s plan to replace the copper phone network on Fire Island destroyed by Superstorm Sandy. Today, Verizon acknowledged that customers do not find Voice Link an adequate substitute for traditional copper-based phone and DSL. Verizon will deploy FIOS to Fire island by next Memorial Day, offering voice and broadband (but not TV — everyone on Fire Island already has satellite and offering cable programming would seriously drive up the cost). Verizon will continue to offer Voice Link as a less expansive alternative for those who want it.
I’m pleased that Verizon has stepped up and recognized that customers just did not regard Voice Link as a substitute service for a traditional copper line — no matter how much Verizon at first tried to tell them otherwise. I’m also pleased because this is exactly what I asked Verizon to do back in May — replace copper with FIOS and offer Voice Link as a cheaper alternative to those who don’t want to upgrade to fiber. Which leads to the first important lesson from this: Always Listen To Harold — it will make your life ever so much easier and save us all so much needless wasted time and effort.
In the category of lessons that might actually stick, however, I will note once again how critically important having a state commission providing oversight and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) providing oversight proved to be. Without these important public forums to provide a focus for these complaints, and without the threat of regulatory backlash, no one would have any reason to believe that customers were unhappy and Verizon could have simply forced them to take whatever it wanted to provide. Instead, people stood up for themselves and forced Verizon to respond.
As we finish the series finale of the summer sitcom That Darned Voice Link, I reflect below on how we all learn some very important lessons . . .
