Month: February 2014

New Alliance of Orgs To Promote WiFi As Totally Awesome.

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To calm myself from the news of the proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable by Comcast, I will return to my happy place — spectrum policy. Specifically, stuff that promotes unlicensed spectrum as totally awesome. (Sorry, I just saw the Lego Movie so now everything is awesome!)

Lost in the big news of the Comcast/TWC acquisition last week was the announcement of the launch of WiFi Forward. WiFi Forward brings a bunch of companies and organizations that use WiFi heavily — cable companies, tech companies, the American Library Association, Best Buy, and others (you can find the list here).  You can also watch this 3 minute news video by the Wall St. Journal which talks about the coalition (and the notable absence of Verizon and AT&T, despite the fact that they use WiFi fairly heavily).

Although the group is called “WiFi Forward,” it is about promoting unlicensed spectrum generally and not just WiFi or TV white spaces. However, try saying “unlicensed spectrum” to a random person and you get a blank look, whereas everyone knows about WiFi as the home of the Great Intelligence. OK, not the most positive example.

 

Totally Awesome Resources!

Of immediate relevance to advocates for more unlicensed spectrum is the Resource Page.  In particular, I recommend the report by Dr. Raul Katz on the contribution of unlicensed spectrum to the overall economy. For those unwilling to read the full report, a look at the Executive Summary or just this infographic gives the big headline — unlicensed spectrum (all of it, not just WiFi) provided $222 billion in economic value to the U.S. economy in 2013. That includes about $36 billion saved by consumers from having WiFi in their homes (and thus avoiding data overages and having access to cool stuff).

 

That’s a fairly big number. One worth keeping in mind when you see rather foolish statements about how the value of unlicensed spectrum is inherently limited. While George Ford (author of the piece) acknowledges that “both licensed and unlicensed spectrum have significant value to consumers,” the statement that “the value of spectrum commons is limited because of the poor incentives that go along with them” appears refuted by actual facts. (Part of the problem, of course, is that unlicensed spectrum is no more a “commons” than it is “property.” But explaining this unfortunate failure of metaphor and the intellectual traps that have resulted requires a much longer piece.)

 

Anyway, it would be a shame for WiFi Forward to get lost in the other news from last week.

 

Stay tuned . . .

Comcast/TWC Merger Explained By Taiwanese News Animation

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I will, eventually, have more to say about the Comcast’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC). My first reaction, I will admit, was pretty visceral. “My God! Aren’t you already freakin’ BIG ENOUGH Comcast?” But then, I realized that I needed to actually calm myself, and recall that bigness is not necessarily —

OH MY GOD!! YOU COMCAST PEOPLE HAVE NO LIMITS! YOU’RE LIKE SOME GIANT, COAX-TENTACLED CTHULHU-BEAST THAT KEEPS PROMISING TO DEVOUR US ALL BETWEEN 8 A.M. AND NOON BUT DOESN’T ACTUALLY GET AROUND TO DEVOURING US UNTIL AFTER 3 P.M. BECAUSE YOU GOT ‘STUCK IN TRAFFIC’ AND A PREVIOUS DEVOURING RAN LONGER THAN EXPECTED . . . .

Breathe, Harold, breathe. Think policy. [pause for calm] Several folks have posted excellent policy analysis, starting with my Public Knowledge colleague Jodie Griffin in this blog post here to this excellent piece by David Karr to this more general expression of antitrust concern by Paul Krugman —

COMCAST IS ALREADY BUYING A POWER COMPANY! A FREAKING POWER COMPANY!!! YOU ALREADY ARE DOMINATING VIDEO, DATA AND VOICE AND YOU ARE BUYING A POWER COMPANY AND RUN ALARM SYSTEMS AND ARE PROBABLY GOING TO IMPLANT CHIPS IN OUR BRAINS SO WE CAN STREAM XFINITY DIRECT TO OUR EYEBALLS AND —

As you can see, I’m still having a bit of trouble getting over my visceral reaction to the shear size and scope of this deal. So while I am calming down and getting ready to write my Insanely Long Field Guide To the Comcast/TWC Merger, I will simply let the good people at Taiwan’s fine Tomo News capture the moment. Because nothing really says “Comcast/TWC” better than giant robots and tasers.

Stay tuned . . . .

Broadband and Burgernomics: Is the Monthly “Netflix Rankings” The New Big Mac Index?

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Some years ago, The Economist developed an informal metric for determining whether currencies were overvalued or undervalued based on purchasing power. They looked at the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac in the target country currency as compared to the price in the U.S. This “Big Mac Index” works on a theory that currencies should converge on the cost of a standardized basket of goods, and Big Macs are an internationally standardized product using pretty standard food goods available locally, which makes them the ideal metric for comparison over time. (Let us set aside for the moment various tweaks for low wages.)

 

As explained by The Economist:”Burgernomics was never intended as a precise gauge of currency misalignment, merely a tool to make exchange-rate theory more digestible. Yet the Big Mac index has become a global standard, included in several economic textbooks and the subject of at least 20 academic studies.”

 

I thought of this when reading this piece by Jon Brodkin on the decline over time of several major broadband providers in the monthly Netflix Rankings. As reported extremely well and in great depth by Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm (see here, here and here) and others (see, for example, this long and good piece by Jon Brodkin), a lot of factors go into how well or how poorly your ISP performs — particularly on high-bandwidth applications like video. With no standards by which to judge performance and with variability a factor over time, how can the consumer tell if its really worth it to shell out big bucks for top-tier speeds on your ISP when the video you want may still behave unreliably?

 

Then it occurred to me that the monthly ranking by Netflix of how well its service works on the major ISPs may work as the new Broadband Burgernomics. As I explain below, performance over time allows people to compare relative ISP performance (both the ISP’s performance over time and its comparative performance to competitors – if you are lucky enough to live in a market with good competitors). As with currencies, make a rough estimate as to whether or not the ISP’s speed and performance claims are ‘overvalued’ (i.e., the speed tier purchased does not deliver to the consumer a consistent experience the consumer would expect for the stated speed), accurate, or ‘undervalued’ (i.e., the speed tier purchased delivers to the consumer an experience better than what the consumer would expect based on the stated speed.)

 

I want to stress this doesn’t tell us whether the ISP is doing anything illegal or immoral. It doesn’t tell us anything about blocking or throttling. It also doesn’t tell us whose “fault” it is that performance drops — at least not for month-to-month variations.  But, as I explain below, using the same logic as “Burgernomics,” the “Netflix Rankings” index, taken over time, should provide a reasonable rough indicator for consumers as to whether or not their ISP can make that higher speed tier worth the money for the upgrade, and a possible indicator to policymakers and investors about deeper changes in the market.

 

Before all you carriers and the usual suspects who go apoplectic on the subject of ISP performance metrics and the various policy issues freak out, read my full reasoning below . . .

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The NSA & other USIAN “Surveillance” entities are actually

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in the business of Control, not the business of Watching.

The two go hand in hand. See, for example, this essay by Cory Doctorow

For courage, take a moment to read the transcript of the late, great Pete Seeger’s testimony before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. “Who I associate with is none of your business.” Really, read it, it’s inspiring and eye-opening.

I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.

The NSA “metadata” sweeps are all about collecting exactly the kind of information Seeger mentions, and it leads, inevitably to the kind of state harassment and terrorizing that Cory Doctorow wrote about.

Call your representatives today.