Harold – Page 88 – Wetmachine

ABC Wins First Ever ToTSF “Sleaze Whiz” Award

Harold September 7, 2006 February 24, 2013Tales of the Sausage Factory

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.

FCC loses a good one

Harold September 6, 2006 February 24, 2013Tales of the Sausage Factory

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 . . . .

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

Harold September 5, 2006 February 24, 2013Tales of the Sausage Factory

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 . . . .

How Broadcasters Make Lobbying Lemonade Out of National Catastrophe Lemons

Harold September 5, 2006 February 24, 2013Tales of the Sausage Factory

Jim Snider at New America Foundation has written an excellent piece extensively documenting how broadcasters leverage their response in national emergencies and support of charitable causes to get special regulatory goodies and rules that keep competitors out. You can dowload a copy here.

While in one sense not news to anyone in DC, most people are unaware how broadcasters shamelessly take the coverage of local charity events or other efforts (which (a) are local news and so worth doing anyway, and (b) other companies routinely do) and use them to justify many billions of dollars in privileges such as must-carry rights on cable systems and limiting the ability of rivals such as satellite radio or Low-Power FM to compete. A bit of advocacy expounding, and a few thoughts on Jim’s paper and policy recommendation, below.

Tiering, It's Not Just For Telcos Anymore

Harold September 1, 2006 February 24, 2013Tales of the Sausage Factory

Years ago, I used to spend a lot of time in ICANN-land. Happily, my contacts these days are pretty much limited to the occassional post-cards from friends.

But a recent contretemps caught my eye. Apparently new registry contracts will now allow price-tiering for names. As Milton Mueller at ICANNWatch observes, this raises similar worries as tiered internet access.

This is why Sascha Meinrath’s & Victor Pickard’s new paper on redefining net neutrality is important. Meinrath and Pickard make the very good point that the openess of the Internet rests on more than just residential access providers. Those concerned with the current fight to maintain net neutrality — as narrowly defined as preventing the last-mile access provider from defining the internet experience — should be aware of the need to protect other potential bottlenecks from emerging.

And, for us old timers, there is a certainly irony. Back in ye ancient days, when the “destroy the evil tld monopolist Network Solutions” [now Verisign the registry, not NetSol the registrar] crowd were backing ICANN, one of their great boogeyman arguments for ICANN regulation of registries was it would prevent tiered pricing of names. Some of us tried to explain how things like “agency capture” work, and that therefore such policies could change unless we inserted suitable checks and balances in ICANN to maintain accountability, but we were just lawyers and other useless policy types and they were the engineers who built the domain name system, so what did we know? (Bitter? Me? Why do you think I no longer spend time in ICANN-land?)

What I love most about reality, is how it will always turn around and bite you in the rear end if you decide to ignore it. Reality soooo does not care that you chose to be ignorant of things like economics and political science, any more than it cares when idiots in poli-sci decide they can dictate technology and try to make idiotic rules about blocking net gambling or blocking indecency or outlawing peer-2-peer. Reality doesn’t care. It just is.

Gotta love something that democratic.

Stay tuned . . . .

Not Only Will the Lion Lie Down With the Lamb, He Will Make Big Bucks Opening a Feed Store (While Still Running a Butcher Shop on the Side)

Harold August 30, 2006 February 24, 2013Tales of the Sausage Factory

Y’all remember how AT&T (under its old name SBC) launched over a hundred lobbyists into the Texas legislature to kill muni broadband in TX? How it tried to kill muni broadband in Indiana? Not just once, but twice?

Guess what? AT&T has now cut a deal to build a muni wifi system in Springfield, Il. The article quotes an AT&T spokescritter as saying that AT&T expects to close many more such deals, and will seek them out where it makes economic sense.

Whoa! What happened to all of that rhetoric about the brave incumbent telco capitalist captain of industry going eyeball to eyeball with the evil Socialist menace of a publically financed internet? Answer: increasingly, the incumbents have realized this is a losing issue for them and have decided to figure out how to make money out of it.

While I take this as the latest and most potent sign that the move to outright kill muni broadband has run out of steam, I think a note of caution is advisable as well. Some victory snark and reflections on the future challenges for both muni broadband and other forms of community-based broadband below.

Comcast Really Ought to Do Something About That Spam Blacklist Policy

Harold August 30, 2006 February 24, 2013Tales of the Sausage Factory

The San Jose Mercury News reports on yet another group blaklisted by Comcast’s anti-spam policy. This time, it was the venerable online community The WELL that got blocked, then had a devil of a time getting off the blacklist.

Having been temporarily blocked by Comcast myself, I can say that it is rather unnerving to find oneself cut off from a huge number of folks because you fit some email online profile (or, in the case of The Well, because a bad actor in your community created a problem). As I reported, my case was easily resolved, but The Well and others (such as afterdowningst.org) have run into trouble.

Yes, blacklists have a long tradition, going back to the old days when there were damn few of us online and cutting off someone’s access to your subscribers was unlikely to cause anyone any harm. Nowadays, when it is easy to spoof IP addresses and when getting blacklisted even for a short period of time can cause serious issues, companies should reexamine their policies. Given that Comcast is the largest residential broadband provider in the U.S., I really hope they reevaluate the usefulness of their blacklist policy ASAP.

They Chose to Praise Spectrum Ownership When They Should Have Buried It

Harold August 29, 2006 February 24, 2013Tales of the Sausage Factory

The Cato Institute a solid bastion of neo-conservative economic thought (i.e., I disagree with them, but they aren’t industry sock puppets) has released a paper by Dale Hatfield and Phil Weiser on the difficulty in creating a property regime in spectrum property.

This should have been a hard-hitting indictment of the “property school” and its belief (as advocated by such champions as Evan Kwerel) that a transition from the current “comand and control” allocation to a property rights regime offers a quick and easy way to get new spectrum services deployed, and we should therefore move as quickly as possible to adopt the “property” model instead of the “commons” model. (See my now old but still vaguely useful primer on the spectrum reform debate if you are wondering what these terms mean.)

Instead, it assumes that the benefits of a property regime are so obvious and well-proven that, regardless of the burden of devising a property regime, spectrum reformers need to “stay the course” and keep slogging ahead. After all, if we question the value of property rights in spectrum, the info commies win.

I happen to like both Dale and Phil and usually agree with what they write. In fact, I happen to agree with the central tenet of this paper: devising a true property-rights regime for spectrum raises more problems than advocates would like to believe. But I draw a rather different conclusion from their work. My conclusions (and a few trademark TotSF snarky observations on some of the hand-waving and rhetorical tricks used in the article) below.

Appears that Rose and Lloyd (and me) were right . . .

Harold August 28, 2006 February 23, 2012General, Spectrum, Tales of the Sausage Factory

A month or so back, I reported that Greg Rose and Mark Lloyd had written a study for the Center for American Progress concluding that incumbent wireless providers used spectrum auctions to block the mergence of new competitors. Then came the AWS auction, with its legion of bidders. �A ha!� Declared the Wall St. Journal and others in the anti-net neutrality, anti-regulatory, pro-spectrum property camp. �Look at how the market-based policies create competition! No need for regulation here!�

Turns out, not so much . . . . Either for new spectrum entrants or for broadband competition.

The Federal Trade Commission Gets in on Network Neutrality

Harold August 23, 2006 February 24, 2013Tales of the Sausage Factory

As widely reported, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Deborah Platt Majoras announced that the FTC will look at network neutrality. In the same paragraph, however, she also expressed her doubts on the need for network neutrality legislation. That, combined with her choice of forum (Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Aspen Summit; PFF is a vigorous opponent of NN), the FTC’s natural bias toward post-conduct remedies rather than prophylactic regulation, and Majoras’ decision to sign off on the Adelphia transaction without considering the voluminous evidence collected by the FCC make me suspect that the FTC will conclude that Congress should take no action and that antitrust solves everything.

A bit more analysis below.