Life In The Sausage Factory

The mechanics of how Washington works

A Pocket Guide For The WCIT-12

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So here I am in Dubai, attending the World Conference on International Telecommunications (#WCIT or #WCIT12) of the International Telecommunications Union (#ITU). The good folks at the ITU are webcasting the Plenary Sessions (the official part where the countries vote). You can tune in here (archives of live caption transcripts here). As you might expect, the WCIT has its own specialized vocabulary which can make following all this rather difficult. I have therefore prepared an impromptu and very incomplete glossary of the acronyms and peculiar phrases of the WCIT for the benefit of folks trying to follow along.

Disclaimer: I am an advisory member of the U.S. delegation, but nothing in here is an official statement of U.S. Del. I’m offering this for information purposes only.

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Why California Will Sit Out The National Debate On Shutting Off the Phone System — Heckuva Job Governor Brownie!

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In the last two months, AT&T’s announcement that it will convert its existing traditional phone system to an Internet Protocol (IP) based network and the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy have galvanized the telecom policy world. One would think the state of California would figure prominently in this discussion, and that people in California would have a huge vested interest in the outcome of these discussion. For example, given our newfound interest in disaster preparedness for IP networks in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, California (which, I’m told, has the occasional wildfire, deluge, mudslide or earthquake which causes power and telecom outages) might want to hold their own hearings and develop their own state plan and state standards. Similarly, with both AT&T and Verizon (both service providers in California) announcing they are replacing rural copper with wireless and converting their old-style phone networks to IP, you would think California would want to have some say in how these companies (and other IP network providers) serve the customers of their state.

Sadly for the people of California, you will not have that opportunity. All decisions on these matters relative to you will be left entirely to the private sector, or will take place in Washington D.C. Why? Because on September 28, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law S.B. 1161. This law, drafted by the fine people at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and introduced by Senator Alex Padilla, prohibits any agency of the state of California from regulating “voice over IP” or “Internet enabled service” (text of law here) (More on ALEC and its role in drafting the law here, here, and here). While this primarily focuses on the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC), the law prohibits “any department, agency or political subdivision of the state” from doing anything to regulate VOIP or IP-based services.

How does this relate to Hurricane Sandy, emergency preparedness, and the conversion to all IP networks? I explain below . . .

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This Is Why Policyland Is Complicated

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Yesterday, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski circulated a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to address the problem of high phone rates charged to inmates and their families.  For those unfamiliar with this issue, many state prisons team with telecom providers to charge outrageous phone rates, sometimes exceeding a dollar a minute, for inmates to call family. Since these calls are collect, the burden falls on the inmates family, who are often poor. For too many, the weekly or monthly choice is whether to pay to talk to a son or daughter (or spouse, or father or mother) behind bars or whether to have enough to eat or pay for needed medication. This phone gouging is not only cruel, it is also bad policy. Just about all research on preventing recidivism shows that the more contact and support someone in jail receives from their family and community, the less likely they are to return to crime. So from a societal standpoint, we would want to do everything to encourage prison inmates to stay in tough with family.

As you might imagine from the above, I regard the current practices as cruel and abusive of the most helpless. This is literally a case where, as the Bible commands us, “suffer not the oppression of the widow, the orphan, the stranger or the poor.” (Zach 7:10). If ever there was an “unjust and unreasonable rate or practice” this surely qualifies. I cannot praise Genachowski enough for acting on this.

Also yesterday, Genachowski circulated a draft order to conclude the pending review of media ownership. He proposes to entirely lift the television/radio cross-ownership limits and to permit newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership in the top 20 markets.

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Open Letter To Congress: Please Do Not Try For A Grand Bargain When “Competence” Still Eludes You.

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Dear Congress:

Please solve the Fiscal Cliff, but please don’t try for any “Grand Bargain.” Frankly, the fact that you can even suggest with a straight face that this is the time for a total rewrite of not just the tax code, but just about every major social program on which Americans rely, is a good indicator that you have absolutely no business trying to make decisions like this at the moment.  Like texting while drunk or Tweeting while in a rage, I know this seems like a really good idea. Worse, all your buddies in the media keep egging you on, telling you to “think big” and “show leadership.” Do not listen to them. Remember when your former best friend told you that drunk text to you coworkers was “outrageous man, do it!” or when your Tweeps kept saying “yeah, you totally tell it like it is!” And then when you came back later you realized you had totally embarrassed yourself? The media is not your friend here.

Just solve the fiscal cliff problem then go home for Xmas break. Get rested, maybe even laugh a little at yourself for all the ridiculous and crazy insults you shouted about the people you need to negotiate with, then come back in January ready to do the real work.

Still don’t believe me? Meet me below . . .

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How Antitrust Enforcement And Pro-Competitive Regulation Encourage Investment, Encourage Innovation, Enhance Spectrum Efficiency And All That Other Good Stuff Despite CW To Contrary.

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In the past month, to the complete surprise of just about every analyst and industry watcher, foreign investors spent the equivalent of $25 billion to invest in competing carriers T-Mobile and to acquire control of  Sprint and ClearWire. AT&T has announced a whole bunch of network upgrades such as repurposing its 2G spectrum, clearing up the interference in the WCS band, and a seemingly endless stream of license acquisitions. While the last is perhaps not so unusual, U.S. Cellular has likewise been spending money to coble together a broader footprint using the less—than—stellar—but—better—than–nothing 700 MHz A block.

Quite a turnaround from the start of 2011, when the industry appeared on a glide-path for a duopoly. Last year, T-Mo parent Deutsche Telekom (DT) was looking for a U.S. exit, AT&T and Verizon seemed more focused on buying out competitors than on developing the spectrum they already held, cable operators were giving up whatever plans they had to enter the market, and competing carriers couldn’t find financing to build out networks or pick up licenses in the secondary market. So what happened?

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have made clear over the last two years that (a) we will have 4 national carriers, and (b) the FCC cares about ensuring enough spectrum access to keep Sprint and T-Mobile (and hopefully other competitors) viable. Contrary to all conventional wisdom, two years of FCC regulation like data roaming and special access reform, combined with antitrust enforcement around AT&T/T-Mo and Verizon/SpectrumCo, stimulates investment in the wireless industry and forces companies like AT&T and Verizon to get serious about developing the spectrum they need and ditching the spectrum they don’t need on the secondary market.

Does that blow your mind? Is that just all freaky and too much for you to handle in a neo-con policy world that worships The Gods of the Marketplace and can’t tell the difference between a “competitive market” and a “deregulated market?” If you think you can handle the wisdom, pilgrim, then see my explanation below. . . .

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Turning Off The Phone System? What Do You Mean We’re Turning Off The Phone System?

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A few weeks ago I went to a fascinating gathering of a few dozen academics, policy wonks, and others from the U.S.  and elsewhere to talk about the end of the phone system. While by no means a unanimous consensus, a very solid majority considered the phone system obsolete and ready for the scrap heap. This will come as a surprise to those of you who called home on Mother’s Day or who thanked God for a call center number when your broadband connection went down. But in fact, most of you are probably not using a phone service but a “phone service,” so we are half-way to shutting down the actual phone system anyway.

 

For about a year now, folks in the nerdiest, geekiest, obscurest reaches of Policyland and Wonkdom have been talking about how to turn off the phone service and replace it with “phone service.” For those of you enjoying “phone service” from the likes of cable companies or cell phone providers, you may wonder why this matters. Sure, Grandma may finally need to replace that princess phone, but other than that, who cares? As is so often the case, however, these technical issues matter quite a bit in the real world – but you won’t notice until waaaay too late to make a difference. (Unless you keep abreast of these things by reading this blog.)

 

In the best case scenario, we shift over to an all digital network free from antiquated laws and policies that stifle innovation and needlessly increase cost to consumers. In the worst case scenario, your phone becomes an utterly unreliable overpriced service that doesn’t guarantee that you can communicate with someone on another phone network because the two networks are having a “peering dispute” and won’t exchange traffic. What actually happens is anyone’s guess at this point, but the recent effort to totally deregulate “phone service” in California gives us something of a preview.

 

More below . . . .

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CISPA Passes House, But I See Reasons For Optimism — Lessons From 2006 And How to COPE With A House Defeat.

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In the face of a remarkably successful public outcry, the House Republican leadership moved up the vote on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) by a full day and amended it to make it even more awful. While obviously not a good thing, I see a lot of positive signs for the future fight.

Why? Because CISPA backers faced serious signs of opposition — enough so that they moved up the vote to avoid further R defections. By the end of yesterday, the number of Rs committed to opposition had grown from 2 (Barton and Paul) to 28. That sounds small, but the trend was rapidly accelerating in the wake of the Tea Party uprising on this. Meanwhile, the White House veto threat combined with the civil liberties outcry from the left help shore up Democratic resistance. While it did not prove sufficient to prevail in this round, it will prove extremely important as we roll on to the Senate.

In many ways, the situation here reminds me of when Congress considered the Communications Opportunity Enhancement Act of 2006 (COPE). Among other things, COPE would have prohibited the FCC from adopting significant Net Neutrality rules (which everyone at the time actually assumed the FCC had the authority to do, so opponents wanted legislation to limit that authority). Almost exactly six years ago, we suffered a similar defeat in the House. Then, as now, I saw good reasons for optimism that we will ultimately prevail. In fact, our situation then was much weaker than the situation now.

I explore some of the reasons to believe that we can continue to ramp up the fight against CISPA in the Senate and ultimately prevent passage of either CISPA or its equally- nasty-but-for-different-reasons Senate version, the Cybersecurity Act of 2012. (While I appreciate the White House veto threat, I prefer not to rely on it.). But before I dig into any detail, let me repeat what I said 6 years ago when COPE passed out of Committee despite the effort of grassroots activists on the left and right to stop it:

There’s a lesson here . . . . YOU CAN’T OUTSOURCE CITIZENSHIP. You can’t let “the tech companies” or even “the consumer advocates” or anyone speak for you. Citizenship carries responsibilities that go beyond the ritual of voting every two years. But when citizens wake up and speak up, and speak to each other, they find — to their surprise — they are strong. They find they have power. And they find that being a citizen may take hard work, but it is so, so, SO much better and more satisfying than being a couch potato. As the great Jewish sage Hillel said: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I? If not me then who? If not now, when?”

More on the current situation below . . . .

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The Day The Public Interest Died: Media Access Project Shuts Its Doors After 40 Years of Public Service

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Outside of our small world of telecom wonkery, few will notice that my old employer, The Media Access Project, announced that it will cease operations on May 1. After 40 years of fighting to protect the public interest, including playing a pivotal role in stoping the deregulation of media ownership rules in 2003 and training a generation of public interest advocates, MAP ran out of money. In fact, according to the email, it will need to hold a fundraiser to retire its debt.

I know I should take this opportunity to eulogize MAP as an institution and sing the praises of its leader for the past 35 or so years, Andrew Jay Schwartzman. But I need to vent first. All you Liberals and Progressives with Serious Money who piss and moan about how the Koch Brothers and other conservatives with money have transformed this country by funding all kinds of conservative advocacy groups and think tanks — shut up. I was at MAP for 9 years and it was incredibly, painfully difficult to get people to understand why having a law firm in DC to advocate for the right policy at the Federal Communications Commission or bring cases challenging these arcane policy issues like how many television stations can one company own or whether we should allow Comcast to block BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer applications mattered. Many potential funders were too pure to fund anything that looked too much like inside the Beltway advocacy.

If you don’t fund progressive advocacy, it dies. If you are too pure to fight inside the Beltway, you lose. You cede the battlefield to folks who care a lot less about being chaste and pure and above the fray and who care a lot more about persuading policymakers and the country to adopt their vision of what’s right. So either pony up with the cash or get the policy you deserve. But please do not bitch about how awful it is that people with a vison for America you find revolting are willing to spend “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors” succeed while you prattle on about not wanting to “create dependencies” and how advocates need to find “sustainable models for funding” other than relying on funders — while simultaneously not compromising themselves by taking corporate money.

OK, enough ranting.  Some personal reminiscences and appreciations below . . . .

 

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AT&T, Anger Management and Spectrum Legislation

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Based on recent statements, it’s hard to tell whose angrier at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and its Chair, Julius Genachowski: AT&T’s Upper Management or the House Commerce Committee Republicans. Mere mention of Genachowski’s name converts House Commerce Committee Republicans, such as Telecom Subcommittee Chair Greg Walden (R-OR), from urbane sophisticated legislators into sputtering mad parodies of Elmer Fudd.  “Oooh that wascally Chaiwman! Always wegulating the fwee market! I’ll fix his wagon!” Meanwhile, AT&T CEO Randal Stephenson devoted the main part of his recent earnings call to repeating variations on “Juliuth, you’re desthpicable.”

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The Republican FCC Reform Industry Doesn’t Want.

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You haven’t seen a lot of industry lobbying to support the FCC Reform Legislation pushed by House Republicans on the Energy & Commerce Committee. One would think that a bill which requires the FCC to spend three years building up to adopting a rule, imposes all kinds of new burdens on the FCC before adopting a rule so that rulemaking will be even more burdensome and less likely to occur, and generally tries to limit the FCC from regulating or imposing conditions on media and telecom mergers would generate loud applause from industry players supposedly chaffing under the terrible yoke of the FCC. But we haven’t, and we won’t. Oh, Republicans may lean on industry trade associations for some perfunctory applause and ritual chanting about “the burdens of job killing regulation” blah blah Amen. But their heart won’t be in it.

This may surprise those who think that the proposed Republican FCC Reform Bill is an industry fantasy crafted by high-paid industry lobbyists and pushed by their wholly owned subsidiaries. The bill contains everything industry always claims to want, so where the heck is the industry cheerleading squad? Why haven’t they shown up to cheer its passage with any enthusiasm? Why aren’t industry lobbyists busy writing op eds about how this wonderful FCC reform bill will make your cell phone bills cheaper, bring us better broadband, and give you free cable? And why are Republicans so determined to push it if no one in industry really wants it?

I explain below . . . .

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