Finally…someone who can talk about oil and energy and leave both parties in the dust…
My Thoughts Exactly:
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Worsht Ex Parte Ever: I Gloat Over Latest D.C. Cir. Case on a Procedural Point
One of the constant irritants for me and others trying to follow what happens at the FCC is the problem of “the too brief ex parte.” Under the Commission’s rules (47 C.F.R. 1.1200, et seq), when a party meets with FCC staff on an open proceeding, the party is supposed to submit into the record a written statement providing a summary of the conversation. This is called a “notice of oral ex parte presentation” in FCC-speak, but we usually shorten this to just ex parte. By rule, the ex parte should provide a reasonable explanation of what took place so that a reader can get a sense of the argument made (although you can refer back to a previous filing to avoid repetition). In practice, however, you usually get nonsense like this piece of garbage from Alltel which wins the Comic Book Guy Award for “Worsht Ex Parte Ever.”
So it was with a considerable amount of schadenfreude that I saw the D.C. Circuit whomp Sprint/Nextel for producing crappy ex parte‘s that failed to provide a record of their no doubt numerous detailed conversations with Commission staff. This failure to leave a record resulted in dismissal of Sprint’s case and may cost it many billions of dollars.
More gloating below . . . .
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
MAP Brings DC To The Valley
Time for a shameless plug for my employer, the Media Access Project (MAP).
As long-time readers know, one of my frequent complaints is why don’t folks whose lives depend on the rules made in DC bestir themselves and get active on the policy front. All it takes is a web browser and a docket number, after all. Why don’t we see more Silicon Valley folks, VCs, and others show up at FCC proceedings.
Answer, they live as much in their own isolated bubbles as the DC folks do. If you are out in Silicon Valley, odds are good you rarely think of DC as having any relevance to your life and there is not going to be anyone or anything around you to tell you otherwise.
Well rejoice, lucky Silicon Valley people (and whoever else wants to make the trip out)! Media Access Project is sponsoring a series of policy forums (fora?) in Silicon Valley, wherein we will bring the D.C. policy world to you. And, lest you think this is some sort of socialist cult-like retreat wherein we will brainwash you with our public interest ways, we are working with big corporate partners like AT&T and eBay to assemble panels that present a wide variety of views. The primary purpose here is to get folks actually thinking about policy and why it is important for everyone to participate in the process. Think of it as a kind of “Rock the Vote” for Silicon Valley.
In any event, details below.
Stay tuned . . . .
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
What Does Cablevision Want With Newsday? And Should I Care?
For a business supposedly on the edge of extinction, newspapers attract an odd assortment of newcomers eager to get in on the game. Real Estate billionaire Sam Zell bought Tribune last year, marking fresh blood coming into the newspaper and broadcasting biz. Now, as Zell sells off some chunks of Tribune to to pay down debt, it would appear another new player is poised to enter the game.
According to this story, NYC based Cablevision has beat out Rupert Murdoch for the Daily News. Unlike the Murdoch deal, this would not implicate any FCC rules and should not raise too many hackles on the antitrust side. Arguably it has an impact on the local advertising market, but hardly enough to make a difference. Besides, I’m not sure if there is any evidence that the newspaper advertising market and the cable advertising market are related.
What is more interesting is “why does Cablevision want Newsday at all? And should I care?” Cablevision has in the past tried to break out of its main business as a cable operator and dabbler in cable programming and owner of various sports venues and franchises. At various points, it has tried to launch a satellite service and was a bidder in the last two major FCC spectrum auctions (coming away empty handed both times). Is this a toe in the water to go into the newspaper business or a more limited foray?
It is interesting to note that a few years ago, Cablevision was sued by the Jets over an alleged effort to block the Jets from building a sports stadium that would compete with those owned by Cablevision. Among the charges, the Jets claimed that Cablevision routinely gave its own front group free advertising time on its cable systems to drum up support against the Jets’ stadium effort, while refusing to sell advertising time to the Jets for pro-stadium advertising. Owning Newsday will certainly give Cablevision a bit more political clout in its backyard should it find itself wanting to lobby local government again. While I don’t think that’s the primary reason for Cablevision buying Newsday, it does make for an attractive bonus from Cablevision’s perspective.
Unfortunately, I think only DOJ or the FTC will examine the acquisition. It doesn’t trigger either FCC rules or local franchise review. But this sort of impact on the diversity of news sources and the ability to leverage ownership of different media assets for political gain falls outside antitrust review — even in an administration that cares about antitrust. So for better or for worse, barring some new bidder emerging, I expect the deal to sail through easily.
Stay tuned . . . .
My Thoughts Exactly:
Atrios dogbark blogging
In March, I went to a gathering of people who read Eschaton, a blog by “Atrios”. This guy Atrios has a pithy blogging style that I like a lot. Basically he puts out short observations about this and that (or thus and such)–much as my late dog Rosa used to just bark at random times. People then leave hundreds of comments on Eschaton in response to the Atrios dog-barks.
Among other things, Atrios likes to bark at his readers. From time to time he barks at readers who want him to give them or their blogs publicity. He barks that it is not his job to give people publicity. When he blogs on this topic he gets riled up like a proper chihuahua.
One time Atrios put up on his blog a photo taken inside his apartment. I saw on his bookshelf books by Douglas Hofstadter. So I sent him a note asking if he would like a copy of my Hofstadterian book, “Cheap Complex Devices”. Atrios did not write back.
At Eschacon, I spoke with him for a little bit. He was drinking red wine & think he was a little tipsy. I gave him a copy of my book, which he graciously accepted, and I saw him carrying it around hours later, so I know that, at the least, he did not immediately throw it in the garbage.
However, he still has not replied to my email or given me free publicity on his blog. Also, hardly anybody ever leaves comments here on Wetmachine. Finally, although Doug Hofstadter and I are now friends, he had not read my homage a Hofstadter yet either. And none of you people leave comments!
Also, this entry is much too long for an Atrios-style blog entry. Maybe that’s why I’m a minor blogger and he’s a superstar. It’s harder than it looks.
My Thoughts Exactly:
McBush McSame, mcJohn McCain!
Those meanines on the internets keep showing this little video of W’s very-own Mini-me, McSame McBush McCain, saying how staying in Iraq for a hundred years would be “fine with him”.
But everybody knows that it’s unfair to show Straight-Talking Maverick St. John McCain saying anything politically unpopular! St. John got mad. St. John got sad. St. John went to his jillionaire-millionaire wife looking for a little love, but she was too busy plagiarizing a cookbook to notice him. He wound up back in the arms of the Hugger-in-Chief!
Now that’s what I call “straight” talk!
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Follow Up On Medical Devices: Smarter Devices And Smarter Policy, Not More Bandwidth
So I’ve been following up more since initial post yesterday. As a general matter, I recommend interested readers start with this piece from the FDA’s website, followed by the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology (OET) FAQ on wireless medical telemetry devices and the digital transition. OET does not see this as likely to cause a big deal because there’s plenty of empty “white spaces” out there after the digital transition and users can adjust their devices as digital televisions come online.
Well, I hope they are right about that, although I’d feel a lot better if someone were responsible for actually keeping track of this and making sure that users get informed. Under the rules, there are notification requirements for when a station goes live with its digital signal so hospitals can make changes. That works as long as folks are paying attention, of course. In any event, in case OET is looking for more work (or someone on the Hill wants to step up), I would suggest that it would be awfully nice to know what the state of the industry is. But I suspect the right place to do that is really the FDA not the FCC, or perhaps the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
But there is a broader lesson here. As with wireless microphones and a host of other specific low power applications, the real problem is not capacity. The problem is that we have a legacy system that slices spectrum uses into these discrete little services rather than allowing general low power unlicensed use and using cognitive radios to avoid interference.
Hospitals provide a particularly useful environment for smart devices, because they have so many noisy devices, sensitive devices, and such an expanding need for wireless devices for medical telemetry. Imagine a device that works equally well in all locations of the hospital without putting other systems at risk because it senses and adjusts for its radio frequency environment in a real-time basis. If another doctor starts up a device in a neighboring bed that is noise generator, the device monitoring my patient will move to a clear frequency. Devices and systems could even be tagged for priority, so that a mobile monitor attached to a patient knows that it must give the “right of way” to the cardiac ward systems if they come into conflict.
But more specifically here, there is nothing that existing wireless medical telemetry devices authorized in the band do that could not be replicated more flexibly and at lower cost by authorizing generic low-power white spaces devices. This is essentially the same problem as with wireless microphones. If wireless microphones had never received a special dispensation to function in the broadcast white spaces as a licensed ancillary service, you could replicate these systems with unlicensed white spaces devices. But, like the QWERTY typewriter, they are an embedded technology. And they have a constituency that, quite logically, resists change and argues that it plays an important role that generic devices could not replicate.
We thus have the irony of everybody agreeing there is “plenty of white space” for existing secondary users like wireless microphones and medical telemetry, but supposedly no room for the next generation of devices that could do the job of both technologies and bring us a host of other applications besides. We could cure this with more powerful cognitive radios, but the same natural conservatism by incumbents against any intrusion in “their” spectrum makes any movement in that direction politically difficult (as demonstrated by the FCC terminating two promising proceedings last year).
We therefore have the classic political and collective action result of fixing the wrong problem, at least from a public policy perspective. Rather than expanding wireless use generally, we make the new, more useful generic technology subordinate to the existing stakeholders. It is rather like what would have happened if harness makers and farriers had been able to demand that automobiles must protect their industries before being allowed to share the road with the horse and buggy.
Hardly a new problem or an original observation, I recognize. This has been the lament of spectrum reformers since five minutes after the first licenses were issued and the rest of us got cut off. Still, I keep hoping that this time around we’ll manage to get the right result and not let the embedded old technology trump the next generation of users.
Stay tuned . . . .
Tales of the Sausage Factory:
Paging Hospital Techies: You Have Bigger Worries Than White Spaces
CNET has this story about how “Hospital Techies” (notably medical monitor manufacturer GE) are worried that white spaces devices will mess up their medical systems.
Bluntly, “hospital techies” have bigger problems. As the CNET article observes, but lightly passes over, some unknown number of hospitals are using legacy medical monitoring equipment that will stop working after the digital transition. So while the odds of white spaces devices (WSDs) interfering with actual medical equipment on the approved set aside, Channel 37, approaches zero, and WSD interference with legacy equipment is equally unlikely, we may face a total meltdown in poor hospitals of medical monitoring equipment.
Rather than waste time on white spaces, I would say manufacturers like GE Healthcare need to start working with the FCC (and Congress) to engage in a massive education and outreach effort equal to what the FCC has done with the NAB and retailers to educate the public. That means stop selling any legacy equipment, require manufacturers to notify customers that have legacy equipment that it may stop working, and find out how many hospitals are likely to lose medical monitoring equipment after the DTV transition happens. A little funding from Congress to help poor hospitals that can’t afford to upgrade wouldn’t hurt either.
But worrying about white spaces is like worrying about whether a candle will blow over when a brush fire is bearing down you. Unless folks wake up to the danger, we may get seriously burned.
More analysis below . . .
Inventing the Future:
Sense of Place
I think we normally speak of work being done “in Powerpoint,” “in Word,” and so forth. This morning I looked at a transcript of people discussing virtual worlds while in one. The words “Qwaq” and “Forums” appear once each. The word “here” appears 49 times. We are finally getting to the point of having discussion about the results, not the technology. The program itself disappears, in just the same same way as we usually discuss being “at a Web-site” rather than “in Firefox” or “in Safari.” (Internet Explorer users may indeed reflect their tool’s relative intrusion by thinking of their activity as being “in IE” more often.)
My Thoughts Exactly:
Anti-Shame League holds its annual bash
In the spring of 1980 in Boston there was a murder trial of a notorious pair of thugs, ghetto low-lifes who had raped, murdered and robbed a young nurse in her own home. At the trial, the prosecutor asked one of the murderers about a certain boombox, proved to be the nurse’s, that was in the man’s possession when he was arrested. The exchange went something like this:
Prosecutor: You took that boombox from her apartment.
Murderer: Yeah.
Prosecutor: But when you were arrested, you said that it was your boombox.
Murderer: It is mine.
Now that is what the absence of shame looks like.
For a more recent example of brazen shamelessness, we have the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents Association.
