Unsurprisingly, the NAB and MSTV have filed a Petition for Review with the D.C. Circuit to try to get last November’s Order permitting unlicensed use of the white spaces overruled. As is the norm, the Petition merely recites the basics of jurisdiction and the general allegation that the Order is “arbitrary, capricious and otherwise not in accordance with law.”
Of perhaps greater interest, Broadcasting and Cable reports that a coalition of Broadway groups is filing in the Second Circuit.
The Embarq/CenturyTel merger is not just pending FCC approval. The transaction, which affects more than eight million access lines in 33 states, must be approved by regulatory agencies in several states.
Washington and Oregon are pivotal in this, partly because of the extensive rural coverage CenturyTel has in both states, and the merger raises substantive issues about industry consolidation and quality of rural service. Were the Washington or Oregon Public Utility Commission to deny the merger, it would likely kill the deal. It is for this reason that Embarq and CenturyTel tried to avoid having the Oregon PUC rule on the merger until a decision by the Oregon Attorney General forced them to do so.
Embarq and CenturyTel tried to fly under the radar, quietly filing their petition on January 1, 2009 with the Oregon PUC (note that the actual petition doesn’t start until page 218 of the .pdf; the rest is data pro forma required by the PUC — got to love state PUCs for having data requirements for corporate petitioners that the FCC never thought about having). There was no public notice until Administrative Law Judge Allan J. Arlow issued a Notice of Prehearing Conference on the PUC website today. The conference will take place on Friday, March 6, 2009 at 1:30 p.m. at the PUC in Salem. This conference “will be to identify parties and interested persons, establish a service list with addresses and telephone numbers, identify issues, and set a procedural schedule.” It is possible to be conference-called into this conference from out-of-state. Call the number on the Notice to arrange it.
What is extremely important is that this proceeding is moving forward very quickly. Parties which have filed as intervenors in other states, including public interest groups, have apparently not taken notice of this fact, as evidenced by the lack of filers in the relevant docket, UM-1416. It is possible to file as an intervenor or interested party electronically. Essentially, if there are few intervenors, it is likelier that public hearings will not take place.
There is a real chance to get serious conditions imposed on this merger if people move fast.
No surprise, but good to see it finally happen officially. According to this article, Commissioner Copps has been named as acting Chair, pending appointment of the official chair (presumed to be Julius Genachowski).
I expect Acting-Chairman Copps will be heavily focused on the DTV transition for the next few weeks. Indeed, I think that if they do not push off the analog switch off date, the smartest thing would be to keep Copps in as Acting until after the transition. We have only a few weeks to go, and the idea of piling on the inevitable confusion of a new Chairman — even one as familiar with the agency as Genachowski — on top of the mad scramble of the DTV transition is probably not a good idea.
In any event, I’m extremely pleased with the FCC in Copps’ extremely capable hands however long it lasts.
Stay tuned . . . .
I just got an email from the folks at Family-Life TV, a leased access channel on a bunch of Comcast systems in Pennsylvania, that Comcast just decided to drop their programming. Comcast claims Family-Life TV is in arears and owes 3 months worth of payments. David Croyle, who runs Family Life TV, tells me he has canceled checks to show he paid.
All I can say is “wow, that sure didn’t take long.” I wonder what other celebrations the cable boys have planned. Roasting a PEG programmer on a spit? Killing PEG in Los Angeles? Or perhaps just the ever popular “rate increase because we feel like it.”
I remain hopeful that the cable reform agenda will not die with Martin’s departure. At the least, it would be nice to see that the FCC will entertain complaints from leased access programmers when they get kicked off the air. Hopefully, it will take less than 3 years to resolve the complaint.
Stay tuned . . . .
I will, hopefully, have time in the near future to write up my farewell to Kevin Martin and assessment of his term as Chairman of the FCC. In the meantime, I think Commissioner Copps gives a good assessment and farewell.
As I say, I hope to have more to say later. For now, I will simply say that I have enormous respect for Kevin Martin and for what he tried to accomplish, even when I disagreed with him.
More below . . .
Sometimes the conventional wisdom gets it right. After much speculation, it now seems increasingly likely that Obama’s Harvard Law classmate Julius Genachowski will be nominated to take over as FCC Chair.
From my perspective, this looks like very good news. Genachowski is no stranger either to the FCC or to the private sector, a distinct advantage given the twin difficulties of managing the agency and dealing with all manner of incumbent dog-and-pony shows. Heck, Genachowski is no stranger to the DTV transition, having been involved in the initial standard setting work back in the day. Genachowski’s close relationship with Obama, heavy involvement in the Obama campaign from the beginning, and general tech background provide fairly strong early assurance that — contrary to the hopes of some and fears of others — Obama does not appear to be backing away from his campaign commitment to open networks and media diversity.
All that said, let nobody think the fun is over and we all get to go home. Now more than ever, progressives need to build on our movement momentum and press our case open networks, real spectrum reform, a more diverse media, adequate consumer protection, and regulation that creates real competition by opening bottleneck facilities and limit market power. We have an opportunity, not a victory, and we must act to seize it.
More below . . . .
As I observed back awhile ago when describing possible scenarios for the FCC, Commissioner Deborah Tate would need to depart when the 110th Congress expired and the 111th Congress convened at Noon on January 3, 2009. So, at the FCC’s pro forma meeting on December 30, Commissioner Tate stepped down and made her farewell address. Despite the rather tense atmosphere that often prevails on the 8th Floor of the FCC these day, her fellow Commissioners used most of the meeting time to say many nice things in appreciation of her tenure.
Allow me to add my own appreciation for Commissioner Tate’s service. This may come as a surprise to some, given that I disagreed with Tate a fair amount on most matters of substance. As others have noted, Tate voted along fairly standard Republican lines — generally shying away from regulation of “the market” despite a sincere concern about consumer welfare. (I should add that despite her much publicized comments about the dangers of Worlds of Warcraft, her support for strong digital right management and urging ISPs do more to block content potentially harmful to minors, Tate still generally followed a deregulatory line in simply urging industry to voluntarily do more and raising this in the context of voting against the Comcast/Bittorrent Order).
But let me tell a little story below which illustrates why Commissioner Tate deserves a respectful farewell even from staunch progressives such as myself.
More below . . . .
I am seeing in a few places such as App Rising and Slashdot that Fairpoint is planing to force subscribers to use its webmail portal even if they get Yahoo, MSN, or AOL email. This would, of course, be a major violation of the FCC’s “Four Freedoms” by preventing users from accessing the legal content or services they want to access. Which makes me somewhat skeptical that this is actually what Fairpoint intends.
For those just tuning in, Fairpoint acquired most of Verizon’s high-cost rural systems in Maine, NH and VT. Leaving aside the underlying logic and value of the deal to the various parties and local subscribers, the critical point is that Fairpoint will complete its take over of these systems and cease operating them as part of the VZ network on January 31, 2009.
What started the current rumor about Fairpoint’s plans is this article in the Rutlan, VT Herald detailing changes for local subscribers. In particular, the article notes that as a result of the change, users will get Fairpoint.net addresses rather than Verizon.net addresses, and will need to reconfigure their mail clients to pull mail from Fairpoint rather than VZ. Then comes this quote:
Web-based e-mail users can continue to access their e-mail at the Verizon Web site until Feb. 6. After that date, Fastiggi said users will need to log on to www.MyFairPoint.net. Customers then click on Web mail and type in their existing user name@myfairpoint.net and existing password.
AOL, Yahoo! and MSN subscribers will continue to have access to content but will no longer be able to access their e-mail through the third party Web site. Instead, Yahoo! and other third party e-mail will be accessed directly at the MyFairPoint.net portal.
Most folks are reading this as saying that Fairpoint plans to require all users of these services to use the Fairpoint mail portal. But I notice that these are all companies that have various sorts of co-branding agreements with Verizon. This suggests a different interpretation.
Right now, as I understand it, if you are a Verizon-Yahoo customer (or other third party customer) than you have certain access privileges that integrate email to either Verizon or the third-party email service seemlessly. Our VZ-Yahoo customer logs into mail at either VZ or Yahoo’s portal and sees all mail addressed either to xxxx@verizon.net or xxxx@yahoo.com. I should stress that as I am not a VZ subscriber, I am not entirely clear on the details. But it boils down to the fact that VZ has negotiated certain application deals to make itself more attractive and that these deals are seemless to the subscriber. Fairpoint, obviously, does not have these thrid party deals.
What I think the article is trying to say is that whetver special value-add services you got from being a VZ-AOL or VZ-MSN or VZ-Yahoo subscriber, these disappear when Fairpoint takes over on January 31. Rather than have an integrated mail platform for both email addresses, you will need to go to AOL.com and go to their mail portal, which will provide only the mail addressed to xxx@aol.com, and go to the Fairpoint web portal separately to get your email addressed to xxxx@fairpoint.net. But Fairpoint is not planing on interfering with you going to AOL.com and using their website to read your email.
This explanation would make much more sense than the idea that Fairpoint will force you to read any third party email through the Fairpoint web portal. For one thing, it really doesn’t make sense to force all email users to give up their web-based third party emails to use Fairpoint. Nor does it make sense that they would give you access to the entire third party website except their email portal. They could, but why do it? Finally, given what happened to Comcast when they interfered with applications in a much more subtle way that was arguably linked to network management, I can’t imagine what would prompt Fairpoint to court an FCC complaint — especially when state regulators had previously voiced concern about Fairpoint’s ability to provide broadband service for local subcribers.
In any event, I await clarification before going ballistic or engaging in another round of breathless “network neutrality violation” stories. If I’m right and this is just a notice that Fairpoint cannot honor deals made between Verizon and third-party service providers, all well and good. If it is Fairpoint for some reason trying to force customers to abandon third-party email providers and use only Fairpoint, then we have another NN complaint and, most likely, a user revolt and angry letters from various members of Congress and state officials.
Stay tuned . . . .
In what Rob Friedan accurately describes as an obtuseness so thorough it looks suspiciously like deliberate misinformation, the Wall St. J. has yet another piece on what it imagines the network neutrality fight is about and why the best thing in the whole wide world is to do nothing.
Rather than rehash old ground (Rob does a fairly good job of it in his post), I will move on to my handy and simple network neutrality solution. “Simple,” in the sense of being a fairly straightforward piece of legislation. It would pass the buck back to the FCC for implementation — with all the attendant hassle and complications that brings. But from a Congressional standpoint, it is really quite straightforward. In fact, Congress already resolved this problem once a long time ago, back when the FCC was struggling with them new-fangled mobile wireless networks.
How did they do it? And what would I do for broadband? See below . . . .
Harry Jessell over at TVNEWSDAY has this story about a possible interference problem between operation of 3.65 GHz band equipment and the neighboring C-Band satellite receiver operated by CBS-owned KYW in Philadelphia.
According to the article, KYW experienced interference on its C-Band downlink near the 3.70 GHz frequency in February 2008, and resolved the problem by shifting to a higher frequency. The interference stopped a short time later, then flared up again in September, prompting KYW to call the FCC. That seems to have taken care of the problem, indicating it was a byproduct of some human operation addressed by the FCC enforcement — although possibly not. According to the article, the FCC won’t talk about it — which is standard procedure in an enforcement complaint.
According to the article, KYW Chief Engineer Rich Paleski thinks the problem was a “WiMax operator” using the 3.65 GHz. Paleski worries that 3.65 GHz will not be compatible with C-Band satellite downlink operation and warns “that should concern every station that imports programming via C-band satellite, which is to say just about every station in the United States.” He wants all television broadcast engineers to be alert for interference in the lower part of the C-Band near 3.70 GHz.
Given the rule limitations on use of the 3.65 GHz band, I am extremely skeptical of Paleski’s conclusion. Why? Because given the rules for operation in the band, no one should have been operating on the band in Philadelphia. And even they were operating illegally, they would have needed to hack the equipment to get within 25 MHz of 3.70 GHz, or have anything like the power needed to cause the kind of interference Paleski reports.
Given the growing popularity of the 3.65 GHz band for WiMax (as evidenced by projects like these), I think it’s important to look at this very carefully and not go leaping to conclusions. The 3.65 GHz band holds out a lot of hope for rural broadband by wireless ISPs (WISPS) running small businesses and priced out of licensed spectrum. Before anyone starts speculating from this single incident that use of 3.65 GHz poses a danger lets take a careful look at some of the facts around the use of 3.65 GHz and why I don’t think this is an industry-wide issue. It’s always easy to blame the new neighbor — especially when you think “their kind” is trouble. But how likely is it really?
More below . . .
But while the uproar has swayed much of the public to Johansson's defense at a time when #genAI is increasingly under scrutiny, this may not quite be an open-and-shut case should she decide to sue . Read the breakdown from @M_F_Rose in her latest article:
The release of @OpenAI's new digital assistant "Sky" stirred controversy after actress Scarlett Johansson alleged that the company had infringed on her rights by using a soundalike voice of hers after she'd declined to voice it herself.
Just saw @MargotSusca fantastic interview with @adamconover about the death of local news at the hands of hedge funds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N21YfWy0-bA A theme I have written about *a lot*. Like this blog post from 2018: https://wetmachine.com/tales-of-the-sausage-factory/we-need-to-fix-the-news-media-not-just-social-media-part-i/ This has been a long time in the making.
I wrote yesterday on the terrifying escalation of antisemitism in Canada, citing events just over past week. Now there is more: last night a firebomb attempt at a Vancouver synagogue. Daily antisemitic incidents is who we are now.
https://www.jewishvancouver.com/important-community-updates-may-20-2024
https://x.com/mgeist/status/1796233336203194446
