Introducing Dallas Rea| Author | Post |
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Goldstein  All-Star Member  "You have sacrificed nothing and no one." 3689 Posts 8/10 |  Posted - Feb 13 2014 : 9:03AMComcast Set to Acquire Time Warner Cable for $45 Billion Renamed thread from "Two Worst U.S. Cable Companies to Merge" Edited by - Goldstein on May 17 2014  [Link] |
| jayo All-Star Member 2117 Posts 7/04 | Posted - Feb 13 2014 : 7:54PM I'd say that I don't care because I won't do business with them. On the other hand, I hate to see yet another "To Big to Fail" company appear. I was laughing at some moron on tv this morning, who was trying to explain why a mega-cable company would be able to lower its prices, and thus be a friend to the consumer. What color is the sky in your world?  [Link] |
| BYOB_Kenobi Senior Member “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” - Kierkegaard 2684 Posts 8/09 | Posted - Feb 13 2014 : 8:20PM That's one huge disappointment during last 5 years is the FTC not doing shit for anti-trust and keeping monopolies from happening or at least limiting them. Google ridiculous acquisition rate Comcast and NBC and now Time Warner Cable. Intel We need Teddy Roosevelt back to do some major trust busting at Federal level. Consumers/citizens loose with monopolies and anti-competitive practices. [Link] |
| jayo All-Star Member 2117 Posts 7/04 | Posted - Feb 13 2014 : 9:35PM [Link] |
| Goldstein All-Star Member "You have sacrificed nothing and no one." 3689 Posts 8/10 | Posted - Feb 14 2014 : 9:18AM The New York Times By THE EDITORIAL BOARD FEB. 13, 2014 Regulators might be tempted to agree with Comcast that its proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable for $45.2 billion in stock poses no threat to competition and would actually benefit consumers by giving the company more resources to invest in new services. But government officials should not accept that argument without conducting a thorough investigation into what effect a merger between the country’s two largest cable companies would have on the media and the Internet. Comcast’s chief executive, Brian Roberts, on Thursday said that his company and Time Warner Cable do not operate in the same ZIP codes. But the issue with cable mergers is not that they reduce or eliminate head-to-head competition for subscribers, because most cities have just one cable provider. This deal is important because it would give Comcast greater power over media companies like CBS and Disney and Internet services like Netflix and Amazon. And that would ultimately give it more control over American consumers. If the government approves this deal, Comcast will operate in 43 of the 50 largest metropolitan markets, and will have about 30 percent of the national pay television subscribers and about one-third of all broadband Internet subscribers. Because it would control such a large chunk of the country, Comcast would have significant leverage in contract negotiations with media companies over what TV channels cable companies are willing to carry and how much they pay for them. Such contract talks have become increasingly acrimonious in recent years. For example, in August Time Warner Cable temporarily pulled CBS programing from its cable systems in New York, Los Angeles and Dallas because the two companies couldn’t agree on the terms of a new contract. The merger could also strengthen Comcast’s position in its dealings with businesses like Netflix that send data to customers over broadband connections. Representatives for cable and phone companies have argued that content companies should pay them fees to transport movies and online video on top of the monthly charges individuals pay for Internet access. A recent federal appeals court decision made it easier for cable and phone companies to demand such payments by striking down Federal Communications Commission rules that required broadband providers to treat all Internet content alike. Generally speaking, antitrust regulators are most worried about mergers that create monopolies that can raise the prices of goods and services when customers have few or no other choices. But officials should be just as concerned about deals that turn a business into a dominant buyer that can make or break its suppliers. An all-powerful cable company, for example, would be able to influence and control what Americans could watch or read by refusing to carry channels or certain Internet services, or it could favor its own content. Comcast, for example, might find it tempting to treat programming from NBC Universal, which it owns, better than shows from rival networks and movie studios. Officials at the antitrust division of the Department of Justice and the F.C.C., who have spoken recently about the importance of competition in the increasingly concentrated communications industry, need to study this deal closely. If they find that the merger would give Comcast too much power, the agencies can demand that the company make significant divestments (Comcast has offered to divest three million customers to get regulators to look upon the deal favorably) or they could sue to block the acquisition altogether. --------------------------------------------- In Colorado Longmont, CO This is an opportunity to completely reform regulation of the industry. Although the industry claims it faces competition (e.g., from satellite, telcos, or broadcast), the consumer faces a near-complete monopoly that now governs access to information and connectivity, content, and prices. Our cable and high speed internet prices rise faster than inflation. Comcast juggles offerings such that one is forced to buy higher priced packages to receive the same service and packages as before. HD was supposed to be an attractive new technology, but it costs more. Just today I visited Comcast to shed some cable and internet features to cut our monthly bill to a "more reasonable" $100. It is now time to get serious about equal access. And it is way past time to unbundle channels. I am willing to pay a per-channel premium to shed the hundreds of terrible offerings that merely clutter my life. Give me PBS, a few news and local channels, TCM, and Lifetime. Keep the rest for someone who wishes them. Perhaps with the savings, I'll add HBO or other premium offerings. Or offer the rest on a pay-per-view basis when something unusually attractive shows up on a channel to which I don't subscribe. There are plenty of formulae that won't bankrupt the industry. But the continued concentration of power in a few providers without serious reform won't help consumers. --------------------------------------------- Capt. Penny Silicon Valley Sophistry, pure sophistry from Comcast and their paid flacks. I heard one on the radio today assert consumers would benefit. Nonsense and malarkey. Net Neutrality is under direct assault with millions of dollars in lobbying money able to...ah...influence legislators and regulators. At stake are hundreds of billions in increased revenue for the winning monopolist. --------------------------------------------- ChrisH Adirondacks Just what we don't need: Another 900-lb Gorilla of a Corporation, too big to regulate, too big to allow to fail, too big for 'our Representatives' not to be bought by. No. No. No. --------------------------------------------- MP Florida In addition to the mostly cost and carry issues you overlooked CUSTOMER SERVICE. Comcast has the WORST "service" of any company I have dealt with. I avoid contacting them like the devil. I am stuck with them because they are the only game in my town and I am locked in via a community plan. They are horrible. I urge the FCC to deny the merger. We need more competition through breakups of all mega companies not mergers. --------------------------------------------- Bill Appledorf British Columbia George Orwell would love this one. Fewer competitors means more competition. Sure. What a joke. [Link] |
| jayo All-Star Member 2117 Posts 7/04 | Posted - Feb 14 2014 : 11:48AM (For them) [Link] |
| Bill All-Star Member 5334 Posts 6/00 | Posted - Feb 14 2014 : 6:35PM [Link] |
| Goldstein All-Star Member "You have sacrificed nothing and no one." 3689 Posts 8/10 | Posted - Feb 24 2014 : 7:50AM Comcast and Netflix Reach Deal on Service Media By EDWARD WYATT and NOAM COHEN FEB. 23, 2014 Comcast, the country’s largest cable and broadband provider, and Netflix, the giant television and movie streaming service, announced an agreement Sunday in which Netflix will pay Comcast for faster and more reliable access to Comcast’s subscribers. The deal is a milestone in the history of the Internet, where content providers like Netflix generally have not had to pay for access to the customers of a broadband provider. But the growing power of broadband companies like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T has given those companies increased leverage over sites whose traffic gobbles up chunks of a network’s capacity. Netflix is one of those sites, accounting for nearly 30 percent of all Internet traffic at peak hours. The agreement comes just 10 days after Comcast agreed to buy Time Warner Cable for $45 billion, an acquisition that would make Comcast the cable provider to nearly one-third of American homes and the high-speed Internet company for close to 40 percent. Federal regulators are expected to scrutinize whether that deal would thwart competition among cable and Internet providers. It is also unclear whether the Comcast-Netflix deal violates the principles of what is known as net neutrality — where all content providers have equal and free access to consumers. People close to the deal characterize it as a common arrangement. Content companies frequently pay a middleman to carry traffic to a broadband provider, which then moves through its pipes and into a consumer’s home. In a news release announcing the deal, the companies said, “Netflix receives no preferential network treatment under the multiyear agreement.” Details were not disclosed, but a person close to the companies said it involved annual payments of several million dollars. Others, including Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor and advocate for net neutrality, said the interconnection agreement between Comcast and Netflix was one of the first such arrangements where a broadband provider like Comcast has extracted payment to send specific content through the “on ramp” to its network. “This is the water in the basement for the Internet industry,” Mr. Wu said, the first in what could be a flood of such arrangements. “I think it is going to be bad for consumers,” he added, because such costs are often passed through to the customer. One fear is that if such deals become common, only the wealthiest content companies will be able to afford to pay for them, which could stifle the next Netflix from ever getting off the ground. The agreement also follows a January ruling from a federal appeals court that struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules, saying the agency overstepped its authority. This type of deal between Comcast and Netflix might have been forbidden under a liberal reading of the F.C.C.’s rules. The announcement on Sunday confirmed reports that had trickled out late last week, as close watchers of Internet traffic began to detect a more direct Internet path of Netflix videos to Comcast customers. In recent months, Netflix had reported that delivery speed of its content to Comcast subscribers had declined by more than 25 percent, resulting in frequent interruptions and delays for customers trying to stream television shows and movies delivered through Netflix. Customers of other providers, including Verizon, also reported delays. Comcast, Verizon and other Internet service providers denied that they were playing any role in slowing down traffic. Instead, they blamed the intermediaries that Netflix used to deliver its content to Comcast on its way to consumers. They said that those middlemen — companies like Cogent Communications — were trying to shove too much data through too small a pipe. The agreement, which is expected to be put fully into effect in the coming weeks, had been many months in the making, well before the Time Warner Cable announcement. The contours of a deal were reached after a meeting between Brian L. Roberts, chief executive of Comcast, and Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, as well as the engineering teams of both companies, said sources close to the deal. The new arrangement will deliver an “even better user experience to consumers, while also allowing for future growth in Netflix traffic,” the companies said in their joint statement Sunday. Netflix will now deliver its content directly to Comcast rather than going through an intermediary. These types of deals, known as “paid peering,” are typically struck between companies that manage the plumbing of the Internet, unseen by consumers. Netflix does far more than that, offering original programming and features like TV and movie recommendations for users based on their previous choices. Netflix will now essentially have its own on ramp to Comcast customers. That is different from paying to be moved through the pipes more quickly, a deal known as “paid prioritization” that is generally seen as a net-neutrality violation. That the technical, arcane details of how streaming videos arrive on a customer’s screen are the focus of corporate announcements and media coverage speaks to the outsize importance of Comcast and Netflix in how Americans now watch movies and television. Craig Aaron, president of the consumer advocacy group Free Press, saw the Netflix deal as more reason to prevent Comcast from growing. “As a consumer, this is a really opaque process — being unable to really know who’s paying what to whom,” he said. “All you know as a consumer is that you are really paying in the end.” [Link] |
| Bill All-Star Member 5334 Posts 6/00 | Posted - Feb 24 2014 : 8:54PM As I understand it, one of the foundations of the Internet is that, the "middlemen", such as Cogent (who currently supports Netflix), are supposed to have a relatively equal amount of data passed to and from one another. If it turns out that middleman A is passing far more data to middleman B than middleman B is passing to middleman A, then middleman A is supposed to pay middleman B for that difference in traffic. Supposedly, Cogent, as the middleman for Netflix is passing far more data to all of the other middlemen than it is receiving, but refuses to pay for that additional data. IMO, this paid peering should be taking place at the middleman level, so all middlemen can afford to build "big data pipes" for all traffic to flow through, rather that cutting deals with companies such as Netflix, in order to build their own "private pipes" directly between Netflix and an ISP. [Link] |
| Goldstein All-Star Member "You have sacrificed nothing and no one." 3689 Posts 8/10 | Posted - Apr 14 2014 : 7:24AM Media By ASHLEY PARKER APRIL 11, 2014 WASHINGTON — For Senator Al Franken, the political became personal at a “Saturday Night Live”party, of all places. It was there in New York two years ago that Mr. Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, ran into Lorne Michaels, the creator of the NBC show and his former boss when he was a writer and performer there. Mr. Michaels was chatting with Brian L. Roberts, the chief executive of Comcast, which had recently acquired NBCUniversal in a deal that Mr. Franken opposed. “I fought to prevent this!” Mr. Franken blurted out to the two men. It was a potentially awkward moment that Mr. Franken defused with the kind of blustery humor that delighted audiences during his years as an entertainer. “We all had a laugh, fun was had by all, and I went on,” he said in an interview. But for Mr. Franken, antitrust issues involving big companies are no joking matter. The man who created such famous “Saturday Night Live” characters as the self-help guru Stuart Smalley is now a serious policy wonk and a self-made expert in antitrust matters like price-fixing and monopolization. After a failed attempt to block the Comcast-NBC Universal merger, Mr. Franken again finds himself playing a trustbusting role in Washington — against the same adversary. He has emerged as the leading congressional opponent of Comcast’s $45 billion bid to take over Time Warner Cable, a merger that would unite the nation’s two biggest cable companies. In a three-hour Senate Judiciary hearing on Wednesday, Mr. Franken adopted a prosecutorial stance as he interrogated executives from both companies, asking pointed questions, often repeatedly, like a dog with a particularly tasty bone. He was the only lawmaker to explicitly say he wanted the merger blocked. “We’ve got the biggest cable provider and biggest Internet provider, in Comcast, buying the second-biggest cable provider and third-largest Internet provider, and I’m very worried that will create a company that’s too big,” Mr. Franken said in the interview. “They’re going to use their position to leverage higher cable prices and to dictate a lot of things that will make for fewer choices, and their service will be even worse.” Mr. Franken, for his part, should have a good sense of Comcast — he said the company was his provider in both Minnesota and Washington, and added with a laugh: “It’s great. The service is wonderful.” Moments later, he doubled back to explain his tone. His chuckle, he said, “was more ironic than sarcastic.” Mr. Franken, who also opposed the unsuccessful merger of AT&T and T-Mobile, said his interest in the issue was about “trying to protect consumers in Minnesota, trying to protect people whose experience with Comcast has not been good.” He added that when he asked his constituents to weigh in, he received over 100,000 replies, overwhelmingly opposed to the deal and talking about “how lousy the customer service was.” But the issue is also one Mr. Franken knows intimately from his time in the entertainment industry. He recalled working in television when the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, which reined in the power of the networks, were relaxed and ultimately overturned in the 1990s. That allowed networks to own the television they broadcast in prime time, which Mr. Franken said “killed independent production.” “The networks swore up and down that they would not favor their own shows because they said, ‘We want the best ratings,’ ” he said in a phone interview. “That was completely false.” “LateLine,” a sitcom he helped create, was produced by Paramount, a company that NBC did not own, and as a result NBC did not give it a choice slot, in Mr. Franken’s view. “Our time slot was not conducive to getting many eyeballs to our show,” he said. During his performing career, Mr. Franken acquired a reputation for tilting heavily against the establishment — and that included the government, the network he worked for and even his own show. In 1980 he took on Fred Silverman, then the NBC chief executive, in a commentary on the Weekend Update segment, calling him “a lame-o” for wrecking the network. Mr. Silverman was reportedly enraged by the sketch. In another well-remembered segment from 1980, he mocked the show’s producers and essentially argued for “S.N.L.” to be canceled — but not until a week later, after he had a chance to be the host. (Because of a writers’ strike, he never was.) He was known for leading the effort to make sure the writers were paid for every type of replay of “S.N.L.” or the sketches they had written. A colleague from the early years of the show, who asked not to identified because he’d become estranged from Mr. Franken, said that Mr. Franken had been originally hired as a writer at a less than subsistence salary, “and he never forgot that.” As a senator, Mr. Franken has followed the workhorse model of previous senators who came in surrounded by hype, such as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, and focused on the minutiae of legislation. He usually speaks only to the Minnesota press, and even his more whimsical pursuits are local in nature, like the Annual Minnesota Congressional Delegation Hotdish Off, a casserole competition among the state’s lawmakers that Mr. Franken organized. “If you had to pick a word for Al Franken as a senator, it’s ‘studious,’ ” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. “He really studies the issues hard, he’s very serious about them, and he’s effective.” Far from cracking wise, he has earned a reputation as a student of the fine details of policy and legislation. He spent his 62nd birthday last year immersed late into the night at a Senate Judiciary Committee session, marking up a broad bipartisan immigration bill; at one point, as the hours ticked by, forcing Mr. Franken to miss a family birthday dinner, the Democratic senator Chris Coons of Delaware presented him with a vanilla buttercream cupcake. “That’s Al Franken the senator,” Mr. Coons said. “He is engaged, he is diligent, he is thorough, he is thoughtful.” Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, echoed the praise. “He’s been one of the best-prepared people there, and is very valuable in committee,” Mr. Leahy said. “He certainly knows a lot about the business, far more than most of us would on a personal basis.” Mr. Franken’s deep understanding of — and near obsession with — telecommunications mergers has impressed even those involved in antitrust debates. Albert A. Foer, president of the American Antitrust Institute, which opposes mergers, still recalls a speech Mr. Franken, who is not a lawyer, gave on the subject to the American Bar Association two years ago, calling it “beautiful.” “As a guy coming from the media, he understands the need for diversity, and as a politician, he understands the need for decentralized power,” Mr. Foer said. “He puts these together in a kind of nonpedantic way.” Mr. Franken’s colleagues on the judiciary committee, many of whom have law degrees, say that Mr. Franken likes to joke, “I’m not a lawyer, but I played one in a sketch.” It is a punch line that is adaptable to different situations. “When I speak to prosecutors, I say, ‘I played a defense lawyer,’ ” Mr. Franken said, adding with a chuckle and evident satisfaction: “There, I made myself laugh.” [Link] |
| Goldstein All-Star Member "You have sacrificed nothing and no one." 3689 Posts 8/10 | Posted - Apr 22 2014 : 11:16AM By MICHAEL J. de la MERCED APRIL 21, 2014 Netflix on Monday voiced strong opposition to Comcast’s planned $45 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable, even while confirming that it was raising subscription prices. Using its prominent soapbox — a letter to investors disclosing better-than-expected first-quarter earnings — Netflix argued that Comcast’s megadeal would give the cable company unprecedented control over high-speed Internet access in the United States, power that it could use as “anti-competitive leverage.” Netflix, the streaming movie and television business, has become the first media company to publicly oppose the merger, one that would create a behemoth with 30 million subscribers across the country. It was the clearest statement on the merger from Netflix, nearly two months after it agreed to pay Comcast for a more direct connection to the cable operator’s Internet backbone. Since then, Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, has criticized the state of American broadband Internet and argued that the arrangement his own company agreed to violated the spirit of so-called net neutrality. The principle states that Internet service providers not favor one type of content over another. In a blog post, Comcast disagreed with Netflix’s criticisms, arguing that the streaming company willingly requested and paid for a more direct connection to the service provider’s network. “Netflix is free to express its opinions,” Comcast wrote. “But they should be factually based.” Netflix also took aim at another major Internet provider, AT&T, arguing that its U-verse high-speed service was slower than older DSL connections. It encouraged AT&T to provide a faster connection to allay customer complaints. Separately, Netflix confirmed that it planned to raise prices for its services in the United States by $1 to $2 a month, after hinting early this year that such a move was in the offing. The decision was made after a price increase for subscribers in Ireland generated what the company described as “limited impact.” Existing American customers would retain their current pricing plans for what the service called a “generous time period.” The rate increase will help pay for more content, the lifeblood of Netflix’s business. The company’s push into original content continued to pay off: In the letter, Mr. Hastings wrote that the second season of “House of Cards” drew “a huge audience that would make any cable or broadcast network happy.” As is its custom, Netflix did not provide overall audience numbers for the show. Netflix also promoted the achievements of its other programming; “The Square,” a documentary about the 2011 Egyptian revolution, garnered an Academy Award nomination. And it heralded new seasons of programs like “Orange Is the New Black” and the animated show “Turbo F.A.S.T.” On the numbers Wall Street cared about the most — subscriber and profit growth — Netflix appeared to have delivered. It added 2.25 million domestic subscribers, meeting its forecasts, while exceeding its predictions by gaining 1.75 million subscribers internationally. Over all, it reported a $53 million profit for the first three months of the year, or 86 cents a share. Wall Street analysts had expected 81 cents a share, according to Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ. Shares in Netflix, which is based in Los Gatos, Calif., rose $22.94, or 6.6 percent, to $371.33 in after-hours trading. But the stock has been subject to the hopes and fears of traders chasing growth this year, whipsawing between frequent peaks and drops. Still, the last 12 months have been kind to Netflix’s shares, which have risen more than 113 percent in the period. That growth highlights how the once-stable television business continues to face new disruptions. Newer entrants like Amazon.com are busy building their own offerings in the Netflix mold, including by commissioning their own original programming. But the biggest challenge to the status quo will come before the Supreme Court on Tuesday. Lawyers for the start-up Aereo plan to defend its business of streaming live television and recording programs for Internet subscribers, an operation that the big content companies say functions as a huge content piracy shop. [Link] |
| Goldstein All-Star Member "You have sacrificed nothing and no one." 3689 Posts 8/10 | Posted - Apr 23 2014 : 9:19PM Experience has shown that Comcast just will not build the necessary infrastructure to provide what they promise, but don't deliver on, right now. F.C.C., in ‘Net Neutrality’ Turnaround, Plans to Allow Fast Lane By EDWARD WYATT APRIL 23, 2014 WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission will propose new rules that allow Internet service providers to offer a faster lane through which to send video and other content to consumers, as long as a content company is willing to pay for it, according to people briefed on the proposals. The proposed rules are a complete turnaround for the F.C.C. on the subject of so-called net neutrality, the principle that Interrs should have equal ability to see any content they choose, and that no content providers should be discriminated against in providing their offerings to consumers. The F.C.C.'s previous rules governing net neutrality were thrown out by a federal appeals court this year. The court said those rules had essentially treated Internet service providers as public utilities, which violated a previous F.C.C. ruling that Internet links were not to be governed by the same strict regulation as telephone or electric service. The new rules, according to the people briefed on them, will allow a company like Comcast or Verizon to negotiate separately with each content company – like Netflix, Amazon, Disney or Google – and charge different companies different amounts for priority service. That, of course, could increase costs for content companies, which would then have an incentive to pass on those costs to consumers as part of their subscription prices. Proponents of net neutrality have feared that such a framework would empower large, wealthy companies and prevent small start-ups, which might otherwise be the next Twitter or Facebook, for example, from gaining any traction in the market. The F.C.C. plans were first reported online Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal. The new proposals, drafted by the F.C.C.'s chairman, Tom Wheeler, and his staff, will be circulated to the other four commissioners beginning Thursday, an F.C.C. spokeswoman said. The details can be amended by consensus in order to attract support from a majority of the commissioners. The commission will then vote on a final proposal at its May 15 meeting. [Link] |
| Goldstein All-Star Member "You have sacrificed nothing and no one." 3689 Posts 8/10 | Posted - Apr 25 2014 : 12:13PM By THE EDITORIAL BOARD APRIL 24, 2014 Dividing traffic on the Internet into fast and slow lanes is exactly what the Federal Communications Commission would do with its proposed regulations, unveiled this week. And no amount of reassurances about keeping competition alive will change that fact. Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the commission, is proposing that broadband providers — phone and cable companies — be allowed to charge fees for faster delivery of video and other data to consumers. This would be a totally new approach to Internet service. It would essentially give broadband companies the right to create the digital equivalent of high-occupancy vehicle lanes for content providers, like Netflix and Amazon, wealthy enough to pay a toll. In this new world, smaller content providers and start-ups that could not pay for preferential treatment might not be able to compete because their delivery speeds would be much slower. And consumers would have to pay more because any company that agrees to strike deals with phone and cable companies would undoubtedly pass on those costs to their users. The F.C.C. proposal claims to protect competition by requiring that any deal between a broadband company and a content provider be “commercially reasonable.” But figuring out what is reasonable will be very difficult, and the commission will struggle to enforce that standard. The rules would also prohibit broadband companies from blocking content by, for example, making it impossible for users to access a service like Skype that competes with their own products. If a majority of the five-member commission approves the proposal next month, it will be open to public comment before being finalized later this year. If adopted, this measure would be a huge victory for phone and cable companies that have consistently argued that services like Google, which owns YouTube, that transmit a lot of data should pay fees for the use of broadband networks. But the viability of those networks are based on decades of public investments in the Internet, the companies’ use of public rights of way and, in the case of some companies, a long government-sanctioned monopoly over telephone service. Public interest groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Public Knowledge oppose the creation of two-tiered Internet service because it offers no public benefit, but would squelch innovation. Officials at the F.C.C. said on Thursday that the proposed rule is the fastest way for the commission to respond to a January ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that struck down previous rules barring broadband companies from blocking content or engaging in “unjust and unreasonable discrimination.” They argue that under the “commercially reasonable” standard, the agency will be able to review deals to make sure phone and cable companies do not abuse their market power (in most markets, there are only one or two service providers). But the proposal does not meaningfully prevent discrimination; it is largely a capitulation to the broadband industry. The commission should move in a wholly different direction. It should decide to classify broadband as a telecommunications service, which would allow it to prohibit companies like Verizon and Comcast from engaging in unjust or unreasonable discrimination. (The F.C.C. classified broadband as a lightly regulated information service during the George W. Bush administration.) Mr. Wheeler is seeking public comment on this option, but he is not in favor of it. Even though the appeals court has said the F.C.C. has authority to reclassify broadband, the agency has not done so because phone and cable companies, along with their mostly Republican supporters in Congress, strongly oppose it. The Internet has been a boon to the economy and to free speech because it is not divided into tiers and is open to everybody in the same way. In 2007, President Obama said one of the best things about the Internet “is that there is this incredible equality there” and charging “different rates to different websites” would destroy that principle. The proposal from Mr. Wheeler, an Obama appointee, would do just that. [Link] |
| Goldstein All-Star Member "You have sacrificed nothing and no one." 3689 Posts 8/10 | Posted - Apr 25 2014 : 12:53PM By EDWARD WYATT APRIL 24, 2014 WASHINGTON — In the nine weeks since the Federal Communications Commission said it would try, for a third time, to write new rules to secure an open Internet, at least 69 companies, interest groups and trade associations — over one a day — have met with or otherwise lobbied commission officials on what the rules should specify. That effort does not count the more than 10,000 comments that individuals have submitted to the F.C.C. Now the flood of lobbying efforts is likely to increase after the disclosure Wednesday evening that the F.C.C. would soon release preliminary rules allowing for the creation of special, faster lanes for online content to flow to consumers — for content providers willing to pay for it. The F.C.C. had previously warned against those types of deals, saying they could unfairly discriminate against companies that could not or were not willing to pay. But after a federal appeals court struck down, for a second time, the commission’s earlier regulations, the F.C.C. is trying again. Reaction was swift to the proposed new rules, as consumer groups accused the commission of betraying its promise to maintain net neutrality, or equal treatment for both providers to and users of the Internet. That prompted an immediate rebuttal from the F.C.C. chairman, Tom Wheeler, who said late Wednesday that speculation that the commission was “gutting the open Internet rule” was “flat out wrong.” The jockeying continued on Thursday. Verizon, which brought the court challenge that prompted the last set of open Internet rules to be struck down in January, issued a statement warning against “unnecessary and harmful” new rules. Consumer advocates reiterated their opposition. Mr. Wheeler stepped up his defense of the commission’s plans. “The proposal would establish that behavior harmful to consumers or competition by limiting the openness of the Internet will not be permitted,” he wrote in a post on the F.C.C.’s blog. The sparring will be closely watched by every company that depends, even peripherally, on the Internet — which is to say, just about every company. Businesses that use Internet connections to provide consumer services — obvious ones like Google and Netflix but also home alarm system providers, medical equipment companies and even makers of washers and dryers — will thrive or fail based on how much it costs them to maintain easy online contact with households and businesses. As such, the lobbying ahead of the release of the proposed new rules on May 15 is certain to be intense. As recently as Tuesday, officials from the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, which represents cable and broadband companies and is led by Michael K. Powell, a former F.C.C. chairman, met with commission staff members to discuss the pending proposals. For Internet service providers, video distributors, movie studios and even medical companies, lobbying efforts will center on what it means for a broadband provider to favor some content over another in a “commercially reasonable” way — the standard that the F.C.C. says will determine whether a practice is acceptable. The F.C.C. says its proposal will show that it is trying to accomplish most, if not all, of the same goals that it pursued in its 2010 Open Internet Order, which the appeals court struck down. “The court of appeals made it clear that the F.C.C. could stop harmful conduct if it were found to not be ‘commercially reasonable,’ ” Mr. Wheeler wrote in his post. The commission “will propose rules that establish a high bar for what is ‘commercially reasonable,’ ” he said. In addition, he wrote, the commission “believes it has the authority under Supreme Court precedent to identify behavior that is flatly illegal.” For years, many advocates of a free Internet have said that information should never have to pay a toll to ride on the web. But as traffic and competition has increased, much of it from big video providers like Netflix, the Internet has been becoming more congested and regulators have struggled to catch up with new digital realities. If the F.C.C. fails in this attempt to devise rules that withstand judicial scrutiny, it might have no choice but to try to reclassify broadband for stricter utilitylike regulation, which would likely result in another trip to court. With no more than vague guidance, many interested companies were reluctant to comment. But Verizon said in a statement that it was “publicly committed to ensuring that customers can access the Internet content they want, when they want and how they want.” However, it added, “Given the tremendous innovation and investment taking place in broadband Internet markets, the F.C.C. should be very cautious about adopting proscriptive rules that could be unnecessary and harmful.” That position was also put forth by two Republican lawmakers, Fred Upton of Michigan, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Greg Walden of Oregon, the chairman of the House Communications and Technology Subcommittee. In a joint statement, they said, in part: “We have said repeatedly that the Obama administration’s net neutrality rules are a solution in search of a problem. The marketplace has thrived and will continue to serve customers and invest billions annually to meet Americans’ broadband needs without these rules. Chairman Wheeler’s approach to regulation seeks to freeze current market practices, which will cast a chill on technological breakthroughs and cause American consumers to lose out.” But plenty of groups supporting a strict interpretation of net neutrality criticized the F.C.C.’s plans. Michael J. Copps, a former F.C.C. commissioner who is working with the nonprofit advocacy group Common Cause to keep net-neutrality safeguards in place, said big telecommunications and entertainment companies had spent millions to lobby for rules that would allow them to tilt the scales in their favor. The F.C.C.’s plan “is a lot closer to what they wanted than what we wanted,” Mr. Copps said in a phone interview. “It reflects a lot more input from them.” Based on what the F.C.C. has revealed so far, he said, the commission appears to be going beyond what the appeals court laid out. “The courts did not tell Chairman Wheeler to take the road that he is reportedly taking,” Mr. Copps said. [Link] |
| Goldstein All-Star Member "You have sacrificed nothing and no one." 3689 Posts 8/10 | Posted - May 8 2014 : 9:09AM By EDWARD WYATT May 7, 2014 WASHINGTON – A Democratic member of the Federal Communications Commission called Wednesday on the agency’s chairman to delay a proposal for new net neutrality rules, throwing into doubt whether the chairman will be able to muster enough votes at an F.C.C. meeting next week to issue proposed rules. Jessica Rosenworcel, one of three Democrats on the five-member commission, said in a speech Wednesday that a delay was warranted because of a “torrent of public response” to the idea that the commission’s rules might create a fast lane on the Internet for companies willing to pay for it. Last month, Tom Wheeler, the F.C.C. chairman, said he would aim to get a new set of proposed Open Internet rules before the commission at its May 15 meeting. The commission would then vote on whether to put the proposal out for public comment before adopting a final version. Since then, tens of thousands of individuals, companies, interest groups and others have visited with or written to the F.C.C. about the topic, with most of them opposing any sort of paid access that might cause some Internet content to be favored over others. Shannon Gilson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Wheeler, said that he intends to go ahead with his planned introduction of a proposal. “Chairman Wheeler fully supports a robust public debate on how best to protect the Open Internet, which is why he intends to put forward his proposals for public comment next week,” Ms. Gilson said. “Moving forward will allow the American people to review and comment on the proposed plan without delay, and bring us one step closer to putting rules on the books to protect consumers and entrepreneurs online.” The idea that all Internet content should be treated equally as it flows from content providers to consumers and back, known as net neutrality, has been debated for at least a decade. A federal appeals court has twice thrown out F.C.C. attempts to codify permissible behavior among companies that provide high-speed Internet service. Ms. Rosenworcel said, essentially, that the commission needs to stop and take a breath to allow the F.C.C.’s legal experts to engage the public in an online dialogue about what net neutrality means and how, or whether, it should be enforced. “While I recognize the urgency to move ahead and develop rules with dispatch, I think the greater urgency comes in giving the American public opportunity to speak right now, before we head down this road,” Ms. Rosenworcel said in an address to a meeting of the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies. Under F.C.C. rules, the commission must stop accepting public comment one week before it votes on a proposal, meaning that commissioners could no longer be lobbied beginning Thursday. “I think it’s a mistake to cut off public debate right now as we head into consideration of the chairman’s proposal,” Ms. Rosenworcel said. “I think we should delay our consideration of his rules by a least a month,” she added. The two Republican F.C.C. commissioners have said that they do not believe that the agency should impose strict, or possibly any, net neutrality requirements. The fifth commissioner, Mignon Clyburn, a Democrat, has said that she continues to oppose the idea of an Internet fast lane and that this is an opportunity for the commission “to take a fresh look and evaluate our policy in light of the many developments that have occurred over the last four years.” [Link] |
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| Goldstein All-Star Member "You have sacrificed nothing and no one." 3689 Posts 8/10 | Posted - May 17 2014 : 11:01AM By JEFF SOMMER MAY 10, 2014 The future of the Internet — which means the future of communications, culture, free speech and innovation — is up for grabs. The Federal Communications Commission is making decisions that may determine how open the Internet will be, who will profit most from it and whether start-ups will face new barriers that will make it harder for ideas to flourish. Tim Wu, 41, a law professor at Columbia University, isn’t a direct participant in the rule making, but he is influencing it. A dozen years ago, building on the work of more senior scholars, Mr. Wu developed a concept that is now a generally accepted norm. Called “net neutrality,” short for network neutrality, it is essentially this: The cable and telephone companies that control important parts of the plumbing of the Internet shouldn’t restrict how the rest of us use it. Most everyone embraces net neutrality, yet the debate over how to accomplish it is so volatile that more than a million signatures have been filed protesting F.C.C. regulations that haven’t even been proposed yet. (They may be released in draft form on Thursday.) What makes the current debate so contentious is that the F.C.C. has signaled its intention to grant cable and telephone companies the right to charge content companies like Netflix, Google, Yahoo or Facebook for speeding up transmissions to people’s homes. And this is happening as the F.C.C. is considering whether to bless the merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which could put a single company in control of the Internet pipes into 40 percent of American homes. In other words, these arcane matters of engineering and jurisprudence stir people up because they appear to violate net neutrality. “Sometimes what everybody thinks about the law is more important than what the law itself says,” Mr. Wu told me recently in his Columbia office. “I think that’s what’s happened with net neutrality. It’s become a kind of norm of behavior, what you can and can’t appropriately do with the Internet. It’s got to be open. Except for legitimate purposes like protecting the network itself, there shouldn’t be discrimination against one form of content or another or one provider or another. And people generally accept that. Until now, the idea in a way has been more important than what the regulations have actually said.” But what the law says is important, even paramount, and Mr. Wu is one of the most influential voices arguing that net neutrality be fully protected by law and regulation, which, in his view, means treating the Internet like a regulated utility, for the good of all. That remedy may not happen immediately. But his opinion is nonetheless sought out by rule makers. What got him to this point of influence and authority, besides his creative legal scholarship, was firsthand experience in Silicon Valley during the wildest days of the dot-com era. And a depressing afternoon at an Atlanta strip joint. ‘A Perpetual Frontier’ On a rainy May afternoon, Mr. Wu, attired in academic casual, sat in his cluttered office discussing the state of the Internet and his place in it. A child of peripatetic scientists, he was born in Washington and spent formative years in Basel, Switzerland, and Toronto. His father, born in Taiwan, was a noted immunologist. He died in 1981, when Mr. Wu was 8. His mother, who moved from London to Canada as a child, is an immunologist at York University in Toronto. Continue reading the main story Thanks to his mother’s farsighted purchase of an Apple II computer in 1982, Tim Wu says proudly that he became something of a geek. “That computer changed our lives, my brother’s and mine,” he said. In high school, Tim Wu got a part-time job writing software, while operating an online bulletin board, “the main purpose of which was to move around pirated software,” he said. “Hey, it was a different time.” His younger brother, David, is now a computer game software developer. A biochemistry major at McGill University, Mr. Wu was headed toward a career in “the family business — science,” when, he noted wryly, “I had a sort of rebellion.” It took the form of an application to Harvard Law School, where he spent the next three years. But he didn’t really know why he was at Harvard until he wandered into a cyberlaw class taught by Lawrence Lessig, an early advocate of an open Internet. “I didn’t know what cyberlaw was exactly, but it seemed cool,” Mr. Wu said. “Larry gave me my calling.” Mr. Lessig said he recognized that Mr. Wu was “unusually gifted” and helped arrange two clerkships for him. (Several years later, Mr. Lessig recommended that another student receive the same clerkships, and she did. Her name is Kathryn Judge. She is also a Columbia law professor and Mr. Wu’s wife.) For one year, Mr. Wu worked for Richard A. Posner, a federal appellate court judge, influential University of Chicago law professor, prolific author and blogger. “Richard Posner is a kind of law demigod,” Mr. Wu said. “He didn’t really need a clerk. He wrote everything on his own. But he wanted someone to be his critic — to match wits with him intellectually, to fight with him and tell him why he was wrong.” Judge Posner encouraged Mr. Wu to be a contrarian — and to find an independent road in the broad territory between heavy-handed government interference and free-market anarchy. In 1999 and 2000, Mr. Wu served as a clerk to Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the Supreme Court. There he played a different role. Justice Breyer’s law clerks, Mr. Wu said, were expected to find out what the other justices were contemplating. “One of Breyer’s favorite things was to ask, ‘What does Sandra think?,' ” referring to Sandra Day O’Connor, who was often the pivotal vote until she retired in 2006. “He believed he had a big job trying to defend the middle ground in the court — to form a caucus of reasonable adults.” In 2000, as Mr. Wu’s clerkship came to a close, the country was infected with dot-com fever. And even at the Supreme Court, he caught a case of it. With his legal pedigree and programming skills, he was in high demand. He opted for a high-risk, high-reward opportunity: a marketing job with a start-up firm in Silicon Valley called Riverstone Networks. The company, he said, “promised to make us all rich.” Instead, it made him disillusioned. He says he was appalled by the business practices around him. “Network neutrality came out of the bad things there,” he said. The company sold industrial-size Internet routers that were being used, Mr. Wu recalls, “to block and prioritize Internet traffic, to discriminate against traffic, basically, to do many of the things that I think companies on the Internet shouldn’t be doing.” He went to China for the company and found that the equipment he was dealing in was of interest to the Chinese for its potential to abet censorship. “Helping the Chinese government censor dissidents wasn’t the way I wanted to spend the rest of my life,” he said. “It hit me that we weren’t on the good side there.” The idea of net neutrality grew, in part, because “I had personal experience of violations of it,” he said. That was only part of the problem. The company’s top executives were engaging in activities that the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors said were improper. His immediate boss, Andrew Feldman, ultimately pleaded guilty to a felony count of violating internal accounting controls, and Mr. Feldman and four other top executives agreed to an S.E.C. settlement in a complaint accusing them of a scheme to defraud investors by misstating revenues. Mr. Wu was untouched by the investigations, but said he had known that things weren’t right. It all crystallized for him on Sept. 12, 2001 — the day after the 9/11 attacks. He was stranded in Atlanta at a trade show with other company employees. Their business engagements were canceled because of the attacks, and, with no other plans, his colleagues decided to go to a strip club. On such a solemn day, the tawdry revelry repelled him. “I wondered how I’d gotten there,” he recalls. “I realized that what we’d been doing all those months was abhorrent.” He had been living in a world based on nothing but money, he said, and saw that “the idea that the private sector, the free market, on its own has all the solutions is just a myth.” He added: “When it’s just about money, there are no values.” He looked for a way out and got a job teaching law at the University of Virginia. But the Internet preoccupied him. “I thought of it as a kind of perpetual frontier, the place where everyone gets a shot, where the underdogs have a chance. The Internet has been that. And I wanted some principles that would keep it that way.” He got back in touch with Mr. Lessig, who encouraged him in May 2002 to put his thoughts down on paper. The result was a sparkling memo, “A Proposal for Network Neutrality,” that asked: “What principle can balance the legitimate interests of broadband carriers in administering their networks with the danger of harm to new application markets? And how can such a principle be translated into both clear legal guidelines and the practice of network design?” The answer was in the title: a new creation called network neutrality. Mr. Lessig began sending the paper to his contacts the next month. Mr. Wu’s ideas spread, reaching top staff members at the F.C.C., who brought them to the attention of Michael Powell, then the commission chairman. “I was convinced by Tim Wu’s ideas,” Mr. Powell said in an interview last week. He cited Mr. Wu in a major speech in 2004, calling on Internet providers to refrain from blocking or restricting data or applications available to consumers. He asked consumers to “challenge their broadband providers to live up to these standards and to let the commission know how the industry is doing.” In 2005, the F.C.C. enjoined Madison River Communications, a telephone company, from blocking phone service over the Internet. In essence, Mr. Powell told me, “the F.C.C. made network neutrality the law of the land.” The ‘Common Carrier’ Debate The argument today is not so much whether net neutrality is a good concept — most people agree that it is — but what it means in practice. Mr. Lessig and Mr. Wu both say Mr. Powell was effective in maintaining an open Internet. He used a very light regulatory hand — and this has left some issues unresolved to this day. He decided that the Internet was “an information service” and not a “common carrier.” This semantic difference is crucial. Common carriers, like phone companies, are more tightly regulated, and while Mr. Powell prohibited the arbitrary blocking or setting of priorities for Internet traffic, he did so without invoking the F.C.C.'s authority over common carriers, which is embodied in Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. This point has haunted the F.C.C. ever since. In January, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down open Internet rules that had been in place since 2010. The court said the F.C.C. had regulated broadband carriers as though they were common carriers, yet the agency hadn’t designated them as such. Congress could intervene, but has not done so. One reason for his original decision, Mr. Powell said in the interview, was that the Internet needed enormous capital investment, which would have been deterred by tighter regulations. “If I thought Congress wanted to throw $10 billion or $20 billion or $30 billion a year into building up the infrastructure, I’d be willing to have a conversation about how to regulate such a system.” Today, Mr. Powell speaks as the head of the cable industry’s trade organization. “Now that private markets have created a system with certain expectations on return of capital,” he said, “it would be wrong, from many perspectives, to change the rules and confiscate what has been a public good.” Mr. Wu and his allies argue that broadband carriers — basically the telephone and cable companies — do, in fact, function as common carriers. In their view, the Internet is increasingly crucial to the economy, society and the political system, and its openness to all comers needs to be enforced by the F.C.C., which should invoke its full authority under Title II. Netflix has already begun making deals with Comcast and Verizon Communications to ensure swift transmissions from its servers to their broadband networks, and with the new F.C.C. proposals, priority service might be permitted through the “last mile” of these networks — that is, through the broadband networks into people’s homes. Mr. Wu says both sorts of commercial prioritization should be regulated under Title II. Andrew McLaughlin, the chief executive of Digg, a news collection site, said last week that he was worried that if big companies were allowed to buy priority service on the Internet, “it will be harder for two guys in a garage with a great idea to innovate and get their ideas out and compete.” Mr. McLaughlin was an adviser to President Obama on these issues from his election in November 2008 through 2010. Mr. McLaughlin’s words echoed comments made by the president in February 2010 in an interview on YouTube. “I’m a big believer in net neutrality,” Mr. Obama said in that interview. “We’re getting pushback, obviously from some of the bigger carriers, obviously who would like to charge more fees and extract more money from wealthier customers, but we think that runs counter to the whole spirit of openness that has made the Internet such a powerful engine not only for economic growth but also for the generation of ideas and creativity.” Many companies, including content providers like Netflix and Yahoo; social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit; search sites like Google and Microsoft’s Bing; and e-commerce companies like Amazon, say they worry that the F.C.C. might give “broadband gatekeepers” control. In a letter to the F.C.C. last week, these companies and many others said the new rule making “represents a grave threat to the Internet.” Cable and telephone industries respond that it is in their own interests to keep the Internet open. The main question, they say, is whether content providers will help pay for the cost of operating and building the network. “That’s just a financial issue,” Mr. Powell said. “It’s not a question of principle.” Some scholars say there are merits to the F.C.C..'s apparent approach. Philip J. Weiser, dean of the University of Colorado Law School, said, common-carrier regulation “is not a panacea.” If the F.C.C. were to use it, he said, there would most likely be years of litigation. Even if the classification withstood a legal challenge, he said, it might not improve the situation. Priority service would presumably be permitted for a “reasonable fee” so long as that fee was offered to everybody. “It’s like FedEx,” he said. “You pay a certain amount for overnight delivery and a certain amount for two-day delivery. You could end up with something like that for the Internet.” The agency’s evident strategy is fraught with problems, and there has been dissension in its own ranks. “The F.C.C. appears to be attempting to thread a needle,” said Christopher S. Yoo, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. It wants to avoid invoking Title II, he said, while adding enough conditions to a standard of “commercial reasonableness” for prioritizing Internet transmissions to satisfy the courts as well as the fiercest net-neutrality advocates. “I don’t think we’ll know for a while whether they can succeed.” Mr. Wu views the current battles as the latest in a long cycle. His book, “The Master Switch: The Rise And Fall of Information Empires,” describes how the F.C.C., as a weak overseer of the old AT&T telephone monopoly, often acted less in the public interest than to promote the interests of the company. Mergers like the one now proposed between Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which he opposes, could create new behemoths that might overwhelm the F.C.C. Yet he says the agency should persevere, using the most powerful weapons at its disposal, which include Title II. He says media companies will combine and grow — until they grow too large and start to fragment, and are replaced by more dynamic companies, in an endless cycle. In his book, he cites “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” the classic Chinese novel: “An empire long united must divide; an empire long divided must unite.” But when this process takes place in the modern world, he says, government regulators must protect the public interest. [Link] |
| Goldstein All-Star Member "You have sacrificed nothing and no one." 3689 Posts 8/10 | Posted - May 17 2014 : 11:09AM The New York Times Editorial By THE EDITORIAL BOARD MAY 15, 2014 After weeks of being criticized for a proposal that would have divided the Internet into fast and slow lanes, the Federal Communications Commission put forward a new plan on Thursday. While more balanced than its earlier approach, the commission still seems to be leaning toward creating a two-tiered system that could discriminate against smaller companies and restrict consumer choice. The F.C.C. has been struggling for years to come up with rules to prevent phone and cable companies from blocking or interfering with Internet content. Last month, the chairman of the agency, Tom Wheeler, appeared to throw in the towel when he proposed regulations that would have allowed telecommunications companies to strike deals with firms like Netflix and Amazon for faster delivery of their videos and other data to consumers. Then, on Thursday, the commission voted 3 to 2 along party lines to consider two options. Under the first option, the F.C.C. would require cable and phone companies to provide their broadband subscribers a basic level of unfettered Internet service. But as long as that condition is met, telecom companies would also be able to charge businesses like Netflix fees to deliver their movies faster to consumers than others. Under the second option, the commission would reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service, akin to a public utility. That would allow for more stringent regulation that could prevent companies like Verizon and Comcast from engaging in unreasonable and unjust discrimination. Many consumer advocates like Public Knowledge and legal scholars like Tim Wu of Columbia Law School have recommended this option all along. Mr. Wheeler and the commission’s two other Democratic members say they will listen to public comments over the next four months before making up their minds about which of the two options they will pick. (The agency’s two Republican members said they voted against the proposal because they do not think the F.C.C. should adopt any such rules.) There are serious problems with the first option. It would give phone and cable companies a financial incentive to scrimp on basic high-speed Internet service in order to encourage companies like Apple or Google, which owns YouTube, to pay fees for premium delivery. Mr. Wheeler said on Thursday that he doesn’t want the Internet “divided into ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’ ” but that’s exactly what would happen if the commission creates a regulatory distinction between basic and premium offerings. The commission would be on much more solid ground if it decided to classify broadband Internet service as a utility. Mr. Wheeler has not been very enthusiastic about this option, which has many opponents among lawmakers in Washington, particularly Republicans who usually side with deep-pocketed phone and cable companies on controversial regulatory matters. But the chairman and the other two Democrats on the commission have to consider this option seriously if they want to make sure Americans can access lawful content on the Internet without restriction. Mr. Wheeler has said he wants to adopt final rules by the end of the year. But the F.C.C. should take more time if it needs to, as one Democratic commissioner, Jessica Rosenworcel, has suggested. These rules are too important to rush through. [Link] |
| Dread Senior Member Latex and boobs 5085 Posts 3/07 | Posted - May 17 2014 : 11:34AM ----Dread's Twitter---- [Link] |
| Bill All-Star Member 5334 Posts 6/00 | Posted - May 17 2014 : 11:36AM [Link] |
| Goldstein All-Star Member "You have sacrificed nothing and no one." 3689 Posts 8/10 | Posted - May 21 2014 : 11:10AM By EDWARD WYATT May 20, 2014 WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said Tuesday that the agency would examine the type of paid-priority arrangements that Netflix recently entered into with Comcast, a deal that created an uproar of accusations that the F.C.C. was allowing companies to buy fast-lane Internet access to consumers. The chairman, Tom Wheeler, told a House panel Tuesday that the commission “needs to be looking at and will be looking at” those types of agreements, which are business-to-business contracts known as peering arrangements. Mr. Wheeler also stated that position last week after the commission voted to release its open Internet proposal for public comment. The stance is significant because Mr. Wheeler has long said that peering agreements do not fall under the umbrella of what is commonly referred to as “net neutrality,” which is the focus of the commission’s open Internet proposals introduced last week. Mr. Wheeler has emphasized that he believes net neutrality is a concept over which the F.C.C. has jurisdiction and which it should enforce. Net neutrality encompasses the concept that Internet service providers should treat all legal digital traffic equally, not giving any content priority in sending it to consumers. But he has said that net neutrality, as the commission is considering it, applies to what is known as the “last mile” connection, between an Internet service provider like Comcast or Time Warner Cable and the consumer. Peering arrangements are not part of that universe, Mr. Wheeler has said. That stance has drawn vocal opposition from many net neutrality supporters, who believe that paid-access agreements should be banned wherever they occur. Peering arrangements primarily are agreements between Internet service providers and the operators of Internet backbone systems for the exchange of traffic. They generally do not involve payment, because equivalent amounts of traffic are usually going both ways. But Netflix entered an agreement with Comcast recently in which it agreed to pay Comcast for a direct link to Comcast’s high-speed Internet service, which has allowed its traffic to reach consumers without encountering congestion that can slow down video transmissions. Mr. Wheeler made the remarks at a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee oversight hearing, where Republicans told him they were troubled both by what the commission was doing and what it was not. “Given some of the most recent actions out of the commission,” including the issuance of net neutrality rules and regulations governing coming auctions of airwaves for wireless broadband, “I fear that we may be headed into some rough waters,” Representative Greg Walden, an Oregon Republican who is chairman of the Communications and Technology Subcommittee, said at the beginning of the hearing. Mr. Walden also cited as troublesome the agency’s “selective inaction,” including its failure to complete its 2010 quadrennial review of broadcast ownership rules. Mr. Wheeler, who took over as F.C.C. chairman in late 2013, said earlier this year that the commission would skip that long-delayed report in favor of a new, 2014 review of the rules. At the hearing, Republicans also warned Mr. Wheeler against reclassifying high-speed Internet service as a utility, a designation that would subject the service to a greater level of regulatory oversight. The F.C.C.’s recently released proposed rules on net neutrality asked for public comment on whether broadband service should be subject to the tightened regulation. Mr. Wheeler noted in his testimony that because a federal appeals court in January threw out the net neutrality rules enacted by the commission in 2010, “today we do not have any rules in place to protect the open Internet.” The purpose of the rules proposed by the commission last week “is to give Americans the ability to express themselves and provide analysis and guidance,” Mr. Wheeler said. The commission is gathering public comment over the next four months. Representative Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat who represents Silicon Valley, also warned against the possibility that the open Internet rules would allow broadband providers to offer faster access to their networks to companies willing and able to pay for that access. “I don’t want this to become an auction, selling off the best in bits and pieces where some pay for faster lanes, while others cannot pay and get stuck in a slow lane,” Ms. Eshoo said. To do so, she said, would “unravel the values that have been the hallmark and the bulwark of the Internet.” Ms. Eshoo and others repeatedly called for hearings to examine the implications of the proposed mergers of Comcast and Time Warner Cable and of AT&T and DirecTV. [Link] |
| Goldstein All-Star Member "You have sacrificed nothing and no one." 3689 Posts 8/10 | Posted - Jun 18 2014 : 8:09AM By EDWARD WYATT June 17, 2014 WASHINGTON – Democratic members of both houses of Congress introduced legislation Tuesday that would ban Internet service providers from charging content companies for faster or more direct connections to Internet service subscribers. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, and Representative Doris Matsui, a California Democrat, filed bills in their respective chambers that would ban so-called paid prioritization – deals similar to the recent agreement that allows Netflix to connect directly to Comcast’s system to avoid network congestion. The legislators said that the bill “would help prevent the creation of a two-tiered Internet system, ensuring start-ups and entrepreneurs have access to the marketplace and ensuring consumers can access all content equally.” With no Republican co-sponsors as yet, the proposal will most likely have a hard time making it through the House of Representatives. The bills are the latest development in a fervent public debate over net neutrality, the concept that all Internet traffic should be treated equally as it moves through networks on its way to a consumer. Last week, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said the agency was opening an inquiry into those types of deals, which critics contend would divide the Internet into fast and slow lanes. Internet-service providers like Comcast and Verizon, which also struck a deal with Netflix, say that their agreements involve interconnection of networks and are not covered by the concept of net neutrality. Net neutrality, they say, applies only to what is known as the last mile – the Internet service provider’s pipe to a consumer. The F.C.C. also is collecting public comment on proposals for how to ensure an open Internet, and more than 20,000 comments have been registered at the agency. Two previous attempts by the agency to complete such rules were struck down by a federal appeals court. In its proposals, the F.C.C. says that interconnection agreements are not covered by its proposed rules. But the commission also asked for comment on whether paid-prioritization deals should be disallowed. “Americans are speaking loud and clear,” Mr. Leahy said. “They want an Internet that is a platform for free expression and innovation, where the best ideas and services can reach consumers based on merit rather than based on a financial relationship with a broadband provider.” [Link] |
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