March 2010

Toward a more wired union

[Commentary] Silicon Valley should be pleased with the Federal Communications Commission's new national broadband plan. Though it isn't perfect, the plan is far better than anything that came out under former President George W. Bush's FCC - and it recognizes that broadband is becoming as crucial to the American economy as electricity and telephones.

Unfortunately, there are many things in the plan that require congressional approval. While common sense suggests that Congress should jump at the chance to keep America competitive and expand access to the most important invention of the last century, there are certain entrenched interests - namely the telephone and cable companies - who have a vested interest in preventing competition, even if it means that the whole country has slower and less reliable service than our global competitors. Coincidentally, these companies also employ lots of lobbyists. To protect its own growth, Silicon Valley needs to do some lobbying of its own.

FCC's Broadband Plan: Mobile Broadband Will Save Us!

The Federal Communications Commission issued the long-awaited National Broadband Plan this week, a 376-page document that makes clear the agency accepts the reality of the current wireline duopoly — and as such, has decided to put the burden of competitive pressure on mobile broadband.

There are many consumer-friendly aspects of the plan, such as opening up set-top boxes and creating an easy-to-understand label that shows people what their broadband connections are capable of. But the FCC has clearly decided against a plan that requires a new infrastructure buildout when the current infrastructure will suffice. If only the agency had moved to tackle this issue back in 2002, when the telecommunications providers were thinking about how their fiber rollouts were going to occur, and implemented policies that could have resulted in a shared nationwide fiber network.

Consumer Broadband Test Update

Thanks to the over 150,000 unique users who have taken over 300,000 Consumer Broadband Tests, as well as the nearly 4,000 addresses submitted to the broadband Dead Zone Report. The popularity of the consumer tools has exceeded our expectations.We've made some text changes to the short "About" section found on a tab below the Consumer Broadband Test Tool. Some users have been confused by the differences between the two testing platforms presented by the FCC - Ookla and M-Lab - and this posting explains the variability.

Your Questions (and answers) about the National Broadband Plan

Immediately following the release of the National Broadband Plan, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski sat down for a YouTube Interview to answer questions from the American people about the future of the Internet.

The interview was lead by Steve Grove, Director of News & Politics at YouTube, and was the second interview of its kind following the session with President Obama last month. The questions were interesting and insightful, and drove discussion to the core issues facing the future of the Internet in America.

Verizon, AT&T, Google Partake of Broadband Speed Race

The race to provide ultrafast broadband is on.

In May, Cleveland will become a test bed for a service, spearheaded by Case Western Reserve University, that lets residents of more than 100 homes download data at about 1 gigabit per second. In February, Google said it plans an ultra-high-speed broadband network covering as many as 500,000 users. The plans by Google and Case Western may add to pressure on the largest broadband providers such as Verizon Communications, AT&T, and Comcast to accelerate their own deployments and could create a windfall for the makers of networking equipment, analysts say.

"Pre-Google announcement, it would have been five years" before such speeds became common, says John Mazur, a principal analyst at Ovum, a telecom market researcher. "Post-Google announcement, it could be sooner."

A download speed of 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) is 20 times faster than top speeds Verizon offers consumers and more than 256 times faster than the speeds available to the average broadband subscriber. Broadband providers are trying to meet a surge in demand for video and other services delivered over networks, sometimes wirelessly. Global data traffic may increase fivefold by 2013, according to Cisco.

States embark on a scramble for cyberspace

[Commentary] It is time to stop thinking of cyberspace as a new medium or an agglomeration of new media. It is a new continent, rich in resources but in parts most perilous. Until 30 years ago, it had lain undiscovered, unmined and uninhabited.

Cyberspace is being nationalized rapidly. In some parts of the world, this has been going on for a while. The legal mapping of cyberspace in the west is more chaotic. But we are now witnessing the establishment of myriad laws and rules by legislators and in the courts.

In a hearing this week at Blackfriars Crown Court in London following a major cybercrime trial, Harendra de Silva QC put his finger on it when he argued that "we are entering a world where almost any human interaction of any kind will require use of the Internet".

So while there is clearly a pressing need to define rules that apply in cyberspace, they are emerging at speed with little coherent strategy behind them. Nobody knows where this process will lead for two central reasons. The speed of technological change means that the traditional tools of state used to carve up the world in the 19th century, such as laws and treaties, are often inadequate, if not entirely irrelevant, when applied to this new domain. Governments are becoming obsessed about the need to control the Internet but have yet to work out how to do this without suffocating the noble goal of those pioneers who merely wanted to facilitate communication between ordinary people.

Spy agencies and business to share data

The US government will share classified information with the private sector operators of "critical infrastructure" under the terms of a proposed cybersecurity bill in Congress that has bipartisan support.

The bill was unveiled by Sens Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) amid heightened concern in Washington that the US is ill equipped to deal with the growing threat of cybercrime and state-sponsored "intrusions" into US government and communications networks. If passed, the legislation would enhance collaboration between US intelligence agencies and the private sector. First, it would require the White House to designate certain technology systems as critical if their disruption threatened strategic national interests. If intelligence officials received information about a forthcoming attack targeting a specific company or critical part of the US infrastructure, a top-level private sector official with security clearance would be provided with "enough" information to defend or mitigate the attack.

Google In Italy: Lessons from Tobago

[Commentary] A look at Google's legal trouble in Italy.

Two horribly disturbing features of this Italian misadventure stick in Epstein's craw. First, the episode shows how principles of strict criminal responsibility for the acts of others continues to gain traction around the world. That specter of liability gives governments, including totalitarian regimes, an opening to bully companies around the world with threats of criminal liability that could result in jail time for top officers and huge fines for the corporation.

Second, this incident brings us back to those pesky courts in Tobago. Anything that gets uploaded onto YouTube can be accessed around the world. Fortunately, most nations, most of the time, have sensible policies on privacy that makes a repetition of the Italian fiasco unlikely. But what good is protection in 99 jurisdictions around the globe if Google officials could be hustled off to jail in even one nation? It would be a travesty of justice to let the misguided criminal policies of an over-enthusiastic nation dictate the type of content that is posted world-wide. Punish the actual perpetrators in their home state, and the public interests in protecting privacy are satisfied.

[Richard A. Epstein is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of law, The University of Chicago; the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution; and a visiting professor at New York University Law School.]

FCC to tackle retransmission issue

The Federal Communications Commission will undertake a review of the retransmission consent rule amid the growing contentiousness between broadcasters and cable operators on carriage agreements, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Wednesday.

"We're going to look at (retrans) the same way we looked at broadband: Open participatory proceedings focusing on facts and data, and just thinking in an open way with an open mind about what would work best for the country and for all the players involved," Chairman Genachowski said. A group of cable, satellite and telco operators filed a petition with the FCC last week urging the commission to mandate that retrans disputes be subject to arbitration and that stations cannot pull their signals while negotiations are ongoing -- a key leverage point for station owners. The FCC is expected to post a formal notice seeking comments from the public on the petition some time this week.

China Drawing High-Tech Research From US

For years, many of China's best and brightest left for the United States, where high-tech industry was more cutting-edge. But Mark Pinto is moving in the opposite direction.

Pinto is the first chief technology officer of a major American tech company to move to China. The company, Applied Materials, is one of Silicon Valley's most prominent firms. It supplied equipment used to perfect the first computer chips. Today, it is the world's biggest supplier of the equipment used to make semiconductors, solar panels and flat-panel displays. In addition to moving Mr. Pinto and his family to Beijing in January, Applied Materials, whose headquarters are in Santa Clara, Calif., has just built its newest and largest research labs here. Last week, it even held its annual shareholders' meeting in Xi'an. It is hardly alone. Companies — and their engineers — are being drawn here more and more as China develops a high-tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States. A few American companies are even making deals with Chinese companies to license Chinese technology.

Benton

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