December 2014

British Telecom Calls on FCC to Regulate Broadband 'Special Access'

Bas Burger, the president of British Telecom in the Americas, wants to see the special access market regulated as a way to end the negative effects of the effective monopoly held by AT&T and Verizon in the US. Special access is communication that includes data and voice used by enterprises, carriers and others to connect one point to another. For example, a cell carrier would use special access to connect a cell tower with the central office where calls are routed.

Fiber fight: Broadening broadband Gig City touted as model in broadband debate

In a growing number of cities, high-speed Internet is seen as another essential utility, like water, sewers, roads or electricity. If cable and phone companies don't provide faster web service, more municipalities say they want to do it themselves as municipal electric utilities have done in Chattanooga (TN), Tullahoma (TN) and Dalton (GA). As a model, many cities from around the globe are looking at Chattanooga and the first citywide gigabit-per-second broadband service developed in the western hemisphere, built by the city-owned EPB.

AT&T joins case; Chanute needs state nod to offer fiber broadband, says 1947 law

After beating back a legislative effort to stop them, city leaders in Chanute (KS) now face another state government hurdle in their effort to extend ultra-high-speed fiber broadband to residents’ homes and businesses. Because of a 1947 state law on utilities, the city has to get permission from the Kansas Corporation Commission to sell bonds to fund its fiber-to-home project, which would extend some of the fastest Internet service in the nation to the rural community of about 9,200 people in southeast Kansas. AT&T, one of two lower-speed broadband providers serving Chanute, filed to officially intervene in the case and was granted that permission. In the commission case, Chanute is arguing that the 1947 law was actually designed to protect municipalities from defaulting on bonds because of private-sector competition, not to protect private-sector providers from competition with local government.

NHMC Welcomes New Policy Counsel, Elizabeth Ruiz

The National Hispanic Media Coalition recently welcomed Elizabeth Ruiz as our new Policy Counsel, based in our Washington (DC) office.

Ruiz is not new to NHMC -- she was our 2011-2012 Legal Fellow during her last year at University of North Carolina School of Law. In law school, she also interned for FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn and served as a Google Policy Fellow at Media Access Project. She was a member of the North Carolina Journal of International Law and Commercial Regulation, and she was Vice President of the Carolina Public Interest Law Organization, for which she organized a live-auction event to raise grant money for law students who accept unpaid public interest internships.

Network Neutrality Essential to our Democracy

[Commentary] Network neutrality is, simply put, the fundamental principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally.

There are very few level playing fields in American life, but in a nation plagued by inequality, the Internet has remained open, free and fair -- a powerful equalizing force that has allowed good ideas to flourish whether they came from a corporate board room or a college dorm room. This equality of opportunity is at the core of net neutrality. And it is under relentless attack by major telecommunications companies seeking yet another advantage to tighten their grip on the market. The importance of preserving net neutrality should be obvious. A tiered Internet will be great for the profits of telecommunications companies, but terrible for entrepreneurs, stifling the kind of innovation that can build massive followings before ever leaving the garage. Worse yet, sanctioning the creation of “fast lanes” could lead to online discrimination, with the providers choking off controversial views to protect their financial or political interests. Net neutrality is also essential to maintaining a genuinely open marketplace of ideas.

The fight for net neutrality started long ago, the result of a people-powered movement that has spent years fighting for an open and free Internet. As President Barrack Obama acknowledged in his statement, for example, the Federal Communication Commission’s plan to allow “fast lanes” received almost 4 million public comments, the most in the agency’s history. And today, it seems possible, if not likely, that the public interest will prevail over special interests. But the forces mobilizing against net neutrality have no intention of stepping down from a fight. If the American people are serious about keeping the Internet open and free, the movement that has gotten us this far must continue to demand true net neutrality without delay.

FCC Commissioner Pai’s Letter to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings

Federal Communications Commission member Ajit Pai wrote a letter to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings saying he was, "surprised to learn of allegations that Netflix has been working to effectively secure 'fast lanes' for its own content on ISPs' networks at the expense of its competitors", as these allegations "raise an apparent conflict with Netflix's advocacy for strong net neutrality regulations." A response from Netflix is requested by December 16, 2014.

Cable lobby head frets 'Alice in Wonderland' network neutrality plan

Federal regulators are needlessly going down the rabbit hole by toying with broad new rules for the Internet, according to the country’s top cable lobbyist.

“You’re going to make this tectonic shift to radically transform the entire regulatory framework in order to solve a minor legal problem associated with the smaller rules,” said Michael Powell, the head of the nation’s top cable lobbying group, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. “I’ve never seen such an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ series of events in my career." “While it’s self-serving, there has not been a deep-enough, honest-enough examination by the President or anyone else about what Title II really means,” he added, referring to the legal authority governing rules for public utilities. “The consequences of this are going to be, at best, six to 10 years of prolonged ambiguity, uncertainty and confusion in a market that has settled and stabilized 20 years ago,” Powell said.

[raise your hand if you were a broadband subscriber in 1994]

Mark Cuban on net neutrality: Fear the FCC, not Comcast

Mark Cuban doubled down on a recent Twitter rant in which he likened the Federal Communication Commission’s proposed broadband regulation to some sort of socialist dystopia.

“We’re seeing competition, but everyone is like ‘the big ISPs are going to f--- everyone,'” said Cuban, who argued that the public is better off waiting for competition between broadband providers than running the risks of regulation. He pointed to the FCC’s reaction to the Janet Jackson nipple-slip incident to argue the agency is inherently political, and will ultimately screw up forbearance or whatever pro-consumer mandate it tries to impose. In Cuban’s view, the widespread fears that ISPs like Comcast will squeeze small websites are illusory, while the outlook for fast Internet is better than we think. Cuban assured his audience that, years from now, we’ll all be awash in 8-gigabit Internet and so we can rest easy. Advocates for Internet competition can only hope that Cuban will follow his Dallas Mavericks basketball team on the road to cities like Brooklyn, where there’s precisely one broadband provider -- and consumers have no hope of switching, no matter how bad the service gets.

The Only Legitimate FCC Hybrid Network Neutrality Approach

[Commentary] In trying to re-impose price controls that the US Court of Appeals found the Federal Communications Commission did not have the legitimate authority to impose in the first place, the FCC is considering basically re-doing what it did the last two times it failed in court, i.e. re-proposing yet a new “hybrid” of combined FCC authorities, in a new hybrid mix of re-packaging, to see if they can get a different appeals court panel to swallow the FCC’s third hybrid cocktail. The only legitimate FCC “hybrid” network neutrality approach is for the FCC to respect the legitimate legal path the US Court of Appeals effectively advised the agency to follow, combined with an official request to Congress for the new legal authority the FCC believes it requires to regulate effectively in the 21st century.
[Scott Cleland is Chairman of NetCompetition, a pro-competition e-forum supported by broadband interests and President of Precursor LLC, a research consultancy for Fortune 500 companies]

The FCC’s powers of taxation: A signal of bad governance

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler floated a proposal to increase the E-Rate funding by $1.5 billion, or about 60%, raising total funding to about $3.9 billion. The issue here isn’t whether schools and libraries should have additional funding, or whether they should spend any additional funding on technology. Rather, the issue is that the FCC has become a de facto taxing authority and education funder, a task for which it was not designed.

Benton

Search