July 2015

Joint Statement of Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Michael O'Rielly on the Wireline Competition Bureau's Implementation of 100% Overlap Rule

Today, we support the Bureau’s Public Notice to implement the phase out of universal service support for rate-of-return carriers in service areas fully served by a competitor that does not receive such subsidies. Providing support to a carrier that is in essence using it to compete against an unsubsidized provider is not the best use of our scarce federal universal service dollars, as it distorts the market, fuels inefficiency, creates an un-level playing field and is not the intent of universal service. While today’s action is a significant first step, we have more to do to address wasteful or excessive spending that is an undue burden on all consumers that contribute to the program. Further reforms are necessary to ensure we target finite universal service funds to areas that will not have broadband without such support.

Sri Lanka ties with Google for Internet beamed from balloons

Sri Lanka teamed up with Google to bring high-speed Internet access to the island using balloons, aiming to become the first country in the region with complete coverage.

Foreign minister Mangala Samaraweera said officials signed an agreement with Google in the capital Colombo to launch the helium-filled, high-tech balloons above the Indian Ocean island in coming months. Google announced Project Loon in 2013 aimed at delivering Internet connections to remote or rural areas worldwide using gear floating from thousands of the balloons. "The entire Sri Lankan island - every village from (southern) Dondra to (northern) Point Pedro - will be covered with affordable high speed Internet using Google Loon's balloon technology," said Samaraweera, who is also IT minister. Officials said local Internet service providers will have access to the balloons, reducing their operational costs.

'First We Pray, Then We Organize' The Unlikely Coalition for Net Neutrality

[Commentary] On Tuesday, July 28th, a diverse group of faith leaders and advocates posted the same video on the Twitter and Facebook feeds of more than one million people. Backers of the video came from a wide range of civil rights causes -- racial justice, LGBTQ equality, economic justice, religious pluralism and more. What's the unlikely hashtag that unites them? #NetNeutrality. The new video from Faithful Internet shows how the open Internet has become the lifeblood of today's social movements -- #BlackLivesMatter, #99Percent, #LoveWins and more. It celebrates the 2015 Open Internet Order for codifying #netneutrality -- the principle that has kept the Internet free from undue corporate control. The Open Internet Order protects the Internet as the prophetic platform of the 21st century -- a place where we communicate, create and organize freely. Specifically, it bans carriers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking or slowing down websites, or charging sites extra fees to reach people faster. That means Americans have an equal chance of being heard online. As a Sikh American, I have come to understand acutely that marginalized communities like my own cannot fight for equality and dignity without reaching audiences online. I'm not alone.

The call to action is urgent. As we speak, big carriers like Comcast and Verizon are lobbying Congress hard to override rules that protect net neutrality. This month, Congress is considering an appropriations bill that would undo the Open Internet Order. And this week, carriers are filing briefs in a lawsuit to kill the Order entirely. A delegation will deliver the video and a list of supporters to the Congressional Black Caucus tomorrow, urging lawmakers who care about social justice to vote their conscience. Because Internet freedom is what makes other movements possible. If you want a world where #BlackLivesMatter, if you proclaim #Not1More or #LoveWins, if you want dignity for #Sikhs and #Muslims and the #99Percent, then #NetNeutrality is your cause too.

[Valarie Kaur is an interfaith leader, lawyer, and filmmaker]

Tired of waiting for high-speed Internet? Ask your local government.

Fed up with waiting for faster Internet access, two Northern Virginia governments are trying to prompt the development of fiber-optic broadband networks by creating them or partnering with entities that can. Alexandria (VA) is seeking proposals from organizations that want to work with the city to create a fiber-optic backbone network that can be used by public institutions -- such as libraries, school and public safety agencies -- and by businesses, residents and nonprofit groups.

Five months ago, Arlington County decided to offer access to its own 10-mile fiber-optic network to companies located in the county’s major commercial areas as an economic development incentive. “Broadband is the new transit. It’s sort of a must-have for any business,” said Stephanie Landrum, president and chief executive of the Alexandria Economic Partnership. “Seven years ago, only people working in technology or the federal government needed access to the highest speeds and capacity for broadband connectivity. Now it’s becoming an expectation that business people and those working in the nonprofit sector have it too.”

Why Can’t We Be Like South Korea?

[Commentary] Rural areas in New England are mostly -- with some shining exceptions -- struggling to come up with a route to fiber-optic-plus-Wi-Fi access that will allow people to work from home and generally participate in the modern world. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to find a rural section of South Korea that doesn’t have fantastic high-capacity Internet access. It’s clear that Massachusetts is not South Korea. Just a handful of Massachusetts utilities have embraced the idea of fiber, and people in Western Massachusetts often travel far for a persistent (even if third-rate) data connection. South Korea invested heavily in communications infrastructure following its 1997 economic crisis, and is dedicated to ensuring world-class Internet access in every corner (high or low, wet or dry, urban or rural) of the country.

What’s brought this problem home for me, yet again, is the human experience of this difference. We’re not planning for the future and we’re not in the lead. We need high-powered leadership at every level of government as well as university-catalyzed collaboration in order to move things along. Our politicians don’t understand how important this is -- and a citizenry desensitized to inferior service can’t envision a better situation. So it takes a teenaged visitor from halfway around the world to open our eyes.

[Susan Crawford is co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University]

The government is headed back to the drawing board over controversial cybersecurity export rules

The cybersecurity industry and the government have been struggling over proposed export rules that researchers say could end up making the Internet less safe. And now the government says it will try again and give the public another chance to weigh in.

Earlier in 2015, the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security released a proposal for how to implement restrictions on exporting so-called "intrusion software" in order to comply with an international arms control agreement known as the Wassenaar Arrangement. The list of items covered by the agreement was updated in December of 2013 to include some surveillance and intelligence-gathering tools and the proposed rules were meant to ensure the US meets its obligations under the pact. But the proposal drew criticism from big tech companies and independent researchers alike, who argued that they were too broad and would end up stymieing defensive cybersecurity research. Security professionals warned that licensing requirements in the proposed regulations could limit the use of so-called "penetration testing" -- tools designed to help researchers discover problems in computers systems or even make it more difficult for researchers to disclose vulnerabilities they uncover to software makers so they can be fixed. On July 29, representatives from the Department of Commerce told industry stakeholders that there would be a new version of the proposed rules incorporating industry feedback, as well as more time for the public and industry to weigh in. An official at the agency's Bureau of Industry and Security confirmed that it was working on a updated version of the rules and there would be a second comment period, but said it was unclear exactly when the new version would be ready. The initial round of comments closed on July 20th.

Why Republican presidential campaigns will buy way more TV ads than Facebook ones

There's already a premium on television ad time in early primary states. Earlier in July, WMUR in New Hampshire made headlines when it held off on reserving time for the presidential campaign of Sen Marco Rubio (R-FL), knowing that as more slots sold, the price for each would increase. So why didn't Sen Rubio just turn around pour his money into, say, Facebook? After all, in her always-fascinating annual look at media trends, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers' Mary Meeker notes that there are big gaps between where people spend their time and where advertisers buy ads. Advertisers reserve a lot more of their budgets for print than do consumers (God bless them); consumers spend way more time on mobile devices than advertisers spend money.

The answer? Voters don't look like the population at large. If you compare turnout in the 2012 Iowa caucuses to where people spend their time on a weekly basis (as compiled quarterly by Nielsen), you can see that the older people are, the more time they spend watching TV. And the more likely they were to come out and vote three years ago. So ad money from candidates goes to TV. You fish where the fish are.

NCTA Defends Call for 'True' LTE-U Collaboration

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association fired back at Qualcomm over the impact of new LTE-U and LAA wireless spectrum plans and their impact on cable Wi-Fi. Qualcomm had branded NCTA assertions false and misleading, which did not sit well with the cable trade group. NCTA wants the FCC to open a new docket on the implications of allowing mobile operators to employ "non-standard" LTE unlicensed (LTE-U) technologies including LAA (license assisted access) to operate in unlicensed spectrum, which the cable trade group argues could degrade Wi-Fi service, cable operators' primary mobile broadband play. Qualcomm, which is promoting the technologies, has said LTE-U, including with an assist from licensed spectrum (LAA), can share spectrum without interfering with cable Wi-Fi. It also told the FCC in a letter that any suggestion by NCTA or others, which include Microsoft, Google and Cisco, that Qualcomm has not been working with the wireless industry directly and via industry bodies to "ensure that LTE Unlicensed coexists well with Wi-Fi," is not true, as, it says, are a number of other NCTA et al assertions. NCAT begs to differ.

In a letter to the FCC in response to Qualcomm's letter, it said that in that company's "through-the-looking-glass world, PowerPoint presentations and unilateral pronouncements amount to collaboration, and sharing mechanisms that can be unilaterally scaled back or turned off constitute a fair and equitable approach." NCTA has said it believes sharing is possible and that LTE can operate in unlicensed bands, but that will take a truly collaborative process, a point it reiterated this week. "This process will require Qualcomm and others to recognize the shortsightedness of their ongoing efforts to downplay the serious concerns of consumers and the unlicensed community, and to recognize that the so-called “sharing solutions” suggested to date are incomplete and insufficient."

Verizon, CenturyLink say abandoning copper network is a "myth"

Verizon and CenturyLink may be anxious to shut down all of their copper facilities and transition to fiber, but each provider has told the Federal Communications Commission that de facto copper retirement is a "myth" and there's no need to include new requirements addressing the issue in its technology transition plans. De facto copper retirement is the process where a telecommunication company would let their aging copper plant deteriorate to the point where it would become necessary to replace the copper with fiber. The FCC is concerned about these allegations because CLECs, which rent copper facilities from ILECs like Verizon and CenturyLink, could be left without connections for their business customers.

Seeing greater operational efficiency and the potential to upsell FiOS services, Verizon has been replacing copper plant with fiber that connects to residential customers in various parts of its Northeast last mile network. In the second quarter of 2015, Verizon reported that it had converted 51,000 customers off of copper to fiber, bringing its first-half total to 98,000. It has set a full-year goal to convert 200,000 customers. However, Verizon said that de facto copper retirement does not exist and including a provision on it would make it more challenging to migrate customers to fiber, particularly in areas where the copper plant is unsustainable to maintain. "Consistent with our July 13 ex parte letter, we explained de facto copper retirement is a myth and defining copper retirement to include de facto retirement could result in unmanageable loop-by-loop retirement requirements and complicate a provider's ability to move customers to fiber when that is the best and most efficient way to resolve troubles they are experiencing with copper facilities," wrote Verizon in a FCC filing.

AMC warns of increased programming costs if FCC enacts MVPD reform

AMC Networks warned the Federal Communications Commission that reclassifying certain over the top services as cable services, would raise programming costs and do little to help online video distributors. The cable network company, which offers pay TV services channels that include "The Walking Dead" and "Humans" in the programming lineup, is the latest company to weigh in on a proposal FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has promised to move this fall.

Since the proposed rule would require AMC to make "The Walking Dead" available to over the top Internet services the same way it makes it available to Comcast, DirecTV, AMC would have to acquire the digital distribution rights from the studio, AMC argued. Those rights may not even be available, and if they were, the rights could get expensive, AMC explained. “Requiring programmers to purchase online distribution rights in all cases may lead to increased programming costs, especially due to the increased leverage content holders will have in negotiations with affected programmers,” AMC wrote. Comments are picking up on FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal, stoking the debate on Wheeler’s proposal to apply cable regulations to over the top services that provide linear programming. Recently, the nation’s largest OVDs made a visit to the FCC describing a growing sector that isn’t in need of new FCC-imposed regulations while it experiments with new programming options to offer consumers.

Benton

Search