1. Monthly archive
  2. July 2017

July 2017

DC Court Upholds FCC Rebuttable Presumption Decision for Cable Rate Regulations

In a big victory for cable operators large and small, a federal court has said the Federal Communications Commission was within its authority to make it easier for cable video services to shed basic rate regulations. The US Court of Appeals has upheld the FCC's decision—under former chairman Tom Wheeler—reversing the rebuttable presumption that cable operators are not subject to local competition, thereby making regulators prove there is a lack of competition or rate regulations go away.

The onus had been on cable operators to prove their was competition, but the FCC concluded that the near-nationwide availability of DBS essentially represented that competition. The commission, with the strong backing of cable operators—NCTA–The Internet & Television Association and American Cable Association both intervened in the court challenge on the FCC's side—in 2016 voted to reverse the rebuttable presumption and assume cable systems faced local market competition (primarily given the ubiquity of satellite TV) unless telecom regulators or other challengers could prove they did not. A finding of effective competition lifts basic cable price regulations. Writing for the three-judge panel that rejected the challenge to that decision by the National Association of Broadcasters, the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, and the Northern Dakota County Cable Communications Commission, judge Douglas Ginsburg said the FCC decision was within its authority.

New E-Rate Policy Helps school Bridge the 'Homework Gap'

[Commentary] Thanks to a 2016 change in Federal Communications Commission policy, a small school district in central Virginia may have found a way to the bridge the “homework gap.” The homework gap is the lack of digital access at home that can hurt students’ academic performance and interfere with their ability to complete assignments.

Brette Arbogast, director of technology for the Appomattox County School District in Virginia, saw problems with E-Rate in 2015, in part because of a lack of competition among technology companies bidding on school business. Arbogast figured out his school district could save a lot of money if it built a network itself rather than hiring a private internet-service provider. Though the savings potentially amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, without internet access in students’ homes, the program would do nothing to address the homework gap. A recent amendment in FCC policy was a game changer. Until last year, E-Rate-funded networks could only serve the grounds of schools or libraries. In 2016 the FCC reformed the rules so that networks funded with E-Rate could reach off-campus to serve students during non-school hours. The district quickly capitalized on the change. The school district became a certified ISP and an E-Rate provider – a process that takes about a year. Once they had built the network to serve the school, they cooperated with a municipality that helped finance Wi-Fi radios, which the school connected to the network. Those Wi-Fi devices provide internet access to students in their homes after 4 p.m., thus getting them online to complete their homework.

[Craig Settles is a broadband industry analyst and consultant to local governments]

As Full FCC Roster Looms, Net Neutrality Changes Moving Forward

With a full set of commissioners and a chief economist named, the Federal Communications Commission is set to undo network neutrality rules put in place during the Obama administration, but thorny issues around industry consolidation remain.

Former FCC commissioners, antitrust scholars, and at least one GOP senator share competition-related concerns about discarding net neutrality — the idea that internet service providers, who perform a gatekeeping function, should treat all data online equally, with no blocking, throttling, or unreasonable discrimination of legal content. On July 5, FCC Chairman Aji Pai announced that Jerry Ellig, a senior research fellow at George Mason University with a focus on competition policy, will lead economic analysis for rule-makings. President Donald Trump nominated Brendan Carr to the FCC for a Republican-designated seat, along with former FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel for a Democratic opening. That will make for a 3-2 Republican majority, up from the current 2-1 edge, with Pai and GOP-appointed Commissioner Michael O’Rielly often on opposite sides of votes with Democrat Mignon Clyburn.

The ethics issue: Should we abandon privacy online?

In an age where fear of terrorism is high in the public consciousness, governments are likely to err on the side of safety. Over the past decade, the authorities have been pushing for – and getting – greater powers of surveillance than they have ever had, all in the name of national security. The downsides are not immediately obvious. After all, you might think you have nothing to hide. But most of us have perfectly legal secrets we’d rather someone else didn’t see. And although the chances of the authorities turning up to take you away in a black SUV on the basis of your WhatsApp messages are small in free societies, the chances of insurance companies raising your premiums are not.

Rachel Maddow’s urgent warning to the rest of the media

Rachel Maddow says someone tried to dupe her into airing a bogus scoop about collusion between President Trump's campaign and Russia, presumably intending to debunk the story later and tarnish Maddow's reputation in the process. Having avoided the trap, the MSNBC host hopes to serve as a cautionary tale for others in the media. “Heads up, everybody,” Maddow said on the air July 6. “Somebody for some reason appears to be shopping a fairly convincing fake NSA document that purports to directly implicate somebody from the Trump campaign in working with the Russians on their attack on the election. It is a forgery.”

A Hidden Threat to Free Expression: DRM

Thanks in part to organizations like Free Press Action Fund, the movement to protect free expression online is strong — for proof look at the millions of people fighting to save Network Neutrality. But there’s an important problem that many free-expression advocates aren’t aware of because it usually lurks just beneath the sleek interfaces of our devices and software: DRM, or digital restrictions management.

DRM is a broad class of technologies that give the manufacturer of a digital good special control over the ways people use it. DRM has been around since the 1990s and has colonized personal computers, smartphones, game consoles, cars, tractors and more. DRM harms free expression most when it interferes with our use of media like videos, books and music. This DRM is the underlying technology that prevents you from copying Amazon Kindle e-books on to a Barnes and Noble Nook, from downloading a clip of a movie on Netflix for use in a documentary or from sampling a song from Spotify in a new piece of music. DRM exists primarily so that Hollywood studios, big music labels and streaming services like Netflix and Spotify can use it to artificially corral us into spending more money than we would if we were able to make full use of media.

[Zak Rogoff is the campaigns manager at the Free Software Foundation.]

© 1994-2024 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. All Rights Reserved.