Purity Trolls and Broadband Access

Atrios sings the praise of telling the purity troll what for and that brings up a good point.

Both of us--Blue Girl and myself--struggle every day to find the time and the bandwidth to blog. In my case, I use Verizon's FIOS system and I have tremendously reliable and fast Internet access. I personally wish I didn't use Verizon for my Internet and wireless provider--I have tirelessly advocated against retroactive immunity for them and I was damned sorry that it happened. In Blue Girl's case, she doesn't have ready access to a broadband infrastructure, and that's a crying shame. She has to fight to get on, fight to stay on, and more than once she's had to ring me up and give me what she's got and what I can do to finish things up for her.

Never feel sorry for us--we do this because we would do this no matter what. We're here to stay, we battle everyone and everything, and we fight like maniacs against the bullshit, the sleaze, and the just plain batshit crazy. We have our rewards and our families know the deal. We have great support networks.

However, we will bash the living shit out of purity trolls. If this were a perfect world, we certainly would not have anything to do with corporate malfeasance and we would be green, local, and self-supporting. We'd do this like a co-op, probably. We'd never link to suspect blogs or outlets, we'd even recycle the recycled paper we saved from the trash and put into a recycling bin.

Until such time as the United States gets a Federal Communications Commission that makes free, unlimited broadband a right, not a pipe dream, like it goddamned should, fuck purity trolls.

/rant off >

--WS

By The Way, What Would You Pay?

Comcast and Time Warner Cable have made their move--they're going to begin seeing what will happen when they slow down Internet connection speeds for heavy Internet users. Unless...unless the users want to pay for faster connections. And the FCC doesn't care because, well, why would they?

Cable service operators Comcast and Time Warner Cable said yesterday that they would begin testing new approaches that would slow Internet access for heavy users and charge more to those who want additional speed.

The tests come as the Federal Communications Commission wraps up an investigation on complaints that Comcast blocked certain users from sharing video, music and other files. The complaints fueled a larger debate, with hearings in Congress and by the FCC, on how much control Internet service providers should have over the flow of data.

"The cable companies see a hammer hovering above their heads and are scrambling to find ways to reduce the appearance of wrongdoing," said Ben Scott, head of policy for the public interest group Free Press, which advocates for better oversight of cable operators. He called the plans "Band-Aids" on the bigger problem of network capacity, which he said can be solved only by larger investments in the cable companies' networks.

Comcast said that on Friday it would begin tests in Chambersburg, Pa., and Warrenton, Va., that would delay traffic for the heaviest users of Internet data without targeting specific software applications. Public interest groups complained in November that Comcast targeted users of BitTorrent, a file-sharing application, by blocking or delaying video and other files exchanged with the technology. Free Press said the practice discriminated against certain content and impeded users from having full access to the Web.

Time Warner wants to try something else:

Time Warner Cable is trying a different approach with a test that will charge customers more for larger volumes of data and faster Internet access. The metered-billing test, which the company compared to cellphone billing structures that charge extra for those who go over their minutes, will begin tomorrow with new customers in Beaumont, Tex. The company said its approach allows customers to choose plans that fit their needs.

"Instead of raising prices across the board, consumers who are excessive users would pay," said Alex Dudley, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable. "It is clearly the fairest way to fund the investment that is going to be required to support that use."

So is there a chance of price gouging? I wouldn't expect consumer-friendly regulation to come out of the FCC any time soon. We are in a holding pattern until something approaching good government happens, if ever. The ultimate goal of the providers is to find a way to make more money from the networks they have instead of adding more bandwidth.

Dave Burstein agrees:

“I suspect what happened last month at Comcast is they decided the important battle was already lost,” said Dave Burstein, the editor of DSL Prime, a newsletter that covers the broadband industry. He argues that the restrictions on BitTorrent “don’t add up to a hill of beans” because Comcast and other Internet providers were only blocking a tiny fraction of file-sharing traffic at peak times. Yet the issue could have set the stage for the Internet providers to impose much more significant restrictions on video delivered over the Internet, rather than through pay-television services.

“The peer-to-peer issue was a sideshow,” Mr. Burstein said. “Everybody involved knew there was a bigger issue on the table: do Disney and ESPN go directly to customers if Comcast charges them too much? There is also a free speech issue: can Al Jazeera or the Jerusalem Post TV station get through if Verizon doesn’t have them in its channel listing?”

Several years ago AT&T openly discussed charging a fee to big Web operators to carry their traffic on its network. And at various times other Internet providers have expressed interest in such plans, although no one has tried to impose such a fee in the United States.

Mr. Burstein argues that if the broadband networks had been able to significantly slow down high-bandwidth uses, it would have created demand from television networks, video sharing sites and others to pay to have faster access for their programming. Now that the Internet providers have essentially been forced to agree not to discriminate against specific sorts of traffic, this scenario becomes much less likely.

When the network providers say, in effect, “we will never block anyone’s content or slow it down, network neutrality is an uninteresting issue for them, because they can’t abuse it enough to make the money they wanted to,” Mr. Burstein said.

Can't abuse it under the current structure--to be more exact. The providers have deep pockets and are never going to stop lobbying for a better regulatory situation. The Fall 2008 Presidential election means a great deal, in terms of, "who will run the FCC?" and "will lobbyists be given unfettered access to the Oval Office?"

Who the Hell Thought This Was a Good Idea?

One company in Northern Virginia controls the database for all phone numbers in North America. And, no, that's not a great idea.

Sterling-based NeuStar is the carriers' digital directory for all phone calls in North America. More than 800 telephone companies have numbers in the database. NeuStar assigns blocks of available telephone numbers to carriers. It also manages the directory for common short codes: five- or six-digit codes that people punch into their cellphones to take part in sweepstakes or to vote for game-show contestants, for instance. And about one out of every four Internet transactions is routed using a NeuStar database, as NeuStar handles traffic for domains that include .biz, .us, .org and .info.

NeuStar's databases are so powerful that the FBI a few years ago sought direct, unfettered access to one containing 310 million phone numbers in the United States and Canada. The telephone companies that pay NeuStar to run the database denied the FBI's request, but they did allow NeuStar to create a site where authorized law enforcement officials with court orders can obtain carrier information on telephone numbers.

NeuStar is part of an evolving telecom industry that is creating caches of information attractive to the government without clear guidelines governing who may have access and under what circumstances. Its registries fall under international, U.S. government and trade association rules, including those set by the Federal Communications Commission.

The company is dependent on and crucial to telecom companies and state, local and federal governments, part of the government-industrial complex that drives the region's economy. Indeed, said Jeffrey E. Ganek, NeuStar chairman and chief executive, "this is a business that could only have grown up in Washington."

[snip]

NeuStar also helps optimize Web traffic for clients such as Amazon so that when a customer types in Amazon.com, NeuStar directs the request to one of Amazon's thousands of servers around the world. It provides the same kind of service for Oracle, Emirates Airlines and Forbes.

"We're at all the key Internet nodes in the world," Ganek said. "Depending on the time of the day and the point of origination, we send the traffic to Seattle, for instance, or to a data center in Miami or another data center in Singapore. If there's a fiber cable cut in the Pacific, we see it before [the carriers] do and turn the traffic in the other direction so it goes counterclockwise around the globe."

First of all, BULLSHIT. The FBI asked and they "turned them down?" How did that work? During 2005 and 2006, the FBI was going crazy with "National Security Letters" and they weren't taking "no" for an answer from anyone.

Second of all, they're not just operating here in North America:

Revenue last year was $429.2 million, and profit was $92.3 million, up from $73.9 million the previous year. Company officials expect revenue to exceed $500 million this year. Soon, they said, NeuStar expects to be providing digital directory service for about 85 percent of all wireless devices in the world.

How is that a good idea, either? How savvy are the foreign companies to the fact that US law enforcement can look at any and all numbers?

Third, they didn't "deny" the government. They winked and said, "here you go!"

In 2005, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration wanted a direct link to the database in NeuStar's Sterling headquarters, according to a January 2005 letter from the Justice Department criminal division to a consortium of carriers that have given NeuStar the contract to run the database. The department wanted to use the data to identify which carrier to subpoena for records concerning telephone numbers in an investigation, the letter said.

"What they were asking for in a nutshell was a copy of the database," said Mike Warren, NeuStar vice president of fiduciary services. "They wanted us to send them an update of the database once a day."

Instead, NeuStar set up LEAP, or Local Number Portability Enhanced Analytical Platform, a Web site to help local, state and federal law enforcement in investigations that rely on phone call surveillance. The database gives basic information such as carrier but not more technical details such as whether a phone number is for a wireless phone or a landline. Earlier this year, NeuStar added historical carrier information to that service.

Whether a phone number is for a wireless phone or a landline can be gotten from the companies that already allow warrantless wiretaps. Or a simple telephone lookup. Or just "pinging" the phone with a single dialing from a piece of software designed to determine where the number traces to. That's a very cozy arrangement, designed to skirt the law. Telecom Immunity makes skirting these laws even easier.

In effect, they make a big deal of telling the Feds that they can't have their product, but they give them the whole thing simply by witholding the one thing the Feds can figure out themselves.

Remind me again how we lost our privacy rights? Did I vote for this shit? Because if I did, I really screwed up.

Big Media Consolidation and the FCC

Earlier, some deranged wingnut brought up the Fairness Doctrine. Without getting into the finer details, the Fairness Doctrine was designed to try to present people with an opportunity to hear opposing views on media outlets. This was instituted because the airwaves belong to the public, and the thinking was that hearing both sides of an argument was in the public interest.

There is no shortage of hysterical, Orwellian, mind-blowingly stupid reactions to the idea of bringing it back--all of them seem to emanate from the people who think that it's going to put Limbaugh and Hannity and O'Reilly out of business. It simply won't do that. Only the marketplace can do that. But if AM radio were dominated by liberals commentators, the conservatives in this country would be howling for it. There is also the Equal Time rule, which grew out of Eugene McCarthy's attempts to be heard in 1968 when he was challenging Lyndon Johnson. (Wonder if the wingnuts remember THAT?)

Another issue is media consolidation.Do you like how Media Consolidation enthusiast Rupert Murdoch has taken over the Wall Street Journal and started his own business network?

In honor of Cyber Monday, Fox Business did a segment yesterday on online shopping. A Fox reporter went to ESPN Zone in Washington, DC and interviewed Peter Perweiler, who was identified only as an “online shopper.” Perweiler told Fox Business that he is planning to shop on Cyber Monday and is looking at “big-ticket items this year.”

It’s no surprise that Perweiler was boosting online shopping. As Silicon Alley Insider uncovered, Perweiler is actually the marketing manager at the National Retail Federation. The NRF has blamed Fox Business’s sloppy reporting for the incident.

The FCC, under the leadership of Kevin Martin, is considering relaxing the rules that are now keeping the Rupert Murdochs of the world from consolidating even further so that they can continue to bring such high quality and excellent journalism to the American people.

Stopbigmedia.com has compiled some excellent reasons and done some fine work exposing the lies being spread by the FCC about consolidation and big media ownership. Sometimes, it feels like Rupert Murdoch is able to simply tell the government what to do and how to do it. Does THAT serve the public interest? Of course not.

Here are ten reasons why we should oppose this change:

•FACT #1: Martin’s ‘modest’ proposal is corporate welfare for Big Media.
Martin’s plan would unleash a buying spree in the top 20 markets, making it easier for companies like Belo, News Corp. and Tribune Co. to push out independent, local owners.

•FACT #2: Loopholes open the door to cross-ownership in any market.
Under Martin’s loose standards, cross-ownership waivers could be approved in hundreds of smaller cities and towns.

•FACT #3: Loopholes allow newspapers to own TV stations of any size.
The same technicalities could permit top-rated stations in any market to combine with major newspapers.

•FACT #4: FCC history shows weak standards won’t protect the public.
The current rules forbid cross-ownership, but the FCC hasn’t denied any temporary waiver request in years.

•FACT #5: Cross-ownership doesn’t create more local news.
The latest studies — using the FCC’s own data — show that markets with cross-ownership produce less total local news, as one dominant company crowds out the competition.

•FACT #6: Cross-ownership won’t solve newspapers’ financial woes.
Claims that the newspaper industry is about to “wither and die” are greatly exaggerated, and no evidence shows that cross-ownership would make things better.

•FACT # 7: The Internet is an opportunity, not a death sentence.
Mergers and consolidation are not the answer to the financial problems of the traditional media.

•FACT #8: Martin’s plan would harm minority media owners.
Nearly half of the nation’s minority-owned TV stations are lower-rated outlets in the top 20 markets, making them a target for Big Media takeovers.

•FACT # 9: A broken and corrupt process creates bad policies.
The FCC’s lack of transparency, flawed research and secret timetable have tossed aside basic fairness and accountability in the rush to change media ownership rules.

•FACT # 10: The public doesn’t want more media consolidation.
Martin’s actions ignore the millions of Americans — and 99 percent of the comments in the FCC docket — who oppose letting a few media giants swallow up more local media.

There is something un-American about having a handful of people control everything we read, hear, and watch. Do you ever get the feeling that it's 1902 and there is no Teddy Roosevelt out there who is going to go after the monied trusts and the robber barons?