Eideard

As a result of the campaign by sportsfans.org and others – the FCC is asking for public comment over the next month on its sports blackout rule. The FCC’s rule props up the leagues’ own blackout rules by prohibiting cable and satellite carriers from carrying a game if local broadcasters are prohibited from carrying the game because of league blackout rules. Sports Fans Coalition and other groups have asked the FCC to eliminate this rule because we think the government shouldn’t be in the business of supporting counterproductive and unethical blackout policies.

SFC is currently creating a website to make it easier for you to submit comments to the FCC, but in the meantime, if you’re chomping at the bit to put in your two cents, please see below. Remember that your name and comments will be visible to the public, so please be respectful. But feel free to share the details of your own frustrations with blackouts.

To submit a comment:

1. Your message will need to be in the form of an attachment, so just open up a Word document, write your message and save it.
2. Click here to be redirected to the FCC’s electronic filing system.
3. Where it says proceeding number, enter 12-3.
4. Fill out the required information and attach the saved Word document with your message.
5. That’s it!

Need help with what to say? Feel free to copy or adapt this example for yourself:

It’s time to end to the sports blackout rule. It is an unnecessary and anti-consumer regulation that only benefits team owners. Fans and taxpayers have already heavily subsidized professional sports, so blackouts are unethical and punish fans who can’t afford the high cost of attending games or who don’t have the right TV provider. The government should not be in the business of propping up sports leagues’ counterproductive blackouts. Keep the games on the air!

Overdue. And a terrific example of citizen pressure on the government getting the beginning of a result. The rest is up to you…

Almost everyone with a landline has felt the annoyance of picking up the phone and realizing that a call is not from a friend or a family member but rather is a prerecorded message delivered by a software-robot…

Telemarketers cannot make prerecorded calls to either residential landlines or cellphones, unless the recipient has provided express consent or has a business relationship with the caller. For commercial calls that do not involve an explicit sales pitch, the law extends special protection to cellphones: automated equipment cannot be used unless the recipient has provided consent.

“Consent” is not hard to secure. Current law assumes that it is given by the act of providing one’s phone number, even if it was just for a one-time home delivery or was mentioned in reply to a clerk’s spoken question. This allows automated cellphone calls that may not be especially welcome, like a “customer satisfaction” survey administered entirely by robo-software, or robo-messages about an overdue payment.

The Federal Communications Commission has been working on a draft of a stricter rule defining consent. Businesses might be required to secure the customer’s consent in writing or from a box clicked online if automatic calling equipment will be used to call the customer’s cellphone in the future.

The American Bankers Association, the Association of Credit and Collection Professionals and other trade groups want to prevent the F.C.C. from strengthening the consent requirement. They are backing a bill in the House, H.R. 3035, that they say would clarify issues of consent surrounding automated calls…

The bill is opposed by the National Association of Consumer Advocates, the Consumer Federation of America, Americans for Financial Reform, Consumer Watchdog, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group and other consumer advocates…

Cellphones are an immeasurable convenience. But the fact that the phones go wherever we go means that unwanted calls of any kind feel far more intrusive than calls that came in to the home number (for those who remember home numbers). The banks’ last nifty idea for consumers was a monthly charge for debit cards. Their fight to block stronger protection of our cellphone numbers is just as consumer-friendly.

So, uh, when you have a chance, drop your Congress-critter an email and ask which side they’re going to support? I wonder if they’ll straight-out support consumers or dance around the Maypole for a while and offer a canned corporate rationale?

All Americans will have broadband access to Internet and telephone services by the end of the decade under new rules adopted by U.S. regulators. The rules also reform a broken system of phone charges fraught with inefficiency and should result in $2.2 billion in savings passed down to consumers, the Federal Communications Commission estimates.

The FCC voted unanimously on Thursday to modernize its universal service program, aiming to help the 18 million Americans who have no access to broadband where they live and work.

The new rules will shift the roughly $4.5 billion in public money spent annually to subsidize telephone service for rural families to high-speed Internet in rural America and costly-to-serve areas…

“We are taking a system designed for the Alexander Graham Bell era of rotary telephones and modernizing it for the era of Steve Jobs and the Internet future he imagined,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said at the agency’s open meeting.

Broadband buildout to unserved areas could begin in early 2012 under the plan, bringing high-speed Internet to hundreds of thousands of homes in the near term.

The plan approved on Thursday would phase out funding for landline phone service over a period of years as companies move to a competitive bidding process for securing funds for broadband. Companies now receiving phone service subsidies would get first dibs in some areas to receive support for deploying broadband service.

The rules will also reform the complex system of payments among carriers called intercarrier compensation, gradually reducing per-minute intercarrier compensation charges…

The new Connect America Fund created by the rules will have a firm $4.5 billion a year budget, the first budget constraint ever imposed on the program.

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell said the fund will not be able to exceed its annual $4.5 billion cap through 2017 without agency approval. “It is my hope that competitive forces will flourish and the development of new technologies will create additional efficiencies throughout the system,” McDowell said.

We all know how well Congress and the corporations sharing their beds strive for competitive forces.

Actually, politicians and administrative hacks may be stuck with the democratic basic premises of legislation that goes back to FDR and the Communications Act of 1934. Republicans hated it, then – I imagine they still do; but, they’re stuck with the egalitarian premises.

A top telecommunications regulator who voted to approve Comcast Corp.’s takeover of NBCUniversal in January is leaving to join the company as a lobbyist.

Meredith Attwell Baker, one of two Republicans on the five-member Federal Communications Commission, will become senior vice president of government affairs for NBCUniversal.

Comcast said it did not begin discussions with Baker about a possible job until after the transaction had closed…

Uh-huh.

Craig Aaron, head of the public interest group Free Press, called the move an example of “business as usual in Washington — where the complete capture of government by industry barely raises any eyebrows.”

Comcast, the nation’s largest cable TV company, bought a controlling interest in NBCUniversal after the FCC and the Justice Department approved the deal with conditions following a year-long review. The FCC’s vote was 4-1…

At the FCC, Baker was a reliable pro-business voice who frequently expressed concern that the agency was imposing unnecessary and onerous regulations on phone and cable companies.

Along with fellow Republican commissioner Robert McDowell, Baker opposed the controversial “network neutrality” rules approved by the commission’s three Democrats last year. Those rules, which prohibit phone and cable companies from interfering with Internet traffic on their broadband networks, are now facing legal challenges from Verizon and Metro PCS.

It’s called a reward for loyal service – isn’t it?

Does it matter who’s in the White House?

WASHINGTON — in this covetous town, the delicacies of the Georgetown Cupcake shop stand alone as symbols of wish fulfillment — heaping swirls of luscious confection atop rich, creamy pastry.

Therefore: Operation Cupcake. As the Federal Communications Commission debated final rules last December on how Internet service providers should manage their traffic, AT&T delivered 1,500 of these opulent desserts to the F.C.C.’s headquarters here.

Like many other big corporations, AT&T annually blankets power brokers with token holiday gifts, but the cupcake campaign was notable for its military precision. A three-page spreadsheet, stamped “AT&T Proprietary (Internal Use Only),” detailed how the desserts were to be deployed to each of the 63 commission offices: four dozen were assigned to the enforcement bureau, 10 dozen to the wireless divisions, 12 cupcakes to each of four commissioners, and 18 to the chairman, and so on.

As it turns out, AT&T had begun its $39 billion courting of T-Mobile about the same time. The resulting deal, announced a week ago, would transform the industry if approved. It would narrow the field of major wireless providers to three and vault AT&T into the No. 1 spot, ahead of Verizon; consumer advocates say the combination will lead to higher prices.

As interested parties lobby for and against the merger, one person will be pulling at the levers of power more often and with more influence than anyone else, according to both friends and foes: AT&T’s chief lobbyist, James W. Cicconi. A master strategist, Mr. Cicconi internalizes the art of regulatory and legislative war — and Operation Cupcake is but one of the efforts to come out of his shop…

In 13 years at AT&T, Mr. Cicconi has helped guide the company through roughly a dozen mergers, large and small, and he has made his share of enemies in Washington. As a testament to his power, however, few of them will criticize him on the record…

Nor is Mr. Cicconi’s lobbying effort a one-man show. He oversees a division that spent $115 million on lobbying over the last six years, putting it among the top five corporate spenders in the country, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks lobbying and campaign spending.

AT&T employs an army of outside lobbyists, including at least six prominent former members of Congress, including the former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, and former Senator John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat.

Two of the sleaziest politicians who ever lived.

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Republican version of broadband

The Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday will propose the first steps toward converting the $8 billion fund that subsidizes rural telephone service into one for helping pay to provide broadband Internet service to underserved areas, according to commission officials…

Most of the money under discussion involves a longstanding subsidy known as the Universal Service Fund, which is paid for through fees tacked onto most consumers’ phone bills and distributed among telephone companies to subsidize the high costs of providing service to rural areas.

Mr. Genachowski will propose phasing out the payments between phone companies, which he says create “inefficiencies and perverse incentives” that result in waste in the fund. The F.C.C. will also propose consolidating existing methods of paying for rural phone service into a new pool to be called the Connect America Fund, to be used for helping pay for making broadband available to underserved areas.

The current Universal Service Fund and its spending methods are “unsustainable,” according to a draft of Mr. Genachowski’s remarks prepared for Monday. “It was designed for a world with separate local and long-distance telephone companies, a world of traditional landline telephones before cellphones or Skype, a world without the Internet — a world that no longer exists.”

“At the end of this transition, we would no longer subsidize telephone networks; instead we would support broadband,” which then could be used for phone service, Mr. Genachowski plans to say…

So far, the F.C.C. has outlined efforts to expand broadband availability only though wired connections. But commission officials say that they will almost certainly look at whether it makes sense to try to use the growth of wireless Internet service as a spur to expand high-speed Internet access for underserved areas.

Whatever the mechanism, folks like me – living just a couple miles outside city limits into rural New Mexico – will support such a change. The operative word, once again, being choice.

I can have erratic and throttled, overpriced service from Comcast – or barely minimal DSL from Qwest. That’s my range of providers. Satellite service is even more expensive and has its own set of tech problems. Folks living another few miles further away from any sizable city or town – have no options. They get nothing, nada, broadband.

Texting – old school

In a bid to bring the life-saving emergency service 911 into the 21st century, the FCC is looking at letting citizens report crimes through text messages and even stream video from their mobile phones to emergency centers.

Established as a national standard in 1968, 911 handles more than 230 million calls a year — 70 percent of which now come from mobile phones.

The last real overhaul of 911 by the FCC came in 2001, when mobile carriers were required to allow 911 to identify the location of callers either through GPS or cell-tower data…

But the 911 system still can’t handle text messages, multimedia messages or streaming video, all of which could be very helpful to first responders.

A system that could handle those messages would also allow people to report crimes without being overheard, which could be useful in situations ranging from kidnapping to seeing someone being robbed on the street…

It’s not clear yet where the money will come from for the upgrades, whether they will be federal requirements states and cities must carry out or if they will simply be suggestions.

Perish the thought our politicians adopt useful, constructive protocols like this without giving every local hack a chance to get in on an opportunity to be “lobbied” by equipment vendors.

Push comes to shove, the Federalist rationale supports small-time graft as well as it does the Congressional flavors.

The Federal Communications Commission is poised to release the first batch of unlicensed wireless spectrum in 25 years tomorrow, which could lead to “Wi-Fi on Steroids,” giving consumers, device makers, entrepreneurs and service providers more connectivity over wider areas.
 
The FCC is scheduled to vote tomorrow morning on a set of rules that will set the release of this so-called “white spaces broadband” into motion, giving device makers and others the guidelines on how they can use the spectrum. This could inject new competition in the wireless broadband space and provide a boost to technology companies hoping to connect more consumers. Just as Wi-Fi tapped unlicensed spectrum and untethered millions of consumers, white spaces could have a similar effect on a broader scale.

White spaces refers to the unused television spectrum that traditionally existed between channels as buffers or empty spectrum left over or vacated by TV stations through the transition from analog to digital TV. The FCC voted two years ago to approve the unlicensed use of whites spaces. Here’s what you need to know about white spaces.

Because of its lower frequency, white spaces can offer much broader reach and better penetration through walls than the current spectrum used for Wi-Fi…

The added range and performance could help connect rural communities, allow schools to light up entire campuses, help service providers relieve burdened cellular networks and could help with things like in-home video streaming and smart meter monitoring…

Since white spaces would remain unlicensed, the use of it could interfere with local broadcasters…so, of course…the National Association of Broadcasters has filed a lawsuit.

Though, no evidence of problems exists because the use of white spaces hasn’t yet started.

And here we are with the results of the vote and lots more detail.

In the debate over Internet neutrality, Tea Party and other conservative activists have aligned their interests with those of major telecommunications companies…

Last month, many of the groups represented at Glenn Beck’s rally at the Lincoln Memorial, including Tea Party activists and Americans for Prosperity members, wrote to the Federal Communications Commission asking it to abandon attempts to regulate the Internet.

They oppose net neutrality — the notion that the federal government should establish rules of the road to prevent companies from indiscriminately blocking or slowing traffic for their own competitive advantage.

They asked the agency considering regulating it under Title II of the Communications Act to stop pursuing what they called “a massive regulatory regime that would stifle broadband expansion, create congestion, slow Internet speeds, jeopardize job retention and growth and lead to higher prices for consumers…”

“People no longer think it’s strange that the majority of the U.S. House is telling the Federal Communications Commission not to have authority over the dominant 21st century communications platform,” said Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, which advocates net neutrality.

Members of Congress take donations from corporate lobbyists to “fund” their decision-making. Know-nothing teabaggers rely on corporate ideologues to “guide” their feckless activities. Same suit – different street.

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Why are these men smiling?

Four Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives have voiced opposition to a network neutrality proposal offered by Google and Verizon Communications last week, with the lawmakers saying the two companies shouldn’t set the rules for how U.S. residents access the Internet.

The four lawmakers — Representatives Jay Inslee of Washington, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Anna Eshoo of California and Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania — said they opposed several pieces of the Verizon/Google plan in a letter sent to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission Monday.

“Americans’ online experience shouldn’t be dictated by corporate CEOs,” Inslee said in a statement. “Innovation and creativity online have given rise to millions of jobs and tremendous economic growth, in large part because individual consumers have been free to access what they want. Net neutrality is not about imposing a new set of rules, net neutrality is about preserving the open Internet and empowering consumers and small businesses to bring the next generation of entrepreneurial drive to the World Wide Web…”

The four lawmakers, all members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, called for the FCC to set the same net neutrality rules for wireless broadband as it does for wired broadband. The proposal by Google and Verizon would exempt wireless broadband from net neutrality regulations. The committee has jurisdiction over most Internet-related law…

The lawmakers also raised concerns about the Verizon/Google proposal’s exemption from net neutrality rules for managed services, separate from the public Internet. “An overbroad definition of the proposed ‘managed services’ category would sap the vitality and stunt the growth of the Internet,” the lawmakers’ letter said. “In fact, an overly broad interpretation of managed services would create an exception that swallows the rule. Managed services might be rebranded or repackaged services and applications — only with priority treatment not available to competitors.”

It’s almost a surprise – having waited as long as we have to see political and economic alliances like this preparing to confront the future. Not only the future of the US [and North American] Internet market; but, the larger growth potential within the developing world. The latter relying even more upon wireless access to the Web.

If you care enough about Net Neutrality to make it an up or down vote in your life, I’d suggest getting hold of your elected representatives and telling them to get off their rusty dusty.