Policy and regulation

Garth Graham is the visionary leader behind Telecommunities Canada; Graham has been thinking about communities and technology longer and with more clarity than most of us, and when Garth talks, I try to shut up and listen. In the hallway between PCNA sessions, I made a casual statement about how "technology is a tool." It's an innocuous phrase that has been uttered by millions of technocrats at one time or another.

Stephen Levy is a knowledgeable technology columnist for Newsweek, and his article on network neutrality is short and articulates the issues clearly. As Levy puts it, the Internet may end up with two classes of service: "steerage and first class," with nothing in between.

I've borrowed the title of Jeff Chester's article in The Nation. Chester raises alarm bells about the plans of the incumbent broadband providers to create walled gardens that give them near monopoly control over what their subscribers can do and access via their broadband connections.

Vermont legislators are debating legislation that would provide low interest loans to wireless providers that offer broadband in underserved areas of the state. And even better, the state lawmakers may waive onerous state-required impact reviews and red tape for new wireless towers if local communities have an approved review process in place.

If you are not familiar with the phrase "network neutrality," it is time to start learning more about it, as the issue is moving front and center in the debate about the future of the Internet.

The current Internet is "network neutral," meaning that there is a gentleman's agreement among all network managers that they will allow anyone else's data to cross their network. If you send an email to someone in California, it might traverse several privately owned networks along the way. Network neutrality is what makes the Internet work.

A new book alleges that the phone companies owe every household in America $2000, or about $200 billion in total. Just released (disclaimer: I have not had a chance to read it yet), the book is already creating a lot of discussion online.

The dollar figures allegedly come from calculations the author has performed by looking at the increases in phone and broadband costs over the past decade and comparing them to what the phone companies promised to do in the mid-nineties.

With a hat tip to Chris Miller, this article underscores the seriousness of the broadband crisis in the United States. We're paying more than anybody else in the developed world for "broadband," while getting a lot less, performance-wise (50 to 100 times slower in most cases).

In yet another example that government is not usually the biggest threat to our privacy, a political blogger just bought the phone records of former presidential candidate Wesley Clark. For $90, the blogger got them from a company called Celltolls.com that has a business selling your phone records to anyone who wants them.

SlashDot has a long discussion thread about an opinion issued by the Federal Election Commission that "bloggers are journalists." The ruling exempts bloggers from having to file lenghty reports and paperwork to meet the McCain-Feingold campaign laws. As Slashdot points out, the ruling indicates that bias in reporting does not automatically mean a blogger is NOT a journalist.

Some bloggers are calling this simple four part statement a "Monroe Doctrine" for the Internet. The United States has made it clear that it is not going to give control of the Internet to the U.N. Good. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The mayor of San Francisco has proclaimed that WiFi is a "right." Here are his exact words, from a recent Yahoo! article.

This is a civil rights issue as much as anything else...It is to me a fundamental right to have access universally to information.

The FCC has approved the SBC-AT&T merger and the Verizon-MCI merger. What these deals really mean is that long distance as a service is dead, dead, dead, as I like to say.

The baseline for telephony service is now nationwide flat rate calling, or some variant of that that includes a lot of long distance minutes in the base rate and something around or below five cents a minute if you go over.

There is much handwringing by local and state governments and the Feds about the "lack of money" to spend on broadband infrastructure. But it is pretty hard to take all that seriously. When politicians say, "There is no money for that," what they are really saying is that there are other things they would rather spend it on, and often for no good reason.

This report on the ever expanding oil well style gusher of gas taxes is a perfect example.

What I and others have been predicting for years is starting to come to pass. As the number of broadband providers has narrowed to a duopoly of the cable and phone company in most regions, these firms are starting to muscle out third party service providers. VoIP startups are the first target because both the phone and cable company want VoIP customers of their own, and the simplest way to do that is to simply block all VoIP data packets except their own. Evidence of this is clearly visible as hardware manufacturers begin to sell VoIP blocking appliances.

The notion of a national ID number is being considered for a variety of reasons: the Social Security number was never intended as a national ID number, but is used that way, the illegal immigration crisis is due in part to the difficulty of identifying valid U.S. citizens, and law enforcement, insurance agencies, and health care providers all like the idea of having a better way to keep tabs on people.

Meanwhile, we have Google and the credit card companies tracking and aggregating information on everything we do.

I have taken much criticism over the past several years by arguing that forcing the telephone and cable companies to open their networks to competitors (called "open access") was the wrong thing to do. And I got more scorn when I said the FCC did the right thing earlier this year by formally putting an end to line sharing for DSL.

An FTC (Federal Trade Commission) commissioner spoke out against cable and telecom efforts to stifle community investment in broadband. Jon Leibowitz made a sensible analogy when he said that the current industry approach was like "Barnes and Noble and Borders saying libraries are killing their business and asking law makers to stop localities from building more libraries."

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is considering a move away from Microsoft Office and toward Open Source products like Open Office.

Microsoft's proprietary XML formats that are being used in current and future versions of Office to store Word and Excel documents, among others, are licensed to users. What this means, basically, is that you have the right to open and use your own Word documents only as long as Microsoft allows you to.

The state government of Massachusetts is worried, and rightly so, that public documents may become inaccessible either legally (if in the future the state does not continue to renew MS software licenses) or may become incompatible and therefore unreadable because MS has changed document formats.

RUPRI (the Rural Policy Research Institute) has an editorial that hits the nail on the head with respect to the challenges emerging from the cable/telephone duopoly that is tying up broadband markets in the United States.

We need clear policies at the local, state, and national level that preserve the right of communities, organizations, and individuals to use broadband for public and private purposes, without third party control.

Opportunity Iowa has an excellent Communications Utility FAQ that is worth a read. Although some of the information is specific to what is going on in Iowa, it provides a nice, short, clear summary of some key issues and what they mean for communities.