More FCC news for you, this Wednesday morning (and before Droid news consumes us all). The agency is considering taking some of the bandwidth that is currently allocated to digital television, and auctioning it off so that broadband companies can bid on it. The point, of course, is to increase the availability of wireless broadband.

There’s a few sides here, each with some valid points. You’ve got the current TV station owners who, as you might expect, don’t want to lose any spectrum, even if you compensate them with giant bags of money. Then there’s the broadband companies who are all, “Please oh please let us have the spectrum, so we can create some new broadband service, and sit back and watch the money roll in.” You’ve got people who are against the move because it might put in jeopardy the spectrum that the federal government spent billions of dollars convincing people to switch to (the switch to digital TV). And then you’ve got people who just hate the FCC, and think that regulating the Internet isn’t even part of its charge.

It’s important to keep in mind that, by definition, the spectrum belongs to all of us, as citizens. It should be used in such a way that is beneficial to the most citizens and not just a handful of TV station owners, for example.

Now, will this even happen, auctioning off some spectrum so that broadband companies will bid? It might happen, but no rules will be put in place till February at the next big FCC meeting.

A strong argument in favor of this: broadband access is simply more useful than traditional TV. You can only watch TV, which is fine. With broadband, you can watch, sure, but you can also participate (in debates relevant to you: PS3 vs. Xbox, the public option vs. something else, etc.), which is vital to having a fully informed citizenry.

But don’t freak out: the FCC can say, come February, “Yeah, we can’t do that broadband spectrum auction thing. Sorry. Next question.”

The beauty of the Drudge Report right now is that Mr. Drudge is working against his very interests. He’s got some ridiculous headline right now, JULIUS AT FCC WANTS TO ‘REGULATE’ INTERNET, that’s meant to wile up his easily excitable readership. What’s going on is that the FCC has moved one step closer to bringin Net Neutrality to fruition, and has invited the public to weigh in until January 14.

Here’s my problem with the Drudge presentation: he’s using the word “regulation” to scare up opposition to Net Neutrality. Here’s a quick scenario that I pulled out of thin air the site would do well to consider:

My name is Mr Smith. I run a really big ISP in the United States. You know who I don’t like? That damn Drudge Report guy. He’s always talking smack about my company. So what I’m going to do is, now that there’s no Net Neutrality to get in the way, I’m go to either block access to his Web site, or just slow it down so that it’s practically unusable. Now Drudge gets no traffic from my subscribers, and his business suffers. Meanwhile, I’ve gone ahead and partnered with TechCrunch, and have rigged it in such a way that all of my subscribers can access the site REALLY CRAZY FAST, and there’s no ads. My subscribers now go to TechCrunch all the time. It’s a free market, right: I hate Drudge, so I’m gonna block his site. Now, of course, my subscribers are free to go somewhere else if they want to visit Drudge, but considering how little competition there is in broadband, have fun paying for a dial-up connection in 2010; I own all the fiber optic cable in this city!

That’s a gigantic oversimplification, yes, but it illustrates my basic point: Drudge here is so off the mark that he’s putting his own business at risk.

Not smart, sir.

Think about it. Flip Video already has a small army of users out there uploading videos taken with a Flip to YouTube. What if, instead of doing that with a computer, a set-top box could do that for you and allow you to watch your videos on the big screen? This is just pure speculation, btw, but Flip Video must do something innovative to stay relevant in a iPhone/iPod nano video recording world.

[FCC via Engadget]

This past week saw the resurrection of Net Neutrality as a divisive issue. Some folks (people like Google, and, well, us) are in favor of Net Neutrality, while other folks (primarily the ISPs) are against it. Not long after the FCC announced its intentions, six Republican senators, three of which who received quite a lot of money from AT&T, proposed an amendment to a bill to stop the FCC in its tracks. The senators later rescinded their amendment, saying that they were now open to a “dialogue” with the FCC.

Which brings up to today’s point: are there any angels in this debate? The Wall Street Journal recently, I guess, came to the defense of the ISPs: why should Google and whoever else be allowed to profit off the Internet Service Providers’ networks? Why should, say, Time Warner, subsidize Google’s online applications with its broadband network when it (Time Warner) doesn’t stand to make any money?

That’s how the Wall Street Journal characterizes it, at least.

The WSJ says that people like Google (I keep bringing up Google because it stands to benefit the most from an open Internet) want to maintain the status quo: it doesn’t want to have to pay Time Warner (or whoever) hand over fist just to keep it from shutting off access to Google Maps.

The WSJ also brings up how one of Google’s top lobbyists, Andrew McLaughlin, recently got a job in the Obama Administration as deputy head of telecom policy. The scary implication, of course, is that now Google will get whatever the hell it wants because one of its former guys is now in a proper policy-making position. If only things were that easy.

So, basically, I’ve just said nothing other than that this Net Neutrality business can get really complicated if you want to devote the time to it. I stand to benefit more from a Net Neutral world, so I’m in favor of that, which is only logical. You’re free to disagree, of course. In fact, I encourage it! More opinions expressed = a better chance of coming to a well-informed conclusion.

A bit of an update to that whole AT&T-linked senators story from the other day. Well, our complaining must have worked because the senators will no longer try to block Net Neutrality. USA!

A Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee (that’s where Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who first made the proposal, resides) staffer told this to the Washington Post:

While we are still generally opposed to net neutrality regulations, we have decided to hold off on the amendment because [FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski] approached us and we are beginning a dialogue.

So, a small victory for Net Neutrality for the time being. I’m hesitant to dance in the streets because they’re still “generally opposed” to the regulation. And why wouldn’t they be? When you’ve got the likes of AT&T funding your campaigns to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, you better damn well know what side your bread is buttered, so to speak.

That’s the beauty of lobbying: AT&T makes how many million dollars per year, and yet it only takes a couple thousand to totally skew the legislative process to its favor. Amazing political process we’ve got here.

via DailyFinance

On the upside, we have a fabulous new quote on the level of Ted Stevens’ “series of tubes” that demonstrates how utterly out of touch people like Paramount’s COO are with actual Internet terminology and capabilities. Behold:

“We are uploading it essentially to a ‘cyber locker,’ which is nothing more than electronic locker on the Internet.”

Mr. Huntsberry, we are in your debt for this immortal chestnut of cyber-wisdom. That’s nothing more than electronic wisdom on the Internet, for those of you who don’t know.

Here is his presentation. It has an air of Reefer Madness to it.

It’s an excellent study in how the RIAA and MPAA are able to show a service solely in the light of illegality. I like to imagine them showing a picture of a hammer. “This is what’s called a hammer, it’s essentially a heavy rock on the end of a stick. This allows the user to beat people with said rock over and over without losing it. The stick portion can also be used to dig up other people’s gardens.” As far as they are concerned, there is no legitimate application for a site like Mininova or, incredibly, something as simple and practical as Drop.io.

Interesting that he’d look at something like Drop.io and not Megaupload or another such widely-misused site. Note that the free accounts at Drop.io are limited to 100MB. Frederick, if I may:

Clearly Drop.io is not at the cutting edge of piracy, however useful it may be for sharing home videos and other medium-sized files.

It’d all be the usual fun and games if this weren’t a public hearing, advising the FCC on broadband policy. It was neither the time nor the place for copyright issue grandstanding. As if that weren’t bad enough, Paramount decided that its own portion of the hearing, a public policy meeting you understand, would be private. Its explanation for asking for this was that the content of the presentation was unpalatable for public consumption. And, disappointingly, the FCC agreed to this ludicrous condition.

Luckily, the concerned citizens at Public Knowledge found a copy of the presentation and put it up on YouTube. They had to snip it from the FCC’s Real Video stream (!) and I’m sure they’re fielding takedown notices as I type this.

There’s a fairly obvious conflict of interest going on here, among other things. Public Knowledge has an excellent breakdown of the issues involved, and Techdirt has a nice follow-up as well, so I’d rather not duplicate their content here, even if I were capable and informed enough to do so.

I have to say, though, the bubble Huntsberry speaks from is pretty entertaining. “This is a site that is clearly an illegal website” indeed. I understand you have to speak for your company’s best interest, but you might want to take your foot out of your mouth first.

[Update: Title changed to have more Ps in it.]

Nicholas “Net Neutrality” Deleon here with truly shocking news: six Republican senators have tacked on an amendment to an appropriations bill that would block the FCC’s attempt to make Net Neutrality a reality. So remember, kids: when you think of a free and open Internet, don’t think of the GOP. It’s not your friend here.

The Senators involved are: Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas; Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas; Sen. Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina; Sen. John Ensign of Nevada; Sen. John Thune of South Dakota; and Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana.

It literally took two seconds to look up these guys’ top contributors, and you’ll be absolutely shocked at the findings. Guess who is Sen Brownback’s top donor this cycle? AT&T at a cool $11,000 so far! Sen. Brownback? Oh my, looks like AT&T has given him some $35,000 thus far! And what about that Vitter gentleman? Yeah, AT&T has given him $19,500 this cycle.

So that’s three out of the six senators who have a huge financial incentive to see to it that AT&T doesn’t have to play nice by the Net Neutrality rules.

You folks are free to draw your own conclusions, but if I were you I’d make a cool Twitter hashtag like “#ATTSENATORS.” I’m sure I’m not the only person who finds it a little bit suspicious that three of the senators who have attached their name to the amendment are sucking at the teat of AT&T.

But whatever. It’s just the Internet. Who cares about that?

My God in Heaven! It’s been about four hours since the FCC announced its intention to add two more pillars to its idea of Net Neutrality: one, ISPs should not be allowed to wily nilly permit/disallow traffic on their networks (non-discrimination); and two, traffic management should be done is as transparent a manner as possible, so you don’t wind up with people discovering that their software is being tampered with, without their knowledge or consent, after the fact. I don’t know about yous guys (not a typo), but that seems pretty reasonable to me. And if you disagree, then you’re probably a high-ranking executive at Comcast.

One of Comcast’s executive vice-presidents, David L. Cohen, posted a message to the company’s Web site that, in so many words, attempts to throw cold water on the FCC’s proposals lest they become popular with its customers. The post, entitled “Does the Internet Need More Regulation? FCC to Decide,” is skeptical of the whole operation even before it begins. If not the FCC, then who should regulate the Internet? I’m certainly not Mr. The Government Solves Everything, but I’d much sooner trust the FCC to see to it that consumers don’t get screwed by this nation’s ISPs than the ISPs themselves.

So yes, the FCC should decide; that’s what it’s there for.

Then there’s a bit of a contradiction within two breaks:

There’s been a debate in Washington for the last six years over whether rules like these are necessary to promote an “open Internet” and an innovation economy. And before that, there was a debate that began more than a decade ago over whether Internet Service Providers should be required to let others resell their services.

But before we rush into a new regulatory environment for the Internet, let’s remember there can be no doubt that the Internet has enjoyed immense growth even as these debates have gone on.

How you can characterize six years of discussion as a “rush,” I’ll never know. In six years you have two congressional elections, and one general election. That hardly seems like “rushing” to me. And if what the FCC is true about Internet traffic doubling every two years, then six years is plenty of time to Figure Something Out™.

It’s not all negative, though, as Comcast says it’s “committed” to working with the FCC. So that’s good, and promising.

For the record, I’m not some scorned Comcast customer; I’ve never used it. I’ve used two ISPs since 2002 when I first got broadband: Cablevision’s Optimum Online, and Time Warner. So, really, what Comcast does isn’t any of my business.

As expected, the chairman of the FCC, Julius Genachowski, announced today his agency’s support for Net Neutrality. Odds are if you’re reading us then you have a basic idea of what Net Neutrality is, but if not it can be summed up like this: ISPs will be expected to treat all data equally, and not favor 0s and 1s from Company A or Company B, no matter what sweetheart a deal may be in place. (Wikipedia has more, of course.) The idea is that, since all data is treated equally, consumers will have better, unfettered access to the sites and services they choose to support.

Let’s say you’re a Cool ISP customer. You like Skype, and you use it to call your sister in Europe and your brother in Maine. Cool ISP, however, has a deal in place with Mad Good VoIP, which pays Cool ISP x-number of dollars per year to be the “preferred” VoIP application of Cool ISP. In exchange for those dollars, Cool ISP makes it so that Mad Good VoIP network traffic takes precedence over Skype. So if you want to make a call on Skype, but there’s a whole bunch of people currently using Mad Good VoIP, then your call quality necessarily suffers (“waiting to connect,” for example). Then you quit using Skype because the call quality stinks. Then Skype goes out of business. Then Mad Good VoIP can rest on its laurels, knowing that it’s the only VoIP service in town worth a damn. Then it raises its rates just because it can. You see where I’m going with this.

Today’s announcement should, theoretically, prevent all of that from happening. The FCC already has four principals, but today it added two: non-discrimination (the above example, where ISPs can’t favor one application or service over another); and transparency. That last one should be of interest to BitTorrent users: here, ISPs will have to make available their methods and rationale for managing their network. That is, Cool ISP (or Comcast!) won’t be able to arbitraily limiit all BitTorrent traffic just because it doesn’t like the strain it puts on its network—who’s to say what you’re sharing over BitTorrent isn’t considered free speech? That said, ISPs shouldn’t be expected to “eat it,” as it were: if you’re downloading 300GB of data per month, you may well have to pay more for that than Grandma who checks her e-email once per day.

All of this, of course, is being done to preserve the “free and open” Internet. If the Internet is to remain an engine of commerce and ingenuity, it needs to be totally free and open. As Genachowski said, if the FCC waits too long to ensure the free and open Internet it will be too late. Since Internet traffic is roughly doubling every two years, steps need to be taken now to ensure the Internet doesn’t burst into flames.

What I liked most about the speech was when Genachowski mentioned, in passing, people who, for some reason, are against Net Neutrality, which, again, merely means the preservation of a free and open Internet. Net Neutrality isn’t government regulation for regulation’s sake; who’s to say that your ISP doesn’t want you writing comments to Right Wing Blog or Left Wing Blog because it doesn’t agree with the politics therein, so it blocks access to that site? You’re damn right you want Net Neutrality in that instance.

Basically, this is common sense at work. Enjoy the rest of your day, and if you’re not too busy, you may want to poke around the FCC’s new Web site, OpenInternet.gov.

AT&T Statement on Letter to the FCC Regarding Apple App Store

So, if you need to kill some serious time, head on over to the FCC and browse through the pages and pages of patent documentation. There is everything in there except for external photos and the retail manual for both the 16GB and 32GB iPhone 3G S. Enjoy!

Digital OTA is great, but it can be a tad tricky to pick up sometimes. This Google Map mash-up should help by providing data on where station’s broadcast towers are and how much power is needed to pick up the given station. We only have a few days left before the June 12th shutoff, btw. Is your family ready?

DTV.gov via EngadgetHD

It seems a handful of markets will see a the majority of the stations turn-off the analog streams, but the vast majority will only see a few stations go 100% digital. Hawaii, of course, is the exception as 100% of the state’s stations already made the switch.

FCC [PDF] via EHD

We’re curious to judge your perception of the switch-over so hit the read link and participate in a couple of quick polls and feel free to leave your general thoughts in the comments.

How great is this: the FCC meeting that was scheduled to take place this week where they’d discuss the plans for free nationwide Wi-Fi isn’t even going to happen. The meeting, which was supposed to occur on the Dec. 18, was killed because a bunch of congressman objected to any “controversial” items emerging from the FCC during the last day’s of George W. Bush’s presidency. Better to let the new congress and Obama-influenced FCC tackle the matter.

Kevin Martin, the FCC chair, wants the nationwide Wi-Fi network to be be pornography-free (yeah, that’ll happen; the Internet is for porn), dontcha know?

In any event, it’s best to look at this latest development as merely a postponement and not an outright killing of the plan.

Next year, then.

via Boy Genius Report

Do I switch to AT&T to get the 3G Bold or suck it up and wait for the EDGE Curve II?