February 2008 Archives

Trackbacks have reappeared on the Google Blog. I wonder if the time I spent on the phone with a C|Net reporter had anything to do with it, or if they have a real explanation.

Plagiarism is pretty darned low.  At the risk of getting admonished by Andrew for lack of a proper introduction, here's the scoop from CNN.com

 

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A senior White House official admitted Friday that he copied large sections of another writer's work for an essay appearing in a Fort Wayne, Indiana, newspaper.

In an e-mail to The News-Sentinel, Tim Goeglein, special assistant to the president and deputy director of public liaison, apologizes, saying, "It is true. I am entirely at fault. It was wrong of me. There are no excuses."

Goeglein goes on to say he has reached out to the author, Jeffery Hart, whose 1998 writings in the Dartmouth Review he copied nearly verbatim.

"I have written to Jeff to apologize, and do so categorically and without exception," he said.

The White House press office provided the e-mail to CNN. Spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore said the White House was made aware of Goeglein's column and actions Friday morning.

"It's not acceptable," Lawrimore said. "And we're disappointed in Tim's actions."

Lawrimore would not speculate on whether the plagiarism would affect Goeglein's job at the White House, adding "we will certainly keep you updated as we learn more."

 

 

There is a world of difference between what I just did there (and what we do often) and plagiarism.  What I put in here from CNN is clearly attributed, with a verbal acknowledgement, a link back to the original content, and even a change in format to indicate that the material is from a different source.

 

In an age where information changes hands with incomprehensible speed and people react to reactions to reaction to the original content, it is more vital than ever that we give credit to the creator(s) of said content and make it clear what is original and what isn't.  Every instance of plagiarism calls into question the credibility of an entire industry.

I just bought the eponymous (Hooray SAT word!  Mom would be proud.) album from Vampire Weekend.  It's a quick, poppy 11 tracks that's a really fun listen.

 

When I bought it at Rasputin I was not treated as I am normally there, which is to say ignored entirely until they take my money.  Instead, the girl (she's probably my age but the lack of maturity classifies her as a "girl") decided that she first needed express her inability to comprehend the popularity of the album, stating that she didn't "get it."  If you want, you could make a suggestion.  It could be an additional purchase, you know?  Or just find some way to be helpful.  Unless your job despcription includes "be a condescending tool" you're in potentially dangerous territory, little missy.

 

I know, my consumer-y posts are usually more "here's how you can improve" and less "you suck" but this goes beyond poor service to effectively insulting me by way of my taste in music.  At the very least it deserves semi-public ridicule.  If I were her boss and was within earshot it would have resulted in her being in need of a new job.  Some things can be improved.  Sometimes the way to improve, however, is to let someone go.

 

Back to happier thoughts, Vampire Weekend (the band and the album) are great and I can't wait for more.

Reuters has some stats regarding the percentage of Americans who get their news online as opposed to getting it by traditional means.  I am certainly someone who gets their news from the web.  I don't subscribe to a newspaper and my TV is really just a monitor for my DVD player and recently re-acquired XBox 360. 

 

Here's an excerpt right from Reuters.com

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe traditional journalism is out of touch, and nearly half are turning to the Internet to get their news, according to a new survey.

While most people think journalism is important to the quality of life, 64 percent are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism in their communities, a We Media/Zogby Interactive online poll showed.

"That's a really encouraging reflection of people who care A) about journalism and B) understand that it makes a difference to their lives," said Andrew Nachison, of iFOCOS, a Virginia-based think tank which organized a forum in Miami where the findings were presented.

Nearly half of the 1,979 people who responded to the survey said their primary source of news and information is the Internet, up from 40 percent just a year ago. Less than one third use television to get their news, while 11 percent turn to radio and 10 percent to newspapers.

...

Howard Finberg, of the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, said the public often doesn't understand that the sources they are accessing online such as Google News and Yahoo News pull stories from newspapers, television, wire services and other media sources.

"It's delivered in a non-traditional form, that doesn't necessarily mean there isn't traditional journalism underneath it," he explained.

 

I disagree with the latter half of the excerpt.  I don't think I'm alone in realizing that a lot of sites, like Google news, are an aggregator of news from other sources, neatly grouped and delivered to be more convenient.  I get most of my online news directly from the online entity of its source (ie Reuters.com, CNNMoney.com, WashingtonPost.com, etc, etc). 

 

Journalism certainly isn't dead, and I don't think anyone really dedicated to delivering news via the internet is out to try and kill it.  It's simply an advance in the method of delivery.  The internet has obvious advantages over print media.  The fact that you don't need to wait for printing and delivery makes it amazingly useful for breaking stories.  By way of RSS feeds you can be told when the news happens as opposed to dedicating your time to specifically monitoring the evening broadcast. 

 

I totally understand why the old media is wary of the internet.  The newspaper has been around in the States since the late 1600's.  I understand the fear that they'll be replaced.  I'm sure the town crier was scared shitless when newspapers started coming out, fearing that he would be replaced.  Maybe a savvy town crier or two could have embraced printed media and started distributing their own newspaper.  The less-savvy who complained and derided the newspapers probably had to look for new jobs.  This new wave of internet vs print/tv/radio news is the same thing, and should be a non-issue.

 

If old media outlets would embrace the internet the way Reuters and the Washington Post, among others, have, they won't have anything to fear.  Howard Finberg is at least partially right -

"It's delivered in a non-traditional form, that doesn't necessarily mean there isn't traditional journalism underneath it,"

 

I agree, but I don't think it's the public who need to pay attention to that fact.

Update - they're back up on the Google Blog, but it seems like they aren't letting us link to them from here. Also, the trackbacks are still disabled. Here's the same cut-and-paste as earlier. The images come up now, but they don't come up in the post from yesterday Now click on the link to the entry...still no trackbacks!

Here is a screenshot deeper in the application:



We're proud of the product that we've designed and are continuing to build, but recognize that we are just at the initial stages of our "launch early and iterate" strategy. We look forward to the feedback we will receive from our Cleveland Clinic pilot, from all of you, and from the initial users of our service when we make it publicly available in the coming months.

Did anyone notice that they've disappeared from the Google Blog? Only the original press-releasish blog post remains. Did they put it down the memory hole? Have they invented one?

Are they backtracking now that people have heard about this privacy nightmare of a product? They should know you can't just make it go away.

Still waiting, Google...

I was going to do this myself, but mocoNews.net did it first and better.  Here is their totally awesome comparison of the new $99 unlimited plans from the Big 4.

 

-- Sprint Nextel: Perhaps the biggest example of this, the Overland Park company launched today an unlimited pricing plan that includes unlimited voice, data, text, e-mail, Web-surfing, Sprint TV, Sprint Music, GPS Navigation, Direct Connect and Group Connect for $99.99 a month. For $89.99 a month, there will be an unlimited voice, push-to-talk and text option. On financial impact, Hesse said they are balancing fiscal responsibility and growing the wireless data market.

-- T-Mobile USA: Announced on Feb. 19 that it will offer a plan that includes unlimited voice, and unlimited text, picture and IM messaging for $99.99 a month.

-- AT&T: Announced an unlimited voice plan for $99.99 a month on Feb. 19. Separately, AT&T customers can sign up for data plans such as $5 for 200 text, picture, video and instant messages or $35 for unlimited messaging and MEdia Net access. AT&T said it still expects 2008 revenue growth in the mid-single digit percentage range despite offering the unlimited calling plan, and said a very small percentage of its customers spend more than $100 a month.

-- Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Wireless: Announced an unlimited voice plan for $99.99 a month. An unlimited plan including messaging is $120 a month, and a plan including messaging, VCAST, VZNavigator and Mobile Email is $140 a month. Verizon said currently about 305,000 customers, or 0.5 percent of its subscriber base, have monthly plans above $99. Those customers have an average monthly bill between $125 and $135 a month. Over time, the reduced revenues from higher value customers moving down to the unlimited plan should be offset by increased revenues as a result of customers moving to unlimited plans, Verizon said.

 

The story goes on to metion the unlimited offerings from some of the smaller carriers and MVNOs (companies who offer mobile phone service but lease space on another company's network).

Do any of you have service from a carrier that wasn't mentioned?  Know of an awesome unlimited plan that got overlooked?  Let us know!

 

OpenDNS has launched a free web-filtering service that parents or network admins can use to block web sites based on content.  Sites with topics ranging from drug and alcohol use to social networking to dirty dirty porn can be filtered out by anyone who takes the time to set up a free account with OpenDNS and change some settings on their machine so that they use OpenDNS' DNS server instead of their ISP's.  Huh?

 

Here's more about how DNS server's do their thing from Security Fix at WashingtonPost.com

OpenDNS filters out Web page requests at the domain name system (DNS) level. DNS is responsible for translating human-friendly Web site names like "example.com" into numeric, machine-readable Internet addresses. Anytime you send an e-mail or browse a Web site, your machine is sending a DNS look-up request to your Internet service provider to help route the traffic.

Most Internet users use their ISP's DNS servers for this task, either explicitly because the information was entered when signing up for service, or by default because the user hasn't specified any external DNS servers. By creating a free account at OpenDNS.com, changing the DNS settings on your machine, and registering your Internet address with OpenDNS, the company will block whatever content you have specified.

You can change the DNS settings on each computer in your home. But if your network is behind a wireless router, a speedier and more reliable solution is to change the DNS settings on the router (see this link for instructions broken down by router model). That should cover all of the systems that connect to that router.

 

What OpenDNS is offering would be an amazing tool, both for parents and for administrators at companies who need to restrict web access on a budget.

 

Of course, there's opposition.

When I last wrote about this filtering service, I received quite a few comments from readers who took issue with the idea of parents deciding what sites their children should be permitted to visit online. Most who were critical of this approach said parents should instead focus on explaining to their kids why such sites are inappropriate and should be avoided.

But for a lot of parents -- particularly those with very young children -- that approach only goes so far. As nearly anyone who has been online for any length of time can attest, it is often quite easy to start out online at one completely innocent site or simple Web search, only to end up in the back alleys of the Internet's red light district with an errant click.

 

Are you kidding me?  Were any members of the opposition ever children?  Can they say that they never did anything stupid or dangerous even though their parents said not to?  Do we expect parents to watch over their kids' shoulders every second they're online?  It's so ridiculous that parents have a service available to them, for free, that can protect their kids and someone would have the audacity to admonish them for it.  I wonder if anyone opposed even has kids.  Even a kid. 

 

They way I see it, OpenDNS' system is like the V-Chip.  It's there.  If parents want to use it, fantastic.  If they don't care or if they think that they can convince their kids to "do the right thing" without technological aids, more power to them.  For the parents who want to use the technology available to help protect their children from content they don't want them seeing...please do.  I'd rather have parents limiting what their kids can view as opposed to the government getting involved and blocking content from everyone, thanks to some loud-mouthed buffoon whose kid only saw porn because mommy was too lazy to do anything about it herself.

Patrick Ruffini sent me to a wonderful, wonderful study examining the email strategies of the six major candidates this year (Obama, Clinton, Edwards, Huckabee, McCain, Romney). The results are not encouraging. The candidate who used email the most effectively was...

 

...71 year old John McCain.

 

The Results
After examining the email programs and grading each candidate, 24 total points equaling a perfect score, no campaign's email program received a passing grade.

Here is the final tally:

While Sen. McCain scored the highest of the six with 16 points, each candidate's campaign missed multiple opportunities toward full email optimization. As the election steamrolls through the summer toward Election Day in November, each of the remaining candidates needs to critically look at his or her campaign and make sure each marketing effort, including email, is being maximized to its full potential

 

I suggest checking the study out.

 

I'll be covering the 2008 Politics Online conference right here in Washington next Tuesday and Wednesday. One of the keynote speakers is CV favorite Drew Clark, of Broadband Census and I should have coverage of a bunch of really cool panels on technology, democracy, and their intersection in Washington.

There is alot of attention focused on "Social Networking" for politics. I'm interested to see what the DC chattering class and the so-called "technologists" have to say about it. To some degree it looks like alot of bunk, and just another money-raising tool. I have at least one person I plan on talking to about it on Tuesday.

The schedule is posted here. Please let me know if there's something you want to see or a speaker you want me to talk to.

Only two days after that I head to Austin for SXSW Interactive. Again, reader suggestions on what to cover are appreciated, otherwise all you'll have is what I think is cool. While that may be great for some, I think those of you not there should have some input on what you get to hear about.

If you're going to either and you'd like to meet up, feel free to drop me a note.

Broadcasting & Cable is reporting that Meredith Baker, acting head of NTIA, and the public face of the DTV Converter Box program, is leaving. This is only four months after her predecessor  John Kneuer quit last November.

"Given ongoing concerns about the converter box coupon program, it is important that there be continuity of leadership at NTIA, I'm pleased Ms. Baker is committed to remaining at NTIA until a replacement is confirmed and urge the President to nominate a well-qualified replacement who is knowledgeable about the transition and whose arrival will not cause any disruptions at this critical time in the transition."

So one of my regular reads is the Google Blog. Recently, I've been writing about some of their entries, and it's been driving some traffic this way since they link to posts that link back to them.

Today around 10:30 am I read a post on Google Blog about their new Google Health product that described it and showed some screen shots. I thought "wow, that's a bad idea" and I so I took a lunch break, threw together my thoughts and posted them here on this site. The post went live at 12:00pm EST.

Now, I had been busy at work, but earlier (around 9:45am EST) I had checked the Google Analytics for the site and the visitor count was low since neither Alex nor myself had posted anything new since last night (2/27/07). Maybe an hour after I posted I went back and was a bit shocked, the visitor count had gone through the roof. I looked at the Google Blog, and out of all the links shown on the "Links to This Post" list, mine was the only one with a remotely critical title, "Google Health is Frightening." The rest were either simply linking or re-reporting with various degrees of fawning and praise going on. Yet, there was my post on how I thought it's a horrible idea, and that any doctor would be insane to use it, and that there were probably legal issues that hadn't properly been considered.  It was maybe the 5th link in the list.

Around 4:00PM EST I noticed the hit count slowing. I went back to the source (the original Google Blog post), and lo and behold, the post had every single link/trackback deleted.

Not only that, but they turned off the trackbacks for every single post on the blog, but didn't remove the presence of the feature from their front page template! Look! Straight-up cut-and-paste job from their front page as of 10:30PM EST:

Here is a screenshot deeper in the application:

We're proud of the product that we've designed and are continuing to build, but recognize that we are just at the initial stages of our "launch early and iterate" strategy. We look forward to the feedback we will receive from our Cleveland Clinic pilot, from all of you, and from the initial users of our service when we make it publicly available in the coming months.

Permalink Links to this post

Labels: healthcare

Now, when I went to click on the "Links to this post" link, I got a blank space. Nothing. All the  trackbacks are kaput.

So, it's ok to link to the Google Blog in order to shower them with praises and talk about how revolutionary and wonderful they are...but criticize them or suggest they are heading down a dark path? They'll make you disappear. At least that's what it looks like. Now, I know a lot of tech types don't get Washington, but us Beltway locals have a saying: "the coverup is worse than the crime." You may have heard that before.

Hey, Google Bloggers: want to tell me why you turned off trackbacks? If you give me a real reason, I'll even apologize to you. Heck, I'll fly out to California and buy you all a round of your preferred beer.

But only if you can prove to me that you're not so scared of criticism based on your own blog that the second someone does, you stop linking back.

Your corporate motto is "do no evil" but honestly, this looks like something Steve Ballmer would do. I'm just too far away from the Googleplex for you to throw chairs at me.

So come on, Google Bloggers. Turn them back on, or explain on your blog why they are gone.

I'll be reading. And I'll be writing, too.

Let me start off by admitting that this post is a bit off-topic.  It has nothing to do with DC or with technology.  It is related to one of my passions, which is awesome customer care.  I've mentioned over and over how much I think that corporate honesty and getting good information to the consumer allows those consumers to make better decisions.

 

I had that kind of experience last night.

 

I was getting a very ill-advised tattoo covered up last night.  When I was having my little consult with the artist I told him what I wanted and he weighed in.  He let me know that with any cover-up it has to be larger, of course, and probably very solid.  He explained that the cover-up would be more permanent than the original.  He also let me know that he thought my idea would be a little obvious, that it would be readily seen as a cover up.  When I gave him my reasons for it he was totally cool about doing it.  He gave me his opinion, made me very aware of the longer term consequences but still let me make the decision.

 

That's what was so important to me.  I, the consumer, told him what I wanted.  He drew on his training and expertise and gave me his opinion of the situation and gave me his suggestions.  I took that information, made my decision, and he ran with it.  The entire time he was really friendly and professional and when he did offer suggestions he did it without being the least bit condescending, despite his infinitely superior knowledge of the product, in this case, a tattoo.

 

In a perfect world, you could apply that last paragraph to any situation and simply replace "tattoo" with "Television" or "wireless plan" or "internet package."  In fact, by being such an off-topic product, it may actually drive the point home that consumer education allows 3 big things to happen:

 

 1^st - The supplier of the product or service eliminates a lot of their liability if the customer's choice blows up in their face.  "Hey, we told you what would happen."

 

2^nd - The customer can feel a lot more confident in their purchase.  They know the facts and aren't guessing as far as whether or not the product matches their needs.

 

3^rd - The customer knows that the supplier/sales rep/company cares about them, by way of highlighting potential pitfalls of the customer's decision.  This is the kind of thing that customers remember and causes them to be repeat customers.  Anyone who took Business 101 (or has an ounce of common sense) knows that you make a lot more money off of repeat customers versus one-time customers.  Also, it cuts down on things like complaint calls and returns, which waste money, further eating into profit margins.

 

Well, I've rambled long enough, but I think you get my point.  There are certain principles of the sales and customer support processes that transcend industry and make the entire process of buying a product much more pleasant.  Once again, I challenge any representative of any company who reads this to try this with their customers.  I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with the outcome. 

Sun Microsystems missed the boat in a huge way. They ignored Linux until it wasn't cool to ignore Linux anymore, and by then they were almost as deep in as Silicon Graphics, which barely exists anymore. Remember them? I always wanted to own a SPARC or an O2, but Linux was so much better, and it ran on hardware that I could afford. We know where that battle ended.

McNealy still thinks he's smart, and so he says that telcos need to serve up content or die, as opposed to say, providing services in accordance with their FCC licenses issued under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which amended the Telecommunications Act of 1934:

"I have explained to every telco that either you become a destination site, or the destination site will become a telco...I think the telcos have to make sure they don't get marginalized to just being bit providers and bandwidth providers"

Um...did he miss the FCC hearing Monday, when one of the Commissioners (I forget who) noted that if Comcast didn't offer Video on Demand service, that their restriction of Vuze's BitTorrent-based video content would have not been an issue?

Telcos have much to gain through R&D, competition, and being honest brokers. In fact, by law that's what they are. McNealy obviously knows very little about communications law, policy, or the history such concepts as the common carrier, Stratton-Oakmont v. Prodigy or the recent Net Neutrality debates.

Oh, yeah. Speaking of too-little, too-late:

"During a speech earlier in the day, McNealy slammed the U.S. government for not being interested in adopting open-source software. McNealy said the farther he gets from Washington, the more governments get interested in open source."

Thanks for finally jumping on the bandwagon, Scott. You recieve no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.

As per our previous post, Nokia and Qualcomm are in a recently consolidated legal battle over various mobile phone patents since their licensing agreement expired last April.  Nokia just won over some of Qualcomm's arguments.

 

Here are some of the details from mocoNews.net

By Tricia Duryee - Thu 28 Feb 2008 10:24 AM PST

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) checks off another win against Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM). The International Trade Commission upheld a ruling in one of their many patent battles on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The agency determined there is no need to review a decision issued on Dec. 12 that found that Nokia did not infringe on three Qualcomm patents at issue in the case and that one of the patents is invalid, a Nokia spokeswoman told the WSJ. Qualcomm said it was disappointed with the ruling and had not yet decided whether it would appeal.

 

Under the Licensing agreement Nokia was paying Qualcomm $500 Million per year in licensing fees, which they were looking to reduce.

We'll update with more details as they become availble.

...is a Sacrement in the Ritual of Public Humiliation performed before on the altar of the Church of Washington over and over. First, the Gaffe. It takes many forms. It could come in a hearing, statement, news conference, speech, or any off the cuff remark in the age of YouTube.

Next, the Outrage: Druge, newspaper websites, blogs, cable news,  network news, local news, next day headline, editorial, "expert," and if it's really bad, Nancy Grace.

Then, finally, the Apology. The Politico's Ben Smith notices a curious pattern that has developed over the past year:

In the course of the primary campaign, and perhaps in a preview of the fall election drama, Senator Barack Obama has accepted the apologies of three United States senators, a former senator, CNN and various lower-level supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton.

Isn't it great? And it's not even the general election campaign yet. Here's a preview:

On Tuesday, a talk radio host, Bill Cunningham, introduced McCain to an Ohio crowd by attacking Obama, and dwelling on his little-used middle name, Hussein.

McCain swiftly responded. "I regret any comments that may be made about" Clinton and Obama, he said. "I will take responsibility in any offense that was inflicted."

The next day, there was a different culprit, but the same offense: the Tennessee Republican Party sent out a press release dwelling on Obama's middle name.

And again the spotlight turned to McCain, who was asked about it at a San Antonio press conference.

"All I can say is that I have made my position very clear and I have made it time after time and I made it yesterday," he said.

I can't wait to see who becomes the next acolyte.

Drew Clark reported for TechDaily for a long time. He also runs the Broadband Census. So, I pretty much take what he says about the Cable/Internet industry as gold, and I won't try to "reinvent the wheel" by saying something better than he does. I missed this story yesterday where he does a good job of explaining the hole a certain cable operator is in, both politically and technically.

After going into some background on Monday's FCC hearing which we both covered, Drew notes the back story:

Besides, Comcast is not a very good FOK, or Friend of Kevin -- as in Kevin Martin, the chairman of the agency. Martin has done nearly everything in his power to harm Comcast and the cable industry since he took over the FCC in March 2005.

 

That political battle with the cable industry is all about a la carte, or per-channel television programming.

So, the company that fought tooth-and-nail to keep Net Neutrality off the table last year has a guy who really, really doesn't like them. As we reported yesterday, the "family tiers" were the compromise to Martin's a la carte proposal. Martin is apparently still a bit miffed. It also didn't help that the Verizon VP who was at the hearing said that Verizon doesn't need to manage their network at all. Drew (who was at the hearing) even noticed the name tags:

 

Note even the pre-ordained and subtle digs, visible in this photograph: It is "The Honorable Tom Tauke" on the left, but merely "David L. Cohen" on the right. (Tauke received this honorific because he is a former Congressman, a Republican from Iowa.)

 So, when you walk in with a politically stacked deck, and the other guy says he doesn't even need to do what you're accused of doing...that's bad. But when you admit that your product has a technical limitation, and he manages to plug his products? Ouch. Quoth Mr. Clark:

 

The basic problem for Comcast is that users of P2P applications like BitTorrent do consume an extraordinary amount of bandwidth . But BitTorrent users aren't hogging the fat, downstream pipe that cable offers. It's the the scrawny upstream trickle that everyone is fighting over.

 

DSL service, in general, has the same "asymetrical" character, offering far greater downstream speeds than upstream speeds. But the cable modem service's shared network compounds this problem.

 

Contrast this with the message that Tauke imparted. Given the capacity of Verizon's fiber optic service (FiOS), "at the current time, we do not have the necessity of thwarting or curtailing traffic." Tauke even touted Verizon's 20/20 service, or 20 megabits downstream and 20 megabits upstream. The Bell company announced this symmetrical during the same week in which the revelations of Comcast's BitTorrent behavior surfaced last fall.

At this point, I'm going to stop keeping score. Thanks, Drew.

As we reported last week, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile all announced $99 per month plans that offer unlimited calling.  T-Mobile had the edge by including unlimited SMS (text) messaging.  There was speculation that Sprint would offer an unlimited plan for around $60.

That didn't happen, but here's the direct line from Sprint

OVERLAND PARK, Kan., Feb 28, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- In an industry-defining move, Sprint (NYSE:S) today announced it will launch a domestic unlimited pricing plan that gives customers unlimited voice, data, text, e-mail, Web-surfing, Sprint TV(SM), Sprint Music, GPS Navigation, Direct Connect(R) and Group Connect(R) for $99.99 a month. The new pricing plan is available to existing and new customers beginning tomorrow.

...

For families, Simply Everything includes an incremental $5 discount for each incremental line, up to five lines on the same bill. For example, two lines would amount to $194.98 ($99.99 + $94.99); a third line would cost an additional $89.99. This is in sharp contrast to the multi-line unlimited rates offered by some competitors. The Sprint plan offers significant savings the more lines a customer adds.

 

Depending on the type of phone, this becomes a better and better deal.  Assuming that BlackBerrys are included (they don't mention anywhere that they are or are not) that means that you're getting, in addition to the unlimited minutes, $40 worth of data access and $10-$15 worth of tect messaging.  Although it's at the same price point as the rest of the big 4 it's tremendously more bang for your buck.  The Family discount is cool too, especially because the discount "stacks" with every additional line.

 

Amazing move on Sprint's part that could really help them woo power users and rebuild their customer base.

That's right. Google wants to host your medical records. Last week they announced a partnership with a clinic in Cleveland, OH. Now they're talking more about the product itself. Here's the scoop from Google Blog:

 

• Platform - One of the most exciting and innovative parts of Google Health is our platform strategy. We're assembling a directory of third-party services that interoperate with Google Health. Right now, this means you'll be able to automatically import information such as your doctors' records, your prescription history, and your test results into Google Health in order to easily access and and control your data. Later, this platform strategy will mean that you will be able to interact with services and tools easily, and will be able to do things like schedule appointments, refill prescriptions, and start using new wellness tools.

• Portability - Our Internet presence ultimately means that through Google Health, you will be able to have access and control over your health data from anywhere. Through the Cleveland Clinic pilot, we have already found great use-cases in which, for example, people spend 6 months of the year in Ohio, and 6 months of the year in Florida or Arizona, and will now be able to move their health data between their various health providers seamlessly and with total control. Previously, this would have required carrying paper records back and forth. With Google Health, the user can simply import the data from each medical facility and then choose to share it with the other facilities. It's advances in data portability like this that we think can really make a difference in the quality of healthcare. The clearer and more comprehensive the information regarding your health becomes, the better your care will be.

I'll be clear. I like Google. I think they mean well. They've got a ton of smart people there. On the other hand, the idea that my medical records are stored somewhere central, indexed and made available to anyone who can get access to the machine (as opposed to my doctor keeping his own records and sharing them when I tell him to) goes completely counter to my sense of privacy. Some things are best kept difficult. Sharing confidential records of any short should be one of them. To be honest, I think anything you want to keep secret or confidential should be on paper. My doctor, who is a pretty young, tech-savvy individual, uses a tablet PC to take his charts, and he's been kind enough to print his notes and stick them in a paper file.

Why do I ask him to do this when I don't have anything to hide? When there is no paper, there is no paper trail. If I know that only my doctor has my records, if they show up anywhere else, I have a pretty good idea of where they came from. If they're hosted on Google's machines, I have no idea who is doing what with my data.

Would this extend to mental health records? Imagine if you went to a therapist, marriage counselor, rehab, whatever, and those notes and records were online for "easy access." I want it to be a total pain in the neck for anyone to get them. I want it to be difficult for me to get them sent to anyone.

I switched Dentists this year. To transfer my charts and X-Rays, I had to call my old dentist, have them fax my new dentist a release form, which I signed in their presence, which they faxed back to my old dentist, who put my charts and X-Rays in a tracked, signed for FedEx envelope. It took some time and it was annoying, but my privacy was protected. Remember, there are many medical conditions that are illegal to disclose in the U.S. Imagine if a misplaced setting on this Google Health inadvertantly released people's genetic records or HIV status? I wonder what Andrew Sullivan, the Internet's favorite HIV+ pundit has to say about this.

People's medical records contain all kinds of things that are nobody's business but their own. Any doctor or hospital that would outsource their record-keeping, which is one of the most important things that a doctor can do for a patient (keep a good chart), is abdicating their responsibility and calls into question whether they value convenience over ethics. The doctor-patient relationship, including medical records, has long been considered sacrosanct. For a company like Google to actually want to offer this as a service says more about their arrogance than the system itself does about their capacity to innovate, and for any doctor or hospital to buy or use it would, to me, be a violation of trust.

There are those in Washington and around the country (Paul Krugman is one) who believe that electronic, portable charts are the key to universal health care. Krugman regular cites the Veterans Administration as an example, since they use some electronic records. The big difference is a) they keep it in-house, and b) they are a single organization. If I wanted to send my VA records to a private doctor, I would have to jump through way more hoops than just telling Google it's OK...and I should have to. Hillary Clinton regularly throws out "e-charts" as the solution to all our problems, and more centralization of records was a big part of her failed 1993 "Hillarycare" plan that she is so loathe to discuss now.

This should not be easy.

Google should be commended for trying to simplify health care record keeping, but this is an arena where they should keep their mitts off. If they want to sell a "black box" turnkey solution for internal record keeping, go for it, but I will still insist on paper. Host my records for me? Go away.

At his news conference, President Bush announced his "economic stimulus" refund checks would be mailed this May.

Can we figure out how to invest it back into some expanded broadband, considering it would provide $143 BILLION to the economy?

Bah.

Two gems today before I head to the office. First is from B&C:

NBC is working with Pando Networks, a peer-to-peer content-delivery-technology company, to revamp its NBC Direct service...

...

The NBC Direct Service lets users download high-resolution, ad-supported versions of NBC shows including 30 Rock, The Office, Heroes, American Gladiators and Late Night with Conan O'Brien. The service -- currently only available for PCs using Internet Explorer -- uses P2P technology to quickly and efficiently download the shows, which are automatically deleted after viewing or after a viewing window has lapsed. Taking a cue from TiVo, the service lets users "subscribe" to their favorite shows, automatically downloading new episodes when available.

NBC will use Pando technology to improve the efficiency of its P2P-delivery system, as well as protecting it through encryption and digital-rights management, including "hash-matching, digital-fingerprinting and content-watermarking technologies," according to Pando.

If you read this space last week, you'd remember that NBC filed comments with the FCC against Vuse, making an uncited assertion that "at least 50% of broadband capacity is taken up by a small minority of users (about 5%) using peer-to-peer networks to traffic in pirated music, video and software." It is a bit interesting that so soon after Monday's hearing that they have announced their intention to use P2P technology to distribute their lawful content, presumably with the expectation that it will not be throttled or blocked by ISPs, especially ones with competing Video On Demand service.

I guess you need a network TV weatherman to know which way the FCC wind blows. Apologies to Bob Dylan.

Next up, the Senate joined their friends in the House of Representatives yesterday in passing legislation giving cable and VOIP providers like Vonage equal access to 911 systems, so that operators can determine the physical location of a call. To their credit, the differences between the bills should be easily fixable, according to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (D-MI). In a statement yesterday, Dingell said:

"I am confident that we can resolve the minor differences between the House and Senate legislation in short order...and present a final measure to the president."

With GPS becoming more common on mobile phones, hopefully this will pave the way for more confidence in the 911 system, and faster responses to emergencies for all, no matter who you get your phone service from. Kudos to the FCC for leading the way, and to Congress for putting more teeth behind the initiative. Sometimes these guys really do get things right for the right reasons.

Ok, so I've been reading Slashdot since 1998 or so...I have a 4 digit user ID (9848, if you must know), so I've seen alot of stuff pass through those pages. I remember meeting Jeff "Hemos" Bates and the infamous Jon Katz at The Bazaar (a one-off Open Source trade show/love-in where I helped run the Debian Linux booth) and doing some contract work for the company that bought Slashdot (Andover.net, which became OSDN, which got bought by VA Linux, which became VA Software, which I think is now SourceForge). They've broken some interesting stories and were one of the first "must-read" blogs before there was such a word.

They've even acquired enough a patina of credibility through longevity that they can get celebrities and the occasional politician to participate in their "interviews." On the other hand, as they've grown more popular they've had less and less original editorial content, and really have been reduced to a "gatekeeper." They won't link to commentary, even when it's original, only the source story. I've submitted things only to have them pull my words out, put them in the "firehose" where noone sees them (or my work) and just write their own summary and link to the story I found them.

And occasionally they link to total sensationalist trash like this. A former FBI agent named Patrick J. Dempsey has made a startling discover: criminals can use networks to cover their tracks.

Although the Internet may be considered the greatest achievement of the past 50 years, the technology behind it has created a sanctuary for various types of computer criminals. The unfortunate and ugly truth is that the Web is providing a brand new "world" where international cyber criminals can thrive, and the world's numerous criminal justice systems just aren't ready to address these crimes in their entirety.

Cyber criminals don't necessarily need to leave the comfort of their homes to commit their crimes. Today, for example, bank robberies can be committed in Southeast Asia via a computer that's being controlled by an individual in Russia. Identity theft is achieved through a complex network of individuals residing in North America, Europe, and Africa, all effectively working together on the Internet to profit from shared information. And organized crime has ties to spam campaigns, identity theft, denial-of-service attacks, and organized hacking rings.

Is this a joke? This guy's job is "Chief Information Security Officer" at Janney Montgomery Scott, a financial services firm. He has also apparently been living in a cave since 1999 or so. On the other hand, Osama bin Laden lives in a cave and probably knew that the Internet had unsavory elements back when he was using it to plan attacks.  The fact that he's using the term "cyber-" anything makes him horribly dated.

Also, tying organized crime to "spam campaigns, identity theft, denial-of-service attacks, and organized hacking rings?" Did he get his education in Information Security by watching Sandra Bullock in The Net? Also, why is he a "former" FBI agent? Did he retire, or was he fired? Does he have any experience in investigating computer crimes? Does he know anything about computers? I'm curious as to his credentials, because it sounds like he has no clue what he's talking about, or he's using a really outdated Buzzword Bingo card.

But the problem with investigating international cyber crimes and capturing criminals on the Internet is not necessarily due to lack of cooperation among international law enforcement bodies. The issue has much more to do with the fact that the legal systems throughout the world vary greatly and take a very long time to change. These two facts make it extremely difficult for law enforcement to cooperate, investigate, capture, and ultimately prosecute the cyber criminals today.

Oh, so it's not that you can't cooperate, it's those pesky laws...or does he mean lawyers? Maybe Mr. Dempsey was one of those guys that wanted to throw Phil Zimmerman in prison for writing PGP back in the '90s. One more thing. Investigating crimes and prosecuting them are two completely different tasks. I am guessing this man has no law degree, and knows very little about prosecuting criminals.

Either way, Mr. Dempsey has come up with a solution. We need a "new" "more secure" Internet where people will "register" with some kind of "authority." What, like old style AOL? Has he heard of Kerberos or Virtual Private Networks?  All those things allow "registration" with "authority." There's a difference between registration and monitoring...

He throws around terms like spoofing and InterNIC (which by the way hasn't existed since ICANN took over running the world's domain registration system) and talks about "managing a more secure Internet." Whether or not he has a clue what he's talking about, I don't know. It doesn't look that way. His article looks like a cut and paste job from a bunch of sensationalist puff pieces from the Bubble pre-2001 era.

If Mr. Dempsey had done any research he would understand and be able to articulate the Internet is built on 1970's technology designed to survive a nuclear war, that operates based on open protocols and a degree of trust between systems, and requires skilled network managers to keep running. When he talks about a "new internet" he means a more tightly controlled network with systems built in for monitoring and controlling its' use.

The fight against international cyber crime is going to take a concerted effort from large and small corporations, law enforcement in all countries, as well as the governments and legislative bodies of those same countries. Most importantly, the average end user will have to join the fight to bring about change on the Internet, or create a "new" Internet using the lessons we've learned.

What does that mean? Governments and legislative bodies? You mean there is a difference? The biggest change that needs to hit the Internet is adoption of IPv6. If he wants some kind of ubermensch system to keep bad things from happening and bad people from using networks, he's going to have to go back in time or move to China.


I don't think I'm going to read Slashdot as much anymore.

While I fully admit that it would be reckless gun-jumping to assume that the Wireless Consumer Protection Bill will become a law any time soon.  To assume that it would become a law at any time without significant changes would also be extraordinarily naive.  It's just a draft at this point.

However, it's still exciting to me.  The stipulations that would allow us, as consumers to a) purchase a phone at full price to avoid a contract and b) to not have to pay anything extra on our monthly bill to avoid a contract are what really float my boat. 

This would be a move towards a mobile phone culture like they have in Europe and Asia.  I've posted about it in bits and pieces so I'll be brief.  You buy a phone, you buy your service and that's it.

What would be so great about the Wireless Consumer Protection Bill is that no one is saying that contracts would be eliminated.  You see, it's all about choice.  A contract is far less offensive when instead of your being only option it's an option.  There are plenty of people who are just fine with signing a contract in order to get a cheaper phone.  Especially, if like me, you just bought a phone with a no-contract price tag of $550 a 2-year contract that reduces your price by $300 after mail-in rebates sounds great.  A lack of choice is what I feel has held the U.S. mobile phone market back.  The lack of choice in handsets has started to be addressed with the iPhone, the Tilt (AT&T's branded HTCH Tytn II) and the Touch (another HTC device for Sprint) and En-V from Verizon.  That's a great start, but hardware is only half of the mobile phone equation.

I think that the potential for a hybrid of the Euro/Asian mobile culture and the American contract-based culture is a step towards putting the U.S. in a position to say it's changing the industry.

There's a lot more going on in the WCP bill than just the option to sign up for mobile service sans contract, but it's the part that's most exciting to me.  Once it becomes a little more "real" Andrew will get into some of the nitty gritty of translating from Washington-ese to human.

It shows great potential and even the fact that one of the most senior members of Congress would attach his name to it is enormous.  Take a sec to read it right here.  And I know it's hokey, but if you believe in this contact your representative and let them know that you support Wireless Consumer Protection.  Don't know who your rep is?  Check out www.house.gov and look towards the upper left.  You'll see a tool to find your rep based on ZIP+4.  Rep. Michael D. Honda (D-CA), expect an email, sir.

Ok, so these converter boxes have been around for about a year now, but they weren't getting any kind of sales push.  They sat on a shelf where they'd likely be missed by any and everyone.  This evening, on a stroll through the Milpitas, CA Wal-Mart, they were actually making a push for the boxes.  They had an entire endcap with easily 150 units ready to go.  They're selling for $49.87 and are emblazoned with a sticker reminding you that you can use your coupons to defray $40 of that cost. 

Now that we're under a year until analog TV goes the way of Brisco County, Jr. (check out the counter on the right, please) retailers are beginning to make a push to get everyone ready.

For more information on the box, check out the specs at Wal-Mart.com.

Maybe after being inspired by NFL Hall-of-Famer Steve Largent's appearance before his subcommittee on behalf of CTIA today, Chairman Markey (D-MA) has scheduled a hearing for next Wednesday, March 5th at 9:30am which has been titled: "Competition in the Sports Programming Marketplace"

We know that Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), a well-known Eagles fan, has been "all up in Roger Goodell's grill" about the NFL's ham-handed attempts to get Comcast (which is headquartered in Philadelphia) and other cable and satellite operators to carry the NFL Network on their main tier. Remember the Patriots-Giants game that was simulcast on 3 networks? That was done because the game was originally scheduled months before to air on NFL Network alone. This was before the Patriots began to do that whole undefeated season thing, and it happened that they would be breaking the 1972 Miami Dolphins' single seaon win record against New York. One problem: not everyone would get to see it, because not all cable subscribers get NFL Network.

You see, many operators keep NFL Network on a "sports tier" and only pay the NFL for customers that choose to get it, rather than pay the NFL more money per regular subscriber. The NFL does not like this, and has engaged in a rather crass advertising campaign to get customers to harass their cable companies.

Obviously, as a Patriots fan, Chairman Markey could have been bothered by this, seeing as Congress has granted the NFL limited antitrust immunity for the purpose of selling the broadcast rights to their games. This was done in 1962. Now, the NFL wants to keep more games to itself and rake in both the subscriber and advertising revenue (although I think there are more commercials for NFL Network on NFL Network itself than for anything else...).

There is also that pesky matter of Sunday Ticket. The NFL only offers it through DirecTV. However, not all consumers can recieve DirecTV signals. Could it be that Markey's Washington residence doesn't have a southern exposure and couldn't get DirecTV? Did he miss a Patriots game? Senator Specter has made a point of criticizing these exclusive programming agreements. I detect a pattern.

The hearing is next Wednesday, March 5th at 9:30am, in 2123 Rayburn House Office Building. No word on a good location for tailgating.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) is behind a bill that would eliminate contracts and contract extensions for those of us who buy a full-price phone.  His bill would level the playing field for those of us who are ok with shelling out a few (hundred, ouch) extra bucks for a phone in exchange for not signing away years and years of our lives to our wireless carrier.

 

Here's the scoop from mocoNews

By Tricia Duryee - Tue 26 Feb 2008 04:24 PM PST

The U.S. House of Representatives is holding a hearing Wednesday on legislation that would require carriers to offer wireless service without contracts when devices are not subsidized.. The Wireless Consumer Protection bill is sponsored by Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.

The bill immediately brings to mind the iPhone because AT&T (NYSE: T) requires customers to sign a two-year contract even though the popular $400 device is not subsidised by the carrier. Carriers typically insist on contracts because they discount many of the devices they sell to customers.

 

While the bill is a great idea, some carriers are already (partially) following its primary guideline.  At Sprint (speaking from experience) I could always buy a phone, sans discount, and not risk renewing my contract.  Until recently, any change to my plan would renew me for 2 more years, but even that has gone away. 

 

What I think is really great is that the bill would also force carriers to offer price-competitive rate plans for non-contract customers.  Presently, even if you buy the handset at full price, you cannot start a new plan sans contract.  I am, of course, talking about post-paid/monthly cell phone plans, not pre-paid.  Most carriers will let you retain your rate plan after your initial contract expires, but the plans that they would let you select when you first sign up if you don't want a contract are a joke.

 

Lastly, the bill would make sure that Early Termination Fees (ETFs) are prorated as the contract wanes and are for the purpose of recovering handsert subsidies as opposed to punishing customers for, say, trying to leave a carrier they feel is mistreating them.  Most carriers have adopted, or said they'll adopt,  pro-rated ETFs.  I like the fact that the bill would, in theory, set a standard rate of depreciation for ETFs and even, perhaps, a cap on ETFs.

 

Edward Markey is very rapidly makingme wish  I lived in the 7th District of Massachusetts.  Not that he needs the vote, but I'd love to be able to say "Edward Markey is my Congressman."

A little behind schedule, Apple is ready to release its SDK (Software Developer Kit) for the iPhone.

 

Here are the details, from Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Wednesday it will reveal its software plans for its iPhone device on March 6, including tools for outside developers and features aimed at businesses.

"Please join us to learn about the iPhone software roadmap, including the iPhone SDK and some exciting new enterprise features," Apple said in an invitation sent to reporters.

(Reporting by Scott Hillis)

 

So the iPhone will finally be able to use a few gigs of its memory for on-board application as opposed to the entirely web-based shenanigans that are currently offered.  On-board applications make a lot of sense because they are so much faster.  Even though some of them access the web in order to perform searches or update information a lot of time is saved when as much as possible id done by or on the phone.  Take TwitterBerry, for example.  Even though you access the web to see friends' updates or to submit your own, you type in your text directly on the handset.  You don't have to wait for the page to load just to enter your text and then wait again to submit it.  Also, there are plenty of apps that don't require any web interaction at all.  There are applications that will let you scour your handset for information.  I think that the usefulness of an application like that would be nullified if you had to wait around for the internet everytime you tried to search your handset for something.  And let's not forget that the internet on the iPhone isn't all that fast.  It's decent, but when it's being relied upon so heavily any inadequacies will get exposed over and over again.

 

While I think it's great that Apple is opening up the iPhone I have to wonder why they waited.  If they were worried about third-party applications drawing people away from Apple software, why release it at all?  If I had to guess, I'd say that they wanted to get people to try the preloaded Apple offerings and decided to gurantee that they would by not allowing effective access to any alternatives. 

 

Who knows.  If enough applications become available and the enterprise solutions are truly "exciting" Andrew may have to take the iPhone out of mothballs.

 

I'm not holding my breath.

I'm watching a live feed of the House of Representatives, where they are debating an Energy bil which would increase taxes on oil companies and subsidize clean and renewable energy.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) is offering a motion to recommit which would insert the "Protect America Act" (aka the Spy on America and Grant Retroactive Immunity to the Telecoms Act).

With his typical charm and wit, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-MI) raised a point of order against Hoekstra's motion. Point of order sustained. Hoekstra appeals. The House is now voting on the motion to table the appeal of the ruling of the Chair (today it's Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL)).

While I don't have much time to write at the moment, I'll point out two things:

• Big Telecom wants this immunity because they've been investing billions into systems to divert and copy fiber optic traffic for the purposes of data mining and spying at various peering points. They also stand to risk billions in judgements and legal fees (and jail time for executives?) if they're not granted immunity, because they've been complicit in a conspiracy to illegally wiretap the entire country.

 

• While renewable energy may not be great for Detroit, the technological investment and R&D for developing truly renewable fuel and energy sources would help the economy. There would be jobs for smart people to think about these things and develop solutions, as well as jobs for the labor needed to implement stuff.

 

• Here's a question: wouldn't Google have an interest in developing energy sources to power their massive data centers? Who do they buy their power from? More importantly, how much does fuel for their backup generators cost? Hey, Larry and Sergey! It doesn't matter if you own your own seperate backbone if there isn't any juice to run your data centers. If you want to be self-sufficient, be self-sufficient. Or, you could always invade a country.

The NPD group, a market research firm, reports that not only did legal downloads increase in 2007, they grew to the point where Apple is now only second fiddle to Wal-Mart in the distribution of music.

Legal music downloads now account for 10 percent of the music acquired in the US. Reflecting the growth in that sector of the market, Apple's iTunes Music Store became the second-largest music retailer in the U.S. after Wal-Mart, based on the amount of music sold during 2007 (based on a 12-track CD equivalency for music track downloads).

Twenty-nine million consumers acquired digital music legally, via pay-to-download sites last year, which is an increase of 5 million over the previous year. Sales growth was largely driven by consumers age 36 to 50 - a segment that was aggressively acquiring digital music-players in 2007.

"The continued growth in legal download sites is encouraging, yet the industry struggles to improve the value of each digital customer," said Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for The NPD Group.  "With so many baby boomers and gen-Xers entering the market, there are certainly opportunities to sell more digital albums, promote older catalog titles, or create bundles that will raise revenues. In the near term that's going to be the best means available to narrow the gap on dwindling CD revenues."

Seeing as their success as a retailer rests entirely on the goodwill of those who operate the network infrastructure, you really have to wonder why Apple is keeping their mouths shut on Net Neutrality. 

For their sake, I hope that no broadband provider wants to partner with Wal-Mart to deliver a music library via set top box. iTunes traffic might suddenly take up too much bandwidth and need to be "managed."

Here's the Wikipedia entry on Icarus, if you're not up on your Greek mythology:

Latin: ?karos, Etruscan: Vicare) is a character in Greek Mythology. Icarus' father, Daedalus attempted to escape his prison, the Labyrinth, in which he was imprisoned at the hands of King Minos, the king for whom he had built the Labyrinth (Labyrinth is derived from the Minoans word for a ceremonial axe). The Labyrinth's original purpose was intended to hold the horrible creature, the Minotaur, a beast that was a product of one of the King's mistress's affairs with a bull. The Minotaur was born to King Minos and his wife instead of a son because the Gods were angry at them. Daedalus was imprisoned on the island with his son Icarus. Daedalus, the master craftsman, was imprisoned because it was he who built the faux cow for the queen to climb into such that she could copulate with the bull. As the Minotaur grew up it became violent and dangerous, so they had to imprison it in the Labyrinth. Daedalus fashioned a pair of wings for himself and his son, made of feathers and wax. Before they took off from the prison, Daedalus warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, as the wax would melt, nor too close to the sea, as the feathers would become sodden. Overcome by the sublime feeling that flying gave him, Icarus soared through the sky joyfully, but in the process he came too close to the sun, which melted his wings. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms. And so, Icarus fell into the sea in the area which bears his name, the Icarian Sea near Icaria, an island southwest of Samos.^[1]

Think of Wal-Mart and any single telco as the sun...

Remember a few years back, when at the urging of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin (R), Cable Television providers started offering "family tiers" of service? When certain groups complained about not being able to get rid of channels with content that offended them, they demanded the ability to "unsubscribe" from them, or purchase the ones they wanted "a la carte."

Obviously, the cable companies did not like this idea, so they compromised. Comcast, Time Warner, and Cox, the "big three" of cable television, started offering "family tiers," or packages without the channels that some considered too racy. In effect, they gave customers the option to "opt-in" to having the selection of channels they received be censored.

Yesterday, in this space, I wrote about a Utah legislator's proposal for "family-friendly" Internet service. I thought it was a good idea that parents, or anyone who wanted content-filtered service (schools, some businesses, etc) could have the option of paying for it instead of filtering software that is often questionable in effectiveness.

Just two days ago, the FCC held hearings on Comcast's alleged throttling of BitTorrent traffic. One of the issues raised was that of transparency, that when people buy what they think is "unlimited" service they are really agreeing to Terms of Service that let the ISP do certain things to manage the network.

Whether or not what Comcast did was proper is up to the FCC to decide. On the other hand, if the cable companies can offer "family tiers" and Utah can have "family" broadband, why can't the broadband providers offer a "tier" of service that is truly "all-you-can-eat" for the power user? Much was made of the need for "full disclosure" of restrictions on bandwidth by broadband providers. I agree that this is true. You should know what you are buying, and you should get what pay for. If a small percentage of users really does use such a large percentage of bandwidth, they should be offered the option of paying for the ability to truly use as much as they want.

Network management is reasonable. Full disclosure is reasonable. Paying a premium for guaranteed maximum bandwidth is totally reasonable. The market for "all you can eat" broadband exists.

If you build it, they will come.

On Monday night we had ourselves a bit of a debate over here.  We're a little divided on how important the open access stipulation is to the 700MHz auction.  Open access is a term we've been throwing around a bit and I feel like we should explain it. 

 

The internet is a prime example of an open access network.  You can use whatever type of equipment you want (PC, Mac, etc.) and, provided you sign up through an ISP, you're online.  None of the ISPs make restrictions on what type of computer you can use to access the internet.  GSM mobile phone networks (outside of the U.S.A.) are the same way.  You get your service, generally prepaid, from one company and then purchase whatever phone you want to use with that service.

 

In theory, that is how the 700MHz spectrum is going to work.  You would buy your cellular service from whomever ends up owning the network (which will still need to be built after the auction is over) and then you can buy any phone capable of operating on that network, regardless of the manufacturer. 

 

The reason that this is so weird in the States is that the handsets and the carriers are so intertwined.  We get our service and our phones from the same people.  In fact, a good price on the handset is almost always used as a way to get you to sign up.  Sign a 2-year contract, get the phone for $150 off plus a $100 mail-in rebate.  I think this is why open access isn't that big of a deal over here and is also why it was pretty uncontested when Google brought it up.  Whichever carrier wins the spectrum auction (and we're just assuming that it will be a cellular carrier that wins) won't necessarily suffer any real monetary loss from open access.  It will still be financially beneficial for its customer to by its own proprietary handsets as opposed to an open access device.  Sure, there will be some people who have hundreds of dollars to spend on a phone who go the route of open access and get themselves a "G-Phone."  There are some people who will do it just on principle, to try and snub their noses at the American cell phone market.  But the vast majority of U.S. cell phone customers aren't going to be willing to shell out the money needed to use an open access device.  Because the network owner can use contracted services to reduce the price of a handset they'll have no problem selling their own devices, the accessories to go with them and locking in contract after contract.

 

Unless we Americans are willing to change the way we look at the cellular phone industry we're never going to get to the same level of open access and wireless freedom seen elsewhere in the world.  It seems like we're doomed to keep signing away our lives, 2 years at a time.

In 2004, the EU did what the US DOJ suddenly lost the courage to do after the Bush administration took over and fined Microsoft 497 million Euros for abusing what was then a 95% monopoly on desktop software.

Microsoft paid the fine, and simply kept doing the same thing, keeping Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer "in the box" and even further integrating them into their operating system. In the EU, this is an illegal business practice. They knew this, and didn't care, because I guess some accountant figured that they would still make a profit if they paid the fines while crushing competition.

In 2007, they were fined another 280.5 million Euros for non-compliance, which Microsoft appealed, and lost.

This latest penalty is the largest amount of money that any company has had to pay, and the first time a company has been able to treat such penalties as "the cost of doing business." That's right, normal corporations learn their lesson. Microsoft? Not so much. Money quote, from Reuters:

"Microsoft was the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy that the Commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an antitrust decision," Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement.

For years after the decision Microsoft said it was making every effort to comply with the Commission's orders.

"Talk is cheap, flouting the rules is expensive," Kroes said. "We don't want talk and promises. We want compliance."

I wonder if the much-ballyhooed "interoperability" announcement and release of some binary specs is an attempt to avoid further fines, now that it appears they will continue to get bigger and bigger. The fines, I mean. Not Microsoft.  

Eager to nail a corporate head to the wall in the mold of his predecessor Elliot Spitzer, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has (according to AP, via The Register) has issued a subpoena for traffic data for Comcast's New York subscribers, despite the company's relatively small footprint in the state.

Cuomo may be a small fish for the company to worry about. When FCC Chairman Martin says things like

"While networks may have reasonable practices, they obviously cannot operate without taking some reasonable steps...but that does not mean they can arbitrarily block access to certain services."

you know you might have a problem. Martin (R), whose tenure at the FCC has been known for fines as massive as his love for deregulation, may join fellow Commissioners and usual suspects Michael Copps (D) and Jonathan Adelstein (D) in issuing an official order and possibly fining the nation's largest Cable TV provider and ISP for their throttling of BitTorrent traffic and subsequent attempts to cover-up or obfuscate the issue.

Martin has indicated his unwavering support for competition in all arenas, and although one would suspect he would naturally side with the business, the fact that Comcast operates a "competing" Video service throws a wrinkle into what would otherwise be a clear-cut "reasonable network management" practice. Also, Martin and several of his colleagues were adamant in their desire to encourage more disclosure and transparency in broadband subscription limitations.

 

Meanwhile, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued the U.S. Department of Justice. Again. They're curious to hear about discussions, negotiations or conversations between Google and Jayne Horvath, who was USDOJ's first "chief privacy and civil liberties officer" in 2006, when Google fought off a subpoena for a massive amount of search records. In an extreme cross-country case of "DC revolving door," Horvath is now Google's senior privacy counsel.

According to EFF counsel David Sobel, "

Google has an unprecedented ability to collect and retain very personal information about millions of Americans, and the DOJ and other law enforcement agencies have developed a huge appetite for that information...We want to know what discussions DOJ's top privacy lawyer had with Google before leaving her government position to join the company."

I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any means, and I'm certainly used to revolving door type moves like this. I can understand the EFF's concern, but perhaps they doth protest too much?

They've filed a FOIA request about this, six months ago. Given the DOJ's normal FOIA time lag, maybe it would be better to just ask Google. Heck, if you want a bigger headline, sue them! At least it would be more than EFF's business as usual.

The recent news over at phonescoop.com got me thinking about Sprint's future.  These 2 Sanyos are starting to make a full transition off of the iDEN network (which is what runs Sprint's Nextel devices).  So far Sprint has released 4 hybrid units.  These units help with the transition because the phone calls and data access run on the Sprint network (CDMA) while the Direct Connect (walkie talkie) operates on the Nextel iDEN network.  These are a good start, but the Sanyos represent a full transition away from Nextel to Sprint.

From phonescoop.com

Sanyo's First Direct Connect Phones Approved By FCC

Friday, 12:57 PM   by Eric M. Zeman   updated Saturday, 1:53 PM

Today documents on the FCC site revealed the PRO 700 and PRO 200 phones from Sanyo. Both are clamshell CDMA phones with dual displays, EVDO data, Bluetooth, and Direct Connect Push-To-Talk capability. Not much else is shown in the documents, although there is no indication that either phone has a camera nor memory card slot. Sprint has announced plans to introduce a CDMA-based version of Direct Connect to eventually replace the aging iDEN system and legacy ReadyLink technology. This PRO series from Sanyo - along with the recently-approved Samsung Z400 - are expected to be among the first phones to support the new Direct Connect service.

If Sprint can release CDMA versions of the i580 (a high-end camera phone that is also rugged) and a CDMA BlackBerry with Direct Connect to replace the Nextel 7100i and 7520 they would have effective alternatives for the majority of their iDEN customers.

A big reason why this transition is so important is that Sprint is not bidding on the 700MHz spectrum.  Sprint has decided to go with WiMAX technology for its next generation broadband network.  By eliminating iDEN they can focus that time, energy and money on successful roll out of a nationwide WiMAX network. They're anticipating  nationwide roll-out this spring.  If they don't make a large and earnest push to transition the remainder of their iDEN customers to CDMA they'll be running three different networks.  If they can get it together and launch on schedule they may have enough of a lead on the competition, who will most likely still be bidding on the 700MHz spectrum, to gain back some of the customers they've lost.

Currently, Sprint and Verizon both have EV-DO high-speed data.  This connection is generally faster than the EDGE data offered by AT&T and T-Mobile.  In fact, when Andrew was out here in San Jose we compared the connection speed of his Blackberry 8800 and my 8830.  Except for the fact that his phone accesses GSM and EDGE and that mine accesses CDMA and EV-DO, they are the same phone.  EV-DO was much faster.

So right now we have Sprint and Verizon on one level and AT&T and T-Mobile on another.  If Sprint can differentiate itself from Verizon and find its own niche (AT&T is the biggest, Verizon has marketed themselves as the most reliable and T-Mobile is number one in customer satisfaction) it has a real chance of closing the gap with Verizon.

Will WiMAX get Sprint out of third and into second?  Probably not.  Can WiMAX help Sprint get its stock back up from $9.29 on the 26th (versus Verizon Communication's $36.81) and start to revitalize an entire brand?  I think it can. 

Another gem on the beauty of open standards from The Google Blog:

Google supports open document standards and the Open Document Format - ODF, the recognized international standard (ISO 26300). ODF is supported and implemented across the globe, and its communal creation and iteration has helped ensure the transparency, consistency and interoperability necessary in a workable standard.

Currently, the technology industry is evaluating a proposed ISO standard for document formats. Given the importance of a workable standard, Microsoft's submission of Office Open XML (OOXML ) as an additional international standard has caught the attention of many. In September 2007, the original request to ISO was defeated. After further technical analysis of the specification along with all the additional data available on OOXML, Google believes OOXML would be an insufficient and unnecessary standard, designed purely around the needs of Microsoft Office.

We join the ODF Alliance and many other experts in our belief that OOXML doesn't meet the criteria required for a globally-accepted standard. (An overview of our findings and sample technical issues unresolved are posted here.)

As ISO Member bodies around the world work on possible revisions of their vote previously submitted, the deadline of March 30th approaches fast. I invite you to pay close attention, and heed the call of many for unification of OOXML into ODF. A document standards decision may not matter to you today, but as someone who relies on constant access to editable documents, spreadsheets and presentations, it may matter immensely in the near future.

I used to really hate MS. I used Linux, and WordPerfect for Linux. I have not touched Windows outside of my public school education (that is to say on my personal machine) from the age of 14, when I switched to Linux, to 2001 when I purchased my first Macintosh, and with it, Microsoft Office X.  I don't hate Microsoft anymore. What I hated was Windows.

I use Word all the time. It's the industry standard for my day job, and it's useful for composing long blog posts. For mail, I have a BlackBerry smartphone. I use Entourage/Exchange at CapitolValley to stay in contact with my compatriot on the left coast, and Outlook/Exchange at my day job to keep calendered and in touch with an organization over 200 people. Sometimes Microsoft, (like those Utah GOPers who want to let parents choose filtered ISPs) gets things right. On the other hand, when it comes to international open standards they should simply admit defeat and adapt their admittedly useful software to use ODF. They have everything to gain by getting more people to use Office. Really.

Embrace the standard, and you'll gain generations of new customers. Maybe not on your operating system, but does it matter?

Give me better software and I'll buy it.

Call your Congresspersons. Make your voice heard. Open standards last. Crappy ones don't.  

...because Madeleine Albright apparently works as some kind of stewardess now.


She wore a similar outfit on The Daily Show tonight while promoting her new book. Rest assured, her seatback is in the full and upright position.

(yes, I know what the pin actually is, it's just funny to look at, especially with the amount of flying I'm doing these days.)

Once again, I'm sorry to seem like we're picking on Comcast.  It's just that the recent bringing of net neutrality to the forefront of FCC hearings is thanks to them.  It started with their limiting of bandwidth for BitTorrent users.  We also remarked (with non-Comcast hypotheticals) how this bandwidth throttling could be seen as a way to promote Comcast's services (like VoD) over their competitors.  This is a sentiment echoed over at Portfolio.com in their coverage of the FCC's hearing on net neutrality yesterday.  The FCC is trying to determine the legality of "reasonable network management" and potentially remove an ISP's ability to favor one for of net access over another by way of limiting the bandwidth allocated to one activity versus another. 

I don't know if I agree with that.  Even FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said that "Consumers need to know if and how network management practices distinguish between different applications, so they can configure their own applications and systems properly," which is something I've been saying for a while.  There really isn't any logical reason why Comcast shouldn't be able to determine how their network is used.  If they want to allow unfettered access to their proprietary content and services.  If they want to start limiting bandwidth hogs, then I guess that's their prerogative.  Where I, and apparently Chairman Martin, have a problem is when it isn't made clear to the consumers what actions could cause their access to be limited.  If they gave clear limits on bandwidth usage along with a simple way to monitor it or maybe gave some examples of practices that would or would not result in limitations.  Maybe something like "Casual e-mail and web surfing with a download the size of a movie once per day is ok, whereas downloading an entire season's worth of 'Friends' each day will probably result in bandwidth being reduced."


Now Edward Markey (D - MA) wants to make net neutrality law.  He feels that the internet needs to stay as open as possible.  Think about the other major means of mass communication:  Television.  TV programs can reach millions and millions of people, but only if licensed broadcasters deem your content important or profitable enough and can convince advertisers to agree.   The internet is totally different.  Right now, I am taking my view on a topic and submitting it for public ridicule and praise.  There's no one telling me what I can or cannot post.  I have to say that this paragraph has me feeling torn.  There's the first part of me who believes that the owner of a network should have a say over how it is used.  Then there's the other part of me who feels that the internet is a public space and that a company might not have the right to limit how I access that space and to what ends.

I think that if pressed to choose, I would have to side with Congressman Markey.  If Comcast, or any company, wants me to pick their content over someone else's just let the content speak for itself.  If your video or method of video delivery is better than another I'll pick you.  You shouldn't need to rely on limiting your competitors' access to consumers to boost your own sales. 

This isn't even something limited entirely to the internet.  Look at Wal-Mart.  They have their various "house" brands but they let those brands compete on the same shelf as brand name products.  They don't limit Coke and Pepsi to small shelves that are hard to reach while placing their Sam's Club brand front-and-center.  It's the same thing at grocery stores where the generics and brand names are side-by-side.  Do these retailers promote the benefits of their products versus the brands?  Of course they do.  They promote the benefits of their products and let you, the consumer decide which you'd rather purchase.

And then, to add insult to injury, Comcast actually paid people off the street to take up space at the FCC hearing in Cambridge.  Here they had an amazing opportunity to explain and exonerate themselves to the public and instead they just did more to damage their reputation.  Once again, Comcast is hiding when they should be embracing the opportunity to turn around their tarnished image.

Again, and I really can't stress this enough, I'm not out to kill Comcast or make them look bad.  When I rant about bad experiences with Sprint's customer service department I'm not trying to create some sort of mass exodus of Sprint customers.  Any "negative" post I write about a company's activities are made in the hopes of affecting change.  These are open challenges that I hope are accepted by these companies.  I'm not here to say "F*** this company" and "You should never buy anything from these guys again."  There are plenty of people who can do that.  That would be taking the easy way out.  Now if Comcast and Sprint and the others want to write off us, and our readers, like that then they're the ones taking the easy way out. 

Once again, please prove me wrong, guys.  Turn me around.  Offer awesome content and services.  Be up front about your policies and limitations.  Offer the best and you'll attract more customers than you'll know what to do with.

Utah's State Legislature is considering allowing "pre-censored" Internet providers and giving them a special label, according to the Deseret News:

Utah Internet service providers could earn a state-approved "G-rating" for filtering content and insuring that users could not access pornography under provisions in a bill heard by a House committee on Monday.

HB407, sponsored by Rep. Michael Morley, R-Spanish Fork, would require the Utah Division of Consumer Protection to create a designation for providers who prevent access to "prohibited" material. After attaining the "seal of approval," providers would be subject for fines up to $10,000 for violating requirements.

"It's very difficult to figure out a way to monitor the internet," Morley said. "I think it's a positive thing for those who are looking for a site that is dedicated to fighting pornography."

The opponents are Google, Yahoo, etc. Obviously they'd see a decrease in traffic from some Utahn customers, but actually I see this as a good thing. While I'm not a fan of filtering, I do think that it's up to parents to choose what is appropriate for their children. If they want to leave it up to an ISP instead of having to constantly update software that their kids could possibly get around, more power to them. If the market is there for these kinds of "G-rated" ISPs, good for them. Let them make bank.

THE federal Government's plan to have internet service providers filter pornography and other internet content deemed inappropriate for children is going full-steam ahead.

Trials are to be conducted soon in a closed environment in Tasmania.

Today is the deadline for expressions of interest to Enex TestLab, the Melbourne company evaluating internet service provider content filters on behalf of the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

ISP-based filters will block inappropriate web pages at service provider level and automatically relay a clean feed to households.

To be exempted, users will have to individually contact their ISPs.The trial will evaluate ISP-level internet content filters in a controlled environment while filtering content inappropriate for children, Enex said. 

Utah wants an opt-in, market-based solution, while Australia thinks that everyone needs to be "protected" by default and have to go "waltzing matilda" to get out of the filtering system. I'm not so sure why Google and Yahoo! are opposing the Utah bill and not screaming bloody murder about the Aussies. Content providers should support allowing people to choose to not receive their content, that way they can realize how much they use it when it's gone. Let parents get frustrated with their filtered service until they cancel it. 

The Taliban wants mobile networks shuttered during evening and early morning hours so they can't be tracked by U.S. forces. From Ars:

The towers and offices of mobile phone operators in Afghanistan are being pressured to shut down operations at night by the Taliban. The former rulers of Afghanistan and current insurgent group held "talks" with the four major mobile companies in Afghanistan today, and gave them three days to go dark for 14 hours per day--or else.

The reason for the threat is the Taliban's belief that American soldiers and rebels within Afghanistan are using mobile phones to track down remaining Taliban members. "Since the occupying forces stationed in Afghanistan usually at night use mobile phones for espionage to track down the mujahideen, the Islamic Emirate gave a three-day ultimatum to all mobile phone firms to switch off their phones from five in the afternoon until seven in the morning," Taliban spokesperson Qari Mohammad Yousuf told Reuters, ironically via mobile phone (and presumably during daylight).

No word on whether or not this will trigger a flood of tourism by Americans looking to get away from their BlackBerry email while on vacation. I can imagine the commercials now..."Kabul: where you can really get away..."

Although primary season may have us thinking about voters' rights, the ACLU has nothing to do with this one.  The row is over the XBox 360 game "Dead Rising" and its striking similiarities to "George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead." 

 

Here's the scoop from Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - An independent movie producer with rights to the horror movie "George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead" sued video game maker Capcom Co Ltd on Monday in the latest salvo in a copyright dispute.

The producer, MKR Group, alleged that Capcom's popular "Dead Rising" game was essentially a computer game version of its "Dawn of the Dead" movies.

...

"Both works are dark comedies," the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in New York on Monday reads. "In both, the recreational activities of the zombies and absurdly grotesque 'kill scenes' provide unexpected comedic relief."

"Both works provided thoughtful social commentary on the 'mall culture' zeitgeist, in addition to serving up a sizable portion of sensationalistic violence," it said.

 

So I guess the question we need to ask is can anyone use the concept of a mall full o' zombies without infringing on "Dawn of the Dead"?  I don't see MKR suing Joe Ma and Wilson Yip over Bio Zombie.

...and people thought PBS was just for Ken Burns. B&C has the scoop:

PBS will launch a consumer-awareness campaign starting next month aimed at educating consumers about the analog shutoff after Feb. 17, 2009.

The first two spots will feature Kevin O'Connor, host of This Old House, and master carpenter Norm Abram.

In October, PBS will launch phase two of the campaign, giving viewers more specific information about their digital-transition options. The informational spots will run in 30-second and 60-second versions.

Public television has reasons to be aggressive about reaching its viewers with the information. More than most networks, PBS reaches a wide audience of viewers who receive television over-the-air, including immigrants, non-English speaking, the poor and the elderly.

Sprinkle in a sizable number of PBS viewers who just don't want cable because they aren't avid viewers and the prospect of a better picture or more channels doesn't hold much allure. One out of five of PBS viewers receives television over the air, not via cable or satellite. Altogether, there are estimates that 21 million (out of 112.8 million) households use rabbit ears, some say that estimate is high.

It's nice to see PBS actually reaching out to their viewers instead of just assuming they'll get cable. Considering the FCC has done precious little to bring the issue to the forefront, and I still haven't gotten my NTIA coupon, something tells me there will people who will be pretty angry about missing March Madness next year.

Question for the "Major" networks: how come PBS has the money to do this and you don't? Get with the program.

Everyone has gotten a call from a telemarketer.  Either some overly friendly person who catches you off-guard by greeting you like a friend or with one of those awful pre-recorded messages. 

Wisconsin is taking a stand against telemarketers who have the audacity to call your cell phone.


From the Wisconsin State Journal

Cell phone protection an easy call

A Wisconsin State Journal editorial

Telemarketers are starting to do something worse than annoying people with unwanted calls at dinner time.

They're starting to cost people in Wisconsin money by calling us on our mobile phones.

They can do this even to state residents who register their phone numbers with the state's popular no-call list. The list only protects land-line phones. It doesn't apply to mobile phones.

The Wisconsin Senate unanimously voted Tuesday to close this loophole in the law. Now the Assembly needs to quickly approve and send Senate Bill 99 to the governor before adjourning this spring.

Two problems with the bill have been fixed. There 's no excuse for not adopting this sensible restriction now.

The bill would boost the maximum fine from $100 to $1,000 for telemarketers who intentionally call people whose numbers are on the no-call list.

That 's a reasonable increase to discourage violations by large telemarketing firms. The bill originally sought to increase the maximum penalty to $10,000 per instance, which seemed excessive. Small businesses had legitimately worried that an isolated, unintentional slipup could cost them thousands of dollars.

TCPA is supposed to protect consumers from incurring costs as a result of unsolicited marketing.  We even talked about it right here in regards to the dreaded marketing text message.   In some  situations advertising is ok, or even expected.  The most obvious is Television and Radio.  You're getting the service for free and it needs to be financed somehow.  The cell phone is the exact opposite.  We pay, some of us through the nose, for our cellular phones and I don't think that it's out of line to expect a little control over who can call us.

The only part of the story that disgusts me is that it's even necessary.  Federal law prohibits telemarketing calls to cellular phones.  The fact that these people have the outright audacity to fly in the face of the law is amazing.  Maybe we (I'm including myself here) need to be more vigilant in reporting these criminals (people who break the law are criminals, right?) we can start to flood the FCC with complaints.  And I'm not saying this because I want to cause the FCC a lot of grief.  Do I think that they overreact sometimes?  Sure.  Do I think that the TCPA is only effective if violations are reported?  Totally.  If the FCC sees an enormous influx of complaints they may pull a Wisconsin and set forth very clear and deterring penalties.  If we aren't reporting these violations then the FCC has no way of knowing how big the problem is. 

Right here, right now, let's take a stand.  Let's commit, right now, to report every violation to the FCC.

You can file a complaint right here.
If it's bad enough that you're seeking financial restitution, click here for more information on how to do that.

There's help out there.  Let's ask for it.

For those who wondered why Google wasn't at the FCC hearing yesterday, it's because they might not be completely concerned about interference in their content delivery...because they're too busy building a series of tubes...

As more and more people conduct online searches and interact with applications like Gmail, Google Earth and YouTube, we've had to think outside the box to create a more scalable, affordable and easy to manage network that meets our users' needs worldwide. One of the biggest challenges we face is staying ahead of our broadband capacity needs, especially across Asia.

One of the ways we are addressing this is by working with five other international companies to create a consortium. Collectively we just signed an agreement to build a new high-bandwidth subsea cable system linking the U.S. and Japan (more detail in the press release). This cable system, named Unity, will address increasing broadband demand by providing more capacity to sustain the unprecedented growth in data and Internet traffic between Asia and the U.S. Our participation in building Unity ultimately helps provide our users with faster and more reliable connectivity.

If you're wondering whether we're going into the undersea cable business, the answer is no. We're not competing with telecom providers, but the volume of data we need to move around the world has grown to the point where in some cases we've exceeded the ability traditional players can offer. Our partnership with these companies is just another step in ensuring that we're delivering the best possible experience to people around the world.

Google doesn't care about the last mile...but they don't want to rely on anyone else's pipes in between. Definitely hedging their bets on Net Neutrality. Very smart.

Reading accounts of the technical presentations at today's FCC hearing in Cambridge, I kept having a reoccurring thought: We're stuck in the 1970's.

Consider this: I'm writing this on an Apple MacBook Pro, running OS X. OS X is based on Darwin, which is based on NEXTSTEP, which is based on BSD Unix, which was developed at the University of California, Berkeley by Bill Joy and first released in 1978.

You're reading this on a Web Browser, which operates over TCP/IP. TCP was first implemented in RFC 675 in 1974, while IP began development in 1977.

It's 2008. We're using 30 year old technology, developed during the Cold War, much of it in academic settings with government grants.

Today, one of the FCC Commissioners, I can't remember which, noted that we're going to switch off our analog TV stations - 1950's technology, in less than a year and that it will most likely be problematic. We're also running out of IP Address space. Fast. Does anyone really use IPv6? Government networks have to, but consumer technology? Please. It might be supported, but no one is using it.

Despite all the advances in technology, the "market" can't come up with anything better than this cold war relic of a foundation. It works because it was designed to be open. Closed systems have repeatedly been failures. BeOS? Dead. MacOS pre Darwin? Dead. Windows? Microsoft has crashed and burned with Vista trying to outdo OS X, which still has this 1970's OS at its' core.

Oh, yeah. 82% of the world's mobile phones operate on GSM, an open standard developed in the 1980s.

Here's my question: is it a testament to the foresight of people like Vint Cerf and Bill Joy that the stuff they invented 30 years ago is still around, or is it a black mark on the same cutthroat culture of "innovation" that keeps us from moving to the next generation of technology, because inventors no longer have a greater good to work for?

When the 700mhz band is auctioned and the next generation of wireless technology deployed, whoever wins that license will have to open the network they build to equipment from all comers, but there is no specification for what kind of protocol, feature set, or technology they have to deploy. Someone will get to use something new.

What kind of technology do you think will work best? Something designed to survive say, terrorist attacks or an all-out war with China? Or something designed to comply to the "open" standard in name only, but mostly to shut out competitors?

Will you bet your business or your life on FCC-mandated corporate good will, or would you rather bet it on something built by smart people working for a common good?

I hope that the winner of the 700mhz auction would rather make sure they could one day save lives instead of kill Google.

Here's a building on "Deneva" from a Star Trek: The Original Series episode.




Now, here's Van Vleck Hall, home of the math department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:





Just a little too weird for me not to post. 

Sean Garrett, who is a San Francisco-based partner at 463 Communications and who is far more accomplished than either Alex or myself, has taken notice of our site and was kind enough to link to us. Not only is Sean an apparent fan of LCD Soundsystem, but he also had some very nice things to say:

And, while I can't say that I fully agree with the tenor of many of the posts there (or some of the purported facts), it's good to have idealistic and over-the-top energetic company in this tech policy blog land.

Anyway, my mother always taught me to say "thank you" when you receive a compliment.

Thank you, Sean.

Connection Nation has a detailed report on what happens to an economy when more people have bigger tubes. Ars Technica has a good summary, as usual:

The new report attempts to quantify the economic benefits of the increase of broadband penetration. Using data from the Brookings Institute, they estimated that the increase in broadband boosted direct wages in Kentucky by over $1 billion. Surveys asked people to self-estimate the amount of health care, driving, and time saved through the use of broadband, which added up to roughly another half-billion dollars.

The report then extrapolated the data nationwide, generating figures for each state based on the relative populations in urban, suburban, and rural areas; the total economic boost came out to be $134 billion. The report notes that this would serve as a significant economic stimulus, and urges support for two bills: H.R. 3919, which would generate a national broadband census, and H.R. 3627, which would promote broadband adoption (Senate equivalents exist). Oddly, the legislation has been rolled into legislation on farming, and the contentious nature of that topic has stalled any progress.  This legislation is where an element of self-promotion comes in; the adoption of a national effort of this sort would clearly help Connected Nation, as they've moved several of the people involved in the Kentucky effort into the national organization in the hope of expanding the program to other states.

At today's FCC hearing in Cambridge, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) as well as several FCC Commissioners made a point of mentioning that they have a strong desire for more broadband competition and market penetration. Yet, at the same time, the Bush administration's NTIA says we're doing just fine and we don't need no stinkin' policy. On the other hand...$134 billion  is a lot of money.

Actually, it's almost the amount of money that the Bush administration wants to borrow from China and cut checks to us all for.

Save the paper and build some bigger tubes, Mr. Bush.

Here's a live recording of the final Draft Lessig conference call, with Professor Lessig himself. We may not agree on everything, but I like how flexible he is, and I'm especially glad to hear he's a Diet Coke man.

Oh, yeah, you'll be able to find future Capitol Valley podcasts on BlogTalkRadio as well. We'll let you know.

Reuters broke the news that Microsoft will no longer produce HD-DVD players for the XBox 360.  Previously, for about $200, you could purchase an HD-DVD add-on for your XBox 360.  As we reported, Wal-Mart decided to carry only Blu-ray discs and players.  Also, Warner Brothers will only be using Blu-ray to distribute in Hi-Def.  Oh yeah, it doesn't help that Toshiba, the primary backer and manufacturer of HD-DVD technology, decided to pull the plug on HD-DVD.

Microsoft, which previously said it would consider supporting Blu-ray technology should consumers want it, did not say if it would make Blu-Ray players.

A move by MS to offer an attachable Blu-ray player similar to its HD-DVD add-on would seem a smart move and take away a selling point from the Playstation 3, which has Blu-ray built in.

Straight from the Professor's mouth: <---Video link.

 

With lots of mixed feelings, I have decided a run for Congress would not help the Change Congress movement. I explain the thinking in this 5 minute video (a new record for me!). First question: What happens to the contributions to Lessig08? As explained on the ActBlue page, all will go to (the yet to be established) Change Congress organization.

Thanks to everyone who helped me make this decision -- and especially the many friends in the harshest way told me it would be a mistake.

 

I disagree, but let's see what he does next...

Update: an email from the Professor himself:

I apologize for the group blast, but I wanted to let you know first 
that I have decided against running for Congress. In the end, it 
became 100% clear that there was no way to win this election in just 
over 30 days. And while losing is not always a bad thing (see, e.g., 
just about everything I've done), losing big here would certainly 
weaken the Change Congress movement. I've got a 5 minute vide about 
the decision at my blog at http://lessig.org/blog/2008/02/on_why_i_am_not_running.html and I would ask just one favor: that you be certain to be signed up 
at <http://change-congress.org> to learn about what we're doing there.

I am sorry to bring this news after the extraordinary range and depth 
of support this idea engendered. Thank you to everyone who helped me 
think through this, and demonstrated to me how vibrant these ideas are.

For a few months now Verizon has said that it will begin allowing non-Verizon devices to operate on its network.

BASKING RIDGE, NJ -- Verizon Wireless today said its upcoming Open Development Device Conference will feature the release and publication of Version 1.0 of the technical specifications for new wireless devices that will work on its "Any Device, Any App" network-only service option.
...
For consumers, the network-only option, which is expected to be available later this year, will provide the option to use these wireless devices and new applications not offered directly by Verizon Wireless. Verizon Wireless' Open Development initiative is driven by the company's desire to encourage innovation, give customers new wireless choices, and quickly address opportunities to expand the wireless market.

This should be pretty exciting news to any VZW customers who are reading.  Any mobile device that meets the Version 1.0 specs will operate on  Verizon's network.  With all of the innovations in mobile web apps combined with the fact that Verizon operates an Ev-DO broadband network could lead to some amazing new functionality.

This same principle behind "Any Device, Any App" also applies to the current FCC 700 MHz auction.  Because bidding has long since broken the $4.6 Billion threshold that Google fought for, the network will be "Open Access."  What that means is that, eventually, the winner of the auction will build out and administer the network, but they won't have control over what devices run on it.  It means that the winner, like Verizon, would sell access to that network via a service plan but would allow any device meeting its specifications to operate on it.  A big part of why that open access stipulation was so important to Google is their Android mobile operating system.  Developers and handset manufacturers designing Android handsets combined with the guarantee that those devices will operate on the 700 MHz network means that Google will be able to run all of its applications on a wide variety of phones without having to try and start its own wireless service or build its own devices. 

I think that seeing how well Verizon's version of open access will be a good test of how it might work in the 700 MHz spectrum. 

A few months ago phonescoop.com reported that Sprint was going to adopt the same policy, which could become more important when they roll out their Wi-Max broadband network nationwide.  Wi-Max is the technology that Sprint is running with instead of participating in the 700 MHz auction.  There's still not been any new word from Sprint regarding specs for developers or for bringing over a CDMA device from another carrier.

Drew Clark also has very good coverage of this.

11:00am: Lunch Hour:

Ed Markey (I think, this is an audiocast, so my TV only shows a caption screen) really opened up, talking about how in 1995 the FCC kept telcos from imposing per-minute charges on online services, and how that was a good idea then, and allowed the Internet to evolve as we know it. Markey wants more of a market for broadband, saying this should be "No country for old bandwidth."

Markey says that the telcos play too much of a "gatekeeper" role, and makes a distinction between "network services versus network access." He doesn't think there is either enough competition or enough broadband access right now, period.

(11:25)

Kevin Martin (R):

Chairman Martin (R) gets it. He talks about the Policy Statement and believes that it's important for the network operators to be transparent and that they should be able to access all lawful applications. He takes this seriously, I think, and believes that if a company is going to "manage" they'd better do it in a transparent manner. I like him more and more on this. He really does have an open mind on these things.

Michael Copps (D):

"Decisions made without you are usually made against you"

Is net neutrality real? He mentions the Verizon text messaging controversy from last year. Also points to Chairman Martin noting last year that two phones from the same manufacturer differed because the U.S. carrier didn't want wi-fi on the phone.

Copps wants a crystal clear policy allowing for "reasonable" management, but he says that non-discrimination should be the law.

Where is the line between discrimination and management? Copps wants a procedure for the FCC to examine the question to develop a "body of case law and rules of the road," in the tradition of common law, "the tree that grows with the roots up."

Copps is skeptical of claims of harm from network operators, harkening back to Carterphone, the claim that breaking up AT&T would hurt national security, and last year's claim that wireless open access would never work, which of course they reversed on.

Copps thinks these are difficult decisions, but wants them made in the sunshine.

Jonathan Adelstein (D):

"Don't drop out of school or you'll end up on the FCC"

Adelstein notes that the FTC tackled this over eight months ago. He also jokes about sending the videotaped testimony from this field hearing back to DC by BitTorrent. Some laughs in the audience...

Americans are very sensitive about free flow of their information, and Adelstein thinks now is the time to establish an "Internet Bill of Rights." He paraphrases Jefferson here. Nice.

"Nobody is in charge, and everybody is in charge."

Adelstein is big on the creativity that the Internet empowers. He wants to hear from the academics on this. Quoting Sir Berners-Lee on how important the Internet is becoming as the main medium by which we communicate...

"Openness is a fundamental requirement..."

He's pleased at the amount of diversity in applications, but concerned about consolidation of "last mile and backbone" as well as "content and services" Telcos control 93% of the residential market, and CRS says that last-mile provides have the ability and the desire to discriminate..."Old Media wants to maintain control of distribution channels..."

Adelstein is concerned that deregulation has removed special protections from Broadband, and wants to address "anticompetitive discrimination." He notes that AT&T and Verizon have agreed to uphold the IPS, and that AT&T in particular has agreed to keep their network open.

"Consumers don't want the Internet to become another version of Old Media...dominated by corporate giants."

Concerned about SMS Short Codes...Twitter anyone?

Adelstein wants transparency and disclosure for consumers...

"The reasonable practices can't undermine the policies themselves"

Adelstein notes that we're behind the broadband 8-ball. Preserving the openness and increasing availability go hand in hand.

"Access translates into opportunity..."

Also wants an "Internet Bill of Rights"

Robert McDowell (R):

New Media is "gangly and awkward"...

"YouTube alone consumes more bandwidth than the entire 'net in 2000"

He's optimistic about the potential of new media for consumer choice...

Competitive Markets are best equipped to satisfy demand...distrusts bureaucrats like himself..

"The Law of Unintended Consequences always has the last word."

Wants to make sure that capital is available to build out, but equally imporant for consumer choice "any time, anywhere, any device. Anyone who tries to frustrate that demand does so at their own peril..."

McDowell seems skeptical of any regulation at all, but wants consumer choice...refers back to the Internet Policy Statement. Wants to know what "reasonable network management" means...

Notes that thus far the FCC has let the market work, but is prepared to take action should practices "frustrate consumer demand" and wants to explore "new market conditions...and potential challenges..." Well, the Commissioners seem to get it...


Vuze CEO testifies...

Martin (R) clarifies that all the Vuze content is legal, and that Vuze users aren't breaking any contracts...good question, good answer. "Each of the consumers involved...has purchased a certain amount of capacity...and your application doesn't let consumers exceed what they have purchased..."

Free Press CEO compares this to 700mhz auction, says FCC should be consistant, notes that Comcast offers a VoD service that competes with Vuze..

Professor Benkler (Berkman): Net Neutrality is important and what we need is competition at every level right down to the physical layer...says that BitTorrent is the only scalable architecture for sharing large files. Does not attribute Comcast's actions to myopia or malice, but preventing it requires "genuine competition...." Concerned about the Last Mile, and that "Unbundling and Open Access are American innovations..."

David Cohen, EVP, Comcast:

"If customers want it, Comcast will deliver it..."

They can use any service they want. We "manage our network to maximize our customers' internet experience"

"every network must be managed..." lumps in Spam and Viruses with overall bandwidth consumption...

Says that their management of P2P uploads is "limited" in time and effect, on a "small number of users..."

"We do not block any websites or online applications, including P2P"

Notes Harvard Medical School blocks all P2P traffic.

Says they clarified their Acceptable Use Policy recently.

"Continue the policy of vigilant restraint..."

Tim Wu (Columbia):

Whatever "network management" is, it should not include blocking legal applications. Wu says he used to be on the other side and sell content filters, bandwidth managers, etc...now bothers him because biggest customers were "industries that wanted to censor speech..." ...compares to Chinese "great firewall..." "technologies of filtering are technologies of censorship..."

America should be..."the model...for open networks..." Compares our Internet policy to our foreign policy...

Christopher Yoo (UPenn):

What estimates on bandwidth growth should be believed? Congestion is a matter of time and space...gives a bit of a history lesson re client-server model versus p2p model...notes that thanks to YouTube, video downloads are majority client-server now.

"We have to guard against a one-size fits all solution..."

Question time...

Martin (talking to Ammori from Free Press) notes that Comcast actually denied they were even doing any blocking or "management" until confronted...

Wu doesn't think this is "reasonable." Notes that consumers get asked to buy more and more, and transparency benefits both consumers and application providers, and those who finance application providers..."very strange thing to be a free market person against transparency..."

Wu does good by pointing out that there is an economic benefit to transparency, that the market can manage well..."50% of VPNs guarantee a level of service..."

Heated exchange between Tim Wu and Cohen from Comcast regarding blocking versus "management." State Rep doesn't know what "reasonable" means and thinks that's a problem...

Commissioner Tate arrives late, had car trouble...is very happy everyone agrees that they want more broadband...at least she's positive...she's throwing a softball at Cohen who keeps comparing this to blocking spam and viruses...she wants to know if Comcast has recieved complaints.

Verizon guy says that people want disclosure and transparency...and as an industry they need to "step up to the plate and address these issues..." He's calling for an industry standard for disclosure...not a bad idea.

Now Tate is playing the "think of the children card" and bringing up music piracy, even though Vuze isn't pirating anything. Ugh.

Lunch is over, back to work for me...

When Barbara Bush did it, however, she was sledding at Camp David.  Hillary Clinton's downhill adventure is a metaphorical one, but may take longer to get over than a broken leg.

From The New York Times

By FRANK RICH

Published: February 24, 2008

WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of Iraq.

It's not just that her candidacy's central premise -- the priceless value of "experience" -- was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination -- "It will be me," Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November -- she was routed by an insurgency.

Let's take a break right there.  Both Clinton and Obama have sponsored local initiatives in Arkansas and illinois, respectively.  Something to take note of is that although H.R.C. took office in the U.S. Senate in 2001 while Barack Obama didn't make it to the U.S. senate until 2005 he was a member of the Illinois State Senate since 1997.  So if we do the math, Barack has 11 years of experience as an elected official compared to Mrs. Clinton's 7.  I also think that it's worth remembering that Hillary thinks that being First Lady for 8 years counts as experience. 

Hillary's supporters (according to Frank Rich's article) would have us believe that their candidate's assumed position as Democratic Nominee for President was usurped by a slick hustler riding a wave of undeserved popularity.  If you want to talk about "undeserved" why not mention that her position that led to all this great executive experience was only granted to her by virtue of the fact that she was married to the President.  She wasn't elected or even appointed to the position based on merit or competence.  She just happened to be married to the  latest  person elected to the office of President.

Moving on to the humor of  the situation is that PR powerhouse Mark Penn doesn't, apparently, take H.R.C.'s bid for the Democratic nomination seriously enough to take time off from his day job, where his biggest client is Microsoft.  He's even recycling strategy.  Just like it was assumed that Window's Vista would be welcomed with open arms because it has the Misrosoft name it looks like he was counting on Hillary's last name (well, the latter half of it) to carry her into office.

PR woes aside just remember that if you really want to place as much importance on experience as Hillary that Barack has 50% more of it than she does as an elected official.

Apple invests $782,000,000 per year  into Research and Development, according to their annual report for 2007. This didn't include $75,000,000 for iPhone software development.

They also spent $467,000,000 on advertising in 2007.

What's missing?

Apple also understands that they need to deal with regulations. Quoth their Annual Report:

The Company is subject to risks associated with laws, regulations and industry-imposed standards related to mobile communications devices.

Laws and regulations related to mobile communications devices in the many jurisdictions in which the Company operates are extensive and subject to change. Such changes, which could include but are not limited to restrictions on production, manufacture, distribution, and use of the device, locking the device to a carrier's network, or mandating the use of the device on more than one carrier's network, may have a material adverse effect on the Company's financial condition and operating results.

Mobile communication devices, such as iPhone, are subject to certification and regulation by governmental and standardization bodies, as well as by cellular network carriers for use on their networks. These certification processes are extensive and time consuming, and could result in additional testing requirements, product modifications or delays in product shipment dates, which may have a material adverse effect on the Company's financial condition and operating results.

They also get the whole "DRM" thing:

The Company relies on third-party digital content, which may not be available to the Company on commercially reasonable terms or at all.

The Company contracts with third parties to offer their digital content through the Company's iTunes Store. The Company pays substantial fees to obtain the rights to this content. The Company's licensing arrangements with these third parties are short-term and do not guarantee the continuation or renewal of these arrangements on reasonable terms, if at all. Some third-party content providers currently or may in the future offer competing products and services, and could take action to make it more difficult or impossible for the Company to license their content in the future. Other content owners, providers or distributors may seek to limit the Company's access to, or increase the total cost of, such content. If the Company is unable to continue to offer a wide variety of content at reasonable prices with acceptable usage rules, or continue to expand its geographic reach, the Company's financial condition and operating results may be materially adversely affected.

Many third-party content providers require that the Company provide certain digital rights management ("DRM") and other security solutions. If these requirements change, the Company may have to develop or license new technology to provide these solutions. There is no assurance the Company will be able to develop or license such solutions at a reasonable cost and in a timely manner. In addition, certain countries have passed or may propose legislation that would force the Company to license its DRM, which could lessen the protection of content and subject it to piracy and could also affect arrangements with the Company's content providers.

Notice something missing here? Apple operates the largest music and video download service in the world. Their ability to provide that service is dependent on the willingness of network operators to not interfere with Apple's customers who rent their movies on their AppleTV instead of say, using their Digital Cable or Satellite Set Top Box. 

In other words, while they admit they're dependent on third-party content, they refuse to acknowledge their reliance on "third-party bandwidth."

Meanwhile, tomorrow the FCC will meet to hear about net neutrality issues, again. Apple, and in particular Steve Jobs, has shown an ability to move entire industries to make more consumer-friendly choices. You can get most TV shows and movies on iTunes now. Who would have imagined that even 4 years ago?

Yet, Apple's continued ability to innovate is completely tied to the goodwill of say, Verizon, who may want to save more bandwidth for their own VoD "rental" service, or another network operator using some kind of "reasonable management" when iTunes downloads reach a critical mass, especially once more people start renting or buying HD content.

Which brings me to the most shocking number of all:

$20,000.

That's how little Apple has spent on lobbyists in Washington during the 2nd half of 2007. What's more shocking, is despite launching iPhone, and making preparations to launch the improved AppleTV last month, here's what they spent their $20k on:

H.R. 1908/S.1145, The Patent Reform Act of 2007; Section 115 of the U.S. Copyright Act: Compulsory Licensing of EU Copyright Directive.

That's from their year-end 2007 Lobbying Disclosure Act report. They didn't so much as make a single contact with the FCC during the last half of 2007.

Last January, Apple Computer became just "Apple," because they were starting to sell more than computers. You would think they would be interested in protecting their new revenue streams, and the networks that allow them to be such innovators in content distribution to all consumers.

Time to ante up, Steve.

Qualcomm is huge in the cellular industry.  A lot of people wouldn't recognize the name but if you look at your phone (a Sprint one, at least) you'll probably see a "3G by Qualcomm" (or something to that effect) sticker on the back.  Qualcomm makes the chips that make millions of cell phones do their thing.  They also hold the patents on other chips that make other cell phones do their thing.  Nokia's phones, for instance.

From Reuters

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Cellphone maker Nokia (NOK1V.HE: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Sunday its agreement in a U.S. court in Delaware with Qualcomm was unlikely to solve the major legal battle over patent fees between the two technology heavyweights.
...

The companies have been at legal loggerheads since they failed to renew a part of their 2001 technology licensing pact that expired last April. Analysts have estimated Nokia pays around $500 million to Qualcomm annually for patents and wants to cut the sum.

Qualcomm's head of European operations, Andrew Gilbert, told Reuters in an interview earlier this month, the company did not see smaller payment as an option.

"We want them to pay what they should be paying ... as soon as possible," Gilbert said in an interview at Mobile World Congress trade show.

In 2007 Nokia's handset profit was $5.434 Billion.  While that's an impressive number, it isn't like they can just shrug off $500 Million.  The courts are going to decide if Qualcomm's patent policy is illegal, as alleged by Nokia.  If so, Nokia may get the price cut it's looking for and get to pay less than half a billion dollars per year in licensing fees and (hopefully) be able to use those savings to cut prices.

We'll keep you up-to-date as the case develops.

...as I look through the various petitions and briefs in the Vuze proceeding which the FCC is set to consider tomorrow (but not vote on) in Cambridge, MA. 

I just wanted to thank the people out there who've reacted to Scobleizer's remarks from Friday, and point out one person who I should have looked up a while back.

What about all of the rest of the social web/Web 2.0 movement? Facebook now has a single rep in Washington. MySpace has its NewsCorp lobbyists. What about everyone else?

Washington and tech should have hugely mutually beneficial relationship--the internet is what will power the U.S. economy for the coming decades--but so far they're like oil and water. That's bad news for the country and bad news for the economy. And it's terrible news for geeks.

Finally, someone else in this town who gets it. I can't wait to meet this guy. Garrett, let's talk...maybe we can get something done.

Professor Lessig,

Jim at Verge New Media has a sort of disturbing but revealing look at how some places treat interactive media and the relative freedom of expression it provides, well, anyone:

We apologize the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political, and moral values of the United Arab Emirates.
- page that loads when attempting to access Twitter from UAE

For me this was a little bit of a shock. I've been to a number of restrictive countries before, but as we are still in a somewhat nascent stage of the social media lifespan, I believe many of us are pushing the edges of what types of communications are acceptable to employers, and in this case, governments. A Facebook friend and social media champion, who works for the administration, had noticed that in my profile that I had been unable to Twitter from Abu Dhabi. It was an interesting contrast to see this person's take on the draconian speech restrictions placed on web conversations here. Ultimately though, it was just a bit of a nuisance for me - causing a few hours of Twitter "blackout" - and i was able to resume posting from Saudi Arabia.

Why do I care? Well, as I posted yesterday, a potential nightmare for U.S. technology and media companies is how they deal with governments which might not be as friendly to free expression as ours. Do they simply make nice and make a buck (and risk lawsuits), or take a moral stand and risk shareholder anger (and lawsuits)? It really doesn't have to be a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. Really. This is another example of why Interactive Media needs its own voice. There are ways to handle these issues, and there are ways to get killed in the press and made to look like evil mercenary henchmen. The trick is to choose the right one. Check out the rest of Jim's post, please. I am hoping to get a chance to talk to him soon.

We're incredibly unfriendly to "e-travelers."

(yes, that term sounds lame but it's the best I can do.)

Consider the following photograph I took at DFW while on my way back from California:



That's my laptop, plugged into a chair with an outlet, which gives me a massage (which I had to turn off because it hurt), let me listen to "music" (I had my iPod and was on the phone anyway) and most insultingly, only dispenses electricity when I pay for it by the minute.

Now, I'm not opposed to paying for things. Take Wi-Fi, for example. Free Wi-Fi, while sometimes nice, can be crowded, slow, and insecure. Consequently, now and then I'll pay T-Mobile or whoever a few bucks when I have a long layover so I can get some real work done. If I traveled more, I would buy a "broadband" AirCard, but I'm not at that point yet.

I do believe that you generally get what you pay for, and when I feel I get better service by paying for it, I pay. Case in point, capitolvalley.net's email is on a hosted exchange server which lets Alex and I use Exchange's various useful features to collaborate and maintain contact using our BlackBerry devices when we work several thousand miles apart. We pay extra to our wonderful hosting service (and they are wonderful, because they put up with me) for this service because it works very well, and  brainstomed/tried out a few different solutions before agreeing to split the cost of the hosted Exchange and BES for a pretty good price. For the most part, it's been incredibly helpful. We get what we pay for.

Airports need to maintain infrastructure, some things are best left to "outsourcing." T-Mobile has done a great job of putting Wi-Fi everywhere and keeping it well maintained wherever they install it. On the other hand, electrical outlets are not something that should be "pay by the minute" by themselves. I understand they are scarce, but so are places to sit while waiting for a flight and charging your gear and working.

Here's an idea to the Airport Authorities of the World: I would gladly throw down a few bucks for access to a "mobile office area" during layovers (not, I repeat not the "club lounges" that airlines offer for exorbitant amounts) where I could pay for a quiet space with access to Wi-Fi or a plug-in, a work surface, comforable chair, and maybe a USB hub to charge my BlackBerry, iPod, and other devices that all share a common connector.

What I will never do again, if I can help it, is pay $5 for 20 minutes of electricity to charge my laptop so I can write.  To whoever running the Dallas Fort Worth Airport had the bright idea to install those chairs, you can do better.

Sorry to open up with a title so lacking in originality, but it really best fits what I'm jumping into.  Also, I know it looks like we're bashing Comcast a lot, but it's really only because right now they're in the Net Neutrality spotlight (if Net Neutrality has a spotlight).

 

The fact of the matter is that what Comcast has done to BitTorrent could be done by other ISPs to other content providers and in turn their customers.  To summarize, Comcast restricted bandwidth when users of BitTorrent (a high-speed file transfer system) started to, allegedly, use enough bandwidth to slow down the connection speeds of other users.  Comcast was allowed to do this under the guise of "reasonable network management."  A big problem is that there aren't guidelines for what is or is not "reasonable."

 

Andrew has made this point repeatedly, but I'm going to make it here, and more publicly.  Also, with some non-Comcast examples. In an attempt to show that this isn't just Comcast bashing.  In addition, to make the peril a little more relatable for those of us who don't use Comcast.

 

The first example is Comcast and BitTorrent.  Comcast has already given the official reason for limiting BitTorrent bandwidth but here's the conspiracy theorist logic behind it:  BitTorrent is largely used to transfer video files at high speed.  Comcast has video-on-demand (VoD) services of their own.  Who can say that they won't start to limit bandwidth to and from any VoD source?  They could, under "reasonable network management", limit the accessibility of YouTube, AOL VoD offerings and even MySpace, which is riddled with videos. 

 

Number 2 is AOL.  Almost everyone uses or has used AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) regardless of who their ISP is.  What if AOL is your ISP but you prefer Windows Live Messenger.  Well, AOL could say that other IM clients are too much of a drain on bandwidth and thanks to good old "reasonable network management" could make your non-AIM IMs not-so-instant.

 

Number 3 is Sprint.  What if I decided to use my Sprint Mobile Broadband connection to use Skype (a service allowing for unlimited long-distance calling over the internet) so that I can save my precious anytime minutes?  Sprint could kill my bandwidth when I try and use Skype and force me into using the phone service that they provide.

 

Now, remember that the latter 2 examples have not occurred.  They are just possibilities that could stem form Comcast's actions.  Legally (remember that I am in no way a lawyer) it would seem that Comcast's throttling of BitTorrent is ok thanks to the vaguery of "reasonable network management."  Whether or not it's "right" or potentially dishonest (seeing as I couldn't find any concrete policy on how much bandwidth you would have to consume before being restricted) is still to be determined.  Situations like this very real one and my 2 hypotheticals are why the tech industry and Silicon Valley cannot ignore the Beltway.  If the companies whose products are used and distributed online, at the mercy of ISPs, had banded together they could have, at the very least, gotten a firm definition of what constitutes "reasonable" when it comes to network management policies.  As it stands, thanks to the reactionary standpoint that so many of these companies take, we have to wait until after there's a problem in order to work with the FCC towards finding a solution.  In the meantime, customers are left with neutered service.

 

Are there plenty of non-Beltway concerns for businesses (and not just the 'Web 2.0" variety) to worry about?  Certainly.  We're all familiar with how dirty words like "lobbyist" and "special interest" have become, but a voice in Washington, who can potentially speak on behalf of an entire industry, can protect not only the companies who retain them but their customers as well.  And I don't think anyone reading needs to be reminded of what happens to a business without customers.

 

Drew covered this before I could even begin to digest it when I was running around with Andrew in California this week, but he absolutely nails it: Money quotes:

 

McCain initially supported legislation that would have forced Paxson and handful of broadcasters - but not the great bulk of television stations - off the air by December 31, 2006. Bud Paxson himself personally testified about this bill with "fear and trepidation" at a hearing on September 8, 2004.

 

Two weeks later, McCain had reversed himself. He now supported legislation that would grant two-year reprieve for Paxson - and instead force all broadcasters to stop transmitting analog television by December 31, 2008. Paxson and his lobbyists, including Iseman, were working at this time for just such a change.

 

The Times reports none of this more recent history of McCain's actions benefitting Paxson Communications, which renamed itself Ion Media Networks. McCain later fought hard to push the digital television transition date back in time, citing the needs of public safety officials. Those efforts were not successful. The DTV transition date now stands only a few weeks from the year-end 2008 date that McCain - and Paxson - first proposed: February 17, 2009.

(FYI, this article is obviously, fictional. It is a first in a series of depictions of "worst-case scenarios" that can and will befall new media companies that ignore Washington at their peril. Make sure to read the whole thing. Got a problem? That's why I have comments).

The Washington Times-Post-Tribune, June 4th, 2009

WASHINGTON, DC - 25 year old Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the popular "social networking" site Facebook sat stone-faced in the ornate room surrounded by angry men his father's age and older, most of whom he had never heard of or seen until he received a subpoena two weeks ago. He is not alone. Behind him sit a team of lawyers hired hastily to defend him and his company against criminal negligence charges, lawsuits, and a whole host of legal and regulatory battles.

On this humid morning, the gavel was held by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Not long ago, the very chair Zuckerberg sat in had been occupied by a much bigger star who was brought to earth by these mere mortal Congressmen. Baseball legend Roger Clemens, who Zuckerberg had seen pitch at Fenway Park during his time as a student at Harvard, had sat and absorbed round after round of scathing criticism from Committee members who excorieated him over his alleged use of Human Growth Hormone and other performance enhancing drugs, while Clemens could only stammer and give contradictory answers when Members confronted him with records of his previous sworn statements.

Zuckerberg has a busy week. Besides Waxman's Committee, he is scheduled to appear before the Federal Trade Commission about Facebook allegedly selling user data in violation of their privacy policies and Federal law. Later this week, he'll sit in front of the legendary war hero Daniel Inouye (D-HI) when the Senate Commerce Committee plans to grill him about his privacy practices and his targeted advertsing program powered by Microsoft, which is an investor in Facebook. Down the hall in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room, Zuckerberg will answer to Ranking Member Arlen Specter (R-PA). Right now, both Waxman and Specter want to know why Facebook didn't do more to keep their "high school" site safer when his site famously "opened up" in 2007, taking Facebok from a directory of college students and some corporate employees to becoming a worldwide network which intended to compete with News Corporation's MySpace. In fact, at the table across the isle from him is Chris DeWolfe, Zuckerberg's counterpart at MySpace. DeWolfe had weathered this storm before and was now in Washington not as a cautionary tale, but as an expert in opening social networks while protecting users from criminals of all sorts.

These men have reason to ask some questions. In May of 2009, three 15 year old girls from the same town in the suburbs of Philadelphia were abducted without warning, their bodies later found raped, beaten and drowned in the Schukyll River. The girls didn't know each other, but they did know one man, a recent college graduate who trained on Philadelphia's Boathouse Row, where all three girls spent time every summer at 3 separate boat clubs, but all took private sculling lessons from the suspect. The "killer" connection? They were all his "friend" on Facebook.

Zuckerberg became more and more nervous, biting his lip and turning around to whisper to the team of lawyers behind him whole Waxman calmly had DeWolfe describe the steps MySpace had taken over the years after a rash of hghly publicised incidents where child abductions and other crimes had been perpetuated using his site. DeWolfe explained that while they couldn't control everything that went on, they had an entire staff devoted to investigating complaints, and even regularly cross-checked names of users against "registered sex offender" lists. MySpace's CEO noted that his company had been "under a microscope for years." DeWolfe added,

"We realized we were a target and  put considerable resources into making our site as safe as we possibly could, even when we as technology experts thought that what we were doing was unneccesary or impractical. We wanted to show that not only did we care about who was using our site, but that we also were willing to go the extra mile to satisfy the concerns of people who might not understand what we do, or what our users, including their children do with our service, and we certainly didn't want anyone using what we thought was a great tool for such horrible purposes. We even worked with Microsoft, Apple, Google, and the Mozilla foundation to develop "parental controls" for MySpace which integrated into users' web browsers, so parents could restrict what their computers could do on the site."

DeWolfe took another shot at Zuckerberg, adding that "we knew some users might not like the changes, but we felt we had a responsibility to the people who ue our site to make sure that users of all ages, parents, children, and really anyone could feel safe about being part of our community."

Zuckerberg certainly had a lot to answer for, and could not say he did not see this coming. In late 2007, Facebook was forced by a revolt among their own userbase to restrict their "beacon" feature, which let people's "friends" know when they bought things at online retailers like Amazon, or booked plane tickets online. Before that, they backtracked after introducing an overhaul of their site including the "news feed" feature, which prompted a user "uprising" that received widespread press attention, and led Zuckerberg to personally apologize to the site's membership.

(click Read More below)

I see that already the much imitated, never duplicated Robert Scoble has a very flattering write-up of a very informative meeting we had last night in downtown SF. I was going to wait to see what he has to say about it, and he's definitely got a complete lock-down of what I think on the subject.

If this is the first time you're hitting the site, here's the deal: so much of what goes on in Silicon Valley is totally dependent on the goodwill and lack of oversight of a 535 old men and women in a town several thousand miles away who, given a reason to get on their soapbox, could cut the entire industry (which is a driving force behind the U.S.'s economy) down at its knees.

As I told Robert, the tech industry just doesn't care about Washington until they're being screamed at by a bunch of old men in an ornate room and they see their Venture Capital or Market Cap go through the floor. And when the old men start looking at you funny, bad things happen.

I'm going to be posting in the next several days a series of fictional "case studies" on companies that have done wrong, could be doing wrong, and how they could do right and either dig themselves out of the hole they're in, or keep themselves from putting the shovel in the ground in the first place. You'll also see my plan for how the little guys and the big guys can stop trying to kill each other just long enough to keep the old white guys off their backs. It's never happened before, but that's because as Robert puts it,

"Because we don't care."

You should care, and I think by the time this is all over, you will.

So I don't need to tell you there's some good stuff on the way, so please watch this space. I'm heading back to the east coast within the next few hours and then I'll be able to better keep up on what's going on in DC as it happens instead of from a 3 hour time lag.

Hopefully I can catch a webcast of the FCC's do-nothing meeting on Monday and report from there, as well as get some other cool stuff out onto the tubes for your discussion.

Disagree? Shout loudly. I encourage it.

See you from back in DC.

NYT reports that a former player confirms that Bill Belichick started cheating in 2000. Paging Henry Waxman...

The Patriots' pattern of illicitly videotaping the signals of opposing N.F.L. coaches began in Coach Bill Belichick's first preseason with the team in 2000, a former Patriots player said. The information was put to use in that year's regular-season opener against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Belichick's debut as New England's coach.

Banner day for the FCC today. First, they published their new Print-Broadcast cross-ownership rules, which have been in dispute since a Third Circuit decision which threw out another set of rules years ago. Here are the new ones. They've been a controversy for some time, and B&C quotes an industry insider as saying "Let the games begin." Senator Dorgan (D-ND) can introduce a bill to nullify them. I look forward to some fun hearings.

Moving on, ABC paid their fine for the much debated NYPD Blue "buttocks" controversy, and immediately appealed to get their money back. Meanwhile the Department of Justice wants the Supreme Court to refrain from intervening in the case dealing with Bono's usage of the "F word" some years ago, since should the Supremes hold that a "fleeting expletive" isn't profane, it'd undermine the FCC's ability to arbitrarily enforce whatever they want.

Oh, in Facebook news, usage is down in the UK. More on those guys later. Trust me, it'll be worth the wait.

I head back to DC tomorrow. Expect regular posting from both of us to resume.

Microsoft announced that it will start making "Software Blueprints" available to third-part developers so that their software can better interact with its various Windows applications.

From Reuters

By Daisuke Wakabayashi

REDMOND, Washington (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it would publish key software blueprints to let rival programs work better with its products and address some European antitrust concerns.

The world's largest software company said it would follow up with more actions to address European demands, although the European Commission said Thursday's move did not resolve a key issue about how Microsoft's products are tied together.

Microsoft has been criticized for shutting out competitors by incorporating programs such as its media player closely into its Windows operating system, and by keeping secret product details that rival developers need to ensure smooth operation with Windows and other Microsoft products.

...

From the cooperatively developed Linux operating systems to social networking site Facebook, open systems are becoming key to growth for many software firms, which Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer acknowledged.

"I believe Microsoft's long-term success depends on our ability to deliver a software and services platform that is open, flexible and presents customers and developers with choice," he said on Thursday.

Finally.  Think about FaceBook applications.  How many of them are not written by a third-party developer?  Interactivity and cross-compatibility are huge.  What I think Microsoft failed to acknowledge until just now is that opening up isn't going to cause you to lose customers.  Letting the consumer pick the best product is always a good move.  If anything, learning that more software will run on a Windows PC will improve PC sales, right?  And there's no reason why Microsoft can't compete with third-party vendors.  If another company puts out software that's better than yours, guess what, Microsoft?  You can try and develop better software to woo back that customer.

Common sense tells us that competition should improve quality.  If there's only one option for a product available the maker of that product has no reason to improve quality and/or performance.  But once another manufacturer comes in with a better product the original product is forced to improve or die.  It's commercial Darwinism at its best and I think that Microsoft is finally putting itself in a position to improve itself in ways that we've never seen.

The FCC meets this Monday, in Cambridge, MA. They plan to do nothing.

Straight from the meeting agenda:

The Commission will hear from expert panelists regarding broadband network
management practices.  The hearing is open to the public, and seating will be available on a first- come, first-served basis.

There will be two panels and a technology demonstration.  Additionally, there will be a
technology fair.

Let me get this straight. They have multiple pleas from different parties about network management, which is a de facto net neutrality proceeding, and they're...going to do nothing? No votes? They're going to listen to some executives from Comcast and Verizon, and Tim Wu from Columbia (gotta be fair, I guess) among other people, and after lunch they'll hear from some technical people, including Eric Klinker from BitTorrent. No vote? This question has been up for over a year now...can we get some kind of decision on what's ok? Please?

Oh, and don't forget about the technology fair! Will there be a moon bounce? I want a moon bounce? Pleaaaase, Kevin, can I play on the net neutrality moon bounce? I promise I'll let all the other kids jump just as high. I swear.

Fine. I'll settle for some cotton candy. Delicious.

By the way, we can still send them comments by going to http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/upload_v2.cgi and entering proceeding numbers 07-52 and 08-7.  Speak up, eh?

Also, NYT picks up on Draft Lessig. Good times. Oh, by the way,we've raised $20,000 in 48 hours. Bring it.

From Reuters

By Sinead Carew

NEW YORK (Reuters) - No. 3 U.S. mobile service provider Sprint Nextel Corp is expected to offer flat-rate calling plans at up to a 40 percent discount to its rivals, hurtling the industry into a price war, analysts said on Wednesday.

The two largest U.S. mobile service providers, Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc, on Tuesday unveiled $99.99-a-month plans for unlimited calls. T-Mobile USA went a step further by including text messaging in that price.

Sprint has yet to respond and spokeswoman Leigh Horner declined comment on any plans for future offers, but analysts say the company could be considering an unlimited calling plan for as low as $60 a month to stem customer defections.

None of these plans take data access into account.  AT&T will let you add, for $35 per month, unlimited messaging and data for regular handsets, with PDAs, BlackBerries and the iPhone to be figured out later.  If Sprint launches unlimited calling for $60 per month you could add on unlimited text messaging and data and still come in between $10 and $20 per month below the $99 price-point of your peers.  Even if you're Blackberry-ing you'd only come out at about $110 per month to have totally unlimited everything.

Sprint's assumed reasoning for this drastic undercutting of their competitors is so that a) they can have enough of a difference in price to really set themselves apart and b) because their stock is virtually worthless and they need a stunt like this (and unlimited calling for $60 per month would indeed be a stunt) to try and gain back some market share.

In a market where Reuters says that 85% of target consumers are already subscribers the practice of wooing customers away from their current carrier is now, more than ever, an absolute necessity.  Between waiting out or paying off contracts, picking out a new phone and waiting for your number to port (move from one carrier to another) this is no easy feat.  We're all creatures of habit and on a regular basis endure all sorts of abuse from a service provider (not just cellular) because we're used to it.

Yesterday the FCC finalized it decision to fine ABC for showing an episode of NYPD Blue that showed a brief scene of some T&A in a totally non-sexual situation...5 years ago. The FCC ruled that ABC had violated the indecency provisions of the Communications Act of 1934 by showing a woman's...butt.

We reported here last week that ABC had responded that the "buttocks are not a sexual and excretory organ," which a dictionary definition and any medical doctor would surely agree.

In the FCC's Forfeiture Order, dated yesterday (2/19),  the FCC rejects modern medical science for its' own definition of what the Buttocks, which are simply muscles (or in the case of Dennis Franz, mostly fatty tissue) are. Commissioner Robert McDowell, (M.D.) writes:

8.    The Commission has consistently interpreted the term "sexual or excretory organs" in its own definition of indecency as including the buttocks, which, though not physiologically necessary to procreation or excretion, are widely associated with sexual arousal and closely associated by most people with excretory activities.   Thus, the Commission has in many cases treated naked buttocks as coming within the scope of its indecency definition, even though it has not always concluded that particular depictions or descriptions were patently offensive and thus actionably indecent.

9.    The indecency standard that we are applying here was formulated by the Commission to enforce 18 U.S.C. § 1464 through administrative action.   The Commission has broad discretion to interpret and apply the standards and terminology it has developed, as long as it does so in a manner that is consistent with the statute and the Constitution.   In the context of interpreting and applying the statutory and regulatory proscription against indecent programming, it is appropriate to interpret these terms not in a medical sense but rather in the sense of organs that are closely associated with sexuality or excretion and that are typically kept covered because their public exposure is considered socially inappropriate and shocking.   We believe that it is appropriate to use the terms sexual or excretory organs - as we have in the past - in a manner consonant with the purpose of the regulatory regime to protect children from indecent depictions of organs associated with sex and excretion and sexual and excretory activities.  The purpose of indecency regulation, obviously, is not to regulate procreation or excretion, so we do not think a technical physiological definition is appropriate.      
             

10.    Moreover, if we interpreted these terms in the narrow physiological sense advocated by ABC and the ABC Affiliates, the airwaves could be filled with naked buttocks and breasts during daytime and prime time hours because they would be outside the scope of indecency regulation (at least if no sexual or excretory activities were shown or discussed).  We find it impossible to believe that ABC or the ABC Affiliates ever thought this to be the Commission's policy.  In short, while their Responses to the NAL are brimming with medical definitions and arguments, the respondents offer no legal or public policy reason for their argument, and we find it lacking in merit.

So now the FCC is defining what is and isn't a "sexual or excretory organ," merely deciding what organs or areas of the body are associated with sex. Foot fetishists everywhere should be afraid. You know all those Quentin Tarantino movies with long tracking shots of actors' feet? Under this definition, they could be quite indecent.

 It's also a good thing the Sci Fi channel is on cable, and therefore not subject to indecency regulations. You never know where those creepy alients keep those things.

Lessig makes two announcements:

As usual, Ars does it better than I could on short notice:

Just about every big phone company has filed a statement challenging the FCC's authority to deal with this problem. AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest all submitted lengthy remarks on February 13th, the last day for comments on the proceeding (parties can still reply to comments through the 28th).

In addition, the RIAA and NBC-Universal also submitted fillings, which included praise of French President Nicholas Sarkozy's attempts to have French ISPs disconnect "suspected copyright infringers."

Wait a minute...I thought we didn't want to be like the French...

On the other hand, Sony, the National Association of Realtors, Vonage, the National Public Safety Telecommunications Council, and the American Library Association have come out against the Telcos/Comcast in one way or another. This could get fun.

What's happening is we're seeing the Net Neutrality battle the FCC didn't want to take up, and Congress won't touch, being forced to the front by Comcast's heavy-handedness. I'm not convinced that the Commission is going to be reflexively against Vuze or in favor of the Telcos, especially with the widespread support that Vuze appears to be getting from many sides. Remember, the last day to submit comments is the 28th, and most of the big boys have weighed in. The people with stakes in this who have yet to comment are more "Web 2.0" entrepreneurs,  alternative content providers, etc. I'm surprised that Google hasn't submitted a comment, considering they own YouTube.

Where is Facebook, the largest photo sharing site on the 'net? What about Yahoo!, or anyone who wants to serve up their own content?

I'm actually rather surprised the RIAA and MPAA are being so shortsighted on this. The way things are going, they should want to be able to figure out new ways to get their content distributed. Without some kind of limitation on what the Telcos can and can't do, they could monopolize all distribution rights throguh "network management."

Oh, where in the name of Steve is APPLE? iTunes is growing, and uses more and more bandwidth every day. With the arrival of HD content, it's going to use more. You think Comcast isn't going to want to "manage" that?

What if Comcast started their own music and video download service and "managed" all the others' off their network?

Think about that one for a while...

I'll read the various filings and have some remarks later as they come in and the picture becomes more fully formed.

I'm in Texas but Broadcasting and Cable has blown my mind already and I've been up since 3am:

How far has the federal campaign for the digital-TV transition gone? The National Telecommunications and Information Administration considered deploying the Boy Scouts of America to help inform over-the-air analog TV viewers that they could lose their TV picture at 12:01 a.m. Feb. 18, 2009, just one year from today, unless they get a converter box, a new TV, or are already hooked up to cable or satellite.

Excuse me? The Boy Scouts? Are we talking the gay-excluding, yet slightly...questionable group where boys gather in groups under adult leaders to...tie knots in the woods? I know their motto is "be prepared" but don't we have better people to tackle this problem?

Converter-box retailers held talks with Boy Scout organizations about coming up with a DTV-transition merit badge for helping some older ladies and gentlemen cross the digital divide, although the plan may be scrapped over concerns about sending scouts into strangers' homes. Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission is talking to the Meals on Wheels Association of America about delivering DTV education along with food.

We've been reduced to boy scouts and meals on wheels a year out? Come one! Where are those hearings?

Ann Althouse chews on a Macbook Air...and talks about who she is voting for, and why.

...to give money to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund, it's just John McCain's insurance policy...

While Andrew Sullivan is on vacation, one of his fantastic guest-bloggers has picked up on the Draft Lessig movement.

Call him a crazed egomanic, but there's something really remarkable about the way Lessig takes a manifest failure of our constitutional system personally. He's not in public life because he was charming and popular in high school, or to find some lobbying sinecure or because he is convinced the other side constitutes an American Taliban that must be shamed and then destroyed. Rather, Lessig is most concerned with preserving the immune system, the organic intellectual defenses, of a free and open society, something conservatives and liberals alike ought to care about very much.

Of course there are many avenues through which to effect political change, perhaps the most important of which is raising awareness of the issues at stake. Lessig has brilliantly pursued that course. In leaving behind questions surrounding copyright, though, he's recognized that there are deeper problems with the body politic, and deeper questions concerning the vitality and indeed the viability of representative democracy in a society like our own. The time may now have come for Lessig to bring his considerable rhetorical skills and intellectual prowess to the legislative branch.

I'm not a liberal and I'm not a Democrat. I'll bet I disagree with Lessig on Iraq and S-CHIP and possibly even net neutrality. Yet I think Lessig, who is very firmly a liberal and very firmly a Democrat, can, in some small but significant way, deliver some of that "change" we've been hearing so much about.

Yes, it's from Reuters.com

By Robert Melnbardis

MONTREAL (Reuters) - BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM.TO:...) and rival Motorola (MOT.N:...) have sued each other over what they say are patent infringements for technology used in their mobile phones.

RIM alleges that Motorola is infringing on the Canadian company's patents and demanding "exorbitant" licensing fees, according to court documents.

The civil action, filed on Saturday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, alleges that Motorola infringed on a number of patents held by RIM.

In addition, RIM alleges that Motorola "is demanding exorbitant royalties ... for patents that Motorola claims are essential to various standards for mobile wireless telecommunications and wireless computing that RIM practices."

This includes technology that allows mobile telephone handset users to use Wi-Fi, RIM said.

At the same time, Motorola is refusing to acknowledge or pay royalties for certain patents held by RIM, the BlackBerry-maker said.

Ok, so this part isn't too ground-breaking.  In fact, it isn't ground-breaking at all.  RIM says that Motorola is infringing/not paying royalties for its patents and that the licensing fees for Motorola-held patents are out of control.  So of course, Motorola sued RIM for the exact same thing.  Not particularly mature, but to be expected.

What's interesting is that RIM is insinuating that the real reason behind Motorola's license fee hike is that their handset business is and has been slipping.  Normally it might just be seen  as insult-flinging for RIM to say "You're only charging us more because your own handset business is in the toilet!" but as things stand right now, that accusation may have some weight to it.  We even reported here that Motorola was considering selling its handset business.  That turned out not to be the case, but it is cold hard fact that they have slipped to third behind Samsung (full disclosure, I love my Samsung M500) and worldwide big dog Nokia.

I'm not too concerned about how much RIM has to pay Motorola or visa versa.  I think it makes sense for there to be an investigation and perhaps for the court to reign in what may or may not be license fee gouging by Motorola.  I care very much about what this might do to consumers.  Most BlackBerry users pay anywhere between thirty and fifty (I pay forty) dollars per month to use the internet on their handheld and get that painfully addictive push email (email that comes directly to your handheld once it hits your inbox as opposed to you having to manually log into your account and check for messages) and it would be really shitty if we (all 12 Million of us) lost that.  Especially because I'd be willing to be that the vast majority of us (at least those of us in the USA) are under contract to our carriers.  So here I'd be, locked into a contract with a potentially neutered device.

So guys, please remember that your number one responsibility is to your customers.  You know, the guys who actually rely on those patents?

We can only cross our fingers. Patent Law Blog reports:

    Taking sua sponte action, the Federal Circuit has ordered an en banc rehearing of the In re Bilski case - asking the following five questions:

       1. Whether claim 1 of the 08/833,892 patent application claims patent-eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101?
       2. What standard should govern in determining whether a process is patent-eligible subject matter under section 101?
       3. Whether the claimed subject matter is not patent-eligible because it constitutes an abstract idea or mental process; when does a claim that contains both mental and physical steps create patent-eligible subject matter?
       4. Whether a method or process must result in a physical transformation of an article or be tied to a machine to be patent-eligible subject matter under section 101? 
       5. Whether it is appropriate to reconsider State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, Inc., 149 F.3d 1368 (Fed. Cir. 1998), and AT&T Corp. v. Excel Communications, Inc., 172 F.3d 1352 (Fed. Cir. 1999), in this case and, if so, whether those cases should be overruled in any respect?

Translation? All 16 Judges who currently sit on the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has jurisdiction over U.S. Patent and Trademark Office decisions, are going to get together and decide whether this patent of a method of managing the risk of bad weather through commodities trading, with no specific technology involved, can actually be patented.

Pay special attention to #5. That case is the one that "opened the floodgates" to many, many software and process patents, including "One-Click,"  that whole BlackBerry scare, and so on and so forth.

This could get very, very interesting.

An ActBlue account has been set up for the Draft Lessig movement. The more money that gets pledged, the stronger the change that Professor Lessig will run. If not, the donations will go to Creative Commons. I've already put in some cash myself. Here's the deal. If this is to really work, we have to convince the Professor that there is enough support for him to jump in and have an organization ready to go. Call it a "turnkey campaign."

Please join us in convincing Larry Lessig that to advance the public good and those causes to which he has dedicated his life's work he should run for Congress and fight for change from within. By showing your support here with your donation, you can let Lessig know that you believe he can raise the bar for policy discussions among our public leaders.

This site is created by a group of us involved in the Free Culture movement -- both inside and outside of his district -- who think that Lawrence Lessig ought to consider running for the US Congress from the Bay Area. This effort is completely unofficial and unrelated to Prof. Lessig's work. It is not authorized or approved by Prof. Lessig.

Give, please.

From the Washington Post

By Stephen Barr

Monday, February 18, 2008; Page D01

The U.S. Postal Service is launching a 31-digit bar code that will permit business customers -- advertisers, catalogue and credit card companies -- to track their mail, from the drop-off at a post office to delivery at a home or office.

The project is called Intelligent Mail, and it holds the potential to let companies know if customers are telling the truth when they say the check is in the mail.

"Intelligent mail is like having a GPS system for mail," Postmaster General John E . Potter said when he announced the project last year.

Potter has pushed since the summer of 2002 for a way to track commercial mail as it travels through the postal network. The effort is on the fast track now, and the Postal Service plans to launch the system in January 2009. A federal notice has been published, and the public has until Thursday to file comments and concerns.

Despite my penchant for sending bills in late (the mailbox is so far away) I'm surprised that this hasn't happened sooner.  Point of fact, there are various bar codes on mail now, but what's launching next year is a uniform bar code system.  It will certainly help companies save money by eliminating a lot of the man hours usually required to investigate claims of undelivered bills or packages.

The program will also generate revenue for the postal service.  Companies will  be able to purchase tracking data from the USPS so that they can try and track the effectiveness of their mailings.  This way, after a mailer is delivered the company can see if that person actually bought there product as a result.  This, in turn, can help companies better target their mailings and let them save money and literally tons of paper (making my Bay Area neighbors super happy).

I personally don't see any sort of privacy issue with the impending bar code system.  It isn't being rolled out for personal mail (although the USPS says that they will if there is enough demand for it) and they aren't really collecting any additional information about the recipients of the mailer.  Sure they can track and try to correlate delivery to purchasing, but you have to figure that the purchasing is already being tracked.  Come on, Trader Joe's gets your ZIP code when you buy organic mac and cheese and Radio Shack needs your address before you can buy a pack of batteries.  As far as the part about tracking the mail, most companies assume that you're getting what they're sending.  The biggest impact that more definitive tracking of the correlation between mailings and purchases is that my mailbox might not be so overflowing with junk that goes straight into the trash.

Since I'm heading out to California tomorrow (sadly, which means there is a 3 hour loss of combined blogging time) it might be a bit slow in updates today. The good thing is that Congress is in recess, which means while Robert Byrd can go outside and play four-square and kickball, I can go to Costco and pick up a new toy or two.

However, in recent "stuff I already wrote about news" there is now a Draft Lessig mailing list. Get on it.

Here Comes Another Bubble - Funny video clips are a click away

...side projects. Google's 20% time is well known. Alex Payne (better known as al3x) has written something nice about the value of having something to do besides work.

Sadly, in a place where the standard opening question in a bar is "so, what do you do?," side projects are often frowned upon. If you're an associate at a law firm, it might even be completely verboten, save for an approved pro bono project here and there. Many state bars require attorneys to provide a certain amount per year of free services, but aside from the rare academic or law review paper, most don't have time for outside projects in their chosen field.

Luckily for me, I'm not a lawyer, and I am generally free to work on my own interests on my own time. I can't help thinking how much things could change if this town were more open to allowing the hordes of brilliant, creative, educated people (my hometown of Bethesda, Maryland boats one of the most educated populations in the US) that flock here for public service to pursue their own ideas, and even use their creativity to improve what gets done, and even the process of how things get done around here and across the country.

on Ars Technica the Professor said he's  "...been kind of stunned by the push of many, and am away with my family this weekend to think things through."

The tubes are abuzz with there idea...some examples here, here, and the whole roundup on draftlessig.org.

There's even some Lessig for Congress gear out there.

Keep it going.

An excerpt from CNNMoney.com

By Parija B. Kavilanz, CNNMoney.com senior writer

February 17 2008: 6:50 PM EST

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The toymakers' motto for 2008: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Toy companies, eager to grow sales in a stagnant $22 billion market, are on an all-out offensive against the iPod, Wii, PlayStation and other hot gadgets with new sophisticated tech toys of their own.

These new tech toys are being unveiled at the annual American International Toy Fair in New York that kicked off Sunday.

"Electronics and the Internet. That's what kids are obsessed about today," said Jim Silver, editor and co-publisher of Toy Wishes magazine. "They have an iPod, they are on Facebook and some are e-mailing by age five."

Although Mattel (MAT, Fortune 500) and Hasbro (HAS), the No. 1 and No. 2 toymakers, jumped on the electronics wagon a few years ago, the trend is even more pronounced this year as these companies strive to win back market share they've lost to electronics sellers.

The concern for parents is that some of the latest gadgety toys come with a hefty pricetag, which could be a problem at a time many Americans aren't willing to spend lavishly.

For example, Mattel's Fisher-Price preschool division will unveil a $180 "Kid-Tough" portable DVD player specially designed for a three year old.

As if the RIM v. NTP scare wasn't enough to kick-start patent reform, Multichannel News has a startling example of the danger of patent trolls I'm really not sure what to say about this except how disastrous these types of things are for the industry in general, and a reason why tech companies need a DC presence before they become a big enough target. The Patent Reform legislation currently in Congress has stalled and was fatally flawed during markup to begin with. Maybe this will kickstart things:

A suburban Philadelphia firm whose sole business is to buy up technology patents is trying to force large cable operators and major broadcasters to pay substantial license fees on the transmission of digital TV signals and Internet services.

If successful, the firm, Rembrandt IP Management, could pull in big money from the enforcement of patents related to the cable industry's standard for connecting customers to the Internet and potentially throw a financial monkey wrench into the broadcast industry's mandate to transmit all TV signals in digital form by a year from now.

In the worst-case scenario, Rembrandt's litigation may undermine the ability of industry bodies to set technical standards whose uses are meant to be widely available for "fair and reasonable" patent-licensing fees.

In cases originally spread across federal courts in Delaware, New York and Texas, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Charter Communications, Cox Communications and Cablevision Systems face claims that their cable-modem services infringe eight patents now held by Rembrandt, and that their video services violate a ninth one related to digital-TV transmission.

Separately, ABC, CBS, NBC Universal and Fox -- as well as manufacturer Sharp Electronics -- face suits alleging infringement of Rembrandt's patent on digital TV transmission.

From Reuters

By Mayumi Negishi and Kentaro Hamada

TOKYO (Reuters) - Toshiba Corp...is planning to give up on its HD DVD format for high definition DVDs, conceding defeat to the competing Blu-Ray technology backed by Sony Corp..., a company source said on Saturday.

Between Warner Brothers only releasing Next Generation DVDs in Blu-ray format and Wal-Mart deciding to only stock Blu-ray Toshiba decided to end the HD-DVD format. 

So now the choice has been made for those of us who haven't yet picked their pony; it's Blu-ray.

I'd be excited that there's some finality except that this newest format for home video is coming from the same people who came up with Betamax.

Kurt Cobain said that he knew he'd "made it" when Weird Al Yankovic covered Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit." It's much easier to do that with technology these days, even as a simple mash-up. The great thing that I've seen about the Obama campaign is people have been creating their own ads and hyping the Senator even since last year.  You know that "Yes, We Can" video floating around? Here's the "Weird Al" GOP version:



Too Funny. Featuring a look-alike of Senator Obama's "cousin" too! 

Ok, so yesterday I (even before Drudge!) found out about the New York judge who decided that "Friending" someone on MySpace was a violation of an Order of Protection.

Because I'm such a darn nice guy, I'll quote the judge again, because I do think his ruling makes sense from the point of view of a guy who sits on a bench, hears cases, and reads law books.

"Those friends thou hast and their adoption tried, Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel," the judge wrote, adding: "But not when an order of protection prohibits someone from communicating with another."

"While it is true," he also wrote, "that the person who receives the 'friend request' could simply deny the request to become 'friends,' that request was still a contact and 'no contact' was allowed by the order of the protection."

I am so very excited to go to SXSW Interactive next month. One of the reasons is that a keynote is being given by Mark Zuckerberg, the "boy genius" behind Facebook. I've written before about why I think people overvalue Zuckerberg and underestimate the massive exposure his company has to all sorts of Governmental actions, hearings, investigations, and whatnot. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook in 2008 is Bill Gates and Microsoft circa 1998.

Both MarkZ and BillG share a major mistake: as their companies attracted more attention through various PR gaffes, they didn't make earnest efforts to get their stories out in Washington. They figured the product was enough.

Facebook has already suffered through the disaster of a user revolt after the News Feed some time ago, the MoveOn.org inspired retooling of Beacon, and even worse, the recent NYT article about Facebook keeping your data "forever" after you try and delete your account, Do they have any real professionals telling their side and speaking the right language? No. They hire smart people, but they're California Smart, not DC Smart. So far, they've been lucky that no cute white girls have gone missing after using Facebook.

Microsoft had a great streak. They launched Windows 95 and got the whole world excited about computing. Then came the Browser Wars, during which they actually destroyed an entire company in the space of a few short years and reduced their two competitors in Operating System technology to obscurity through anticompetitive practices, and eventually got antitrust actions against them in the U.S. and the EU, one of which was ended by the Florida recount since the original judge was thrown off the case and the Bush DOJ settled for pretty much nothing. The EU one is ongoing and MS keeps losing appeals.

How did that happen? Well, despite news reports, consumer complaints, and all sorts of bad press, Microsoft had virtually no Washington presence for the longest time. Now they have one of the best lobbying operations in DC, as well as many in state capitals (see the ongoing ODF controversies in Massachusetts, etc).

Facebook (at this writing) has zero registered outside lobbyists, and their Washington presence is limited to a guy whose job it is to get political candidates to put their pages on there. Yet, they're constantly the subject of bad press. They faced a user revolt when they introduced the "news feed" feature last year. Recently, their Beacon feature was forced to be modified after MoveOn.org got a petition together, and the New York Times reported only days ago on how hard it is to get them to get rid of your data after you delete your account.

Zuckerberg, their "boy genius" CEO is profiled in the press as your typical start-up guy living on a mattress despite his estimate net worth of several billion since the company is privately held, and according to his own words during an awkward, stilted 60 Minutes appearance, will probably remain private at least 2008. While more "charismatic" (I use the term loosely) than BillG (who many have speculated suffers from a mild form of Asperger's Syndrome), they both share the trait of being completely tone-deaf when it comes to the way us "beltway insiders" look at technology companies we see as either violating the law, or just acting irresponsibly when there isn't a law to break.

Legislation, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If there is a perceived problem (think "predators on MySpace") than Congress, or the FCC, or the FTC, or whoever thinks they should do something, will do it, without thought to the unintended consequences that their action will trigger. Take child pornography laws, for instance. Everyone agrees that child porn is harmful, and abuse of children is abhorrent and reprehensible. On the other hand, these same laws force prosecutors to charge teenagers who forward drunk cellphone camera pictures around the internet under the same statutes that they prosecute those who hoard videos and photos documenting child abuse.

Of course, many "legislative initiatives" are fueled by media driven hysteria, which leads to bad hearings, (see Josh Green's take on the Roger Clemens hearings) driven by the sole desire to humiliate those who the Congress have done wrong, which in the worst instances can lead to the reactionary writing of bad laws sold with good PR, which of course invoke the law of unintended consequences.

Back to the New York judge and the unprecedented (but not unreasonable, which is simply my personal opinion as I Am Not A Lawyer) case of "Friending" as violating an Order of Protection.  In the press, the general public, and in technical circles, people love to talk about the differences between Facebook and MySpace, but mostly in terms of things like demographics, social network organization, openness to development and user interface. They're forgetting something.

MySpace has already been brought on bended knees before the authorities to avoid regulation. They've adopted policy after policy (however useless), issued press release after press release, and had their News Corporation execs appear with all sorts of law enforcement types who crowed gleefully as MySpace "purged itself of registered sex offenders," as if you could really do that.

Facebook, like its' interface, is clean. It has been spared the wild hysterics of local television news. It has not been featured on "To Catch a Predator" and it is not part of a major media conglomerate which like Roger Clemens, lawmakers would love to publicly humiliate. While they are still private, and while the boyish, not-quite-Rupert-Murdochian Zuckerberg is still the face of the company, they still have a chance to head off being known as the next  boogeyman.  They're a Google, not a Microsoft. People still believe they're a good company, with a smart young kid running things who makes innocent mistakes. They can have a goal of connecting communities and bringing people together, and they can have a great motto like Google's "Don't be evil."

There are other cautionary tales. YouTube  didn't think to partner with any content providers, or do anything to make themselves look like a useful and beneficial service for the general public as it gained popularity, and instead it got hit with a  gigantic lawsuit over Copyright Infringement as soon as it got bought by Google. A few letters to Big Media, and a good PR blitz with say, videos of missing children or putting short Public Service Announcements before random popular videos, and they could have saved themselves a ton of grief by casting themselves as the "good guys" instead of the "cool kids."

They should remember, however, that even Google was slammed by the late, great Congressman Tom Lantos just a year before his tragic death for contributing to censorship and vicariously aiding human rights abuses in China. Lantos, who survived the brutality of the Nazi Holocaust, had this to say to the group of executives from Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft:

"Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace...I simply don't understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night."

The trick to avoiding the "gotcha" game in Washington is to get your story out before the other guy, and to always make sure you have a record of 100 good things to counter every bad thing. If you're a social networking startup, you're in danger. Join a coalition. Get your own efforts started. Think of ways to use your technology to partner with existing groups to do good. Think Red Cross, Salvation Army, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Hire someone who knows how to get the right people in and around Congress to know about the good things you are doing. There's even a Family Online Safety Initiative. Why haven't you joined it?
 

Do these kinds of things now before the sharks start to circle. Make them a real part of your business plan. You should want to be a "safe" online business as much as you'd want to be a "green business." You want the news cycles on your side, so there is no temptation for the media to make mountains of molehills, and even if some emmy-starved reporter wants to be the next Chris Hansen and finds some nutjob using your service for an isolated misdeed in some tangential way that he can exploit, even if of all the social networks on all the tubes on all the internets, some reporter saw some psycho walk into yours, the people in charge can realize that the one bad apple doesn't mean they have to chop down the tree.

Hey New Media, I'm talking to you! How about you talk to me.

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I'm wearing an Aquaman t-shirt today and it reminded me of something.

 

Do any of you remember those really bad Halloween costumes that were a cheesy plastic mask and a plastic tunic with the character's picture and or name?  Like in the case of Aquaman it'd be an Aquaman mask, and then the tunic would have his picture on it, probably proclaiming "AQUAMAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

 

Did any of you guys ever get put into one of those?  If so did you think it was a) lame or b) totally sweet?

From the Washington Post

By Jonathan Weisman and Dan Eggen

Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 16, 2008; Page A02

A federal law granting President Bush extensive powers to monitor the communications of foreign terrorism suspects without a court warrant expires today, the culmination of an unusual political game of chicken in which neither side gave way before leaving Washington.

Bush left the country for Africa yesterday after declaring that "our country is more in danger of an attack." With Congress beginning a week-long recess, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) practically called Bush a liar, saying he is "misrepresenting the facts on our nation's electronic surveillance capabilities."

Both sides were left weighing whether the lapse of a temporary, technical surveillance law will have political ramifications in November. "This is a grave problem, and the Democrat leaders ought to be held accountable for their inaction," warned House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).

But the dominant mood on the House Democratic side appeared to be a "take no more guff" attitude, combined with confidence that the Bush administration's credibility is at a low ebb. Democrats accused administration officials of putting the interests of private phone companies above national security.

At issue is a law passed in August that expanded warrantless surveillance powers. Bush wants Congress to make the law permanent, while adding legal immunity for telecommunications companies that were sued for invasion of privacy after helping U.S. intelligence agencies conduct warrantless surveillance under contested authorities. The Senate approved a White House-backed bill, but the House balked.

After the law's expiration, the government will retain substantial surveillance capability, and classified orders allowing the monitoring of international telephone calls, e-mail and other communications under the law are valid for a year, so they will not expire before August.

"There is no risk the program will go dark," said Rep. Sylvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Officials made clearer yesterday that the real dispute is over the immunization of phone companies from past actions. Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, told National Public Radio yesterday: "It's true that some of the authorities would carry over to the period they were established for one year. That would put us into the August, September time frame. However, that's not the real issue. The issue is liability protection for the private sector. We can't do this mission without their help."

 

So the Government can still, sans warrant, tap my cell phone if they think I'm a terrorist.  That's legal until at least August.  Why the phone companies think they should have retroactive immunity is absurd.  Any cell phone company who is guilty of sharing customer information without a warrant is just that; guilty.  It isn't even a gray area.  All they had to do was say "Come back with a warrant and we would love to help you." and call it a day.  It isn't the Government's fault that they got scared, bent over, and shared customer's information without any legally compelling reason.

 

Here's what Mitch McConnell (R-KY) thinks

"The companies have been waiting for six months for retroactive liability" protection, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said after a White House meeting with Bush. "They are under pressure from their directors, pressure from their shareholders, and you're jeopardizing the entire existence of the company by continuing to do this."

 

They're under pressure?  Really?  Sorry to play the lay-person, as usual, but maybe they shouldn't have broken the law?  It seems to me like that would be the easiest way to avoid a problem like this.

 

Now, even though I am not a terrorist I don't particularly like the idea of someone listening to my phone calls.  And unless the law is compelling you to help the Government listen to my calls or get lists of who I have called your actions are, at the very least, an enormous breach of the trust between us.

Courtesy of TorrentFreak!

Several BitTorrent developers have joined forces to propose a new protocol extension with the ability to bypass the BitTorrent interfering techniques used by Comcast and other ISPs. This new form of encryption will be implemented in BitTorrent clients including uTorrent, so Comcast subscribers are free to share again.

BitTorrent throttling is not a new phenomenon, ISPs have been doing it for years. When the first ISPs started to throttle BitTorrent traffic most BitTorrent clientsintroduced a countermeasure, namely, protocol header encryption. This was the beginning of an ongoing cat and mouse game between ISPs and BitTorrent client developers, which is about to enter new level.

Unfortunately, protocol header encryption doesn't help against more aggressive forms of BitTorrent interference, like the Sandvine application used by Comcast. A new extension to the BitTorrent protocol is needed to stay ahead of the ISPs, and that is exactly what is happening right now.

Back in August we were the first to report that Comcast was actively disconnecting BitTorrent seeds. Comcast of course denied our allegations, and ever since there has been a lot of debate about the rights and wrongs of Comcast's actions. On Wednesday, Comcast explained their BitTorrent interference to the FCC in a 57-page filing. Unfortunately they haven't stopped lying yet, since they now argue that they only delay BitTorrent traffic, while in fact they disconnect people, making it impossible for them to share files with non-Comcast users.