The Senate Commerce Committee took up again today the mark-up of its telecom reform bill S. 2686, sponsored by Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK). The panel churned through a series of amendments among the hundreds proposed, but postponed until tomorrow the most controversial of the bill’s provisions — those dealing with net neutrality and the “broadcast flag.”
The committee rejected a series of amendments proposed by key Democrats. Chief among these was an amendment that would have allowed states to regulate VoIP phone calls. In a statement, NCTA CEO Kyle McSlarrow applauded the progress on the bill’s mark-up, particularly the rejection of state regulation of VoIP. “We applaud the committee for approving an amendment that reaffirms the interstate nature of VoIP service, which we believe strikes an appropriate balance between federal and state oversight of this emerging service,” McSlarrow said.
Another group of amendments, proposed by Stevens, was approved. These amendments all give some relief to cities, which are losing a large degree of local video franchising control under both the Senate and House telecom reform bills.
The changes include: increasing from 75 to 90 days the amount of time that cities would have to negotiate with new video providers before the contract applies; allowing cities to collect monies on fees already paid by cable operators; requiring AT&T’s Internet television service to be subject to new franchising requirements; and ensuring that localities not lose existing public-access channels and institution networks.
The most contentious issue involving franchising, requirement competitors to build out entire communities, won’t be taken up until tomorrow.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:50 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The Chicago Tribune had this editorial yesterday about net neutrality and it reads just like a phone company talking points paper. From painting pro-net neutrality proponents (Google, Yahoo) as “commercial giants” to trotting out those stupid and discredited FCC data on broadband competition, this editorial is nothing but an apologia for the telcos.
That’s not the best part — the best part is how this lame editorial has set off Mike at TechDirt. He can’t contain his outrage over what he basically contends is the crap flying around in the guise of reasoned debate on this subject. Although he gives both sides of the argument a hard time, today he accuses the telcos of “trotting out all sorts of dishonest statements as if they were fact.”
Mike is mad — he goes on for about 500 words regarding the ridiculousness of it all. (As the first commenter to Mike’s lengthy post notes “see what happens? You write more than one short paragraph and all these ADD sufferers lose you :-P”)
Yeah, all these rhetorical flourishes and perilously false arguments are extreme. They’re caricatures of the real issues, short-hand exaggerations of the true problems at hand. But hey, at this point the whole network neutrality debate is a knife-fight and politics is not pretty.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:32 AM | Print | Comments (0)
The San Jose Mercury News’ John Boudreau has this piece on the impact of the Supreme Court’s Grokster decision, which was handed down one year ago today. Much to the surprise of no one outside the recorded music industry, peer-to-peer file-sharing has only grown since the landmark decision.
Meanwhile, file-sharing, most of which is illegal, continues to grow. Nearly 10 million users worldwide simultaneously clicked into peer-to-peer technology last month — 12 percent more than May, 2005, according to BigChampagne, a Los Angeles research firm that monitors file-sharing.
Despite the legal boost that Grokster gave the music industry — the case spurred intensified litgation against file-sharers — the industry might be starting to lose its appetite for lawsuits in the face of so much futility.
“There are some people inside of record labels who admit that they are not doing the right thing in certain cases. There is some resistance” to the digital era, said Ali Aydar, the first employee of Napster, the pioneering peer-to-peer music sharing network that eventually went bankrupt after battling the record industry.
Even though he says that the legal marketplace is “our hope for the future,” RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol also conceded that P2P is “not consuming all the digital oxygen in the marketplace.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:25 AM | Print | Comments (0)The New York Times Saul Hansell has a piece today about a joint effort by leading online portals and ISPs to fight child prnography. (Note: Our web hoster, being the good citizen that it is, bars any customer from posting any items that deal with certain topics — hence, the * in the word prn. Given that the word p*rn is in the URL for Hansell’s piece, the hyperlink above doesn’t connect directly to Hansell’s article.)
AOL, Yahoo, EarthLink, Microsoft and United Online have formed a group that will pay $1 million for a new project by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to develop systems that help law enforcement identify child exploitation on the Internet. Initiative number one: create a database that helps identify unseemly images of children sent by email.
The announcement is timed to coincide with two days of hearings by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. The announcement also follows a request by Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez that Internet companies retain data that can help law enforcement catch purveyors of child p*rn.
The online companies are reluctant to amass the mounds of user data requested and my guess is that they’re hoping this initiative will head off any further demands for this kind of data storage.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:41 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Meteoric online video site YouTube has officially transformed itself from the bane of traditional media companies to a hot distribution platform that blue-chip TV producers want to leverage. According to this scoop in today’s Wall Street Journal, NBC is going to become a big advertiser on YouTube and will even make its content available on the site.
NBC plans to announce that it will make available on YouTube promotional video clips for some of its popular shows, such as “The Office,” “Saturday Night Live” and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.” NBC plans to market its new fall lineup using clips on YouTube, and is holding a contest for consumers to submit their own promotional videos for “The Office.” It will also buy ads on the site and promote YouTube with mentions on television. That’s a significant step for NBC, which earlier had demanded that YouTube take down clips of its programming.
This is a smart move by NBC and reflects a shift in thinking on the part of the media giant given that nothing has seemed to dim the popularity of YouTube. Despite the network’s initial dismay, YouTube helped revive a tired audience for “Saturday Night Live” when a video of SNL’s skit “Lazy Sunday,” which had been posted on YouTube, turned into a cultural phenomenon among young adults.
In an interesting twist of synchronicity, NBC’s deal with YouTube comes almost on the same day that Time Warner announced its own deal with an online video sharing site, Guba.com. Time Warner, however, isn’t taking the same kind of wild and woolly leap as NBC — the company is selling movies and TV shows via Guba. The movies and shows will be viewable on both PCs and mobile devices.
Among the movies available are Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Everything is Illuminated, as well as catalog titles such as The Matrix, Batman Forever, and Best in Show. TV programming includes Babylon 5, Dukes of Hazzard, The Flintstones and The Jetsons. TV shows sell for $1.99/download, catalog titles sell for $9.99/each and recent releases, which become available on Guba the same day they’re sold via DVD, are $19.99/each.
Guba has gone out of its way to satisfy the studio that the content is sufficiently protected — and only users that rely on Windows Media Technology can play the content.
Update: This AP item about Guba.com makes a very good point about video distribution to young adults, who are, of course, the future.
“Kids in the dorm rooms don’t own TVs,” said Tom McInerney, co-founder and chief executive of Guba. “They’ve got computers and that’s their source of entertainment.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:03 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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