The FTC released today its report on net neutrality, a product of the agency’s Internet Access Task Force. It’s a backbreaker — 160 pages (PDF here) of dense material authored by at least 16 people and covering a tremendous amount of territory, starting with the rise of ARPAnet and ending with the current debate.
In short, I can’t read it. After scanning the turgid, legalistic and heavily footnoted prose, I gave up reading all but the last section where the report identifies “guiding principles that policy makers should consider in evaluating proposed regulations or legislation relating to broadband Internet access and network neutrality.”
Among these principles are 1. promote competition in the broadband distribution business 2. proceed with caution and 3. watch out for adverse and unintended consequences of regulation.
Public Knowledge, however, is doing its job and taking this report seriously. They praise the FTC for its investigation into the issue, but take issue with one idea embraced in the report, namely that discrimination by broadband providers can often serve the public welfare (e.g., give doctors priority to engage in telemedicine.) In a statement, the group’s President Gigi Sohn said
It is unfortunate that the FTC staff chose to talk about the differentiation of services, which under some conditions could be beneficial to consumers and network companies, instead of discrimination, which helps no one.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:57 PM | Print | Comments (3)
With the iPhone frenzy in a temporary lull now that we know the device is all but a smash success, the big news today is News Corp.’s pending launch of a YouTube rival, MySpaceTV (www.myspacetv.com).
Starting tomorrow, MySpace’s video sharing section, which helped propel YouTube to its current heights, will become a newly refurbished destination that features user-generated videos in addition to professional content, which News Corp. will feature front and center as users arrive at the site. In fact, the MySpaceTV will become one main hub for the News Corp.-NBC-U online video joint venture (which still lacks a name.)
Om Malik calls this competitive gauntlet-throwing a classical example of the uncomfortable nature of Internet and media alliances these days. Once friends, now MySpace and YouTube are enemies. They’re frenemies.
I think he’s being too nice. With this move, News Corp. and Google, MySpace and YouTube, are now officially adversaries, competing head-to-head in the same sector. With YouTube inching toward social networking territory anyway, a rivalry between MySpace and YouTube might have been inevitable anyway.
It’s likely, however, that YouTube got caught off-guard by this knuckleball. None of the press reports have an adequate response by a Google rep to this development. I’d say that the “friend” part of the frenemy equation has been wiped out of the relationship between MySpace and YouTube.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:29 PM | Print | Comments (0)The BBC has always been ahead of the technology curve, perhaps because its quasi-governmental status has given the radio and TV content giant room to experiment. Whatever the case may be, the BBC is going to launch July 27th its long-awaited and much-debated iPlayer, a software application that allows all viewers (in the UK that is) to download to their PCs all programs for viewing up to 30 days following their initial airings.
The BBC plans to make the player available across other networks aside from its own websites, including MSN, telegraph.co.uk, AOL, Tiscali, Yahoo!, MySpace, Blinkx and Bebo. One of the already-confirmed third-party platforms is YouTube, an arrangement that will be powered on the back-end by Comcast-owned thePlatform.) Farther off in the future, the BBC hopes to put version of the iPlayer on TV sets and handheld devices.
All downloaded content will “self-destruct” after 30 days due to DRM triggers that make the programs unviewable beyond that window, thus providing the BBC some assurances that their ownership of the content retains value.
One issue is whether the BBC’s deal to distribute content over the Internet via Azureus’s P2P network ends once the iPlayer launches. Stay tuned.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:51 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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