Making good on Chairman Kevin Martin's promise at CES last week, the FCC today issued its inquiry into whether network operator interference with P2P applications is a violation of its policy, established in 1995, that discourages network owners from interfering with services or content except when "reasonable network management" practices require such interference.
This inquiry is a direct result of a petition for declaratory ruling filed by consumer and public interest groups last Fall following the heavily publicized report by an AP reporter that Comcast slows down uploads when consumers use P2P applications. The groups asked the FCC to declare that such interference is a policy violation.
Hoping to deal with similar complaints, the FCC also issued two other inquiries. The FCC put out for comment a petition for rulemaking by P2P-powered online video entertainment service Vuze that asks the FCC to establish rules that more precisely define what constitutes "reasonable network management." The docket number and deadlines (comments due February 13 and replies due March 14) for the Vuze inquiry are the same as those for the bigger P2P inquiry.
In an interesting move, the Commission further asked for comments on a conceptually related petition filed by consumer and free press groups which seeks to clarify that text messaging services are commercial mobile services (or Title II services) subject to non-discrimination requirements. This petition was spurred by a highly publicized incident last Fall when Verizon Wireless blocked the delivery of short code, opt-in messages by NARAL.
Gigi Sohn, President of Public Knowledge, which was instrumental in getting the Commission to act on these petitions, is pleased that the FCC is at least looking into this cluster of issues that center on one key question: how much power do network operators have to limit or block certain kinds of content or applications? In a statement Sohn said "these inquiries will go a long way to setting out a road map for determining who will control the Internet, and whether texting will be seen in the same light as wireless voice services."
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:07 PM | Print | Comments (0)Evan Hessel and Dorothy Pomerantz have this piece in the latest Forbes magazine entitled "The People Vs. Comcast." And it's none too flattering.
The article basically accuses the nation's top cable company of all kinds of corporate greed and behind-the-scenes manipulation of government policy, reserving a lot of its enmity for CEO Brian Roberts personally. Here's a passage:
The younger Roberts [Brian Roberts' father, Ralph Roberts, founded the company] tightly restricts what his subscribers can and cannot do. Like other cable chiefs, Roberts insists his customers buy TV channels in bulk, not individually. He led a behind-the-scenes battle to prevent cable subscribers from getting their hands on souped-up set-top boxes designed by other companies. And Comcast recently began interfering with customers' use of Internet peer-to-peer programs.
The article claims that regulators and customers "screamed in protest" against each of the above misdeeds. The Consumer Electronics Association CEO Gary Shapiro is quoted as saying that Brian Roberts is like England's Henry VIII. (So far as I know, Roberts hasn't beheaded any of his wives yet.)
However, "rebellion is afoot," according to the article, because the Internet, "with stunning speed" is swiping viewers away from the TV set, "stripping power from Roberts and handing it to his customers."
Seriously, what is this? I'm no apologist for Comcast, but Hessel and Pomerantz don't even try to disguise their disdain for the company, and Roberts specifically. What did Comcast do to p*ss off the Forbes people? Refuse to include the pub in an embargoed announcement? Is there bad blood between the Roberts and Forbes families?
I admit it's kind of fun to read an article by mainstream journalists that doesn't even attempt objective reporting or rational analysis. But this piece should really be labeled "analysis" or "opinion" and as far as I can tell on the Forbes.com site, it's offered as a feature article.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:36 PM | Print | Comments (0)It's always dangerous to extrapolate trends from one's own anecdotal experience (what statisticians called a "fallacy of composition") but I could have predicted based on my own personal experience what Google's own data say: traffic from iPhones is dispropotionately huge and is surging. On Christmas, traffic to Google from iPhones surpassed traffic from any other mobile device, even though the iPhone accounts for only 2% of all smartphones globally.
The reason the iPhone has generated so much mobile phone traffic is that its browser makes surfing the Internet a breeze while virtually every other mobile device just stinks when it comes to accessing the Internet. I must use my iPhone to do Google searches at least five times a week and Google Maps is an indispensable tool for more than just navigation.
True Google-via-iPhone story: A few weeks back I was in a local CVS drugstore, when a mini-crowd began to form around a cat that walked into the store. This cat had a collar with a phone number and calls made to that number went into voice mail. Two women in particular weren't going to leave the store until they felt sure the cat was safe. They didn't want to shove the cat out the door into a busy parking lot that abuts a very major thoroughfare, at night, no less.
Someone suggested that if we could just use the store's Internet connection, we could conduct a reverse phone number look-up and find the address for the cat's owner. That was a no-go with CVS personnel, so I whipped out my iPhone, conducted a search on "reverse number look-up," went to 411.com, and got the address, which was a nearby house. We carried the (very agreeable) cat to the house and chatted with a neighbor who confirmed that this indeed was the cat's home.
Because of its superior Internet browsing capability, the iPhone might very well have saved this cat's life. While not quite on the level of the tales told on the iPhone commercials, my most recent experience with using Google via the iPhone certainly underscores Google's own statistics.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:53 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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