As if the FCC under Kevin Martin didn't have enough trouble on its hands, the GAO released a report yesterday that seriously lambasts the agency's recordkeeping practices. (PDF of report here.) At the request of House Telecom and Internet Subcommittee Chair Ed Markey (D-MA), the GAO investigated how the FCC handles the 100,000 or so consumer and company complaints it receives each year and what kinds of enforcement actions the agency takes in response to those complaints.
But, before it could even begin to come to grips with the issues, the GAO had to wade through six different databases, each of which was rife with missing information and all of which were incompatible with one another. They are not standardized and they do not track information in the same manner, the GAO noted.
Moreover, the Commission often doesn't even track information that is crucial to determining whether it is fulfilling its Congressionally mandated responsibilities. For example, when the GAO sought to determine whether the FCC met the statute of limitations for assessing monetary forfeitures on rule violators, one relevant database was missing this information 84% of the time and two other databases lacked sufficient data 99% of the time. Two other databases were built so that this information wasn't even part of the record.
The GAO threw up its hands in trying to figure out when the FCC closed investigations. "Enforcement Bureau personnel did not always enter the dates into the database and, when a date was entered, it was not always clear what the date represented. For example, it was unclear whether the date entered was the date of the initial or the final enforcement action."
The GAO couldn't even determine the amount of fines the FCC had assessed against rule violators because of missing or garbled data. In short, the GAO couldn't really figure out what was going on at the FCC using the Commission's record-keeping resources.
The FCC disagrees with the GAO, as the GAO itself notes in the reports, and points to efforts it has made to upgrade its recordkeeping systems. The Commission also objects to the ultimate conclusion of the GAO report, which is that the FCC took no enforcement actions for 83% of the complaints it received.
The FCC's own analysis yields different numbers, but to get there, Commission staff had to analyze 46,000 paper records. The GAO says that the FCC is obviously missing the point: no government agency should have to rifle through that many paper records to answer questions. In its typical dispassionate manner, the GAO says it believes that reviewing 46,000 paper files does not constitute "a good management practice."
We believe that FCC should have data management systems that allow it to generate this type of information automatically, reliably, and regularly. Therefore, we stand by our recommendation that FCC needs to improve how it collects and analyzes data on complaints received, investigations conducted, and enforcement actions taken because we do not believe that managing a program by reviewing 46,000 paper case files constitutes a good management practice.
Perhaps the GAO will next tackle the embarassing monstrosity that is the FCC's public website.
Verizon is set to announce today a bit of news that CNET's Marguerite Reardon covered almost two months ago: a plan to deploy technology that facilitates P2P applications.
Verizon will use methods developed by the P4P Working Group within the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) that allow broadband service providers to minimize the bandwidth burden of P2P protocols by 60% while speeding up P2P services by nearly a third. The techniques, developed by P2P tech provider Pando Networks and researchers at Yale University, help localize the content and minimize costs by using nearby Verizon customers as peers, cutting down on the global search for files that most P2P applications entail.
But, to accomplish the increased efficiencies, Verizon has to share information about its network with file-sharing companies, something that few other broadband service providers are probably willing to do. Moreover, even at efficiently reduced levels, P2P traffic can chew up a lot of bandwidth, which is the main concern by most other network operators.
Still, Verizon's embrace of a P2P-enabling solution might be the smarter strategy in the long run. It's not likely that the hundreds of P2P applications out there will ever disappear and content piracy is almost impossible to snuff out (one studio executive recently told me that it's like playing whack-a-mole.)
AT&T (ed. note: AT&T has been extensively with P4P. See post on 3/18/08.), Comcast and most of the other U.S. broadband service providers have sought to tamp down P2P usage through traffic shaping or other technology constraints. In the end, however, hackers will always be able to evade these kinds of technological barriers and, as Comcast's public battering attests, messing with the Internet makes consumers and public officials angry.
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