Policy Blog Entries by Art Brodsky

Sometime next year, the new Administration will start to figure out a plan for collecting information about where broadband is, and how to increase deployment. The delay will be necessary because while Congress passed the bill to improve broadband data collection, S. 1492, there isn’t any money actually set aside to pay for the program. Until appropriations bills are passed for the next fiscal year, FY 2010, which starts Oct. 1, 2009, there won’t be any money. As a result, it could be calendar year 2010 before any program gets going.

The bill is a worthwhile first step, because it puts Congress on record as wanting more information about broadband.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and the panel’s senior Republican, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, have asked trade negotiators not to make the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) too specific.

In an Oct. 2 letter to U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab, Leahy and Specter said they were concerned that the agreement was being drafted in such detail that it could limit congressional flexibility to deal with intellectual property and related issues in the future. The senators also said their concerns were compounded by the “lack of transparency” that goes along with trade agreements and by the speed of the negotiating process.

They also specifically asked Schwab to steer clear in the trade agreement of issues surrounding liability of Internet Service Providers and of technological protection measures.

As the institutions of Wall Street continue to crumble one after another, there’s a lesson to be learned for those of us who want to make sure the Internet remains as free and open in the future as it has been in the past.

The collapse of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, AIG and the rest didn’t happen overnight. The situation has been brewing for years. The subprime mortgage crisis may have precipitated the immediate tragedy, but underpinning the whole mess is a philosophy about business and government. That way of thinking posits that deregulation is the best path for the economy, and that government is best when it’s out of the way to let the private sector do what it wants. That’s the thinking that led to the collapse of the savings and loan industry in the 1980s, and was revived ten years later to apply more broadly to the financial industry.

Prior to setting a cap on the amount of bandwidth a high-volume customer could use before having service terminated, Comcast instead cut off a set number of users regardless of how much bandwidth they used, according to documents released by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum.

Comcast announced at the end of August that it would impose the 250 GB usage cap on subscribers that had been hinted at for weeks. The cap, which takes effect Oct. 1, appears to cover uploaded material and downloads, given that Comcast’s example included the number of digital photos that could be uploaded.

In announcing the cap on its Web site, Comcast said: “We’ve listened to feedback from our customers who asked that we provide a specific threshold for data usage and this would help them understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive.” Comcast made its announcement on Aug.

Former eBay president and CEO Meg Whitman’s speech to the Republican National Convention on Wed. night (Sept. 3) was notable for what it didn’t say. Whitman is a giant in her field. She was the head of one of the largest, most successful, most culture-changing companies to emerge since the modern Internet came into existence.

She made lots of money for eBay and from eBay. That was why her speech was so disappointing. The word, “Internet” didn’t appear once. Neither did “innovation” or “technology.” She talked about the economy and lowering taxes and creating jobs and took some political shots at the Democratic ticket. But there was not one word for the medium that vaulted her and her company into American business history, the medium that is the greatest vehicle for innovation and consumer empowerment we have.

It wasn’t always this way.

Thanks to Comcast and Verizon/AT&T, we now know a little more about the limits of “unlimited.”

Comcast announced that, starting Oct. 1, it will impose a 250 GB cap on usage. At the moment, the announcement is relatively benign, although there are lots of dangers lurking in the weeds.

Comcast has long complained that it needs to engage in legitimate “network management,” as opposed to the management techniques the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) found not to be so legitimate. One of the meat-cleaver approaches would be to lower the demands on the network as a whole. However, this new cap doesn’t appear to help Comcast meet its network management challenges.

It didn’t take Comcast long to run away from its latest embarrassment. On Wednesday, Comcast Senior Vp Mitch Bowling told Bloomberg News that in an effort to control traffic, Comcast might slow down the transmission of packets from its heaviest users by “10 minutes to 20 minutes.” Here’s the story. PC Magazine had the same story.

If all goes as we anticipate, a new era for the Internet could begin on Aug. 1, 2008. On that day, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is expected to decide that Internet users have rights under the communications law.

This is a spectacular victory, because not long ago the thought that a Bush Administration FCC would actually enforce its 2005 principles for an open Internet would have been laughable. The principles were the product of intense negotiations around an order that took telephone company DSL service out from under the protections of the Communications Act that protected consumers for 70 years. Democratic Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein got the principles as the best deal they could get at the time from FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.

Now, thanks to circumstance and hard work, the Commission will make those principles into something concrete and meaningful.

The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) rulemaking on collecting broadband data has brought some of the critics of Connect Kentucky/Connected Nation to the fore, while challenging the semi-sacred status of the “public-private partnership.”

In recent comments filed with the Commission, the arguments on who should map broadband deployment fall into two categories. One side is those of Connect and its allies in the telephone companies, cable companies and labor. The other is the one made up of public agencies and publicly owned utilities which are wary of too much of the “private” side taking over the equation. The Kentucky Public Service Commission (PSC) and the American Public Power Association (APPA), led by their Kentucky members, are in the forefront.

Over the next couple of days, thousands of online activists will gather in Austin for the Netroots Nation conference. This is the former Yearly Kos meeting, an extension of the Daily Kos progressive blog.

There are scheduled caucuses for Open Left Readers and Geeks and Texans and Moms, and sessions on how to use social networking tools in campaigns. There are panels on how the Internet could be used for transparency in government, how the Internet has affected campaigns and lobbying, to discussions of science, space and food policy. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) will be there, as will Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD) and retired Gen. Wesley Clark.

All of the speeches and 99.99% of the panels and discussions will be about how to the Internet is being used, and should be used. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s fabulous that activists want to make the most out of the online medium.