Spend the coin to push broadband to just about every home, wholesale only and open to any ISPs for resale.

Despite protestations to the contrary I think they’ll use this power to disadvantage content from competitors, since the own a large chunk of copyrights to movies and music consumed in the US. I don’t think they’ll manage their networks for the good of their customers. They’ll do what corporate America always does, maximize their profits by choking off competition, then use those inflated profits to change the rules and regulatory environment to further inflate their profits.

Sadly, this decision leaves the ball in Congress’ court. I seriously doubt they’ll do the right thing and protect the freedom of the internet.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday dealt a sharp blow to the efforts of the Federal Communications Commission to set the rules of the road for the Internet, ruling that the agency lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks…

But Tuesday’s court ruling has far larger implications than just the Comcast case.

The ruling would allow Comcast and other Internet service providers to restrict consumers’ ability to access certain kinds of Internet content, such as video sites like Hulu.com or Google’s YouTube service, or charge certain heavy users of their networks more money for access.

Google, Microsoft and other big producers of Web content have argued that such controls or pricing policies would thwart innovation and customer choice.

Consumer advocates said the ruling, one of several that have challenged the F.C.C.’s regulatory reach, could also undermine all of the F.C.C.’s attempts to regulate Internet service providers and establish its authority over the Internet, including its recently released national broadband plan.

via Court Favors Comcast in F.C.C. ‘Net Neutrality’ Ruling – NYTimes.com.

The Federal Communications Commission is proposing an ambitious 10-year plan that will reimagine the nation’s media and technology priorities by establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network.

The plan, which will be submitted to Congress on Tuesday, is likely to generate debate in Washington and a lobbying battle among the telecommunication giants, which over time may face new competition for customers. Already, the broadcast television industry is resisting a proposal to give back spectrum the government wants to use for future mobile service.

The blueprint reflects the government’s view that broadband Internet is becoming the common medium of the United States, gradually displacing the telephone and broadcast television industries. It also signals a shift at the F.C.C., which under the administration of President George W. Bush gained more attention for policing indecency on the television airwaves than for promoting Internet access.

via Vast F.C.C. Plan Would Bring Net to More in U.S. – NYTimes.com.

Definitely an improvement….

People have wondered for years what Google might be up to with all that dark fiber it had bought up around the country. Now, we may have an answer: delivery of open-access, fiber-to-the-home Internet service at speeds of 1Gbps. That's right: 1Gbps.

via Your new ISP? Google launches 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home trial.

This is good news, as the US has been falling behind in the speed, penetration and cost of broadband. Our geography is partly to blame. We’re larger with large swaths of empty space compared to some of the European countries we’ve fallen behind. It’s more difficult and expensive here.

The other reason is I’ve yet to see anything resembling a cohesive national broadband strategy. If Washington wants to stimulate the economy by spening money on projects, accelerating the roll out of fiber to the home would be a great idea. It get construction types, who’ve been hard hit by by the economic downturn, back to work doing something useful that doesn’t lay the groundwork for another real estate bubble.

A third problem is a lack of real competition. I have exactly two broadband providers to choose from. Their prices are within pennies of being identical. One of them blocks inbound port 80, which prevents me from running my little web server. So I go with the one I’ve always had. Some choice there.

The open access part is important. The Comcasts, Cablevisions and Time-Warners of the world really want to be able to control what you have access to over the internet. They want their content to get priority and competitors content to be slowed or stopped entirely. I am a fan of net neutrality. It should be at the heart of a national broadband strategy.

I really believe that the fiber backbone should be a public resource, like the interstate highways, and free from mucking about by ISPs who want to raise their profits by controlling access. I really don’t know if Google is really committed to net neutrality, or if this is part of their master plan to rule the world.

In my lifetime I’ve seen a revolution in information. I can’t wait to see what becomes possible with 1Gbps fiber to home. What new apps and services can be built on that? I dunno, but I’d sure like to see.

A federal lawsuit against the major music labels calls them a cartel which has banded together illegally to fix the prices of digital music. A New York appeals court has ruled the case can proceed.

via Digital music prices: are they illegally fixed?.

History suggests copyright crusade is a lost cause – Ars Technica
The fundamental lesson is that property rights are not—and never have been—created by Congressional fiat. Property rights emerge spontaneously from the social fabric of a community. The job of the legislature is not to create a property system from scratch, but to formalize the property arrangements that communities have already agreed upon among themselves. A system of property rights will only be effective if it is widely viewed as legitimate.

If copyrights are a form of property right, then the history of American property rights provides clues about how the copyright system will need to evolve in the future. It suggests that Congress’s current strategy of imposing ever more draconian penalties for breaking laws that lack broad public support is a recipe for failure. Congress may be forced to concede, as it did two centuries ago, that property law must accommodate the actions of ordinary Americans, and not the other way around.

The LA Times published  an op-ed piece about this last month.

Anyone who would trust the government on this is a deluded fool

“With a show that’s as deep and rich and such a part of the American zeitgeist as ‘The Daily Show,’ just having it live as a section of ComedyCentral.com doesn’t do it justice,” Mr. Flannigan said.

I strongly agree. The show’s parent company, MTV, opened the entire 8 year history of the show in an online archive found here. Wouldn’t it be cool if all recorded TV shows were as available? This is one of the real strengths of the internet, freely available content. I’m sure it will generate add revenue and support itself.

Why? I have exactly 1 phone company, and 1 cable company offering broadband to my house. I’m not in the boonies. How is this enough competition? If the incumbents aren’t forced to share they won’t. period.

Broadband is a natural monopoly, rife with market failure and barriers to entering the market. It needs government regulation to prevent the kind of stagnation that’s normal here, but not in Korea, Japan and Canada. That’s why they have higher rates of broadband penetration and are moving more rapidly into higher speeds than here in the US. Monopolies do not lend themselves to innovation and innovation is where the future is.

Victorious RIAA defendant gets attorneys’ fees, turns to class-action plans
In his order awarding Andersen attorneys’ fees, US Magistrate Judge Donald C. Ashmanskas noted that he had to make a decision on this case “without ever addressing the merits of the claims or the counterclaims.” Despite that, Judge Ashmanskas noted that there had been a “material alteration of the legal relationship of the parties,” and that with the sole exception of attorneys’ fees, Andersen had gotten “all the relief available to a defendant of a claim for copyright infringement.”

Judge Ashmanskas also cited the RIAA’s admission that the “evidence uncovered during discovery proved inconsistent and inconclusive,” a fact for which the labels could provide no explanation. He concludes that the RIAA lacked the prima facie evidence to support the claims of infringement.

“Whatever plaintiffs’ reasons for the manner in which they have prosecuted this case, it does not appear to be justified as a reasonable exploration of the boundaries of copyright law,” wrote the judge. “Copyright holders generally, and these plaintiffs specifically, should be deterred from prosecuting infringement claims as plaintiffs did in this case.”

As deadline looms, Senate still debating fate of Internet tax moratorium
The ban was originally instituted in 1998 and prohibited local and state governments from collecting tax on various types of Internet connection services (ISPs, etc.). This was done out of concern that a tax on Internet connections, particularly broadband, would significantly slow its adoption rate in the US and keep certain citizens disconnected for good. The moratorium was extended in 2004 for three more years; that act represented a compromise between those who wanted to extend it permanently and those who wanted a shorter extension. At that time, however, taxes on VoIP services were approved due to growing concern over losing tax revenue from Internet-based phone services.

Naturally, ISPs favor a more permanent ban, as lower fees paid to the government would mean broader adoption and hence greater revenues. In May, Verizon VP of State Tax Policy Annabelle Canning testified in favor of a permanent ban: “At a time when state and local economic development experts are touting broadband as critical to economic competitiveness, new taxes on Internet access could have a chilling effect on broadband investment,” said Canning. The National Governors Association, on the other hand, favors a shorter extension along with a clause that would grandfather in states that had already been allowed to collect Internet taxes in 1998—without such a clause, the Association argues that those states will lose up to $120 million per year in tax revenues under McCain’s proposal.

Japan’s Warp-Speed Ride to Internet Future – washingtonpost.com
Perhaps more important, competition in Japan gave a kick in the pants to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT), once a government-controlled enterprise and still Japan’s largest phone company. With the help of government subsidies and tax breaks, NTT launched a nationwide build-out of fiber-optic lines to homes, making the lower-capacity copper wires obsolete.

“Obviously, without the competition, we would not have done all this at this pace,” said Hideki Ohmichi, NTT’s senior manager for public relations.

His company now offers speeds on fiber of up to 100 megabits per second — 17 times as fast as the top speed generally available from U.S. cable. About 8.8 million Japanese homes have fiber lines — roughly nine times the number in the United States.

The burgeoning optical fiber system is hurtling Japan into an Internet future that experts say Americans are unlikely to experience for at least several years.

How did this clown get put in charge of regulating the internet?  While some ignorance of the internet from an octogenarian is to be expected you would expect that a committee staffer would gently guide him away from such obvious stupidity. He needs to be protected from himself, hide the knives and forks in the Senate Dining room. More importantly, we need protestion from him. He reminds me of Uncle Junior from HBO’s The Sopranos. Senile and more than just a little dangerous. Is there a nice Alaskan retirement home willing to take Sen. Stevens?

The internet is arguably the apex of human technological development, the most complex and paradigm-changing invention so far in the history of homo sapiens. And what do we mostly use it for? Porn, Justin Timberlake downloads, and penny stock scams. Makes you proud, doesn’t it?

On look at my inbox and I’m ready to go back to real letters. At least junk snail mail never caused my house to crash.

And this doddering twit is in charge of regulating the Internet?

This is the take on net neutrality from one of the inventors of the web. He puts it forth in a simple clear form, protecting interoperatability protects the internet. He frames the argument in this way: “Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it.”

I’m not sure freedom of connection is under attack, but the idea of vesting more control in telcos makes me uncomfortable because I simply don’t trust them to do what’s best. I trust them to do what returns value to their shareholders and that is almost certainly not in the interests of consumers. The have a long history of ignoring what’s best for consumers and a vested interest in controlling as much of the information on the internet as possible.

I fall back on my basic rule with telcos: “If they favor something, chances approach 100% that it will result in consumers giving telcos more money. Therefore, consumers should oppose it.” Telcos are inveterate oligopolists (monopolists if given half a chance), and that hurts the free functioning of a market resulting in higher prices.

Robert D. Atkinson and Philip J. Weiser make a cogent argument counseling a compromise in the increasingly strident net neutrality debate. The gist of their proposal is:

1. Require broadband providers to “state clearly to what extent content and services enjoy preferential delivery opportunities and any limitations on the ability of consumers to access the content and services of their choice.”

2. Take an anti-trust like appoach to regulation. “Congress should charge the FCC with the responsibility of overseeing the use of discriminatory access arrangements to make sure that any such arrangements do not harm competition (and consumers).”

3. Create financial incentives with strings attached “to companies investing in broadband networks (allowing first-year expensing of broadband investments and exempting broadband services from federal, state, and local taxation), but only if broadband providers provide a best-efforts, open Internet data pipe to their customers with average speeds at least as fast as the evolving FCC definition.”

It seems to me like a much more nuanced approach that balances supporting investments in next genration broadband without allowing anti-competitive discriminatory behavior. It also enforces the clear statement of policies that would allow the market to decide what policies are appropriate.

The focus now moves to the senate where there may be less support for the telcos agenda. The telcos are not the friend of consumers. Some part of the bill are not bad, but net neutrality needs to be codified into law.

TechWeb | News | Net Neutrality Finds Bipartisan Support