October 26, 2005
Business Week has an interview with FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.
As he waits for the White House to fill vacancies that will give him a
Republican majority, the FCC chief is now set to approve the historic
mergers of SBC and AT&T, and of Verizon and MCI, by as early as the
end of October (see BW Online, 8/31/05, "So Long, AT&T? Not So Fast").
Then, he tackles an ever-thornier set of issues, ranging from indecent
broadcasts to the rewrite of the telecom laws. Martin discussed
upcoming issues with BusinessWeek's Washington correspondent, Catherine Yang, on Oct. 12. Below are edited excerpts of that conversation.
What do you want to accomplish most during your tenure?
The Commission's top priority is broadband deployment and to make sure
other new technologies are deployed as quickly as possible.
Are you troubled that the U.S. ranks No. 16 in the world in broadband penetration?
It
should be a concern of the Commission to make sure that broadband
technologies -- both wire-line and wireless -- be deployed as quickly
as possible.
When you compare where we stand internationally, you have to take
into account that we have very large sections of the country that are
rural and where it costs more to deploy (see BW Online, 6/28/05, "Good for Cable, Bad for America").
For example, Massachusetts and Japan have about the same population
density. Massachusetts is ahead of Japan in broadband penetration. But
that doesn't mean there's not more we can do.
Should broadband providers have to pay into the universal service
fund, which taps long-distance fees to subsidize phone service for
rural and low-income households?
What I advocate is moving to a technology-neutral way of collecting
universal service funds. Telephone numbers are technology-neutral.
Whether you're a wire-line provider, wireless provider, or new VOIP
provider, [your customers] need a telephone number. [By assessing
charges per phone number,] we're could [put a system in place to]
collect money from consumers regardless of which technology they use.
One hot regulatory issue involves the efforts of phone companies to
win approval from local cable-franchising authorities to provide TV
services over fiber networks. Do you favor a broad granting of
authority allowing phone companies to go ahead?
Local franchising authorities have the responsibility of granting
access to their communities. But the 1992 Cable Act says local
franchising authorities are not allowed to [unreasonably prevent]
second entrants [in a market] from coming (see BW Online, 9/28/05, "Verizon's Muddy TV Picture"). The Commission may hold a proceeding to see if we have a role in [the franchise approval process].
Why have you taken such a strong stand to require Internet phone
providers to link up to 911 operators -- at a time when many warn of
saddling new technologies with too much regulation?
There's nothing we can do that's more important than making sure new
communications services don't leave people unconnected with emergency
personnel.
Many of the FCC policies completely baffle me.
The Bush administration says they want to offer ubiquitous broadband and plans to open of 90 Mhz of spectrum (see DW: President Wants 90MHz), which will be auctioned next June. The spectrum, at 1710-1755 MHz and 2110-2155 MHz, will be broken up in smaller geographic portions in order for smaller carriers to bid on them.
Sounds good. But duplex 5Mhz channels sound like a sweet deal for UMTS-based
Cingular. How does that help inexpensive broadband wireless? It sounds like a bad play.
The buyout and elimination of 2.3 GHz broadband wireless by XM radio is another issue. Then there's the domination of licensed 2.5 GHz by Sprint/Nextel, the power limitation of 5.4GHz (made available by the efforts of Senator Barbara Boxer), the elimination of telco DSL competition, the limitations of 3.5GHz, silence on attempts to ban virtually all municipal networks, the elimination of unlicensed 700 Mhz, a screwed up DTV system, and the
general lack of affordable broadband and competition in the United
States.
What kind of broadband policy is that?
Sucking up to SBC is good for America?
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unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
Featured Project
Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.
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