MySpace users greeted the FCC’s new channel on the social networking site with profanity and off-color rants. Several left comments protesting censorship. The channel, unveiled last week, also allows users to read commission blog posts and view videos. An agency spokesman said Friday that the agency has “moderation policies for blog and ideascale comments, and are applying those principles to MySpace while we draft a moderation policy specific to that site.” Policies on the other FCC sites prohibit threats, obscenity and encouraging illegal activity, among other things. The FCC’s move to MySpace was criticized in a blog post Friday by Progress & Freedom Foundation President Adam Thierer. “I mean, shouldn’t someone over there have known it would take about 2 milliseconds for various cranks to launch into profanity-laced rants that would make George Carlin blush?” he said. An industry official said the MySpace page “offered a much needed chuckle on a rainy Friday.”
Adam Bender
Adam Bender, Senior Editor, is the state and local telecommunications reporter for Communications Daily, where he also has covered Congress and the Federal Communications Commission. He has won awards for his Warren Communications News reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists, Specialized Information Publishers Association and the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. Bender studied print journalism at American University and is the author of dystopian science-fiction novels. You can follow Bender at WatchAdam.blog and @WatchAdam on Twitter.
NTIA and RUS sought comment Tuesday on how to change their broadband stimulus programs to deal with complaints by applicants and members of Congress. The agencies also said the two planned funding rounds remaining will be combined. The actions had been widely expected, but some observers said they were surprised by how comprehensively the agencies are taking up concerns and complaints.
Section 271 interconnection prices charged by Qwest, AT&T and Verizon are unreasonable and unlawful, said a coalition of competitive carriers that rely on the incumbents’ unbundled network elements. In a petition Monday, CompTel, Sprint Nextel, TW Telecom and six other competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) urged the FCC to adopt rules guiding enforcement of the big carriers’ Section 271 obligations under the 1996 Telecom Act. USTelecom condemned the petition as unnecessary and counterproductive to the commission’s promotion of broadband.
The FCC’s National Broadband Plan should empower broadband efforts by municipalities, said the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors and other local government authorities, responding to the FCC’s seventh public notice for the plan, on the roles of federal, state, tribal and local government. Other commenters compared municipal broadband to city electric systems built decades ago. But Qwest and some rural carriers warned that public-owned networks could impede broadband deployment in many areas.
Serving people with disabilities must be a high priority of U.S. broadband policy, said FCC Commissioners Michael Copps, Mignon Clyburn and Robert McDowell, during a commission field hearing at Gallaudet University, a school in D.C. for people with impaired hearing. “It’s not just something nice for us to do,” said Copps, who hosted the event. “It’s their right. … Access denied is opportunity denied.” Marlee Matlin, an actress who has won an Academy Award and is deaf, called for closed captioning in video media streaming online. The hearing followed an FCC order late Thursday clearing up outstanding technical issues related to the Nov. 12 transition of Internet-based telecom relay services to 10-digit phone numbers.
The FCC laid the groundwork for an investigation into special access, issuing a public notice late Thursday “on an appropriate analytical framework” for reviewing issues raised in the commission’s long-pending proceeding. Chairman Julius Genachowski announced the notice last month in a letter to Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii (CD Oct 9 p1). Meanwhile, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile and others renewed their attack on special access charges in comments at the commission as part of its broadband investigation. Comments were due Wednesday on National Broadband Plan Public Notice No. 11, on the impact of middle- mile access on broadband availability and deployment.
Government should fund a competition for ISPs to win low-income consumers who have yet to adopt broadband, said Information Technology & Innovation Foundation President Robert Atkinson at an ITIF forum. In a report released Thursday, ITIF suggested that NTIA give $250 per new customer to the ISP that signs the most new subscribers in a low- income census tract in a single year. Under the approach, increasing broadband subscribership by 5 percent would cost $970 million, estimated Atkinson. A key advantage of the idea is that money would only be spent after a new customer signed up for broadband, maximizing accountability, he said. And the approach relies on market competition, encouraging “people out in the field [to] figure out the best way to do this,” he said. John Horrigan, the FCC broadband team’s consumer research director, said the proposal is “an interesting and provocative idea.” It could be improved by rewarding consumers in addition to ISPs, he said. For example, ISPs could reward customers who bring in other new low-income users to the fold, he said. Key to spurring adoption is “cultivating a social infrastructure around adoption and new adopters so that they really start to use the technology,” Horrigan said. Many consumers adopt technologies after hearing about it from a peer, he said. Atkinson said broadband adoption won’t happen on its own because people won’t want to pay what they do for a more critical public utility like electricity, and the technology is much tougher for new users to understand than telephony. “I don’t know anyone who would say a computer is a simple technology.”
The FCC could adopt an order this week approving AT&T’s $944 million purchase of Centennial, an eighth-floor official said Tuesday. Chairman Julius Genachowski circulated a draft order last week that includes conditions consistent with commitments made by AT&T last month, and commissioners aren’t expected to get hung up in a long negotiation, the official said. The chairman appears intent on finishing the order by the deal’s one-year anniversary on Saturday, the source said.
Big phone companies urged the FCC to reject a petition on broadband data collection by state regulators. The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners had asked the commission to decide that federal rules don’t limit states’ collecting information from broadband service or infrastructure providers (CD Sept 30 p10). But in comments this week, AT&T, Verizon and USTelecom said the proposed rule would represent an unwarranted expansion of state authority.
The FCC is discussing ways to step up the agency’s involvement in cybersecurity matters, but it isn’t seeking to broaden its responsibilities, said Public Safety & Homeland Security Bureau spokesman Robert Kenny. The commission collected big phone companies’ opinions in a meeting last month (CD Oct 27 p10). So far, industry officials have revealed no concerns.