Tag Archive: “FCC”

Invitation to Regulate

Posted in society by Adam

16 December 201712 October 2021

The vote to scuttle the open internet rules is an invitation to congress: regulate. While there will be litigation over the FCC’s disregard for public comment, including potential violations of the Administrative Procedures Act, it is clear that leaving the rules up to the FCC is insufficient.

Expect that the battle lines will be drawn in 2018. Democrats will overwhelmingly support regulation. Republicans will have their stand-outs, but will generally not.

The Democrats can now run on a bevy of related matters, like the need for affordable broadband, the utility of the internet (Mr. Pai seems to believe it’s all memes and streaming video), and the ongoing problem of regulatory capture and anti-competitive actions by major corporations. That’s piling on other unpopular legislative actions, including the bizarre tax bills and the failed, sadistic attempts to change healthcare.

Once again, Republicans have shown themselves unaware of the risk of their choices. At each turn, they set up another trap for themselves.

But for the modern American netizen, that’s still a ways off. We will see how swiftly the ISPs begin to abuse their powers. We will await the leaks that show they’ll ignore the transparency requirements or try to be as vague as possible in their filings. “Blocking traffic that interferes with traffic,” or some other such idiocy (like blocking access to their own transparency reporting pages).

The basic bad bet here was that net activism won’t translate into votes and that the ISPs won’t piss off enough people to make a difference at the polls. But with the momentum for the Democrats, even if both of those are true, it may not matter.

Set-top Competition is the Medicine Cable Needs

Posted in biz by Adam

22 October 201624 February 2017

The very FCC plan that the cable industry resists is exactly what it needs.

The FCC has been trying, after last decades attempts fell flat, to open the set-top box market to competition. Cable companies make a lot of money off of forcing subscribers to rent boxes, which are often underperforming and ill-equipped to serve the modern video consumption habit.

Cable is in a bad position as streaming continues to expand, with advertising and subscriber revenues expected to continue falling. The one thing that could help the market transition smoothly, the advent of the all-comer hardware device, is being actively resisted by the industry that needs it the most.

The proposal was already corrupted in a switch from an API-based model where access comes to the companies to an App-based model where the companies go to the devices. Now it is stalled completely.

The cable company is protecting its box rental revenue and its subscriber revenue at a time when it has enough of both to take a hit and resettle its place in the content delivery field. Instead, as entrenched industries are wont to do, it is fighting against the inevitable. It will see its revenues dwindle anyway, and its corpses (or at least the cable-related appendages; the ISP parts may survive) will then be swallowed by the new generation of media companies.

It is the same sort of short-sighted behavior that threatens our planet when major energy conglomerates don’t buy into the next generation of renewable energy. We may not see the pattern repeated with the auto industry, but that will likely depend on how fast they can merge as fleets of autotaxis become the norm.

What is clear is that the Republican seats on the FCC are actively blocking competition, which is antithetical to the Republican charge that free markets rule. The anti-regulation strain of so-called conservativism is stronger than the free market strain, when the two principles find themselves in opposition.

The lack of easy, integrated media devices will continue to drive consumers away from cable, as most streaming services are available through a single device. Media consumption is largely a social behavior, with people watching content those around them also watch. A generation is growing up without caring about traditional content delivery, and cable is basically ignoring that and fighting against a shift that’s already happening.

The best choice for cable would be to embrace the FCC’s original plan, lobby for the door to be two-way (allowing them to support streaming content on their own hardware offerings), and fight to make the best interface they can at the best price they can. They could even try to strike some subscription deals with streaming services, offering their subscribers the ability to add streaming packages in exchange for a finder’s fee.

Unfortunately, the bigwigs in the cable companies think that this is a very different year, where they can afford to weather the storm. They are betting that the unfathomable will come to pass and their ship will magically right itself. They are foolish for thinking this.

The Closing Web

Posted in hyperweb by Adam

17 May 2014

Some thoughts on EME in Firefox and the FCC’s now-proposed rules for regulating ISPs.

Taking a break from discussing the FDA’s proposed deeming regulations to talk about the now-released FCC proposal for regulating ISPs and the announcement by Mozilla that they will ship EME (Encrypted Media Extensions).

EMEs in Fx

First, what will Firefox include? They will include the W3C’s EME standard for HTML5 video. This standard effectively says that an implementing browser includes a plug or a mount for DRM. The browser doesn’t have to include DRM directly (though it appears a browser vendor could ship it directly).

Think of it like a car, and because of car theft, a trade group passes a rule requiring members to include remote-controlled self-destruct mechanisms in their cars. Except they didn’t require the car makers to build-in the actual explosives. They just have to provide a place to put the explosives and the remote-detonation functionality to blow the car up if someone installs the explosives.

And then let’s say that all the fast food drive-thrus said you can’t buy our food unless you have the self-destruct system enabled. That’s you going to ACME Entertainment and streaming the movie, getting the popup that says, “please install this EME plugin.”

We’ve seen this before, with codecs. Mozilla resisted including H.264 because it’s a proprietary codec that isn’t available for all systems. But other major vendors paid for it and shipped it without blinking, and sites put videos out in H.264. Mozilla did what they felt they could, but eventually began relying on operating system support for H.264.

Mozilla is a large organization, risk averse. They do not want to see other browsers force them into a less influential position, potentially causing even more harm to the web. So they run the numbers, hold their nose, and compromise if they think it’s a bad path that may let them get to a better place to fight tomorrow. In other words, they see the risk of DRM entrenchment as less likely or less harmful than Firefox being left behind by users who increasingly watch video in a browser.

DRM serves no real purpose, and at-best represents a gris-gris for parts of the entertainment industry that do not innovate adequately. Valve Software and some other video game creators, are just starting to recognize the economic benefits of openness and artistic community. These are promising signs. As the lines blur of the lines between video games and film/television, it is expected that other industries will follow and that DRM will become rarer and rarer.

FCC’s NPRM: “Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet”

The actual proposal (FCC: PDF: 15 May 2014: Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet) only contains a few rules:

Transparency
No Blocking
No Commercially Unreasonable Practices

The rules that aren’t yet proposed have raised the public’s ire. The proposal requests comments on a variety of issues, taking a “we’ll make the rules later” approach. Early on in the proposal (p. 3) the FCC acknowledges two paths seem viable (sec. 706 and Title II) and they want comments on the best way forward.

Currently the FCC classifies ISPs as information services, and the court that struck down the previous rules said, obiter dictum, that they did not believe section 706 would allow for certain regulations unless the FCC reclassified ISPs. This is not a binding ruling, but should be taken as weight against merely trying to shoehorn non-common-carriers into regulations under section 706.

If you read the definitions of both “information services” and “telecommunications services” I think it’s clear which ISPs should be classified as. Despite the claim of ISPs that they will refrain from innovation if classified as common carriers, they should still be so classified.

If we need “fast lanes” they can be done through some alternate arrangement that is voluntary by the information service, rather than mandated by an ISP (similar to how you can have expedited shipping by a common carrier). Or the ISPs can negotiate for a new classification by statute that will include, e.g., mandatory progress and innovation, restrictions on operating as an ISP and line owner and media company simultaneously, etc.

Currently, the only meaningful way forward seems to be for the FCC to classify ISPs as telecommunication services subject to common carrier rules.