Posted by: Bob Quinn on February 18, 2011 at 12:02 pm
So, yesterday afternoon, Level 3 filed a three-page, single spaced letter to FCC Chairman Genachowski explaining to him that he didn’t really mean that the Comcast/Level 3 dispute is not covered by the FCC’s recently announced net neutrality rules and the press got it wrong.
To do that, Level 3 set forth, in quotes, its version of the exchange between Congresswoman Blackburn and Chairman Genachowski and then dissected each word to conclude that the Chairman had left himself enough wiggle room for people to understand that this was not a peering dispute (wrong); that the Commission does not have the facts before it that would allow the agency to determine that this is a peering relationship (wrong again – what was in the 15 filings – yes, 15 separate filings – on this issue that Level 3 has made at the FCC if not “facts”?); that Level 3 is not asking for regulatory intervention into other services beyond the rules’ limited scope of consumer and small business broadband Internet access service (wrong a third time – Level 3 is not seeking broadband Internet access from Comcast and neither Comcast nor Level 3 is a consumer or small business); and that Level 3 is not asking for price regulation (the grand slam of wrong – Comcast wants to charge $X and Level 3 wants to pay $0. It’s all about the rate).
Despite Level 3’s strenuous efforts to spin Chairman Genachowski’s comments, his answer to Congresswoman Blackburn’s question should have made it clear to everyone that the FCC does not plan to insert itself into what the Chairman correctly described as “a commercial dispute” between companies like Level 3 and Comcast.
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Posted by: AT&T Blog Team on February 17, 2011 at 12:30 pm
By Jeff Brueggeman, AT&T Vice President of Public Policy
Last week, the FCC officially launched the secret weapon in getting us to 100% broadband, its Universal Service Fund (USF) and Intercarrier Compensation (ICC) reform effort.
Coincidently, this week, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) released (on time and on budget) its National Broadband Map. The map shows us the geographic areas where wireline and wireless broadband services are available, at the census block level, zooming in to get a fairly detailed look at where broadband exists and where it doesn’t. Additionally, the NTIA map will be searchable by address and show the broadband providers offering service in the corresponding Census Block.
The bottom line is that NTIA is producing the most detailed map of broadband coverage the country has ever had.
Harold Feld over at Public Knowledge has summarized the who, what, when, where and how of the National Broadband Map, so I won’t cover the details of how we got here. Harold also offers some opinions and predictions about how the map will be criticized in some quarters, but ultimately he concludes that the map will be useful.
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Posted by: Bob Quinn on February 16, 2011 at 7:43 am
I was watching Almost Famous last week with my fifteen-year-old son, Matt. In one of the scenes, William Mitchell (the Cameron Crowe character) is furiously typing up his story for Rolling Stone magazine on an electric typewriter in his bedroom. Matt watched for a moment, turned to me and said, “What is THAT.” I laughed and explained to him the amusing story of life before personal computers.
It reminded me about all of the changes that technology has wrought and how my perspective of technology is different than my parents but also different than my kids’ perspectives. It is unfortunate that the same cannot be said for our regulatory system in the United States.
Where each successive generation of technology yields to its replacement, some approaches to regulation fail to yield to new realities and attempt to stop the clock sometime back in 1984, refusing to acknowledge that anything has changed since the breakup of the Bell System. This dichotomy was really brought home to me over the last couple of weeks.
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