You can listen to me on Marketplace Morning Report or read these stories: Baltimore Sun or WRAL-Raleigh, NC. I hear Best Buy is claiming our data are old and things have changed! Well, we re-validated our fall results in January-- same results, including at several Best Buy stores. More recently, meaning this week, Best Buy and other retailers have announced improved education campaigns for their staff and the public. That's great-- and it is probably due to relentless pressure from Jonathan Adelstein, Ed Markey, U.S. PIRG and others. We released preliminary data from this study at two Congressional hearings last fall.

Yesterday Microsoft put big money into a $44 billion bid for Yahoo, in an acknowledgment of the competitive threat to its longtime computer hegemony posed by the Googleplex. While Microsoft had stayed on top largely due to clever marketing of what most consider average products bolstered by a variety of controversial and even anti-competitive business practices, it had never figured out the Internet. No problem, they'll buy part of it. A big chunk, as Steve Lohr explains in the New York Times story Yahoo Offer Is Strategy Shift for Microsoft. The deal at $31 per share is 62% above Yahoo's current price of around $19.

Our colleagues Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy and Professor Joe Turow of the University of Pennsylvania's Annandale School for Communication have issued strong statements. Here's Professor Turow's statement in its entirety:

"Microsoft's decision to buy Yahoo! is a direct result of the decision by the FTC to allow Google to purchase DoubleClick. It is further evidence that despite the appearance of unlimited choice in the new media environment, people's activities will be tracked and shaped by a very small number of companies who care far more about surveillance and targeted advertising than the public interest. The federal government, which should have been the guardian of the public interest, has dropped the ball."

In November 2006, the Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group petitioned the FTC to open up an antitrust investigation into the growing consolidation of the online ad business. We asked the FTC to impose competition safeguards in the Google/DoubleClick deal. The FTC failed to do both and has now placed consumers and competitors at risk.

House Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell (D-MI) and Republican ranking member Joe Barton (R-TX) joined by bi-partisan Oversight and Investigations subcommittee leaders have sent FCC Chairman Kevin Martin a formal announcement of "an investigation into Federal Communications Commission regulatory procedures to determine whether they are being conducted in a fair, open, efficient and transparent manner." The brief letter warns of federal laws concerning Congressional oversight authority and whistleblower rights and is a prelude to an anticipated data dump request. Such "Dingell-grams" are neither sought after nor desired by federal bureaucrats.

Recent actions by Martin, most notably what fellow FCC commissioner Michael Copps has called his "rush to judgment" on the media ownership and concentration rulemaking, have prompted increased bi-partisan and now bi-cameral scrutiny by Congress.

Michael Sorkin, who writes the Savvy Consumer column for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, points out in his story Naked DSL arrives -- but you'll get a better price next month that AT&T continues to do a sloppy, self-serving job offering the low-cost naked-DSL (no phone package required) broadband product that was required by the FCC as a condition of its competition-eliminating purchase/merger with BellSouth:

AT&T finally is offering "naked" Internet service to people without the company's landline phone service. Meanwhile, scores of angry customers say AT&T is still making it hard, if not impossible, to sign up for two nonadvertised money-saving services: $10 a month DSL and "uSelect3," one of the company's cheaper phone plans.

FCC chief Kevin Martin jammed his proposal to weaken media newspaper/television cross-ownership rules through a sharply divided FCC today on a 3-2 vote. Longtime consumer champion and dissident FCC Commissioner Michael Copps issued a long and extremely critical statement (excerpt):

Let's get beyond the weeds of corporate jockeying and inking up our rubber stamps for a new round of media consolidation to look for a moment at what we are not doing today. That's the real story, I think--that the important issues of minority and female ownership and broadcast localism and how they are being short-changed by today's rush to judgment.

Despite public and Congressional pressure, FCC chief Kevin Martin has not yet canceled today's scheduled vote on media ownership. Go to the PIRG backed StopBigMedia.com to take action. Yesterday, Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) along with Chairman Dan Inouye (D-HI) and ranking member Ted Stevens (R-AK) of the Senate Commerce Committee and 22 others sent Martin a letter threatening legislation to reverse any FCC action to weaken the rules today. The Martin proposal would partially lift a longstanding newspaper-television cross-ownership ban in local markets (Washington Post). The ban has helped preserve a media landscape with a diverse set of competing voices providing localized news and comment. The FCC, on a positive note, will at the meeting likely strengthen a cable television ownership cap.

On a voice vote yesterday, the Senate Commerce Committee approved PIRG-backed bi-partisan legislation by Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Trent Lott (R-MS), S 2322, to require FCC chairman Kevin Martin to slow his mad rush toward a vote to weaken the media ownership rules that protect localism and diversity of voices on publicly-owned airwaves. As Congress Daily reports:

"The measure would require the agency to first complete proceedings examining broadcaster commitments to local news and ownership opportunities for women and minorities before tackling any rule changes."

The FCC has several votes scheduled today on matters of public importance. The biggest is whether it will impose regulation on the behemoth cable industry under the 1984 rule known as 70/70. The PIRG-backed Media-Democracy Coalition is urging a yes vote on that proposal and also urging that the FCC protect the future viability of community-owned low power FM radio stations (our release). The key swing vote is longtime consumer champion Jonathan Adelstein.

From the story FCC Could Extend Reach To Cable TV by Frank Ahrens in the Washington Post.

A vote could begin a process resulting in a national cap on cable ownership, with no cable company allowed to have more than 30 percent of all U.S. subscribers, a ceiling that Comcast Communications is near. It could also reduce prices that cable companies could charge smaller or independent programmers to lease access on unused channels. The FCC has the authority to impose such regulations only if 70 percent of all U.S. households are able to subscribe to a cable service with at least 36 channels and if 70 percent of those households subscribe to such service. The first threshold was crossed years ago; nearly all U.S. homes are now "passed" by cable, to use the industry term.

Over the weekend the Baltimore Sun ran a toy safety column Give product safety agency more clout jointly signed by by Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler and Maryland PIRG's David Kosmos. Also, the Vermont Times Argus has Wireless phone monopoly a bad deal by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders as a followup to efforts by him, Vermont PIRG and Vermont's Lake Champlain Chamber of Commerce opposing efforts by the mega-monopoly Verizon to gobble up (one Thanksgiving pun is not too many) a wireless competitor.

A New York PIRG report "survey of 275 airline, travel-agency, hotel and car-rental Web sites found that many of them ask for an excessive amount of personal information in the process of making a sale." according to the story Warning issued on identity theft by Dan Osburn in the Ithaca Journal. Also check out NYPIRG's website cyberstreetsmart.org.

Meanwhile, in the green mountains across the Hudson, VPIRG and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders {I-VT) are challenging plans by the mega-behemoth Verizon to purchase Unicel, a smaller wireless provider. This week, in response to a petition from VPIRG, the FCC granted a 90 day extension of the comment period on the sale. From the story FCC extends sale of Unicel by Neal Goswami in the Bennington Banner:

Verizon announced in July that it wanted to acquire Unicel, owned by Rural Cellular Corp., a smaller company that serves mainly rural areas in Vermont and 14 other states in a $2.7 billion deal.

Burns said VPIRG is seeking conditions that would require Verizon Wireless to provide universal coverage of the state, allow Unicel customers to exchange their phones for comparable Verizon handsets, and commit to national pricing standards and reasonable roaming rates for the state. Sanders, who has also been pushing for those conditions, said the two companies are the only cell phone carriers with significant resources in Vermont. If Verizon is allowed to take over Unicel's customers it will create a "de facto monopoly" in the state that could have a negative impact on the state's economy, he said. "Vermonters must take a very close look at what a Verizon Wireless monopoly would mean in terms of progress towards universal service at reasonable prices," Sanders said Wednesday.

In an op-ed column The Daily Show in today's New York Times, FCC chair Kevin Martin makes his pitch for busting the long-standing newspaper-television cross-ownership ban, but only in large markets:

A company that owns a newspaper in one of the 20 largest cities in the country should be permitted to purchase a broadcast TV or radio station in the same market. But a newspaper should be prohibited from buying one of the top four TV stations in its community. In addition, each part of the combined entity would need to maintain its editorial independence.

Allowing cross-ownership may help to forestall the erosion in local news coverage by enabling companies that own both newspapers and broadcast stations to share some costs.

Despite FCC chief Kevin Martin's effort to stymie public participation with his last-minute announcement of the agency's final media ownership field hearing, as reform advocates at Reclaim the Media report:

LATE UPDATE: The Seattle FCC hearing was a phenomenal event. Over 1100 people from across the Northwest kept the Commissioners in their chairs from 4pm until 1am with articulate, often impassioned testimony opposing further ownership deregulation. More info after we get some sleep!

For those who say media ownership does not matter, I say look at one man from Seattle: Frank Blethen. His family has been here over a century. He owns the local newspaper [the Seattle Times], and he cares about this community. His newspaper gave this hearing the coverage it deserves every single day during this truncated advance notice period. And he had assistance on the ground from the dedicated and passionate advocacy of Jonathan Lawson and everyone at Reclaim the Media. If we let local voices like Frank Blethen's get bought up by voracious media giants looking to swallow up even more local outlets, voices like his will be snuffed out forever. Do you want big out-of-state companies to buy your newspapers and TV stations combined? Are you satisfied with your local media today? Do you think more consolidation is the answer?

It is a major departure for the agency and the industry, which was deregulated by an act of Congress in 1996. Officials say the finding could lead to more diverse programs; consumer groups say it could also lead to lower rates.

Concentrated absentee media ownership has resulted in "a disinvestment in journalism, causing serious erosion in America's public-policy literacy and civic engagement," Blethen said.

The PIRG-backed Stopbigmedia.com has links to the testimony of reform colleagues who testified at yesterday's poorly-advertised but well-attended FCC hearing on the lack of localism in the media, which hurts democracy. The Washington Post's Frank Ahrens has a story Critics Turn Out To Protest Media Consolidation that also mentions the successful rally outside, which featured champ U.S. Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), the Rev. Jesse Jackson and many others, including the "Prometheus Radio Project FCC Cheerleaders," a group with chants that appeared in full costume for Halloween. The story noted that "A dog wandered around wearing a sign reading "Big Media bites." That dog, Indy, is a U.S. PIRG four-legged advocate, she's owned by our consumer advocate Paul Brown. Also yesterday, the PIRG-backed Media and Democracy Coalition released survey findings that show strong public concern over media consolidation.

Taking a page from deposed predecessor Michael Powell's playbook, FCC chief Kevin Martin has announced a supposedly "public" hearing on localism in the media, for this Wednesday, October 31, Halloween, from 9-2pm. The venue -- his plush downtown offices convenient to the well-heeled communications lobbyists that court him, the time -- daytime, and the announcement itself -- late in the day just one short week in advance, were all designed to limit public participation. Along with Free Press, Consumers Union and the Stop Big Media Campaign, we're supporting a rally at the FCC at 9am Halloween morning. Take Metro to Smithsonian, get off on the Independence Ave. side, turn right off the escalator and go a few blocks to the FCC at 445 12th St SW and do the monster mash (Make the F in FCC stand for Frankenstein.) Print out this rally flyer from Stopbigmedia.com and pass it on. Consumer champions and FCC commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps put out a short statement criticizing Martin. Excerpt:

This is unacceptable and unfair to the public. And it makes putting together an expert panel nearly impossible. "Is the Commission serious about allowing the public to participate in the agency's decisionmaking? Or is the goal to be able to claim that hearings have been held, even if the public has
not had a chance to fully participate?"

U.S. PIRG staff attorney and telecom expert Amina Fazlullah testified Wednesday (her testimony, full hearing) on the consumer impacts of the so-called DTV transition before Rep. Ed Markey's (D-MA) Telecommunications subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Other witnesses included FCC chair Kevin Martin. We're concerned, as Amina's testimony points out, that many consumers will be left in the dark:

One other thing will happen on February 17, 2009. Every consumer who watches over-the-air TV with an analog set will have their set go dark. Including in the estimated 22 million consumers in this category are 8 million households with at least one member older than 50. The government is of course at least aware of this problem. Congress has allocated funding for an education program. The relevant agencies have required that manufacturers stop producing new analog televisions and that retailer properly label the remaining analog televisions at the point of sale. Congress has also allocated funding to provide coupons to help consumers pay for the necessary converter boxes to get their analog television sets to work again. Yet, based on preliminary U.S. PIRG research, which we will discuss today, neither government nor retailers are adequately preparing consumers for the impending DTV transition.

Steve LaBaton's lead story in the New York Times today -- Plan Would Ease Limits on Media Owners -- describes the troubling possibility that FCC chair Kevin Martin claims he's got the votes to allow further media consolidation, including elimination of the cross-ownership rules that guarantee that a town's biggest TV station and newspaper will compete with each other to uncover municipal chicanery and corporate crime, instead of being owned by the same firm. Under Martin's proposal, which has been opposed by a vast majority of the thousands of Americans who have attended field hearings on media ownership this year, the winners would be some media moguls (think, Rupert Murdoch) and the losers would be a marketplace of democratic ideas and the American people who want to read or hear them to make informed choices. From the story:

"This is a big deal because we have way too much concentration of media ownership in the United States," Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, said at a hearing on Wednesday called to examine the digital transition of the television industry. "If the chairman intends to do something by the end of the year," Mr. Dorgan added, his voice rising, "then there will be a firestorm of protest and I'm going to be carrying the wood."

No, they aren't altruists. They're still monopolists. But now that Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) has proposed legislation to rein in the worst practices of the companies consumers hate about as much as they hate the cable company, the wireless firms have realized they ought to offer some sop of consumer protection to derail her efforts. Their most heavily-criticized practice, and the subject of litigation in several states as an unconscionable practice, is locking you into a longterm contract with an early termination penalty. If your only choices when you complain about dropped calls, disputed items on your bill, or tricky and deceitful rate plan gimmickry are either to agree to a two-year extension and "we'll gladly fix that mistake" or, "don't like it, pay $200 to buy out your contract and walk," you're locked in a cell (recent PIRG report). Just the threat of the ETF (they call it a fee, not a penalty) allows them to have mediocre customer service in the first place. According to the Washington Post, AT&T, Verizon Loosen Cell Contracts: Changes Come as Senators Seek Prorated Cancellation Fees. Weird. Earlier this year, Chase and Citibank eliminated certain unfair credit card practices the very same day as Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) took them to the woodshed at a hearing. Maybe this new Congressional oversight concept that's been going on this year is worth continuing. Seems promising.

The New York Times reported late yesterday and in today's editions that the powerful telecommunications monopoly Verizon had last week blocked political text messages from NARAL Pro-Choice America. As of 10:30 AM, the Times is now reporting that Verizon Reverses Itself on Abortion Rights Messages. Verizon only "reversed course" after a fierce groundswell of opposition to its arrogant abuse of its many promises that it would abide by net neutrality (and its lobbying campaign that federal action to preserve Internet freedom or net neutrality was unnecessary). Here's Tim Karr of savetheinternet.com's blog entry at Huffington Post. This sorry episode of corporate abuse of power does not demonstrate that the market works; it demonstrates that the government needs to clearly assert net neutrality non-discrimination rules, so companies like Verizon can't pick and choose when they won't discriminate, based on how much heat they take in the press.

The FCC held the fifth of six planned public hearings on media ownership issues around the country last night in Chicago. Illinois PIRG, Consumers Union and Free Press worked hard along with local groups, including Rainbow/Push, to bring out the community. The event was successful (Chicago Tribune story, Buzz Flash), with most of the 800 attendees supporting a greater diversity of voices on publicly owned airwaves (less media ownership concentration). This event was intended to explain the need for that diversity of voices to include greater minority ownership.

Illinois PIRG and numerous Chicago area and national media reform groups (joint release) are preparing for the next FCC media ownership hearing, to be held in Chicago on September 20th.

And by the way, Free Press has announced that the next National Conference on Media Reform will be in Minneapolis next year from Friday-Sunday June 6-8. Make a note in your calendars. This is a not-to-be-missed event. Here's a link to some summary info from the Memphis NCMR in January 2007 and here are some photos from same.

Check out the Hearusnow.org blog for a post by Bob Williams on how the mega-monopoly AT&T appears to intentionally hide the availability of the

$10 a month Internet service the company was forced to begin offering to gain government approval of its megamerger with BellSouth last year.

When is the enemy of your enemy not your friend? When the two supposed antagonists -- Ma Bell and Big Cable -- are actually boon companions and fellow monopolists seeking to share a duopoly market with no consumer protections and at the consumer's and citizen's expense, of course. In this column, Bruce Speight of Wisconsin PIRG and Joel Kelsey of Consumers Union explain in the Green Bay Press-Gazette that, in enacting statewide cable franchise and broadband expansion legislation, the legislature should make sure that Consumers, not AT&T, should get favored status :

The dual goals of increased competition in the cable market and the expansion of broadband Internet service in Wisconsin are laudable. In today's connected world access to robust networks means much more than just the opportunity to watch cable television -- it means increased access to news, art, entertainment, and diverse marketplaces. Unfortunately, the so-called "cable competition" bill that is currently before the state Legislature is missing its opportunity to develop the video service marketplace in a way that truly benefits Wisconsinites.

The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic of the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law has asked Canadian competition authorities to undertake a similar review of the Google/DoubleClick merger as we and others have requested of the U.S. FTC:

In an application to the Competition Bureau, CIPPIC requests areview of the proposed merger between Google and DoubleClick. CIPPIC is concerned that the merger prevents or lessens competition substantially in the online targeted advertising market, as Google-DoubleClick will be able to manipulate the market to raise advertising prices and advertisers and web publishers will have to choose Google-DoubleClick in order to be visible in the e-commerce market.

In an open letter, last week, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) issued an invitation to the American people: In the letter Durbin said:

"I write this open letter to invite you to participate in an experiment -- an interactive approach to drafting legislation on one of the most significant public policy questions today: What should be America's national broadband strategy? . . . I am looking for the best and brightest ideas on what Congress should do to promote and foster broadband."

Tonight, and for the next several days, Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), the #2 man in the Senate, is conducting an experiment in direct democracy and taking a bit of a risk. He will spend the next week in real time blogging over potential legislation. No carefully crafted "town meeting" or managed event, and no showing up as a walrus a la Second Life. Just a chance for people to actually hash out issues with someone who will vote on these things in the Senate.

Whether it's your favorite college or indie station streaming on the web, or one of the new Internet-only stations like Pandora, Internet radio has given the American public a new and innovative outlet for news and music. Internet radio gives new musicians and new ideas a chance to grow and get around the choke-hold corporate broadcasters have over the airwaves. But it's under threat of a Copyright Royalty Board fee change scheduled to take effect next Monday, 15 July that could take all these outlets off the Internet and leave us at the mercy of the canned national playlists of a few media giants.

College students and other youth have long recognized the benefits of the diversity of musical choices on college, indie and Internet radio. That's why PIRG students, led by DC office summer interns Lauren Linville and Sarah Duncan, are part of a national campaign to save Internet radio. They've delivered over 2,000 student signatures collected in just the last few weeks, to Capitol Hill, in support of the bi-partisan "Internet Radio Equality Act of 2007" (H.R. 2060). You can still sign the petition. For more information, go to Savenetradio.org.

The long-awaited FTC staff report on net neutrality is out. In her statement, FTC chair Deborah Platt Majoras tells us "policy makers should be particularly hesitant to enact new regulation in this area." Actually, FTC, the Internet is too important to do nothing in the face of telecom monopoly threats. Telecom leaders such as AT&T's Whitacre have routinely described business models and bold plans to hijack the free and open Internet. We're fighting to save it, while the FTC fiddles.

Today, Reps. Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Lee Terry (R-NE) and Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) filed PIRG-backed legislation to expand a successful FCC program (there are a few!) that promotes the availability of licensed low power community radio stations. Find out more over at Free Press.

Current rules deprive many communities across the country from access to local radio. If enacted, this bill will clear more space for better, more independent and local programming that will bring diversity back to the airwaves.

The Maine legislature, after a strong campaign led by allies Common Cause and others, just become the first legislature to take strong steps to ensure that neither telephone nor cable companies nor any other monopolists could hijack the free and open Internet, by passing a legislative "resolve" backing Internet freedom, or net neutrality (news story). Here's more at the mainewebreport blog .

In an op-ed column The Price of Free Airwaves in today's New York Times, FCC commissioner and consumer champion Michael Copps outlines a detailed and thoughtful plan to better enforce the public interest rules that powerful broadcasters-- who pay nothing for their exclusive use of publicly owned airwaves-- are supposed to live by. Copps suggests "putting teeth back into the renewal process" as a way to improve the programming that most Americans decry as trash, as he explains in his lede:

As a member of the Federal Communications Commission, I often hear how fed up Americans are with the news media. Too much "if it bleeds it leads" on the evening news and not enough real coverage of local issues. Too little high-quality entertainment and too many people eating bugs. It doesn't have to be this way. America lets radio and TV broadcasters use public airwaves worth more than half a trillion dollars for free.

Let's also actually review a station's record before renewing its license. Here are just some of the criteria for renewal the F.C.C. considered in the 1990s but never put into place:

Did the station show programs on local civic affairs (apart from the nightly news), or set aside airtime for local community groups?

Did it broadcast political conventions, and local as well as national candidate debates? Did it devote at least five minutes each night to covering politics in the month before an election?

In an era when owners may live thousands of miles from their stations, have they met with local community leaders and the public to receive feedback?

Is the station's so-called children's programming actually, in the view of experts, educational?

All of this information ought to be available on the Web so people can see how their airwaves are being used.

According to news reports, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the FTC, not the Justice Department, will review the antitrust implications of the merger of the online powerhouse search firm Google with the ad-server giant DoubleClick. This is important, because the FTC has privacy expertise, while DOJ does not. While privacy is not itself an antitrust concern, we, along with the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), filed a privacy complaint to the FTC when the merger was announced in April. Over at his CDD Digital Destiny blog, our colleague Jeff Chester is chronicling daily the privacy and behavioral targeting implications of the recent mega-mergers of Internet firms, including Microsoft's recent $6 billion purchase of aQuantive. Microsoft paid dearly (not to worry, it can afford it) because it had lost the DoubleClick sweepstakes. We fully intend to support full government antitrust and privacy review of this combination as well, even though Microsoft seems to think only Google's merger is not in the public interest and what's good for Microsoft is good for everyone.

[UPDATED SAME DAY: Added link and excerpt from the veto letter from 10 consumer and media reform groups and a link to a Palm Beach Post editorial.] An editorial in today's influential St. Pete Times urges a veto of the so-called cable competition bill enacted by the Florida legislature:

The cable television deregulation bill the Florida Legislature sent Gov. Charlie Crist does what one would expect from a lawmaking process corrupted by special interests. Under the guise of promoting competition, lawmakers would weaken consumer protection, threaten educational programming and enable providers to cherry pick customers and enjoy unfettered access to public rights of way.

The purpose of the bill is laudable--to bring competition to the cable television and broadband Internet marketplace. Yet as currently drafted, HB 529 falls far short of what is required to promote meaningful competition that will deliver lower prices, more competition, and higher quality of service to all consumers. [...] Anti-redlining provisions are insufficient to ensure low and middle income consumers are not left behind. We acknowledge and applaud your efforts to work with legislators to insert an anti-discrimination provision. However this provision alone will not guarantee that new communications technologies will be offered throughout the state to traditionally under-served communities. [...] Every community--rich or poor, rural or urban--deserves the benefits of new technology and competition. Good public policy guides the market to maximize competitive deployment across the board in video and broadband. It also protects an open, thriving and nondiscriminatory marketplace for Internet content and applications. There is currently nothing in HB 529 that gives cable or telephone companies incentives to abide by net neutrality protections.

UPDATE TUESDAY: Over 300 people turned out and, as expected, most attacked weakening the ownership rules. Some clips-- Tampa Tribune, Poynter Institute, MyFox and St. Pete Times.

Tonight, Monday, April 30, you can watch a live video stream (from 4pm-11pm) of the latest FCC field hearing on media ownership at this link. The hearing is in Tampa, Florida. Groups led by Florida PIRG, Free Press, ACORN, and Common Cause are working hard to bring out the public to oppose further media consolidation. More information is here.

PENNPIRG's Beth McConnell is in a Philly Inquirer story HBO move riles some Comcast customers on Comcast's decision to move HBO up to the digital tier in the Philly market (it's already done this in others), and raising prices for some consumers who'll need to rent new digital cable boxes. McConnell: "Making popular channels unavailable on the basic services is one strategy they've pursued to move consumers to those higher-priced services." The change (perhaps not coincidentally?) comes just before the start of the final season for one of HBO's most popular shows, The Sopranos, a show about New Jersey mobsters.

We've recently learned that ATT/Cingular is blocking its cell customers when they seek to participate in certain free conference call services (you do pay long distance charges). ATT/Cingular is apparently in litgation with the firms, but according to a news release from PennPIRG director Beth McConnell:

"ATT/Cingular should not hold consumers hostage in their billing dispute with free conference call services. The company is penalizing their customers for using their phones to access a legal service," said Beth McConnell, PennPIRG Director. "If getting out of a cell phone contract were easy, AT&T/Cingular would never dare take this anti-consumer step." McConnell also noted that Cingular offers competing conference call services for its cellular customers.

McConnell noted that ATT's anti-consumer action in this context has broad implications. "This is an example of what is at stake in the fight for Internet freedom -- a corporation's financial interests limiting consumer choice and access to legitimate, publicly available services. AT&T, of course, is one of the companies opposed to Internet freedom," said McConnell. PennPIRG called on AT&T/Cingular to restore service to legitimate business phone numbers, and called on regulators at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to determine if AT&T/Cingular has violated any laws in blocking phone numbers.

[Update 1, added Jeff Chester comments at end. Update 2, here is today's UCC release]

Original post: In today's New York Times, Steve Labaton reports a scoop: FCC chair Kevin Martin told him about a Record Fine Expected for Univision for its claims that the popular adult telenovela (soap opera) "Complices al Rescate" met its children's educational programming requirements. MORE:

The FCC is finalizing the $24 million penalty in response to complaints filed by the United Church of Christ Office of Communication against Univision and its stations. From a UCC release in 2005 accompanying a petition challenging a Univision station's license renewal:

"'Complices al Rescate' is about suspense, intrigue and love, not education or information," said Veronica Kramer, one of the UCC's complainants and a Cleveland mother of a 7-year-old boy...Almost all of the Univision Network broadcasters relied on "Complices al Rescate" as their only children's educational program.

(Excerpt) ...this episode illustrates how big media companies don’t really care about the public interest; that the revolving door between the FCC and private industry contributes to a "let's make a deal, anything can go" media industry culture; and that the well-connected treat media outlets as just cash cows...

On the eve of today's FCC hearing in Harrisburg, PA, John Eggerton of Broadcasting and Cable reports that National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) President David Rehr sent a letter to FCC chairman Kevin Martin whining that, at the recent Nashville field hearing, citizens from other media markets were there to demand a more robust, fair and local media. MORE:

As a NAB flack told Broadcasting and Cable:

"I was at the Nashville media ownership hearing and there were people from St. Louis and Cincinnati complaining about local media," said NAB spokesman Dennis Wharton. "That suggests to us that there is something curious about these so-called localism hearings."

"There are 210 television markets in the United States — and the FCC has promised to hold public hearings in just six of them," said Craig Aaron, communications director of Free Press. "Yet the broadcasters' lobby is shocked and dismayed that some people might care enough about their local media to take a day off work, get up at dawn, and drive four or five hours for two minutes at the mic during a public hearing. And -- here's the real shocker --they're not even being paid to be there."

We're excited that PennPIRG director Beth McConnell is one of the 8 official pre-selected panelists speaking this Friday February 23rd at an FCC hearing on media ownership and consolidation in Harrisburg, PA. After the panels conclude, any member from the public is also encouraged to speak from the floor. All 5 commissioners are expected to attend. More details on event. Here's where: Sunoco Theatre at the Whitaker Center for the Performing Arts (maps and directions) at 222 Market Street, Harrisburg, PA). Schedule:

9:00 a.m. Welcome/Opening Remarks

9:30 a.m. Panel Discussion (Subject to change)
1. W. Cody Anderson, President & CEO of ACG Associates
2. Bill Baldwin, Executive Vice President of Hall Communications and General Manager of WROZ-FM and WLPA-AM, Lancaster, PA, and WSJW-FM, York, PA
3. Jim Haigh, Mid-Atlantic Community Papers Association
4. Charles Layton, American Journalism Review staff writer
5. Lauri Lebo, York Daily Record reporter and owner of WWII 720 AM
6. H. Joseph Lewin, President of Harrisburg Television, Inc. and General Manager of WHTM-TV, Harrisburg, PA
7. Beth McConnell, Director of PennPIRG
8. Paul Quinn, President and General Manager, WGAL(TV), Lancaster, PA

10:30 a.m. Public Comment
12:30 p.m. Break
1:00 p.m. Public Comment
2:30 p.m. Adjournment

Last Friday, the FCC announced the time and place for this Friday's hearing on media ownership and consolidation:

The hearing will take place on Friday, February 23rd in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania from 9:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. in the Sunoco Theatre at the Whitaker Center for the Performing Arts (maps and directions) at 222 Market Street, Harrisburg, PA 17101.

Find out more about why media consolidation should matter to you and also about the hearing logistics at PennPIRG. If you cannot make it Friday, PennPIRG has a link to the FCC's comments page, so you can file your views electronically. But if you can make it, it will help make a difference!

The FCC has announced its third official hearing on media ownership will be held on Friday, February 23rd in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. As is its odd policy, the FCC hasn't yet said where or when. Nevertheless, along with coalition partners including Prometheus Radio Project, Media Tank, Free Press, Consumers Union, Common Cause and others, PENNPIRG and U.S. PIRG are organizing to turn out the community. Here is our coalition release: Excerpt:

On Feb. 23, all five Federal Communications Commissioners will meet face-to-face with the public at a hearing in Harrisburg to discuss sweeping changes to the nation's media ownership rules. "Big media companies have plenty of opportunities to make their views known in Washington," said Beth McConnell, director of the PennPIRG Education Fund. "This hearing is the chance for Pennsylvanians to be heard on the dangers of media consolidation. We're grateful that the FCC chose to visit Central Pennsylvania, and encourage citizens from all parts of the Commonwealth to participate in this important hearing."

Personally, as a big fan (previous blog on the documentary Shut Up and Sing), I was excited to see the Dixie Chicks sweep five Grammy categories this year, including the trifecta: album, record and song of the year. And, as opponents of media consolidation and its negative impact on the diversity of both music and speech -- we at the state PIRGs were pleased as well. As the New York Times editorialized today in The Courage of Others' Convictions:

The awards -- including for the trio's fittingly titled album "Taking the Long Way" and the song "Not Ready to Make Nice" -- ended a desolate period in which their music was boycotted and banned by country music stations, their CDs were burned and smashed, and group members' lives were threatened.

Was it mere coincidence that at the very same time these big media conglomerates were vilifying the Chicks and/or giving the administration a pass on its Iraq policy, they were also intensely lobbying the administration to free them from the media ownership limits they loathe? One reason these limits are in place is to make sure that a wide diversity of viewpoints and voices have access to our nation's publicly-owned broadcast airwaves. Having diverse viewpoints and voices could provide a necessary counterweight to the Big Media mischief that victimized the Chicks -- and the American public -- and turned a MSM {Main Stream Media] that is supposed to be a watch dog on our government into its lap dog.

Over at his Digital Destiny blog, Jeff Chester spanks the Washington Post for failing to disclose the cable/phone industry ties of Friday's anti-Internet Freedom columnists David Farber, Michael Katz and Christopher S. Yoo, for their column (also with Gerald Faulhaber) Hold Off On Net Neutrality. Jeff Chester's lead:

We wish the editors and reporters covering telecommunications would follow the money--and ask all the interested parties who foots their bill. They would find--with academics especially--so many financial links as to wonder whether these so-called experts aren't violating some scholarly code of ethics.

Before the Free Press Media Reform conference in Memphis, we joined several other founding members of the Savetheinternet.com in signing the Internet Freedom Declaration of 2007: A Public Agenda for the Future of Communications. It expands our call for Internet freedom and net neutrality to include other goals, including a guarantee that

as the Internet becomes our public square and economic marketplace, Internet access must be regarded as a civil right for all Americans...Broadband Internet access should be universally available and affordable. Rural or urban, rich or poor, every American must be able to access the information superhighway at fair prices and speeds that rival the rest of the world.

The New Press has a nice page up on our colleague Jeff Chester's new book Digital Destiny: New Media and the Future of Democracy.

The celebrated media advocate's clarion call for new media to serve the public instead of corporate interests--and what's involved in this high-stakes struggle.

By far, one of the clunkiest, over-priced 19th-century interfaces to the digital world has been the device that sits on top of TV sets known as the set-top box. Why care? If you want your HDTV, and your TiVO, your digital cable and all your toys to play well together, we need the better devices that competition and some long-delayed FCC action on its so-called CableCard rule can force. The cable guys have had a long-standing monopoly (at a hefty monthly fee, don't forget) and they've offered a Hobson's choice. Now, as the New York Times reports from the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, Atop TV Sets, Basic Black Boxes Face Competition:

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, makers of set-top boxes exhibited devices with a host of new features: more hard-disk space for storing digitally recorded TV shows, easier-to-navigate program guides, connections to Web sites, DVD burners and video games. The box manufacturers and the cable operators like Comcast, Cox and Time Warner Cable that they sell to, have an age-old motivation for improving their products: fear.

Although the geek-meter on most of the links in this post is spiking high in the red zone, here's a succinct summary from Karen Sum-Ping:

Consumers should care about CableCARD because it is what allows digital device manufacturers to compete against that digital cable set-top box and provide better features and prices. Previously, a cable subscriber had little to no choice but to lease a digital set-top box from his particular cable provider.

Free Press has posted links to audio of workshops and, at Youtube, a lot more of the major event video streams from the just-ended National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis. I know I'll be checking out some of the workshops and plenaries I missed, including Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (I had a conflicting event!), the Bush impersonator with the real Helen Thomas (I was at a slow restaurant!), and more. You can also check out all the pictures and blogs linking to NCMR2007 (including my own live blogs) that conference participants have posted online from this aggregate link NCMR2007 at Technorati. I've also got some more photos stuck in my camera and after the battery recharges I'll put up a few more pictures and also write my post-conference reflections on the experience.

U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), incoming chair of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications will be here tonight for his keynote address at NCMR2007. He did miss his morning panel but won't miss the National Conference for Media Reform. From his page:

Rep. Markey, who has served on the Telecommunications subcommittee since his first election in 1976, has been the Ranking Democrat on the panel since 1995 and previously served as its chair from 1987 to 1995. He is the author and co-author of numerous landmark telecommunications laws, including the Children's Television Act, the Cable Act of 1992, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996, including provisions establishing the "E-rate" rate for schools and libraries and the V-Chip for parental control of TV violence. He has repeatedly led efforts to protect consumer privacy and to defend public television and public radio from crippling budget cuts and creeping commercialization. His most recent legislative focus has been on the need to keep the Internet an open platform by adopting strong rules for "net neutrality" and to promote policies to make broadband services competitive, available and affordable to all Americans.

They've moved on to a Congressional panel at NCMR2007. It features new U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Memphis, TN) and Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), a long-time media reform, consumer and environmental champion. He's founder of the Congressional Future of American Media Caucus and sponsor of key media reform legislation. From Hinchey: "All of you have got to be involved in this issue...Ask your representative and Senators what they are going to do to get us back on the right track again...[toward a media system that gives us] a free and open society, and a democratic republic based on openness and the free exchange of democratic ideas." MORE

As for Steve Cohen, I doubt he would remember, but I had the opportunity to meet then-State Senator Steve Cohen when I spoke on privacy at the Freedom Forum at Vanderbilt University Law School in 1994. Based on his record in Tennessee, he should be a stalwart consumer advocate in the Congress.

Hinchey is incoming chair of the Appropriations subcommittee with FCC jurisdiction. He also has a deep understanding of media reform issues and the history of the takeover of the FCC by corporate principles that started in the Reagan Administration. His presentation is a powerful critique of and history lesson on the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and other public interest obligations and subsequent corporate-orchestrated full-scale deregulation of the media that began under Reagan FCC chair Mark Fowler. You remember Fowler. He's the one who said that a television didn't need regulation, after all, it was simply an "appliance," nothing more than a "toaster with pictures." Anyway, I hope Mr. Hinchey posts his full speech, as it is a great history of the problems in the media, the need to fight back, and a blueprint for reform.

[Updated again] Back in Memphis at NCMR2007. I am watching a presentation Saturday morning by dissident (but not in this crowd, of course) FCC commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein. It's moderated by former commissioner Gloria Tristiani, who says: "I've got two words: Digital Divide."

Here's my quick paraphrase of the answer from Commissioner Copps: "We don't have a plan. We don't have a strategy....There are two digital divides. The first is between the US and the rest of the world. According to the International Telecommunications Union, [in broadband deployment] the US is 15th, under (a different study) we are 21st, right after Estonia and tied with Slovenia...We do have a glaring digital divide within this country...and [the companies say] don't let municipalities or anyone else get involved [in solving it]...We fly into the 21st century with all these new technologies and...all the new opportunities that come with them.. but [our federal policy then says] that none of the obligations [that have applied to regulated telecommunications services historically, should apply to these "new" information services] -- privacy, buildout, universal service-- none of them apply...If that isn't a recipe for disaster, I don't know what the hell is."

Tonight, consumer champion Ed Markey (D-MA), new chairman of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Telecommunications, will deliver his keynote address. [UPDATE: Unfortunately, due to weather, Mr. Markey has missed his breakout panel and may not be here tonight for his keynote. I am confident that he would have addressed these issues. Senator Sanders delivered his keynote but had to cancel from the workshop also.]

Expect Mr. Markey to describe how Congress will address all the comprehensive broadband issues-- digital divide, universal service, privacy and Internet freedom (net neutrality). We're confident that Mr. Markey, with his media reform colleagues including new Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (who just addressed the conference), Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) (who is speaking later), Rep. Kucinich (D-OH) (who spoke last night) and others including Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Ron Wyden (D-OR), will have the support of the public in their efforts to change US policy. (Michael Copps just pointed out that on broadband and universal service, even Internet freedom opponent Ted Stevens (R-AK) is a fierce disciple.) The Hill leadership of Markey and others will make it easier for the two Commissioners to change the direction of the FCC so that it begins again to advance the visionary public interest policies that the country needs. For too long, they've had to spend too much time fighting the narrow corporate ideas that have wrongly become FCC policy. We owe Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps doubly: First, for holding the ground that they have, and second, for the tremendous wins (such as forcing AT&T to accept Internet freedom as a condition of its merger with BellSouth) that they have been able to achieve under such tough circumstances. I am sure they are looking forward to greater backing from the Congress. As Jonathan Adelstein pointed out last night, we've always had broad and bi-partisan Congressional rank-and-file support, but the former House leadership prevented any floor votes from even occurring. There's a change in the air.

I am live blogging from Memphis and the National Conference for Media Reform:NCMR2007: Bill Moyers is delivering a powerful opening keynote to the conference. He's giving a lot of deserved kudos to the media reform movement's role in "changing the debate" in Washington on both media ownership and Internet freedom: Here's my rough summary of a key section of his remarks, which you can watch in full on the NCMR 2007 videostream.

In reference to deposed former FCC chairman Michael Powell, who resigned after a series of failures and missteps including his brazen attempt to ignore millions of public comments and even the technical reports of his own staff to push forward in his largely-failed attempt to weaken important media ownership rules, Moyers said: [Your coalition and the public you organized] "flooded" the FCC and Congress with comments and "Michael Powell not only backed off, he backed out."

On net neutrality and the run-up to the stunning eleventh hour decision last month by the now-Kevin-Martin-led FCC to force AT&T to agree to Internet freedom [net neutrality] as a condition of its merger with Bellsouth: "First, you lit a fire and put Washington on notice that it had to guarantee the Internet's First Amendment [net neutrality]...I prefer to call it the Internet's Equal Access provision...[it serves] to foster democracy, not abridge it...I believe you [the coalition] changed the terms of the debate...It is no longer about whether the [Internet will be free and open] it is about when and how."

NCMR2007: Free Press, Consumers Union and Consumer Federation of America have filed a series of reports to the FCC documenting that the future of the media is better than the media giants claim. From the story Reports show future looks strong for media in USA Today:

MEMPHIS -- Newspaper and TV executives might not expect encouraging financial news from a major gathering of industry critics. But a collection of studies being released here Friday at the National Conference for Media Reform contends that economic prospects are strong for newspapers and TV stations — despite more competition from new media.
Their forecasts run counter to a widely held view that digital media and the Internet have dramatically altered the economic landscape for traditional media. Companies that have run into trouble, including Knight Ridder and Tribune (TRB), "mangled the transition to the digital age," says Mark Cooper, research director for the Consumer Federation of America. "It's management, not the business."

It's Friday morning. The conference is about to start. It opened last night with a pre-party to Savetheinternet at the Gibson Guitar Showcase just off the famous Beale Street, where a banner welcomes participants. If you aren't here at NCMR2007, you can log on to read the conference blog or for video streaming here. Here's a note from Free Press director Josh Silver:

Even if you can't join us in Memphis, you can get in on the action. Visit the National Conference for Media Reform Web site for live updates throughout the weekend. There are any number of ways you can participate online:

Watch video streams of the main events, musical performances, keynote speakers, including Bill Moyers, Geena Davis, Danny Glover, Al Green's Gospel Choir, FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Johnathan Adelstein, Amy Goodman from Democracy Now!, Congressman Ed Markey and others;
Listen to downloadable audio of the hundreds of panels and workshops;
Join the conversation! Live blogging and open commenting with the 3,000 media reform activists in attendance;
View pictures on the Flickr stream of photographs from the conference;
Watch YouTube footage taken by conference participants;
Reform the media -- Take action on a number of issues that will be discussed at the conference.
It's never been easier to be a part of the action. Visit the conference action site to post your comments to the FCC about media ownership, call your Senators and Representatives about Net Neutrality, help create an accessible online media resource for non-profits and much more.

Don't forget to check back every day for updates. Even if you can't come to Memphis, it will feel like you are there!

I am off for Memphis, with PIRG's delegation to the National Conference for Media Reform, sponsored by Free Press. We'll be joining thousands of activists working for Internet freedom and a diverse media system. Consumer champions from the Congress led by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) are among the speakers. Watch for my blog updates.

On behalf of the PIRG-backed savetheinternet.com, Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) has prepared a Youtube vlog (video blog) explaining his support for Internet freedom (net neutrality). Here's our statement supporting his new bill with Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME).

Reporter Bruce Mohl has a profile of Massachusetts state senator Michael Morrissey in today's Boston Globe. Morrissey discusses his proposal -- modeled after new and used car lemon laws-- to allow consumers to cancel cell phone contracts without paying punitive early termination fee penalties (ETFs):

The bill requires wireless companies to publicly disclose their coverage gaps and allows consumers with poor service (five or more dropped calls in a month) to terminate contracts without paying hefty financial penalties. Industry executives say the termination provision is the first of its kind in the nation. "The industry says no state's ever done this. Well, so what?" Morrissey said.

The New York Times understands that our real-world democracy depends on Internet freedom, known technically as net neutrality. From its lead editorial Wednesday Protecting Internet Democracy:

Internet users now get access to any Web site on an equal basis. Foreign and domestic sites, big corporate home pages and little-guy blogs all show up on a user's screen in the same way when their addresses are typed into a browser. Anyone who puts up a Web page can broadcast it to the world...[MORE]

Cable and telephone companies are talking, however, about creating a two-tiered Internet with a fast lane and a slow lane...Creating these sorts of tiers would destroy the democratic quality of the Internet. Big, wealthy voices would start to overpower the smaller, poorer ones...A net neutrality law would require cable and telephone companies to continue to provide Web sites to Internet users on an equal basis....The cable and telephone companies have fought net neutrality with a lavishly financed and misleading lobbying campaign, because they stand to gain an enormous windfall. But there is growing support from individuals and groups across the political spectrum, from MoveOn.org to the Gun Owners of America, who worry about what will happen to their free speech if Internet service providers are allowed to pick and choose the traffic they carry.

Today, only after important last-minute concessions from AT&T ensuring that it would preserve Internet freedom (net neutrality), the FCC finally approved the mega-merger between AT&T and BellSouth. Here is a press statement from U.S. PIRG media reform attorney Amina Fazlullah:

For Immediate Release: December 29, 2006
For More information: Amina Fazlullah (202) 546-9707 x336

AT&T's Merger Concessions Send Strong Message to Congress -- Protect Internet Freedom
Statement of U.S. PIRG Consumer Advocate Amina Fazlullah

Washington-- On Friday the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the $ 85 billion dollar AT&T and BellSouth merger after AT&T's last minute statement finally declaring that it would keep the Internet open and free of gatekeepers by agreeing to follow Net Neutrality as one of several additional conditions. While these concessions do not mean that the proposed merger is in the public interest, they provide a time-limited guarantee that the FCC can enforce it fairly and protect the Internet from harm.

The largest merger in telecommunications history will span 22 states and create the world's largest telecommunications company. We applaud FCC Commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps for their steadfast opposition to this merger without these important consumer protection conditions. The two commissioners recognize that our media landscape is changing and that traditional phone providers like AT&T now hold vast power over networks that provide much more than plain old telephone service. They own the connection that links millions of Americans to the Internet, voice and video services as well.

The 110th Congress has now been given a strong signal -- it must seriously scrutinize these mega mergers through an updated antitrust lens and work to permanently ensure that all American small business owners, entrepreneurs and citizens have fair and equal access to the Internet. As we move farther into the digital age, it is crucial that government understand the multi-faceted value of telecommunications networks and enact measures to deliver true and robust competition in the industry.

Additionally, AT&T's offer to discount unbundled DSL (broadband) service means that for a brief window consumers will have the opportunity to access high speed Internet for less but will also have the unfettered ability to switch to a new competitor if they desire. It is now up to Congress to extend the window for Internet access competition and push for the expansion of an affordable and democratic Internet for every American.

30-30-30

U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), takes on powerful interests on behalf of the American public, working to win concrete results for our health and our well-being.

Here is our previous blog entry.

It still won't be a merger that is in any way in the public interest. But late yesterday, AT&T finally capitulated to intense public pressure (New York Times: AT&T offers Concessions on Bellsouth buyout) that its PIRG-opposed merger with Bellsouth to create the world's largest telecommunications company (nearly putting Ma Bell back together again) should be conditioned on keeping the Internet free of gatekeepers (net neutrality) and other limits and commitments [new AT&T offer to FCC-large pdf]. We're still evaluating the proposal but here are statements from our Free Press, CFA and CU colleagues and here's one from Media Access Project lawyer Harold Feld's personal blog (Harold analyzes the merger, but also gets in this apt description): "In the dramatic penultimate episode of the telecom world's favorite Telenovella "Death Star Reborn: The AT&T-BellSouth Merger," the forces of Network Neutrality and competition win a dramatic victory!

Net neutrality, or a guarantee that the Internet will remain a free, open marketplace of ideas and opportunities, is no joke. It's a minimum standard that should have been in their original offer. Yet, I note that even in in this latest concession offer to the FCC AT&T demonstrates corporate arrogance, petulance and hubris all in one:

"On October 13, 2006, AT&T submitted a list of possible merger commitments...We emphasized our belief that these commitments were wholly unnecessary...Nevertheless, merger opponents continue to demand even more concessions, including those they were unable to obtain from Congress...In the face of these continuing demands....[blah blah blah]."

Here are links to a few interesting recent entries in the various consumer and public interest blogs I read:

On Monday, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell commendably reaffirmed he would recuse himself from the ATT-Bellsouth merger vote, despite intense pressure from Chairman Kevin Martin. At the FCC page you can also see statements on McDowell's decision by Martin and by Commissioner Michael Copps. Last week, we joined several other media reform groups in a letter to the FCC condemning the pressure being placed on McDowell to "un-recuse" himself. Excerpt from McDowell's statement:

Throughout my brief tenure here at the FCC, I have tried to be as thoughtful, transparent and direct as possible in my decision making. With each decision I make, I endeavor to keep in mind why the FCC exists and what the mission of each commissioner should be; and that, of course, is to promote and protect the public interest. We must never lose sight of the fact that the ultimate shareholders in every endeavor we embark upon are the American people. In this vein, it is incumbent upon every public servant to do all that he or she can to earn the public's trust in the integrity and impartiality of their government.

In light of these factors, I find that I have no choice but to abide by the terms of my Ethics Agreement, heed the independent advice of OGE and my personal ethics counsel, and, ultimately to follow my own personal sense of ethics. Accordingly, I disqualify myself from this matter.

The movie from the PIRG-backed Savetheinternet.com coalition is #1 on Youtube today. Check it out. Find out more here.

We've joined key public interest groups including Free Press and Consumers Union in a letter to the Federal Communications Commission condemning the failure of the agency to seek public comment concerning what appears to be a blatantly political decision driven by the "needs" of the not-so-Baby Bells: the FCC General Counsel's "un-recusal" of Commissioner Robert McDowell in the ATT-Bellsouth merger: MORE:

Given that the combined entity will control half of the business and residential telephone lines in the nation, it is the public, not AT&T or Bell South which has the greatest stake in the merger’s rejection or approval, with or without conditions. Any appearance that a federal regulatory decision that so directly affects the welfare of the public is based on prior or existing commercial relationships jeopardizes the public’s trust in the federal decision making process.

The 109th Congress is winding down. It has failed (a very good thing) to grant the phone companies a national right to "compete" with cable, only without complying with rules preventing redlining some neighborhoods and gouging others, only without requiring public access and education channels, and also without requiring that all parts (fair buildout rules) of the community be served at fair prices, as the Bells sought. Now the battle has shifted to the states. This week, Michigan consumer and civic groups including PIRGIM, and businesses, including Google, all concerned about Internet freedom, redlining, local community protections and fair broadband access held a rally and testified against a Bell-backed state video franchise bill.

The vote on the Michigan legislature's Senate floor could be as early as Tuesday. The one-sided bill as backed by the Baby Bell AT&T has already passed the House. But on the bright side, following the massive outpouring of opposition in the last week, Governor Jennifer Granholm says she wants a bill with strong consumer protections. She should stick to her guns. Cable competition without consumer and community protections is a license for the Baby Bells to steal. And in Michigan, the Baby Bells have offered so many sweeteners to the cable companies to gain their support, too, that the bill is nothing less than a complete evisceration of consumer and community protections. All the "competition" in the world won't offset the giveaways in this bill. Granholm must take an even firmer stance against this bill.

Last night, FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein joined over 400 citizens at the Seattle Central Library for a citizens' hearing on media consolidation. The event was organized by Reclaim the Media, the Seattle Tmes and other civic organizations. And over at Northwest Progressive blog, you can scroll backward through highlights of the testimony with the live-blogs from Andrew. Here's his final thoughts. Consumer champions Copps and Adelstein are barnstorming the nation appearing at a variety of citizens' hearings, but Chairman Martin has also promised at least 6 official events with all 5 commissioners. The FCC's next official hearing on media consolidation is in Nashville, December on Monday, December 11. You can find out more about how media consolidation hurts democracy and culture and diversity of opinion and also take action here.

Click on the pull down menu and select net neutrality for an in-depth news story from Fox45-Baltimore on the fight between the telephone and cable companies and just about everyone else over keeping the Internet free of gatekeepers. The story features Johanna Neumann of Maryland PIRG, and several small business owners, in support of Internet Freedom. For an opposing view, former Clinton flack Mike McCurry, now with the telephone company-funded group with the intentionally-confusing name, Hands off the Internet, is featured. The full name should be Hands off the Internet So We Can Hijack It.

Calling on the telco giant to show us the maps, Abigail Caplovitz Field of NJPIRG critiques Verizon's unfairly secret plan to roll out video services, in Friday's Asbury Park-Press. Last year, the powerful firm steamrolled its statewide franchise legislation through Trenton, claiming that "We're the white knights to protect you from the evil cable companies." Now, Verizon doesn't want to tell either NJ regulators (BPU) or consumers whether it will serve all communities, or redline some and gouge others. Excerpt:

Failing to provide the maps isn't a trivial issue when it comes to preventing Verizon from redlining low-income consumers. Without the maps, the BPU cannot assess who Verizon intends to serve. Verizon wants the BPU simply to trust them, but not even the Legislature trusted Verizon on this point. The Legislature was very concerned that Verizon would redline, and so forbade it.

[13 Dec update: fixed bad urls] According to an article, Hold Off On AT&T/BellSouth, Says Dingell, by John Eggerton of Broadcasting and Cable, John Dingell (D-MI), slated to once again become chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee after a 12-year break, has already sent a letter (these detailed oversight missives are sometimes called "Dingell-grams") to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin calling for delay of the PIRG-opposed AT&T/BellSouth merger until after his committee has had a chance to hold hearings in 2007. Eggerton also reports:

[Dingell] also says the committee will have to take a hard look at any FCC loosening of media ownership rules, and will take a new crack at a telecom reform bill, with an eye on net neutrality and spectrum for first responders.

[UPDATE: 2/07 Fixed urls, updated action] Three years ago, the songs of the best-selling female band of all time, the Dixie Chicks, were blacklisted by at least two major media corporations, Cox and Cumulus Radio, according to the U.S. Senate testimony of their manager. Their "crime"? Lead singer Natalie Maines exercised her First Amendment right to speak and criticized the president (in a total of 12 words) for his conduct of the Iraq War, between songs at a concert in London. The ripple effects of this incident on the lives of the Chicks and their careers, along with the implications of the still-omnipresent threat of greater media consolidation to stifle diversity of views, are explored in the new documentary Shut Up and Sing, which has opened in select cities and opens nationwide November 10th. I look forward to seeing it soon. You can read a transcript of or watch the video of the Chicks' recent Hardball interview with Chris Mathews here.

Excerpt:

EMILY ROBISON: And you said something about corporate America, you know, it brings up another subject of the consolidation of media. Once again, these were edicts coming down from corporate headquarters, that they weren't allowed to play our music. It wasn't a local type of thing. But for the most part, it was coming down from the top, "You are not allowed to play the Dixie Chicks." And so that's another thing you get into. And we've been part of the Artist Coalition even before any of this happened, trying to show the problems that exist when that happens.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: So Martie, a big monopoly can have a big impact if they don't like somebody's politics, right?
MARTIE MAGUIRE: Definitely. We found that first hand, for sure. And we know people that lost their jobs for simply playing our music.

You can watch the movie trailer that some networks (NBC and CW according to this Reuters story) allegedly won't run here at the Shut Up and Sing website. These networks say they have policies against running controversial ads; of course, check out some of the political advertising running around the country on network-owned stations.

In other news of corporations and speech, see this blog over at the Huffington Post from Josh Silver and Bob McChesney of Free Press, about an ABC memo leaked to Fair and Accuracy in Reporting. The memo lists a large number of corporations that don't want their ads run during Air America's politically progressive radio programming.

Musical Disclaimer: Chicks rule. I do like all the Dixie Chicks' music. I also like the music of Emily's sister-in-law Kelly Willis. And I like all the bands that Natalie's father Lloyd Maines (a producer/session musician with the Chicks) plays or guests in (a few-- The Joe Ely Band and the Flatlanders). And I like Little Feat, the band that sings Dixie Chicken: the song is apparently the source of their name. And I like a lot of other Texas music, but I won't go on, except to mention Asleep at the Wheel, whose leader Ray Benson is among numerous musicians who've testified against media consolidation at FCC hearings (scroll down for Ray's comments). If you've never heard of any of these bands, they're not often played on corporate radio with its nationalized and homogenized playlists, and that's just one of the things wrong with media consolidation. Click here to tell the FCC you oppose greater media consolidation and prefer both a diversity of views and a diversity of music on publicly-owned airwaves.

Here's a guest blog from our new media reform attorney Amina Fazlullah on a big consumer victory at the FCC today:

FCC Sides with Consumer Groups and Stands Up For Community Wireless and Competition

Today the FCC upheld a petition by Continental Airlines overturning a request by the Massachusetts airport authority, or MASSPORT, to use trumped-up public safety concerns to seize monopoly control of wireless (wifi) deployment at Boston's Logan Airport. Both U.S. PIRG and MASSPIRG had joined Media Access Project, New America Foundation and a variety of groups and businesses in support of Continental and in opposition to the request (previous blog).

It's a great win for MASSPIRG and U.S. PIRG and allies in the fight for robust and unfettered community wireless. The FCC's decision to support a tenant's right to use unlicensed wireless broadband promotes the deployment of broadband and encourages new avenues for competition and increased consumer access to broadband connections.

The FCC had historically been a champion of competition and choice for consumers in the telecommunications marketplace but in recent years the commission has made decisions that have diminished consumer choice and increased the market power of the established broadband providers.

But today the consumers win. This decision encourages the deployment of low-cost community wifi. It's cheap and it's easy to set up and that makes it viable for communities and families to use it. And now, the FCC says landlords can't prevent you.

Opponents of community wireless broadband (primarily big broadband companies and some landlords) decry the growth of its popularity because the technology takes one broadband connection (whether at home or in an airport) and offers it up to anyone able to pick up the wireless signal. It takes power and control over a broadband connection out of the hands of the landlords and into the hands of the tenants and greater community.

The FCC ruling and the statements of commissioners Adelstein and Copps deftly point out that the use of unlicensed spectrum comes with the "cost" of interference, meaning that the FCC is balancing the concerns that a broadband provider's market may be at serious risk with the benefit to the public.

Here's a section of a statement from Commissioner Copps:

Wi-Fi is one of the Commission's greatest wireless success stories. The genius of this unlicensed technology is that no central authority controls or manages how and where these networks spring up. Instead, any private or commercial operator who sees a need for a local Wi-Fi network may build and operate one. The price that Wi-Fi users pay for this freedom is that they, like all Part 15 users, must accept interference from other devices in the unlicensed bands. But the nation's half-decade of experience with this new technology has made it quite plain that this trade-off is more than worth it. When it comes to providing broadband over the unlicensed bands, the airwaves are truly the people's airwaves (emphasis in the original.) So while I certainly support strong licensing regulation in some contexts, I think it is equally important that we leave other portions of the spectrum open to unlicensed uses.

Link to FCC's Memorandum Opinion and Order

Link to Media Access Project's Press Release on the victory

Link to Media Access Project, MASSPIRG, U.S. PIRG et al comments

So, why did Microsoft drop out (temporarily) of a PIRG-backed pro-Net Neutrality coalition? Find out more in this entry Why Citizen Movements Are Citizen Driven by Harold Feld of the Media Access Project over at the Public Knowledge blog. Excerpt:

MS has taken a temporary hiatus from It’s Our Internet. Why? Because It’s Our Internet filed comments with the FCC demanding a net neutrality condition in the proposed AT&T/BellSouth merger. MS has a corporate policy against opposing other people’s mergers — particularly mergers involving large potential customers. MS is not unique in this.

[Old urls updated, 13 Dec 06] Along with Consumers Union, Free Press, and Consumer Federation of America, we've filed supplemental comments opposing the merger of AT&T/Bellsouth (previous blog listing history of our participation). From today's filing:

The potential merger conditions outlined in AT&T's supplemental filing are insufficient to protect the public interest. The proposed conditions do little, if anything, to mitigate the negative effects the merger will have on consumers and competitors alike. In some cases, the proposed "conditions" represent nothing more than garden-variety "salute the flag" sloganeering. In others, the "conditions" outlined by AT&T appear to be little more than marketing strategies designed to entice existing customers to buy new services.

Over at his blog Media Citizen, in a post called Stranger Than Fiction, Tim Karr of Free Press analyzes an odd opinion column Spreading The Broadband Revolution in Saturday's New York Times by former FCC Chairman William Kennard. Tim does an excellent job debunking Kennard's arguments and pointing out Kennard's role in getting us to the bad regulatory place we're in now (where we need Congress to reinstate net neutrality), so I only want to focus on one point:

What makes the op-ed so questionable is that Kennard supports anti-Net Neutrality legislation without fully disclosing his own financial interests in its passage.

But shouldn't they have mentioned that he also sits on the boards of directors of Sprint Nextel Corporation, Hawaiian Telcom and Insight Communications (a cable provider) -- companies that have lobbied to kill Net Neutrality? It seems, as Larry Lessig puts it, "unseemly" when a FCC Chairman "moves to the boards of the companies he used to regulate, and then uses the op-ed page of a paper on whose board he now sits, to argue for the poor by pushing the agenda of the 'merely rich.'"

U.S. PIRG and a coalition of other major consumer, government reform and media reform organizations have filed comments opposing weakening of the current FCC rules preventing excessive media consolidation. We filed these comments as part of the ongoing FCC media ownership proceeding. The comments were prepared by the public interest attorneys at the Media Access Project. Excerpt:

Media ownership regulation is not simply about creating a competitive, profitable marketplace. More importantly, media ownership regulation is designed to insure a vibrant marketplace for democracy, civic discourse, and diverse viewpoints. Media ownership rules insure that we create an informed electorate, rather than "dumbing down" the public. Appropriate media ownership regulations create genuine options, rather than cookie-cutter options. Without the current broadcast ownership regulations, media ownership would simply serve what is in the best interest of broadcasters, leaving the public to wonder whatever happened to its best interest.

Over at his Huffington Post blog, my colleague Jamie Love of CPTech has posted a good analysis of some of the issues raised at the important international meeting at Harvard Law School on Open Document Formats (ODF) I attended yesterday, along with Amina Fazlullah, our new media reform attorney (my previous blog). The meeting was sponsored by the PIRG-backed TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue. Excerpt from Jamie's post:

A handful of thoughtful government officials are trying to require software vendors, including Microsoft, to use this new open standard, in order to achieve a number of important public policy objectives, including:

* More competition among suppliers of software,
* Improved ability to manage archives of data,
* Enhanced ability to use and re-purpose data contained in documents.

The State of Massachusetts and the government of Belgium and Denmark have already put in place requirements that ODF be supported by software companies, and now other governments are beginning to consider similar initiatives. If they succeed, it could result in a revolution in the structure of the entire software market, and bring much needed competition and innovation to these important areas.

The state PIRGs and other members of the Media and Democracy Coalition have released a series of major reports by economic experts showing that media in 36 representative large and small media markets around the country are already too concentrated. Access the reports. We'll be filing the comments to the FCC in its ongoing Media Ownership proceeding. File your own comment here. From the Coalition (MORE):

BIGGER MEDIA Hurts Local Communities

Misguided actions by decision-makers in DC are bad for our communities and for consumers. Public interest organizations in more than a dozen states are exposing this today and the Media & Democracy Coalition is engaging citizens on an ongoing basis around these issues at town hall meetings and other community forums.

Today, in a dozen states around the country, from Florida to California to Washington to Maine, the Media and Democracy Coalition is releasing new research and shining the light on the FCC's new media ownership proceeding, and we are joining together with local communities nationwide to ask the FCC to clean up its act.

Mergers between newspapers and TV stations in the same market (also known as "cross-ownership") are front and center in the ongoing media ownership proceeding at the Federal Communications Commission. This new research, conducted by Dr. Mark Cooper, the Director of Research at the Consumers Federation of America, documents that more media mergers in our already highly consolidated media markets will reduce already insufficient local news coverage and eliminate diverse voices and viewpoints, harming local communities across the country.

[update 13 Dec 06-fixed bad urls] Following a letter from commissioners and consumer champions Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin (his reply), the chairman has been forced to delay a rubber-stamp vote on FCC approval of the AT&T/Bellsouth merger recently rubber-stamped by the supposed antitrust authorities over at the Department of Justice. Along with the Consumer Federation of America, Free Press and Consumers Union, (our petition to deny and declaration of our experts and reply comments are available at the FCC AT&T/Bellsouth merger page), we've steadfastly opposed this merger, which is anti-competitive, fails to preserve net neutrality and practically completes the anti-consumer, pro-monopoly process of putting AT&T back together again. See also our previous blogs on the AT&T/SBC and Verizon/MCI mergers and our letter urging a court review of those rubber-stamped decisions. Here's a recent news story (13 Oct) on the ongoing review by U.S. Judge Emmett G. Sullivan.

I've previously discussed efforts by webcasters to push unprecedented language in a proposed broadcast/webcast treaty that would grant them a new type of intellectual property right over any content that passed through through their portals, even to content they'd never owned, didn't create or was already in the public domain. MORE:

Thanks to efforts by a PIRG-backed coalition of consumer and civil liberties groups allied with some major corporations, the US recently withdrew its puzzling and longstanding support for the sweepingly dangerous proposal. Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest reports "the US and developing countries such as Chile and India worked together to broker a deal to limit the scope of the proposed broadcast treaty to combating signal theft, instead of the more expansive rights that broadcasters had originally been seeking" (and webcasters had been hoping to get in on). The events occurred at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) General Assembly meeting in Geneva.

By all accounts, Tuesday's two-part FCC hearing on media ownership was a huge success for the opponents of further media consolidation. Here's a blog entry from witness Emily Rusch of CALPIRG and here's Emily's testimony. You can listen to the hearing (Parts ONE and TWO). Skip ahead in Part Two to 1 hour 43 minutes 25 seconds to hear Emily. Here are a few news stories from the the Associated Press, Reuters and our coalition blog at stopbigmedia.com.

Click HERE at 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern today to listen to the FCC hearing on media ownership being held in Los Angeles through the afternoon and evening (two locations). Here are more details and at the PIRG-backed stopbigmedia.com. And if you are in the LA area, come on down:

PART ONE: 1:00 - 4:30pm PST (4:00 - 7:30pm EST)
University of Southern California (USC)
Davidson Conference Center Embassy Room
3415 South Figueroa Street Los Angeles, CA 90089

PART TWO: 6:30 - 10:00pm PST (9:30pm - 1:00am EST)
El Segundo High School
640 Main Street El Segundo, CA 90245

Here's CALPIRG's blog with details and a coalition press release. Here's a link to the PIRG-backed StopBigMedia.com coalition's new Los Angeles hearing website. You can download a leaflet that you can hand out yourself to urge others to attend. Take action to stop big media!

Internet guru Jeff Chester has a chilling new online piece in The Nation called Replaced By A Chimp: Life After Net Neutrality. Coming to the Internet after the 2007 Super Bowl is Budweiser's Bud.TV. We are not making this "network" up. Replaced by a Chimp is one of its "shows" in development. Chester argues that without net neutrality, expect this sort of lame programming to do well on the web: MORE:

The broadband content most likely to benefit from the new "pay us the most to get the best service" Internet will be online programming from our biggest advertisers and media conglomerates. Take, for example, the recent announcement about the new online entertainment channel network called Bud.TV, in which Anheuser-Busch plans to use high-speed and interactive video to attract a new generation of steady beer drinkers. One Bud.TV show already in production--which will likely be able to enjoy the fruits of non-network-neutrality US Internet--is called "Replaced by a Chimp." According to an Anheuser-Busch executive, for each show they will "grab a profession, such as a waiter, or a bartender or a trial attorney and replace those people with a chimp, and film the reaction of the consumers who happen to be in the same environment as the chimp...at the end of the show, the consumer will vote on whether the chimp should stay and continue on the job."

Yesterday the FCC announced that the deadline for initial comments in the Media Ownership rulemaking has been extended until October 23. Reply comments are due December 21. So, you can file comments here at PIRG's media action site until at least December 21. Meanwhile, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) announced she'd found yet a second suppressed 2004 FCC report, this one on radio ownership issues: Review of the Radio Industry (large scanned pdf)). It forms a bookend with the report Senator Boxer released at Chairman Martin's renomination hearing last week: Localism Report (somewhat but not as large scanned pdf). These reports were apparently suppressed by unknown forces working under former Chairman Michael Powell at the FCC. Chairman Martin is doing all the right things. He's sent two letters (9/15 and 9/18) to Senator Boxer explaining he and other commissioners were not made aware of these reports, he's posted the reports on the FCC site (links above), he's made them part of the official record in the localism and ownership proceedings and he's asked for an inspector general report. We wouldn't be surprised if the extension of comment periods is also partly due to the unearthing of the two buried reports, too.

I'd been meaning for some time to do a piece on the massive PR campaign that the cell phone companies have rolled out in DC metro stations and Capitol Hill newspapers to try to convince either Congress, the courts or the FCC to preempt strong state consumer protections against unfair practices of cell phone companies. Well, Annys Shin, the Washington Post reporter who has taken over the paper's consumer blog The Checkout has beaten me to it. We're opposing two industry petitions before the FCC to weaken the rules, we're amicus in a key lawsuit (Cellco v. Hatch)and we oppose the Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) telecommunications bill. all of which would preempt state wireless protections. Excerpt from our 8 September letter, with Consumers Union, to the Senate: MORE:

Section 1006 of the ATOR Act inexplicably preempts existing state authority to regulate the terms and conditions of wireless services―authority that Congress explicitly provided to the states under Section 332 of the Communications Act. The preemption provision was included in the pending legislation with virtually no prior committee consideration of the ramifications of eliminating consumer protections at the state level. The provision is particularly unwarranted given the substantial growth in the wireless industry under the current system of dual federal and state regulation provided by Section 332. Subscribership has grown from 13 million in 1993 to some 200 million today, demonstrating that the dual system has supported dramatic growth in the industry.

Unfortunately, widespread unfair, misleading and deceptive business practices that adversely affect consumers have accompanied that growth. The wireless industry leads the Better Business Bureau’s list of most complained-about industries, surpassing even car dealers in customer dissatisfaction. Wireless complaints to the FCC have more than doubled since 2002, exceeding the rate of wireless subscriber growth over this time. Despite this rise, FCC has never taken enforcement action against a wireless provider in response to consumer complaints in recent years.

John Dunbar of the Associated Press is reporting today that the FCC destroyed all copies of a draft report showing that locally-owned media outlets covered local issues better than nationally-owned outlets did. The AP reports that former FCC official:

"Adam Candeub, now a law professor at Michigan State University, said senior managers at the agency ordered that "every last piece" of the report be destroyed. "The whole project was just stopped _ end of discussion,"

At yesterday's confirmation hearing for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's new term, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), a consumer champion, went after Martin over whether or not the FCC, under his predecessor, Michael Powell, had buried, or suppressed, a study prepared for its Localism Task Force documenting that locally-owned stations had significantly more local news than the broadcast giants, which typically run the same (primarily national) news on all their stations to the detriment of important local news for communities. Our coalition colleagues at Stopbigmedia.com have the story and a copy of the report (scanned). It's an important document and its suppression, if true, is one more check mark on the long list of "things that the failed former Chairman Michael Powell did wrong before he quit" chart.

Over in Geneva, negotiations continue on the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO is a UN agency) proposal to extend a new form of property rights to broadcasters and even to webcasters. A number of public interest advocates are over there lobbying against the treaty and summarize daily discussions at a WIPO Casting Treaty blog. Yesterday, a diverse coalition including public interest and civil society groups along with companies we often otherwise oppose -- such as Verizon -- gave a workshop to treaty negotiators and the media. Last week, we co-signed a statement (html ) against the treaty, along with numerous public interest organizations and businesses and associations including Verizon, Dell, Cingular, HP and several industry trade groups. My previous blog on this important Access to Knowledge (a2k) issue. From today's Los Angeles Times story Proposed Treaty on TV Signals Spurs Criticism:

"Many believe that the broadcasters see this exclusive right as a way to protect an industry that is rapidly being eclipsed by technological development," said Matthew Schruers, senior counsel for litigation and legislative affairs at the Computer & Communications Industry Assn., an industry trade group. "There is a fear that right could prevent the use of cool new devices because people can't license them or because the broadcasters don't want to license them."

Over at his blog Tales from the Sausage Factory, public interest media lawyer Harold Feld uses the iconic franchise's 40th birthday (September 8th) as a hook to explain How the FCC Made Star Trek Possible. Harold first pays homage to Star Trek, then uses its history to explain that with today's deregulation, the odds of another show like it are low. A show with aliens can't happen today? No, an independently-produced, edgy-at-its-time show that doesn't have strong backing from a concentrated, powerful media corporation is a lot less likely today:

Today marks the 40th Anniversary of Star Trek, now referred to as Star Trek: The Original Series (or just ST:TOS). I make no secret of my love for ST:TOS, and credit it with (among other things) imbuing me with a sense of idealism and optimism against the odds. But few realize how FCC regulation of broadcasting made the creation and syndication of Star Trek possible -- and why deregulation has made it so much harder for something like Star Trek to hapen today.

College students and others in the Facebook online community are in an uproar over changes made to the way information is shared on the site. News stories and blog entries abound. In its own blog, Facebook defends its actions as being for you, and says that your privacy is still protected. For an alternate view, check out the blog of web guru Jeff Chester:

Excerpt: Perhaps one reason behind the recent changes at Facebook is that this social web outfit wants to make itself more advertiser-friendly. Last June, Facebook and giant ad agency powerhouse Interpublic Group (IPG) signed a deal that is all about the harvesting of data. IPG's investment gives it the clout to engage in "mining Facebook for market research trends among its young user base."

Yesterday and today, state PIRGs around the country joined coalition partners from savetheinternet.com at petition delivery events in front of the offices of U.S. Senators who haven't announced if they support Internet freedom (net neutrality). Here's a detailed summary of Wednesday's events on the savetheinternet.com blog. MORE:

Here's a hi-res 15-minute long Realplayer video of the Vermont event outside the office of U.S. Senator Jim Jeffords. The event featured VPIRG, the state Library Association, Small Dog Electronics and other small businesses created on the Internet, and others. Of course, the hi-res video is from coalition partner CCTV, Vermont's community media non-profit that also runs Channel 17. And many MoveOn volunteers posted video to Youtube from events around the country-- here's Michigan PIRG's David Pettit speaking outside the office of Senator Debby Stabenow. See if your Senator is with us, undeclared, or with the phone companies at savetheinternet.com's map. In September, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska wants a floor vote on his flawed bill, the Advanced Telecommunications Opportunity Research Act (or ATOR-- H.R. 5252/S. 2686), that fails to preserve Internet Freedom.

When a PR company sets up a fake citizens' campaign, it's called an Astroturf group, because fake grass has no grassroots. Common Cause has a new report Wolves In Sheeps' Clothing Part 2 (pdf) outing 5 more corporate front groups seeking to hijack the Internet while pretending to be against Internet regulation. From Common Cause:

If there were an award for Astroturf lobby campaigns, Hands Off the Internet (HOTI) would win hands down. With its pithy name, viral web cartoons, high profile spokesman (former White House press secretary Mike McCurry) and barrage of print and television advertising, HOTI has been effectively injecting the telephone industry's arguments on net neutrality into the public debate in recent months.

One of the most important consumer protection fights occurring both in Washington and internationally is the battle to ensure access to knowledge and culture. Powerful special interests are using a variety of tactics and strategies to try to privatize and control access to knowledge and culture. There are many efforts, but among the most brazen is the ongoing effort by some "webcasters" to invent, then grab, property rights that never before existed. Jamie Love of CPTech has a new blog entry explaining the Bush Administration's latest submission to a Geneva-based UN agency known as WIPO, which is considering a proposed broadcast treaty that powerful webcasters -- Fox, Yahoo and AT&T and others -- have been using as a wedge to demand an unprecedented grant of new rights and control over information streamed through their servers, even if it exists in the public domain, and even if they don't own it, never owned it, and didn't create it. MORE:

Along with its other perhaps more significant claims, the Bush negotiators have also proposed that what had been called webcasting would henceforth be known as netcasting. The CPTech WIPO treaty page is here. As background, here's a joint statement a number of activists sent US negotiators in March.

For more on the philosophy and importance of preserving knowledge and culture in a shared commons, and the growing corporate threats to privatize and commodify that shared knowledge and culture instead, I recommend a book on threats to all kinds of publicly-held assets, Silent Theft (2002), by David Bollier and, more specifically, an article by Professor James Boyle, The Second Enclosure Movement. Both Bollier and Boyle explain the threat to public knowledge as having an historical parallel in the English Enclosure movement and subsequent Parliamentary Enclosure Acts -- where the rights of the public to graze and hunt on common lands and forests were taken away and those lands then granted to powerful special interests, as this review of Silent Theft explains:

In a massive project of social engineering, Parliament passed the Enclosure Acts, which stripped the commoners of their property rights and delivered the lands to individual, usually wealthy landowners. (By 1895, about half of one percent of the population of England and Wales owned almost 99 percent of the land.) Thus was born the market on a national scale. Land became a commodity---real estate---and commoners became commodities too, in the form of workers in a "labor market." Something people once thought was theirs suddenly was someone else's.

And as Professor Boyle explains:

We are in the middle of a second enclosure movement. It sounds grandiloquent to call it "the enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind," but in a very real sense that is just what it is. True, the new state-created property rights may be "intellectual" rather than "real," but once again things that were formerly thought of as either common property or uncommodifiable are being covered with new, or newly extended, property rights.

We've joined Free Press, Consumers Union and Consumer Federation of America in a letter urging Senators to oppose the Stevens telecom bill now known as the Advanced Telecommunications Opportunity Reform Act or ATOR. We oppose it because it fails to keep the Internet free (no enforceable net neutrality provision) and it fails to ensure that video providers won't cherrypick rich communities and gouge or ignore others. Excerpt:

Every community--rich or poor, rural or urban--deserves the benefits of new technology and competition. Good public policy guides the market to maximize competitive deployment across the board in video and broadband. It also protects an open, thriving and nondiscriminatory marketplace for Internet content and applications. American consumers deserve both build-out of broadband and video networks and enforceable network neutrality on the Internet platform.

Leslie Hall and some friends, including Jay Maynard (aka the Tron Guy), have put together a nice website promoting net neutrality. Go to wearetheweb.org to see their videos where they "sing, dance and rap" to support Internet Freedom. You can take action from the site also.

The powerful senator, Ted Stevens (R-AK), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, is running around Washington claiming he has the votes to bring his defective telecommunications bill to the floor in September and defeat attempts to improve it by adding PIRG-backed provisions to guarantee that the Internet will remain free of gatekeepers. This column Alaska Needs Web Without Gatekeepers is from yesterday's Anchorage Daily News. We hope it will inform the Senator on the important issues of net neutralty and Internet freedom. In the interests of full disclosure, it was written by my legal intern Matt Loeb, with AKPIRG director Steve Cleary. Excerpt:

His [Senator Stevens'] bill ignores the Internet's tradition of openness. Telephone or cable company gatekeepers could restrict full-speed Internet access to sites they'd either approved politically or received a premium fee from, or both. Small businesses unable to pay these gatekeeper tolls would be sent to the slow lane. That's too bad for Alaska small businesses seeking to compete internationally or our tourism companies marketing outdoor adventures online...

...The Internet has flourished because anyone can create a Web site and anyone can surf anywhere. Citizens and consumers have popularized eBay, YouTube and Google. Craigslist, a popular online bulletin board, has relied on word-of-mouth advertising to thrive in Anchorage. The Internet is bursting with millions of other smaller sites as well as creative ideas, but passage of the Stevens bill would stifle future innovation.

Without a free and open Internet, we also lose the passionate debate and discussion central to American democracy. Potentially, Stevens' bill would limit citizens' ability to access Web sites that offer controversial or minority views -- that's why both Gun Owners of America and the Christian Coalition have joined with AkPIRG, the ACLU and MoveOn.org to back net neutrality.

A few weeks ago I posted an entry that U.S. District Judge Emmett G. Sullivan had commendably refused to allow his court to rubberstamp the recent mergers between Verizon and MCI and ATT and SBC. This week, we and two other leading consumer groups, Consumers Union and the Consumer Federation of America, with whom we had filed joint petitions to deny the mergers, sent Judge Sullivan a letter commending him for his vigilance and reiterating the importance of his review to the public interest: Excerpt:

The undersigned representatives of leading, national consumer groups participated actively in federal proceedings in opposition to these Bell mergers, including filing a petition to deny merger approval with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as well as numerous and substantial presentations to the FCC and DoJ outlining the concerns of consumers. Our submissions and concerns about the mergers' anti-competitive impacts on the residential market were disregarded by both FCC and DoJ. DoJ imposed no conditions on the mergers sufficient to protect consumer interests in reducing the anticompetitive impacts of the mergers.

The floor statements of Senator Kohl and other co-sponsors of the 2004 Amendments to the Tunney Act clearly reflect the intent of Congress to overrule the precedents cited by the Department and require the Court "to review a list of enumerated factors to determine whether a consent decree is in the public interest...[and] ensure that the Justice Department's antitrust consent decrees are in the best interests of consumers and competition." Indeed, we do not see how the court can fulfill its statutory obligations by limiting the scope of its review to the complaint and providing the deference to DoJ's decision making that the Department contends is required.

Jeff Chester, over at his Digital Destiny blog, explains the dark, narrow vision of the cable and telephone moguls better than anyone. Excerpt from his latest post:

What Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and others want to give us is a souped-up interactive digital system delivering lots of TV-like entertainment--accompanied by a torrent of personalized advertising. That's why the cable and phone monopoly is opposed to network neutrality. A truly open system would permit our eyeballs and clicks to really roam free.

The New York Times reports that a federal judge is reviewing whether or not the Bush Administration merely rubber-stamped the two massive mergers -- SBC/AT&T and Verizon/MCI that have from a practical standpoint, nearly succeeded in putting Ma Bell back together again. The judge could impose conditions to better guarantee competition. Along with other consumer groups, we opposed the mergers.

Read Senator Kerry's guest blog about the Senate Commerce Committee's net neutrality vote, posted at SaveTheInternet.com. Excerpt:

It is profoundly disappointing that the Senate is going let a handful of companies hold internet access hostage by legalizing the cherry-picking of cable service providers and new entrants. That is a dynamic that would leave some communities with inferior service, higher cable rates, and even the loss of service. Not to mention inadequate internet service --in the age of the information.

In what is likely a calculated move designed to convince the FCC into granting an industry petition to preempt state laws regulating cell phone early termination fees (ETFs) as penalties, Verizon has announced (Washington Post) that it will reduce ETFs over the term of a two year cell plan contract. The gradual reduction doesn't solve the essential problem: ETFs prevent consumers from shopping for the best deals. This allows cell phone carriers to use a variety of unfair practices, knowing that their customers cannot afford to switch plans because they are essentially locked in a cell. MORE:

The PIRG report Locked In A Cell found that:

Nearly half (47%) of all cell phone customers would switch or consider switching cell phone service carriers to get a lower rate and better service if they didn't have to pay an average penalty of $170 to cancel their service contract. The report also found that consumers have paid $4.6 billion over the last 3 years due to the penalties-- that's $2.5 billion in actual penalties paid and $2.1 billion in lost benefits from consumers who either couldn't afford the penalty or didn't think it was worth paying.

We filed the report to the FCC as a comment in its proceeding, and also filed joint comments with the National Consumer Law Center and Consumers Union in the same docket. The industry hopes that the FCC will classify the punitive ETF fees as rates, which would not be subject to state regulation. In a related docket, the FCC has issued a rule which is being challenged in court, that would treat other state regulation (truth in billing rules) as rates. We link to comments in both dockets here. Yesterday's Senate Commerce action on telecom deregulation -- if it becomes law -- would further limit state authority to protect consumers from unfair cell phone practices.

Statement of U.S. PIRG Consumer Program Director Ed Mierzwinski On Net Neutrality:

Senate proponents of keeping the Internet free of telephone and cable company gatekeepers nearly succeeded today in a tie (11-11) vote on the bi-partisan Snowe (R-ME) Dorgan (D-ND) amendment to insert enforceable net neutrality provisions into the Senate Commerce Committee's telecommunications deregulation proposal, S. 2686, The Communications, Consumers' Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006. The close vote was extremely significant. MORE:

It demonstrates that despite the millions of dollars of Baby Bell deceptive advertising and their creation of myriad fak-o front groups with no consumers in them, that their false message against net neutrality is rapidly losing momentum. Their campaign to hijack the Internet is sputtering in the face of the truth campaign from a diverse coalition of civic and arts organizations and businesses concerned about the future of commerce, culture and democracy if the Internet were to be controlled by a telco/cable duopoly. We are making our voices heard.

All Democrats and Senator Snowe voted for the net neutrality amendment. All other Republicans voted with the wannabe Internet gatekeepers. Action now shifts to the floor.

Sign our petition to reinstate net neutrality and keep the Internet free. There are numerous other problems with S. 2686, which we will detail in a future post. On the positive side, an amendment by Senator McCain (R-AZ) to promote low-power community owned FM radio (LPFM) was added to the otherwise extremely one-sided bill.

Apparently, the technician was on hold for an hour seeking advice from Comcast Customer Service, as if he were a mere cable TV customer! Here's the Youtube video. Here's the New York Times/AP story, which says the repairman was fired. Instead, they probably should have fired the executive who set up the firm's primitive customer service system, which appears similar to that used by banks, credit bureaus, airlines and phone companies. I am sure Comcast CEO Brian Roberts himself would fall asleep if they put him on hold in a Comcast voicemail-jail.

Here's our letter with other leading consumer groups to the Senate Commerce Committee strongly opposing the Stevens (R-AK) telecom deregulation bill unless substantial changes are made to promote competition, protect communities and reinstate net neutrality. Net neutrality should be considered Tuesday during continuation of the markup vote begun last week. MORE:

From our letter:

The Act provides for sweeping deregulation of cable services regardless of whether meaningful competition emerges resulting in increased prices and degraded service for many consumers; gives new market entrants a license to redline; inexplicably preempts state consumer protection laws for terms and conditions of wireless telephone services where consumer abuse is rampant and growing; and fails to provide meaningful network neutrality rules to prevent anticompetitive discrimination that squelches competition and innovation. If enacted, the legislation makes consumers far worse off than they are under current law. It provides too few guarantees of new competition to justify the significant sacrifices in consumer protections at the federal, state and local level.

Over at her popular video blog Rocketboom Amanda Congdon explains the need for net neutrality (several viewing formats), . And Tim Berners-Lee of MIT, who invented the World Wide Web, has his own video blog (Realplayer) explaining the crucial need for net neutrality. The Senate Commerce Committee is expected to take up net neutrality Tuesday during continuation of its consideration of a Chairman Stevens (AK) telecom proposal.

I am participating this week in an important conference in Paris - New Relations Between Creative Communities and Consumers. It is one of a series of conferences on access to knowledge (a2k) and culture being hosted by the PIRG-backed TransAtlantic Consumers Dialogue. Intrusive new copyright and intellectual property regimes being considered by governments and international treaty organizations such as the WIPO (previous blog) concentrate control over intellectual property in the hands of fewer and fewer powerful corporations, treat consumers as pirates while restricting their activities and fail to compensate the musicians, artists and authors -- who are the ones that are supposed to reap the benefits of copyright, trademark and patent protectio -- adequately. This conference brings together those actual creators with consumers.

"Don't change my reality, keep net neutrality." Download or stream the new ode to keeping the Internet free from gatekeepers, God Save The Internet, by singer-songwriters Jill Sobule, Michelle Lewis and Kay Hanley, playing together as the broadband. And sign our petition to Save Internet Freedom!

On Thursday the House defeated 152-269 (Pro-consumer vote= AYE) the PIRG-backed Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) amendment to reinstate strong protections for net neutrality and then overwhelmingly approved the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006 (COPE Act, HR 5252), to establish national video franchising at the request of the phone companies. As we said in a story on the AP Wire, which also appeared in USA Today, the bill has more problems than a lack of net neutrality:

"We're afraid that either state or federal bills will allow the phone companies to redline some neighborhoods, to price gouge others, to eliminate benefits to the local community and allow the existing cable company to backslide," said Ed Mierzwinski of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

The lack of net neutrality is one threat to the Internet. So is the proposed WIPO webcast treaty.Here's a new letter from U.S. PIRG, Public Knowledge and other groups urging Congress to investigate the treaty, which would grant unprecedented property rights to webcasters such as Yahoo, including the right to public domain and other content that the webcasters did not create. MORE:

Two little-noticed agencies, the Commerce Department's U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress, have spent the last several years over in Geneva at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO is part of the UN) negotiating a treaty that would grant unprecedented intellectual property rights to webcast companies like Yahoo. But they've kept it low-profile despite numerous attempts by public interest groups to convince them to open up their process. Here's an excerpt from our new letter on what's at stake:

We are troubled not only by the substance of the treaty, but also by the fact that the U.S. delegation, represented by the Library of Congress Copyright Office and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), have failed to engage in any public discussion about the effect of the treaty on consumers, industry, copyright holders and U.S. law...
The harm to the millions of consumers represented by the undersigned organizations would be particularly great – this additional layer of rights could permit broadcasters to restrict access to content within the home and could limit lawful uses of content over the Internet. Thus, this treaty could reverse the explosion of diverse and increasingly sophisticated “user generated” content that has become part of the fabric of the Internet.

House leadership has begrudgingly allowed Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) to bring up his important PIRG-backed amendment co-sponsored by Reps. Eshoo (D-CA)-Inslee (D-WA) and Boucher (D-VA) to keep the Internet free during consideration of the telephone company wish list known as the COPE Act (Barton (R-TX)-Rush (D-IL) on the floor today. Here's what's wrong with the COPE Act besides its lack of enforceable net neutrality provisions. Today's Washington Post has a No Tolls On The Internet column by our colleagues Bob McChesney and Larry Lessig.

This weekend in the Bangor (ME) Daily News, two University of Maine officials explain in a column Net Neutrality and Higher Education the threat that the phone and cable companies pose to higher education if they become Internet gatekeepers.

The network operators are now proposing to create a two-tiered network infrastructure that allows only certain applications onto a "premium" Internet lane leaving universities, entrepreneurs, consumers, small businesses and any other individuals without deep pockets to the slower lane. Taxpayers of our state already pay hard-earned money to support state-funded organizations like our universities, libraries, K-12 schools and museums.

On Thursday the House Judiciary Committee passed PIRG-backed legislation to preserve net neutrality and keep the Internet free. This critical vote shows that like a dead fish, the phone company propaganda against keeping the Internet free is starting to lose its freshness. The bipartisan (Sensenbrenner-R-WI; Conyers-D-MI) "Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006" (H.R. 5417) is now ready for floor action, but so is the PIRG-opposed but phone company-backed COPE Act, which fails to preserve net neutrality.

Today, U.S. PIRG joined Free Press, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union and Media Access Project in applauding a bi-partisan proposal to preserve net neutrality and keep the Internet free:

May 18, 2006

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Craig Aaron, Free Press, 202-265-1490, x 25

Consumer Groups Applaud Bipartisan Bill on Network Neutrality

Consumers Union, Consumer Federation, Free Press, MAP and U.S. PIRG Support House Judiciary Committee’s Effort to Protect a Free and Open Internet

WASHINGTON - A coalition of leading consumer and public interest groups today welcomed the “Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006,” a bill introduced in the House Judiciary Committee that would offer meaningful protections under the law for Network Neutrality - the guiding principle that ensures a free and open Internet.

The bill, HR 5417, is sponsored by House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.); Ranking Member John Conyers (D-Mich.); and Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Rick Boucher (D-Va.). In reaction to this new, bipartisan legislation, Free Press, Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America, Media Access Project and U.S. PIRG made the following statement:

“We applaud the leaders of the House Judiciary Committee for taking this important step toward preserving a free and open Internet.

“From its inception, the Internet has prospered on a foundation of equality and neutrality, open to all and protected from discrimination by unnecessary gatekeepers. Network Neutrality is about preserving the Internet as truly free market that encourages competition and innovation.

“In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens have contacted Congress, urging their elected officials to protect Network Neutrality. Despite the intense lobbying and misleading advertising of the cable and telecommunications industry, Congress is beginning to heed the public outcry.

“A growing alliance in Congress recognizes that Network Neutrality is not a partisan issue, but one of grave importance to anyone who wishes to see the Internet remain an unrivaled environment for innovation, civic participation and free speech. We urge all members of Congress to support this important legislation.”

###

Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge has a nice blog entry on all the Bell ads against net neutrality-- funny thing, as noted by one of the commenters-- one of the fak-o phone company "Don't regulate the Internet" ads that's "cleverly" designed to look spontaneous and "grass-rootsy" appears to the side of Art's blog entry. Don't be fooled.

This Thursday, the Senate Commerce Committee will have its hearing on the 135-page telecom bill Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) introduced. The bill ignores the threats to a neutral and open Internet. Knowing this bill is up for discussion, what kind images and messages do the telephone companies want to present to Congress? Take a trip through one jam-packed edition of the Washington Post and see what about $400k will buy. Be warned. The journey has many twists and turns.

It's an important issue, and videos explaining why we need to keep the Internet free of telephone and cable company gatekeepers are popping up all over the net. Today, net neutrality is explained in this Ask A Ninja video.

Youtube has a nice 6 minute video on why we need Net Neutrality called Death of the Internet by Steve Anderson of COA News. It features Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy (in the yellow tie), who wrote the Nation piece called End of the Internet. Also featured among others, U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, Ben Scott of Free Press, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now and Internet gurus Larry Lessig and Tim Wu.

Damian over at This Spartan Life has a Quicktime video blog, set in a game universe, explaining Net Neutrality and the need to keep the Internet free. As his lead character says: "Internet Democracy advocates are not allowed to use plasma grenades in real life, so arm yourself with knowledge."

Reporter Marilyn Geewax of the Cox newspapers has a story Congress Shaping Telecom Law In Private, which quotes U.S. Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), one of the key House negotiators on the telecom/Internet bill known as the COPE Act:

The Senate just needs to pass "anything to get us into conference," where the real decisions will be made, House telecommunications subcommittee chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said Tuesday...

Tim Berners-Lee, designer of the World Wide Web (the graphical interface running on TOP of the Internet), has posted a blog entry on the importance of net neutrality: Excerpt:

When, seventeen years ago, I designed the Web, I did not have to ask anyone's permission. The new application rolled out over the existing Internet without modifying it. I tried then, and many people still work very hard still, to make the Web technology, in turn, a universal, neutral, platform. It must not discriminate against particular hardware, software, underlying network, language, culture, disability, or against particular types of data. Anyone can build a new application on the Web, without asking me, or Vint Cerf, or their ISP, or their cable company, or their operating system provider, or their government, or their hardware vendor.

Jamie Love of CPTech is over in Geneva at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO is a part of the UN you may have never heard of) attempting to stop a proposed treaty that would grant an unprecedented, unacceptable new form of property right to webcasters such as Yahoo, Microsoft, Murdoch (he owns Myspace) and others. Here's the lead from Jamie's blog entry:

Don't bother reading this unless the words "new intellectual property right" and "the Internet" seem important when put together, because it is a twisted and complicated story. Even the key players are struggling to figure out what is going on. But like a lot of twisted and complicated things, it is important.

Here's more from Jamie Love's blog entry

Web pages are full of documents, sound recordings and video that are licensed under Creative Commons licenses, or simply passed around informally. Information on the Internet often is republished on many different web sites, each reaching its own communities. This is exploding at an astonishing rate as the costs of making and hosting works falls. Within a short time, anyone will be able to create a webcast from a mobile phone, and create records of meetings of all types, news events, performances, interviews, or any number of other events.

Increasingly, people are using these works to create newer works, in documentaries, news reports and commentary, or cultural or technical works that remix or mashup content. Grid Computing and other emerging technologies are creating astonishingly creative and important ways of collaborating.

Copyright alone presents huge problems for the distribution of and creation of these new Internet based works. But a new intellectual property right for webcasting will make things even more difficult, at least doubling the permissions one needs. At a minimum it will increase transaction costs. At worst, it will change the culture of sharing information on the Internet, with some exercising as many rent seeking rights as they can acquire.

Who is pushing for this new "webcasting" middleman right? It is not the vast majority of bloggers, web page owners and others who are creating and distributing content. It is a tiny handful of big corporate players, including most notably US companies like Yahoo, News Corp (owner of MySpace), Microsoft, Time-Warner/AOL, AT&T, and a handful of large European media companies, including it seems, the BBC.

Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times has a followup Lame Ethics Bill At Least Exposes Pet Charities to her previous story on the links between U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) and the Baby Bell telephone company SBC/(now AT&T). The PIRG-opposed Joe Barton (R-TX)-Rush bill known as the COPE Act allowing the phone companies to compete with cable contains inadequate protections against price-gouging some consumers and redlining others, will not guarantee adequate PEG and other services to local communities and, most importantly, will allow the cable and phone monopolists to erect tollbooths on the Internet. It could be on the House floor as early as Thursday. See the PIRG-backed coalition site Savetheinternet.com for more info.

The House Energy & Commerce Committee just defeated, on a 22-34 vote, the Markey (D-MA) net neutrality amendment to the Barton (R-TX)-Rush (D-IL) telecom deregulation bill known as the COPE Act. It would have guaranteed that the telephone and cable companies could not hijack the Internet. MORE:

Instead, the bill will now allow these firms to ignore net neutrality rules that prevented content discrimination on the basis of price or speed and stimulated the growth of the Internet and the thousands of new companies and new voices it has encouraged. We'll have more when we get the confirmed vote count, but we understand that all committee Republicans present except Heather Wilson (R-NM) opposed Markey's pro-consumer, pro-democracy, pro-Internet, pro-business amendment. All Democrats presentexcept Ed Towns (D-NY), Gene Green (D-TX), Al Wynn (D-MD), Charlie Gonzalez (D-TX) and Bobby Rush (D-IL), supported Markey. These listed Dems, and all Republicans except Heather Wilson, opposed the amendment to keep the Internet free. For more information, see the PIRG-backed coalition of citizen groups of all stripes and a variety of technology companies: Savetheinternet.com. From a coalition release: "The diversity of this coalition underscores the importance of this issue," said Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and Google's Chief Internet Evangelist. "When the Internet started, you didn't have to get permission to start companies. You just got on the Net and started your idea."

Yesterday's Chicago Sun-Times included a story by reporter Lynn Sweet where several public interest advocates criticized Rep. Bobby Rush's (D-IL) potential conflicts of interest with SBC/AT&T, the main proponent of the Barton (R-TX)-Rush telecom bill. More:

( Excerpt from her blog entry with more details):

WASHINGTON -- An Englewood community center founded by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), a key player on telecommunications legislation, received a $1 million grant from the charitable arm of SBC/AT&T, one of the nation's largest phone companies.

The chief of a congressional watchdog group says Rush's ongoing association with the Rebirth of Englewood Community Development Corporation and his role in shaping telecommunications law as a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee is a conflict of interest. Using charitable giving as a backdoor way to curry favor with lawmakers is coming under increasing scrutiny, figuring in controversies associated with former Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.), who was forced to temporarily step aside as the ranking Democrat on the Ethics panel.

On Wednesday, the energy and commerce panel on which Rush sits is set to vote on a controversial rewrite of telecommunications law co-sponsored by Rush and backed by major phone companies eager to compete with cable television companies.

Here's a letter from PIRG, Free Press, Consumers Union and the Consumer Federation of America urging improvements to the Barton (R-TX)-Rush (D-IL) telecom bill under consideration today in the full House Energy and Commerce Committee. The letter outlines key amendments to protect net neutrality and ensure that national video franchising doesn't undercut local consumer protections. More:

We urge your support of amendments that will help reduce the risks the bill poses to consumers and improve the likelihood that the benefits of new video competition reach those who most need it, including amendments that will:

o Ensure that low-and middle-income consumers will benefit from new cable competition by requiring that new entrants comply with reasonable build-out requirements. (Dingell-Markey-Solis)
o Provide for meaningful and enforceable prohibitions on broadband network discrimination {protect network neutrality] that impedes consumer access to lawful content; prevent their use of lawful devices; and restricts their ability to send, receive and use content, applications or services. Eliminates the roll-back of FCC's authority to issue rules on network neutrality. (Markey-Boucher-Inslee-Eshoo)
o Provide for more effective enforcement of anti-redlining provisions.
o Ensure that states and localities retain the ability to establish consumer protection standards for video services. (Schakowsky)
o Provide for meaningful state, local and federal enforcement of the COPE Act and other consumer protection regulations. (Doyle)
o Eliminate retransmission consent abuse that drives up the costs of video services to consumers. (Deal)

Along with Gun Owners of America, MoveOn.org, Free Press, Craig's List founder Craig Newmark and the Consumers Union (publishers of Consumer Reports) and others, we're charter members of Savetheinternet.com. It's a new and growing effort to keep the Internet free of the tollbooths that some members of Congress want to allow the Baby Bells and Cable companies to set up. Without what's known inside the beltway as net neutrality, which characterized the Internet since it was developed by government (not Baby Bell) engineers, the phone and cable companies could not only prevent new competition and new culture, they also could prevent democratic communication by civic groups on the left and the right. Start here and also here to troll some of our previous comments on this critical battle for Internet freedom.

The April issue of PIRG's new newsletter, Preemption Alert, is available. Excerpts from the highlights: Protecting America's Food Supply: On March 2, over the objections of 39 Attorneys General, the House passed the National Uniformity for Food Act, which preempts at least 200 state food safety laws. Securing Chemical Plants: In a March 21 speech to the American Chemistry Council, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff signaled his support for weak federal safety standards for chemical plants and federal preemption of stronger state standards. Protecting Americans' Privacy: On March 30, the Senate Commerce Committee marked up a weak bill to protect consumers from those who seek to fraudulently access their phone records. This bill broadly preempts stronger state privacy laws or regulations as well as any laws imposing liability on companies for failing to protect consumer privacy. Providing Quality and Affordable Health Care: On March 15, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee passed a bill allowing insurance companies or HMOs to circumvent state patient rights laws.

Last week two privacy groups, EPIC and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, released an analysis of the privacy threats posed by various commercial business proposals to set up low-cost "muni wi-fi" under contract to San Francisco. Today's New York Times describes the privacy issues posed by Google's winning entry in a story by Laurie Flynn, Some Worries as San Francisco Goes Wireless.

But in the few days since the winning bidder was announced, the city...has found itself at the center of debate about the role of advertising, the implications of the network on consumer privacy and the effect on telecommunications companies that today sell Internet access in the city.

Internet and broadband visionary Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy has a new blog. He's got a nice piece on AT&T setting up a front group to kill Congressional efforts to keep the Internet free and its hiring of former Bill Clinton frontman Mike McCurry to front for them. Jeff forcefully makes the point that McCurry's work for AT&T is against the interests of many of the current or past grassroots clients of his other enterprises, including the ACLU, Sierra Club, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, and MoveOn. More:

AT&T/SBC has made no secret that it wants to hijack the Internet, set up tollbooths and eliminate all pretense of its Net Neutrality principle that has helped stimulate both technological innovation and small-d democratic communication by citizen groups. As Jeff Chester points out:

Ironically, McCurry's work on behalf of AT&T will ultimately harm many of the non-profit and public interest clients who work with Grassroots Enterprise and the Public Strategies Group. Among the clients listed at McCurry's various firms include the ACLU, the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, Sierra Club (MoveOn.org is listed on Grassroots Enterprise website claiming that the firm's leadership team played a key role with the group).

If McCurry's "coalition" has its way, there will be a threat to civil liberties as a few control the Internet (hello, ACLU); more targeted ads promoting unhealthy lifestyles targeted to kids (please take note, Tobacco-Free Kids); an explosion of commercialism and consumption that will further wreck the environment (the Sierra Club and other such groups should be outraged); and an Internet where only big bucks will ensure you can sway voters (which should alarm MoveOn and all other groups concerned about the future of the Internet in politics).

We've joined Consumers Union, New America Foundation and several other media reform groups in a letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin (and news release) urging him to close loopholes to prevent the big cell phone companies from rigging the auction of billions of dollars worth of publicly-owned airwave spectrum for wireless use. We'd prefer that the government lease, not sell, scarce taxpayer assets, but if it must sell, it should sell in a way that gets taxpayers a better return. It should also save as much spectrum as possible for unlicensed uses. From our letter:

The undersigned organizations write to urge you to adopt the anonymous bidding proposal and reject the compromise proposed by the wireless industry. We also call upon you to prohibit material relations between designated entities (DEs) and large wireless carriers – but not with small wireless carriers or other large companies. These two changes, taken together, will introduce much needed competition into the mobile phone and mobile data industry. On the other hand, failure to adopt these rules may cost the United States more than $10 Billion in auction revenues, as well as the harm done to consumers from the failure to introduce new competitors.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee's Telecom Subcommittee is marking up the COPE Act today-- its version of national video franchising legislation. Here's a letter from Consumers Union, PIRG, Free Press and the Consumer Federation of America. It's a poorly written bill that won't keep the Internet free; instead the bill will allow the phone and cable companies to hijack the Internet. Consumer champion Ed Markey (D-MA) calls the bill "misguided" and the phone and cable companies the "broadband barons." More:

As if failing to keep the Internet free isn't bad enough, the bill's lurching effort to bring on phone company competition by replacing historic local franchise negotiations with national rules will result in higher, not lower, video rates -- whether you receive your video from the new Baby Bell "competitors" or from an "incumbent" cable provider. The bill allows the cable companies to backslide, or serve the community worse, immediately after one household signs up for Bell video. It abjectly fails to prevent either the phone or cable companies from redlining poor neighborhoods while gouging others. But with so much lobbying money and campaign cash being flashed, it is not surprising that the cash register Congress will move forward with a proposal, even a bad one. The bill uses the common legislative trick of including one shiny, but cheap, jewel that the big boys don't care about -- the right of local communities to build out municipal broadband networks -- to mask the rest of its giveaways and deficiencies. Excerpt from our letter:

The legislation abolishes communities' authority to ensure all residents are served by new and existing cable providers without establishing reasonable build-out requirements in its place, opening a wide door to redlining. It rolls back state and local authority to establish and enforce strong consumer protections without providing for strong federal consumer protections. It leaves resolution of the tens of thousands of consumer complaints in the hands of the Federal Communications, which lacks the resources and ability to address them. And, without providing for strong, enforceable prohibitions on broadband network discrimination, it simultaneously strips the Federal Communications Commission of its authority establish network neutrality rules, leaving consumers exposed to anticompetitive tactics that will reduce competition and inflate consumer prices. In short, the legislation not only fails to ensure that consumers will benefit from new video competition, it exposes them to the risk of higher cable and broadband rates, reduced quality and reduced access to competitive choices offered via the Internet.

In The Nation, Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy describes how powerful interests, including Google and Earthlink and others, hope to win a self-serving contract with San Francisco (and other cities) to provide muni wi-fi services. The web product they offer will be slow and clunky, but wait, there's more: the firms hope to capture and track information on users for corporate marketing. As Chester explains:

Consumers and public officials should have no illusions that what is being touted as a public benefit is also designed to spur the growth of a mobile marketing ecosystem, an emerging field of electronic commerce that is expected to generate huge revenues for Google, Microsoft, AT&T and many others.

"subjected to intensive data-mining of their web searches, e-mail messages and other online activities are tracked, profiled and targeted. The inevitable consequences are an erosion of online privacy, potential new threats of surveillance by law enforcement agencies and private parties, and the growing commercialization of culture."

Several attendees have posted detailed blogs on last week's Politics and Idealogy of Intellectual Property Conference in Brussels. More.

I participated (see immediate previous blog) in the event sponsored by the PIRG-backed TACD. Here's Ian Brown's post over at Blogzilla, where he comments on participant Bruce Lehman's revelation that the TRIPs (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual property) agreement he'd negotiated as a senior Clinton official was a "mistake" for the U.S. Meanwhile, Johanna Gibson, JD, PhD, who runs the Patenting Lives Project of the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute, University of London has posted her own summary where she says that the event

"demonstrated the ever increasing importance of civil society in international norm setting, and the undeniable importance of "consumers" (indeed, producers in their own right) as stakeholders in international intellectual property law debate."

They couldn't put Humpty-Dumpty together again, but with presumptive rubber-stamping by various U.S. regulators, who seem to worry big about competition in the stapler market but little about big communications mergers, we may see Ma Bell put back together again soon. Following the weekend edition news release style popularized by the Bush Administration, AT&T (that's the new AT&T, which is the old SBC plus the old AT&T) announced Sunday that it would be buying BellSouth in a merger that the New York Times says "would create a telecommunications behemoth serving nearly 70 million local phone customers and controlling all of Cingular Wireless." The Wall Street Journal said:

a purchase of BellSouth would further cement the recreation of the old Ma Bell, which the government pushed to break up in 1984. With an AT&T-BellSouth deal, the nation's telecom services would effectively be cleaved into two behemoths -- the new AT&T and Verizon Communications Inc. -- each vertically integrated with a local phone operation, business services, and a wireless unit.

Americans deserve to be forewarned. If we permit more takeovers, such as AT&T and Bell South, we will soon witness a further shrinking of the number of conglomerates dominating our local and national media. Super media monopolies will emerge, as the cable and phone companies that control vast expanses of online communications seek also to acquire newspapers, broadcast stations, and TV networks. Eventually, the owners of the so-called competing broadband Internet wires of the cable and telephone industry will likely consolidate as well--a merger between Comcast and Verizon, for example, or a Time Warner with AT&T. Instead of having a communications environment that promotes freedom, creativity, and expression, we could witness an ever-dwindling number of major corporations controlling an unthinkable array of the most powerful media outlets.

Today's New York Times editorial Tollbooths On The Internet Highway is a good explanation of the need to keep the Internet free of corporate control and preserve what is called "net neutrality."

When you use the Internet today, your browser glides from one Web site to another, accessing all destinations with equal ease. That could change dramatically, however, if Internet service providers are allowed to tilt the playing field, giving preference to sites that pay them extra and penalizing those that don't.

On Wednesday 22 Feb the U.S. National Academies of Science are holding a public seminar and live webcast on attempts by webcasters (Yahoo et al) to use a proposed international treaty being negotiated at the U.N.'s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to gain greater power over information that currently exists in the public domain. It's a bad idea (our previous blog has details) and we've been opposing it. Our colleague Jamie Love of CPTech is one of the speakers and CPTech has action alerts and backgrounders here.

A new FCC report supports consumer group arguments that cable prices would decline if consumers could select the channels they want a la carte. Conservative, family-based organizations also support a la carte, since their members are currently forced to accept and pay for family-unfriendly channels as part of their basic, extended or premium pricing bundles. PIRG's 2003 white paper The Failure of Cable Deregulation has details on numerous unfair practices of the cable industry. [Of course, be wary of claims now being made by the phone companies and their astro-turf front groups that allowing them to enter the video market on their own terms is the solution. It isn't, and white knights the phone companies are not.]

One of the nation's leading thinkers on media and telecommunications policies and their implications for democracy, culture, competition and consumer choice is Jeff Chester, founder of the Center for Digital Democracy. His ideas form a framework for what he calls a digital democracy and he often is among the first to recognize special-interest backed attempts to accelerate the re-shaping of our media system into an anti-democratic pro-corporate architecture. Jeff has an important piece on keeping the Internet free from Baby Bell/cable company control in the current issue of the Nation, called The End of the Internet? It opens this way (click continue:

The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online. Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency.

These companies, which didn't build the Internet, and are in no way responsible for its benefits to society, have launched a campaign to take it over. One of their goals is to change its "net neutrality" principle that prevents network providers (carriers) from discriminating on the basis of speed or price or access. If that sounds too dull to matter (and the change could be made in just a few words changing some obscure laws), consider this from Jeff Chester:

Without proactive intervention, the values and issues that we care about--civil rights, economic justice, the environment and fair elections--will be further threatened by this push for corporate control. Imagine how the next presidential election would unfold if major political advertisers could make strategic payments to Comcast so that ads from Democratic and Republican candidates were more visible and user-friendly than ads of third-party candidates with less funds.

I recommend the piece, and I recommend his longer CDD website article on these issues: Hijacking the Internet: How Big Cable and Phone Companies' Plans for Broadband Threaten Democracy.

MASSPIRG and U.S. PIRG have joined a variety of public interest and media reform organizations in support of an FCC petition by Continental Airlines (also backed by a wide variety of other business organizations) urging rejection of a request by the Massachusetts airport authority, or MASSPORT, to use trumped-up public safety concerns to seize monopoly control of wireless (wi-fi) deployment at Logan Airport. An FCC ruling for MASSPORT could grant similar undeserved authority to any and all landlords (and incumbent providers as well) to block innovation and competition. MASSPORT's request, if granted, could have broad negative repercussions in the deployment of community wireless networks and other unlicensed and licensed uses of spectrum everywhere. Excerpts from our filing:

...the implications of this proceeding go far beyond airport applications and could affect literally millions of business users of unlicensed spectrum. Moreover, the implications extend far beyond the applications that are the focus of this proceeding. Last year alone more than 1 billion RFID devices and 100 million Bluetooth devices were sold in the U.S.; these and many other unlicensed devices, such as cordless telephones – some of which operate in the same band as WiFi - could all be affected by this proceeding and the dangerous precedent it could set...

...The Commission is charged under Section 1 of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended "to make available, so far as is possible, to all the people of the United States … a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide … radio communications service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges." For more than two decades the Commission has been making the presumption that reasonable competition was the best way to further this goal and the burden has been on those opposed to competition to show why monopolies are in the public interest. Massport has failed to do so.

As a consequence of the Commission’s pro-competitive policies in management of Part 15 devices, the unlicensed spectrum market is witnessing explosive growth and innovation.

The public interest filing was prepared by Jim Snyder of New American Foundation and Harold Feld of Media Access Project.

We're part of a Media and Democracy Coalition seeking to ensure that our communications policies serve the interests of consumers, citizens and competition, instead of kow-towing to the self-serving demands of telecommunications and media monopolies. As Congress and the FCC consider myriad proposals to amend or interpret telecommunications laws, one of the biggest challenges will be preserving "Net Neutrality" -- essentially, preserving an open Internet by preventing price or content discrimination by network carriers. As FCC Commissioner Michael Copps has stated:

We need a watchful eye to ensure that network providers do not become Internet gatekeepers, with the ability to dictate who can use the Internet and for what purpose.

want to create entirely new categories of fees that risk destroying the anyone-can-publish culture of the Internet. And they are lobbying for legislative protection of their meddling with the Internet content that runs through their pipes. These are not good ideas. More:

What's at stake is the future of the Internet. It wasn't built by the Baby Bells, or the cable companies, and it has flourished as a marketplace of new ideas under the simple rule that anyone could hook up and pitch new cultural or political ideas or invent new communications products and hook them up, without going through a gatekeeper that controlled how fast their content was distributed or who could access it. As Stross explains:

the superabundance of content in the Internet's ecosystem is best explained by its organizing principle of "network neutrality." The phrase refers to the way the Internet welcomes everyone who wishes to post content.

Consumers, in turn, enjoy limitless choices. Rather than having network operators select content providers on our behalf - the philosophy of the local cable company - the Internet allows all of us to act as our own network programmers, serving a demographic of just one person.

Today, the network carrier has a minor, entirely neutral role in this system - providing the pipe for the bits that move the last miles to the home. It has no say about where those bits happened to have originated. Any proposed change in its role should be examined carefully, especially if the change entails expanding the carrier's power to pick and choose where bits come from - a power that has the potential to abrogate network neutrality.

Of course, the Internet isn't perfect, (U.S. Internet is frightfully slow as numerous commentators have pointed out, e.g., see Stross above and see a recent post to the Lessig blog), but allowing the Bells and the cable companies to change its structure in their own image is the wrong way to go. Our coalition is watching Congress closely, especially a bill draft expected to be considered soon in the House Energy and Commerce Committee. (My previous blog on the lobbying in Congress. By the way, I hear BellSouth disputes the New Orleans story I mention.)

For more information on net neutrality and open access to the Internet, and on balanced communications policy generally,I urge you to check out any of the following must reads: See Stanford law professor Larry Lessig's blog generally; it also links to excerpts from his seminal books on the Internet, its architecture and its stimulation of culture, including Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. I also recommend Jeff Chester over at the Center for Digital Democracy (see his papers on Open Access and on the Supreme Court's Brand X decision), Tim Karr from Free Press and his personal MediaCitizen blog, especially the entry All Your Broadband Are Belong To Us, and Harold Feld's (lawyer for the Media Access Project) personal blog, Tales of the Sausage Factory. If you really want to dig deep, see the 472 page volume Open Architecture As Communications Policy: Preserving Internet Freedom in the Broadband Era, edited by Mark Cooper, research director of the Consumer Federation of America and a fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. PIRG's Media Reform pages are here.

Once again demonstrating that the competitive threat from satellites or even from Ma Bell doesn't matter, Comcast has annnounced a 6% cable rate hike as reported nationally by the Associated Press in a story quoting PennPIRG director Beth McConnell.

We published a detailed white paper in 2003 on The Failure of Cable Deregulation, which exposes many seamy practices of the industry, including its clockwork rate hikes. This 2004 U.S. GAO report explains the cable industry's pricing power, when it finds that only where consumers have a second cable cable company to choose from are rates lowered:

Competition leads to lower cable rates and improved quality. Competition from a wire-based company is limited to very few markets. However, where available, cable rates are substantially lower (by 15 percent) than in markets without this competition. Competition from direct broadcast satellite (DBS) companies is available nationwide, and the recent ability of these companies to provide local broadcast stations has enabled them to gain more customers. In markets where DBS companies provide local broadcast stations, cable operators improve the quality of their service.

The Washington Post (free reg. req.) has two separate stories by Jonathan Krim this week reporting on the arrogance of BellSouth, one of the Baby Bell phone monopolists.

Today's story Angry BellSouth Withdrew Donation, New Orleans Says reports:

Hours after New Orleans officials announced Tuesday that they would deploy a city-owned, wireless Internet network in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, regional phone giant BellSouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate one of its damaged buildings that would have housed new police headquarters, city officials said yesterday.

Perhaps more troubling even than BellSouth's pouting treatment of a nearly destroyed city trying to climb back from its near-destruction, however, are reports that it wants to remake the open, democratic Internet in its own monopolistic image. Krim reported Thursday in the story Executive Wants to Charge for Web Speed that BellSouth executive William Smith:

said yesterday that Internet service providers should be allowed to strike deals to give certain Web sites or services priority in reaching computer users, a controversial system that would significantly change how the Internet operates.

"The incredible potential of broadband will be severely compromised if network operators are permitted to be the gatekeepers of the Internet, deciding what content, applications and services succeed or fail on the Internet," wrote the coalition, which includes Amazon.com Inc., eBay Inc., Google and IAC/InterActive Corp.

Kudos to FCC Chair Kevin Martin for embracing a la carte pricing for cable channels, which could lower cable prices. One way the cable industry maintains its ability to keep prices high is by forcing consumers to choose from a set of a few pricing packages, rather than choosing only the channels they want. U.S. PIRG and other consumer groups, including the Consumer Federation of America and Consumers Union, have long condemned the practice as anti-competitive. Family-based organizations such as Concerned Women for America have opposed it because it forces them to accept (and pay for) family-unfriendly channels in their bundle.

We published a detailed white paper in 2003 on The Failure of Cable Deregulation, which exposes many seamy practices of the industry.

We joined 17 media reform groups in a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee criticizing its latest staff draft of a more Baby Bell-friendly, less-consumer friendly, less competition-friendly, less net neutrality-friendly telecom rewrite. While we like the bill's section recognizing the right of local communities to provide community broadband services, free from the intervention of state governments, the rest of it is weaker than the first draft, especially its capitulation on net neutrality, which threatens the open, democratic Internet. The committee held a hearing today. Gene Kimmelman of Consumers Union provided consumer testimony, which we endorse.

From the letter:

Policies that do not respond to the public interest, but instead serve special interests, will inhibit economic development, hinder efforts to expand equality of opportunity for all citizens, and stunt economic competitiveness and innovation.

Groups signing our letter include: Alliance for Community Media, Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, CCTV Center for Media and Democracy, Center for Creative Voices in Media, Center for Digital Democracy, Common Cause, Consumer Project on Technology, Deep Dish TV, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, Free Press, Future of Music Coalition, Hawaii Consumers, Media Access Project, Media Democracy Chicago, National Hispanic Media Coalition, The Peoples Channel, and U.S. PIRG.

Letter from U.S. PIRG, AARP, Consumers Union and Consumer Federation of America urging Senators to oppose the Ensign amendment to the massive budget reconciliation bill-- the amendment would reduce funding for the consumer assistance program intended to compensate consumers whose TV sets will go dark through no fault of their own in April 2009. Previous blog.

DTV, media reform, reconciliation, converter boxes, consumer protection

The Media Access Project, acting as attorney for PIRG and other public interest organizations that filed a petition to deny the transfer of the bankrupt Adelphia cable assets to Comcast and Time Warner, has filed a motion at the FCC urging the commission to delay consideration of a Comcast proposal to acquire a different cable company, Susquehanna.

As Media Access Project Attorney Harold Feld colorfully points in the "motion to hold in abeyance," Comcast is seeking a New England monopoly:

An old adage advises that one can boil a frog by putting a frog in water and slowly raising the heat until the water boils and the frog dies. Comcast has apparently found a similar way to create a cable monopoly throughout the Northeast -- acquire systems in separate transactions so that each transaction creates only a marginal increase in regional concentration capable of surviving scrutiny if viewed in isolation. Rather than let Comcast boil the subscriber “frog,�? the Commission should hold the above captioned transaction in abeyance until it receives applications for the proposed Susquehanna transfer and can review both together.

Our previous blog has details on the proposed Adelphia to Comcast/Time Warner transfers and related transactions.

The FCC has ignored our filings against and has instead joined the DOJ in rubberstamping the PIRG-opposed mergers of SBC/AT&T and Verizon/MCI. Previous blog has details.

The Department of Justice has rubber-stamped the anti-competitive mergers of the Baby Bell SBC with AT&T and the Baby Bell Verizon with MCI. PIRG, Consumers Union and Consumer Federation of America filed peitions to deny in both SBC/AT&T and Verizon/MCI. The mergers must still be approved by the FCC. More below.

Here's the FCC's SBC merger page and its Verizon merger page. Here's an excerpt from our SBC petition to deny:

FAILURE TO PROMOTE THE PUBLIC INTEREST
The Commission simply cannot look back on the carnage of the past six years and conclude that its decision to allow a handful of incumbents to dominate the local telecommunications market has served the public interest. Not only have we suffered through a wave of bankruptcies and scandals that destroyed billions, if not trillions of dollars of equity, but the piecemeal approval of mergers and the failure to enforce market opening and network access policies enacted by Congress has allowed the industry structure to devolve into what
Business Week called a “cozy duopoly.�? This “cozy duopoly�? has failed to serve the most fundamental public interest objective of the Communications Act. The “cozy duopoly�? fostered by the Commission’s policies has failed to provide ubiquitous advanced telecommunications services at affordable prices.

Along with CFA and CU, in June we also published the report BROKEN PROMISES AND STRANGLED COMPETITION on the failed promises of the Bells. Excerpt:

THE ANTICOMPETITIVE IMPACT OF THE TELECOM MEGA-MERGERS The wave of proposed mergers in the telecommunications industry — SBC attempting to gobble up AT&T, and Verizon trying to swallow MCI — mark the ultimate demise of any hope for consumers getting more choices and lower prices for local, long distance, wireless, and the new Internet-based services exploding on the market. Evidence submitted to regulators across the country proves the pending mega-mergers of telephone giants SBC/AT&T, and Verizon/MCI will have a devastating impact on the nation’s residential customers.

Taken together, the merger protests submitted by consumer groups show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the mergers are anticompetitive and will impose substantial harm on consumers. The harm posed by these mergers goes well beyond local and long distance markets that are already highly concentrated. More importantly, the mergers will destroy the feeble competition in markets for the telecommunications facilities that are necessary to provide a wide range of telecommunications services, including access to the Internet.

These mergers would create super-Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) that monopolize the in-region public switched telephone network and “mega-Peer Internet backbone�? providers that dominate access to the Internet for end-users. After a decade of market opening, the two firms being acquired account for about three quarters of the competitive presence in telephone markets. The four companies in question comprise the number one, two or three largest providers of local and long distance service, network access, switching and transport services.

The remaining competitors in the telecommunications business would be minuscule in comparison, lacking the size and geographic reach to provide a competitive check on the two dominant firms. Illogical promises of greater concentration bringing greater competition should be flatly rejected by regulators. The track record of the RBOCs since the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 shows a persistent pattern of bad acts, broken promises and the failure to compete. Intermodal competitors—such as Voice over Internet Protocol and wireless—have all been recently been examined and correctly dismissed as substitutes for retail services by both the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ).

That RBOCs’ dismal competitive track record, combined with the dearth of competitive alternatives and the dramatic increase in market power that the megacompanies would possess post-merger, demand the conclusion that anti-competitive and anticonsumer behavior would sharply increase post-merger.

Today the House Energy and Commerce Committee rejected 28-21 a PIRG-backed proposal to adequately compensate consumers whose TV sets will go dark through no fault of their own unless they purchase expensive settop converter boxes when the digital TV (DTV) transition takes place. (Previous blog.) We'll have more later on a Mary Bono (R-CA) amendment that the committee apparently did accept-- the Bono amendment preempts a strong California energy efficiency law (her own state!) for new appliances, allowing these converters to be energy-wasters.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee will vote today on its digital television (DTV) transition bill. Many low-and-moderate income TV viewers will see their sets go dark, unless the committee accepts a Dingell (D-MI)-Markey (D-MA) amendment to Chairman Joe Barton's (R-TX) unacceptable proposal to create a fund of less than $1 billion to compensate consumers for converter boxes to keep their sets working. As a letter from PIRG, Consumers Union and Consumer Federation of America points out, this is not about subsidies or windfalls or free money, but essential fairness and holding consumers harmless:

Consumers paid good money for their TVs with the reasonable expectation that they would receive broadcast signals over their useful electronic life. The $10 billion or more in auction revenue facilitated by the transition is more than enough to fully compensate consumers for the costs they are asked to bear just to keep those TV sets working.

Full compensation for the cost of converter boxes is far from a windfall for consumers. The boxes do not provide for a government-supported technology upgrade; they merely allow consumers’ existing analog sets to continue displaying analog images—something they have a right to expect. Nor is compensation a subsidy. By compensating consumers, Congress isn’t giving them anything; it merely holds them harmless from a government mandate that would otherwise make their perfectly good personal property virtually useless.

National Journal reports today on the issue and references a similar letter from AARP. Last week, the Senate Commerce Committee approved a much better bi-partisan proposal for $3 billion in converter box compensation (previous blog).

Letter from U.S. PIRG, Consumers Union, AARP and Consumer Federation of America urging the Senate Commerce Committee to include a $3 billion compensation fund to help purchase converter boxes for consumers whose over-the-air analog TVs will otherwise "go dark" when the Congressionally-ordered digital transition (DTV) is made in April 2009.

When broadcasters make this switch to digital spectrum, some of the taxpayer-owned analog spectrum they have been using will be allocated to public safety communications and a large part of the remainder will be auctioned off to phone companies and others, netting a one-time budget windfall of $10-100 billion.

Yesterday, the Senate Commerce Committee included the converter box funding in its DTV bill, although similar House funding is not guaranteed.

On the negative side, the bill had no additional language ensuring that a portion of that analog spectrum be retained, not auctioned off, for "unlicensed uses" such as community wi-fi projects. Details in previous blog.

As the Senate Commerce Committee prepares to vote on a Digital TV transition bill as early as Thursday, U.S. PIRG joined the nation's leading consumer and media reform groups in a letter urging the Congress not to sell off all the public's analog airwaves being returned by broadcasters as part of the DTV transition. Instead, we urge that some spectrum, especially unused spaces between stations, be retained for unlicensed public use. While some of our groups may have different priorities for the DTV transition overall,

"on one crucial element of the bill, we speak with one voice: DTV legislation must expand availability of unlicensed spectrum to promote affordable broadband access."

So far, Congressional deliberations on the transition have emphasized the anticipated one-time multi-billion dollar budget windfall from selling this spectrum to telephone companies and others. To some extent, Congress has also worried about over-the-air viewers whose televisions will go dark unless they get digital converter boxes as part of the transition. But Congress has not really deliberated much about about ensure that more Americans hook up to a vital, dynamic high-speed, broadband Internet. To date, while local wi-fi projects have been a stunning success around the nation, the projects have been run in "garbage" spectrum, along with grarage door openers, baby monitors and plain old microwave oven interference. The spectrum available in the DTV transition, conversely, is so-called "beachfront" spectrum, suitable for much better, faster, longer-range wi-fi which will also ideally stimulate more Internet innovation.
From the letter:

It is vital that the American people benefit from the public airwaves in specific, concrete ways. The DTV bill may be the Senate’s best opportunity to promote affordable broadband nationwide and close the growing gap between the U.S. and our international competitors. The U.S. has fallen from 3rd to 16th in the world in broadband subscribers in the last few years. We remain among the worst performers in the industrialized world in terms of bit-speeds per dollar paid by the consumer for monthly service. This gap is both unacceptable and unsustainable for our long-term global competitiveness. Access to unlicensed spectrum will help close it.

CCTV has posted a RealPlayer TV webcast here of a town meeting organized by U.S. Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), VPIRG and CCTV last night to discuss the Comcast/Time Warner acquisition of the bankrupt cable company Adelphia's assets. (Comcast and Time Warner have proposed to divvy up the various U.S. consumer markets, and Comcast pretty much gets Vermont under their proposal.)

Speakers at the Burlington, Vermont event included Rep. Sanders, Mark Reilly (Comcast), Commissioner David O'Brien (VT Public Service Dept.), Paul Burns (VPIRG), Burlington Mayor Peter Clavelle and Lauren-Glenn Davitian (Vermont Access Network & CCTV). (If you want, you can skip ahead to about 41 minutes, where you can hear Paul followed by Lauren-Glenn, but the whole webcast is worth hearing.) Here's a previous blog that links to both the Petition To Deny the merger filed by the Media Access Project on behalf of U.S. PIRG, CCTV and other media reform groups and to other merger documents filed by all parties at the FCC.

Also on Friday, PennPIRG director Beth McConnell had an op-ed "Cable's creeping threat" in the Philly Inquirer outlining issues related to cable, media ownership and also one of Philadelphia's largest corporate citizens, the cable giant Comcast. The op-ed was timed to appear during a major media issues conference called "What Price Media Consolidation?" sponsored by the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. Here's an excerpt from Beth's piece:

Not only does Comcast enjoy the power that comes from being a monopoly, and from having friends in government, but the company has also stacked the deck internally. Not even Comcast's shareholders have any sway over their business practices. Any decision they make can be trumped by the Roberts family, which holds a "supermajority" of Comcast shares.

How Comcast behaves and how government regulates cable goes far beyond how much it costs to watch Six Feet Under on HBO. Cable has become far more than a vehicle for entertainment, especially in today's digital era. As a predominant means of broadband access, cable is increasingly a lifeline for information and communication. New broadband applications are evolving so rapidly that it's hard to predict all of its uses, but as Comcast itself will tell you, cable will soon become a leading way we phone home, with "voice over Internet protocol," or VOIP, ready to explode.

The article goes on to mention the leadership of a number of Philly groups on the national stage-- among them Prometheus Radio Project, the group whose lawsuit busted up the FCC's rollback of its media ownership rules, and Media Tank.

Can states provide cell phone customers with "truth-in-billing rights?" Here's the amicus brief of U.S. PIRG, AARP, Consumers Union and the National Consumer Law Center in the case NASUCA v. FCC, supporting an appeal to the Eleventh Circuit by the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates (NASUCA) and the Vermont Public Service Board seeking to overturn an FCC rule preempting state truth in billing rules. See a recent report by MASSPIRG -- Can You Hear Us Now? -- and other information on a proposed state cell phone bill of rights here. Here's our most recent blog linking to our August "Locked In a Cell" report on unfair cell phone Early Termination Fees.

Our colleague Jamie Love of the Consumer Project on Technology has written a very important letter to U.S. copyright officials calling for either the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) or the Library of Congress to seek public comment on the impact of the so-called webcast treaty under consideration in the U.N.'s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva. The proposed webcast treaty grants unprecedented legal rights (layered above and beyond any copyright rights) to webcasters. The new rights would extend over content created by others or even from the public domain. If the webcasters, led by Yahoo, win this authority, it will mean "less freedom for the Internet." The webcasters have hitched their treaty proposal to an equally problematic "WIPO Broadcast Treaty" also under consideration. CPTech's page on WIPO-casting, which covers both proposals.

Here is an excerpt:

CPTech renews its request that the USPTO or the Library of Congress (LOC) invite formal public comment on the proposal to create a new International Treaty obligation establishing a novel intellectual property regime for webcasting, through the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

The treaty language proposed for a "webcasting"right would create a new layer of property rights, lasting at least 50 years, for materials that are transmitted by web servers over the Internet and other networks. Unlike copyright, the new webcaster right is not based upon a creative contribution. Any material, including material in the public domain, or licensed for public dissemination under a creative commons type license, would be burdened with this new layer of rights, which accompany any "public transmission" of any combination or representations of sounds and or images.

There are no formalities for the new rights. They will automatic increase the transaction costs associating with redistributing or reusing information distributed from web pages.

The proposed treaty will harm the public, by imposing a costly and time-consuming thicket of rights, and will make it illegal to redistribute or copy works that are in the public domain, or which have been licensed for public distribution under a creative commons type voluntary license.

CPTech is part of a growing movement seeking to preserve "Access To Knowledge" as powerful corporations seek to extend their control over information, including information they have not created themselves. Previous blog.

U.S. PIRG, along with every other major media reform organization in the nation, issued a joint news release calling for nationwide hearings on a sweeping new Telecommunications Act rewrite (Washington Post story) proposed in draft form by leadership of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. From the letter:

"Telecommunications legislation has for too long been negotiated behind closed doors with key industry heavyweights and major media conglomerates, which spend hundreds of millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying in Washington."

A low power LPFM community radio station finally went on the air Tuesday-- they moved to an Airstream in the parking lot to avoid the bureaucrats controlling the inside of the Astrodome. More from Evacuation Radio. More with pictures at Houston Indymedia. Our previous blog.

Organizers in Houston are handing out radios, although the "Incident Commander" has still not given them official authority to establish a Low Power FM community radio station in the Astrodome. Houston Indymedia says "For more information call 713-526-4000, log on to www.kpft.org or tune in to 90.1 FM in Houston or 89.5 FM in Galveston." See Evacuation Radio and Prometheus Radio and Houston Indymedia for more information about the Astrodome and numerous other successful community efforts to restore communications all throughout the area ravaged by Katrina.

According to its organizers (see Evacuation Radio and Prometheus Radio) as well as a piece by Drew Clark of National Journal's Tech Daily, just one local bureaucrat, the "Incident Commander," is blocking laudable and widely supported efforts to "barnraise" a community radio station in the Astrodome, despite massive support from the FCC, Sony (which donated thousands of radios) Pacifica Radio, the City of Houston and others. Every day it is delayed, the station becomes less critical, as evacueees move out to new housing. Our previous blog here.

A low-power FM (LPFM) community radio station is about to go on the air at the Houston Astrodome for Katrina evacuees. Organizers from Houston Indymedia and the Prometheus Radio Project (INFO ON HOW TO HELP HERE) seek donations of portable radios -- with earphones -- and batteries. According to their release: “The FCC, the City of Houston, and the people living at the Astrodome want this station to go on the air,�? says Rice University professor and Indymedia organizer Tish Stringer. “But the Astrodome staff won't let the station launch until we have enough radios for all the families."

We've filed copies of our new report on cell phone Early Termination Fees, Locked In A Cell (previous blog), as an ex parte comment (link to the filed comment in FCC Docket WT- 05-194) in two FCC dockets on Early Termination Fee issues. Michelle Singletary of the Washington Post has a nice piece on the report in her syndicated column (free registration required) this week.

Today we released Locked In A Cell: How Cell Phone Early Termination Fees Hurt Consumers. It's a consumer survey and economic analysis of the impact of Early Termination Fee penalties (ETFs). The report finds that "Nearly half (47%) of all cell phone customers would switch or consider switching cell phone service carriers to get a lower rate and better service if they didn’t have to pay an average penalty of $170 to cancel their service contract."

The report also found that consumers have paid $4.6 billion over the last 3 years due to the penalties-- that's $2.5 billion in actual penalties paid and $2.1 billion in lost benefits from consumers who either couldn't afford the penalty or didn't think it was worth paying.

The cell phone industry is highly concentrated. After the recent Nextel/Sprint merger, just four firms control 80% of the market. The report shows how this oligopoly traps its customers by locking them into their 2-year plans with punitive ETF penalties-- you need to pay $150-240 to get out. Worse, when you complain, you are often told "OK we'll fix that or upgrade you, but only if you extend another 2 years. Or, you can pay the penalty."

We've recently filed comments against a petition by the cell phone industry to eliminate state laws regulating these unfair penalties. We've also filed comments on a proposed FCC Truth In Billing rule. These are discussed here. In March, MASSPIRG released a major report on cell phone bills of rights, "Can You Hear Us Now?"

Consumers need strong truth in billing rights and they need to be rid of the burden of ETFs-- which allow the cell phone companies to treat us with impunity. And of course, dealing with the companies is like dealing with space aliens. I can relate. I'm trying to resolve a billing dispute (over my minutes? NOT) with my own cell phone company-- it claims that I am not on the plan that the store where I bought the plan and I both know is the plan I am on-- even the store can't get it resolved. I'll send them a copy of "Locked In A Cell."

The FCC is also receiving comments on whether to override strong state telemarketing "Do-Not-Call" laws. EPIC and a number of other groups have already filed comments in opposition. We will soon. According to DM News, consumers have flooded the FCC with 8,100 comments in opposition.

EPIC has a telemarketing page also. Also see the Indiana Attorney General's Save The Do Not Call Lists page.

The FCC, in its continued quest to serve the powerful telecommunications industry at the expense of consumers, has two critical decision items before it. First, it has proposed a rule that would limit state oversight of cell phone billing practices. Second, it is considering a petition by the industry asking that the FCC declare that its punitive Early Termination Fees (ETFs) of $170 or more are "rates," not penalties. The industry goal? Of course, get out from under pesky state laws. The State PIRGs and other consumer advocates are actively opposing both anti-consumer proposals.

The proposed rule “tentatively concludes�? that states are preempted from regulating cell phone companies’ billing practices, based on the specious claim that bills affect rates and states cannot regulate rates. We have filed joint comments and reply comments opposing this rule along with Consumers Union, AARP, the National Consumer Law Center, the Asian Law Caucus, and Disability Rights Advocates. The cell phone companies, of course, argued that states were preempted, and they also claimed that consumers were satisfied with the industry.

We have also filed joint comments -- along with Consumers Union and the National Consumer Law Center -- opposing the treatment of ETFs as rates, not penalties. ETFs are clearly designed to function as penalties-- the threat of paying such a high penalty to switch keeps consumers from shopping around and allows the oligopoly at the top of the cell phone heap (just four companies control 80% of the market) to keep their shoddy service without improving it, which they'd need to do if consumers could afford to vote with their feet.

Last month a group of local sports bar owners and others in the DC area launched a campaign -- I Want My Nats TV to force the powerful Comcast cable monopoly to provide carriage to the Mid Atlantic Sports Network. MASN carries the first-year Major League Baseball team, the Washington Nationals, but Comcast doesn't carry MASN.

PIRG and other citizen groups discuss the Comcast/MASN debacle on pages 15-16 of our recent "Petition To Deny" the transfer of the bankrupt Adelphia's assets to Comcast and Time Warner. PIRG's 2003 report, "The Failure of Cable Deregulation" (see page 46) discusses a similar fight in New York several years ago between Cablevision and the YES network, which owns the rights to Yankees games. Cablevision ultimately somewhat capitulated, but only because their power over the market in NYC wasn't as powerful as Comcast's dominance in the DC-Baltimore area.

Last week U.S. Senator John Ensign (R-NV) introduced the latest in a series of telco wish list bills that would eliminate most state and local authority over cable, wi-fi and telecom. Meanwhile, now that Texas is in its second special legislative session, the telephone monopolist SBC is trying for the third time to pass an Ensign-type bill in Austin.

Here's a TEXPIRG opedit in opposition from the Houston Chronicle, 29 July, explaining why SBC's SB 5 deserves to go down on strikes.

Ensign's bill (we have a copy but cannot find it yet at thomas.loc.gov) would exacerbate the growing control that powerful cable and telephone companies have over the communications choices Americans have, further stifling competition, encouraging price-gouging and choking the vitality of the Internet. Someone sent me some "Talking Points" in favor prepared by either Ensign's office or some telco spin doctor (these pieces of Washington paper rarely have fingerprints). Here's my favorite: "We have not yet reviewed the legislation in detail, but overall we agree with its market-based vision of a truly level playing field, where consumers can get the products and services they want, from the companies they choose." Actually, if you were to read the bill, you'd find that consumers only get a binary choice-- Ma Bell or Big Cable.

How do powerful national media content monopolists maintain their reign over what music we hear? One way may apparently still be old-fashioned payola. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer today announced a settlement with "SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT, one of the world's leading record companies and owner of a number of major record labels, [which] has agreed to stop making payments and providing expensive gifts to radio stations and their employees in return for "airplay" for the company's songs. Such payoffs violate state and federal law."

FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein has commended the settlement and called for an immediate FCC investigation into sordid pay-to-play practices. Said Adelstein: "We’ve seen a lot of smoke around payola for a while, but now we know it’s coming from a real fire. It’s time to dump a bucket of cold water on it."

Last week attorneys at the Media Access Project filed a petition to deny the transfer of the bankrupt Adelphia's cable assets to the monopolists Time Warner and Comcast. PIRG and other citizen petitioners argued that "The unmistakable purpose of this transaction is to create or maximize regional monopolies or monopsonies in 14 of the top 25 [market areas] and eliminate all head to head competition between the two largest [multi-system operators] in those markets. As such, the Commission must refuse permission for this transaction or designate the applications for hearing." Our petition and all other materials -- including the transfer application and all comments -- dealing with the proposal are at the FCC here.

Today's USA Today has a point (USA Today for muni broadband) /and counterpoint (phone guys for monopoly here) editorial with the US Telephone Association where the phone guys rely on "data" from a supposed think tank (our previous blog on "New Millennium Research Council" here) set up by one of their pretty-close outside PR firms to make their arguments that it is a bad idea to have the cities that provide our streets also provide on-ramps to the Internet. We disagree.

Buzzflash has posted a nice interview with Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, along with Michael Copps, one of two FCC champions of preserving what the Supreme Court has called a "diverse and antagonistic media" that is a condition of a "free press."

In commenting on the recent denial of the broadcaster petition to overturn the 3rd Circuit's rejection of Michael Powell's small-visioned, big-corporate media rules, Adelstein said "we now know from the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which has been today [June 13, 2005] upheld by the Supreme Court, that in fact the rules provided us much greater latitude. We would have been better served by working to promote the public interest more fully and being much more careful about our deregulating these media conglomerates." Go to the Media Access Project, public interest attorneys for Prometheus Radio Project in the lawsuit against the FCC rules for more information.

Today's Supreme Court decisions in the Brand X and Grokster cases threaten the vitality of the Internet. While your connection is faster now under broadband, the net's Golden Age began under old dialup rules. The Internet grew rapidly as an engine of technological innovation and a force for democratic communication revolution because when everyone connected through dialup the phone companies were required to treat everybody, from consumers to competitors, fairly. No more. The Brand X decision paves the way for a corporate oligarchy of the Internet, with the cable companies and the Big Baby Bells dividing up the net and stifling everything that has made it great.

The dialup Internet was regulated as a "telecommunications service." Now, the Supremes agree with Michael Powell's small-visioned FCC that the broadband Internet should be subject to weaker "information service" rules, which will allow the cable companies (and soon the Bells after the FCC broadens the ruling to apply to them, too) to discriminate against competitors and treat customers like chattel.

The companies controlling access to the Internet will also control what websites consumers have access to, be able to slow down transport of content they do not own (whether email from consumers or public interest groups or content from companies they do not own), and to otherwise restrict consumer freedom of speech and dumb down the Internet. For more information, I encourage you to read what Jeff Chester, director of the Center for Digital Democracy, has to say.

The court also ruled against innovation in the file sharing case Grokster. The ruling is bad, but it doesn't go as far as Hollywood and the record companies wanted the Court to go. We'll have more later after we analyze the decision, but here is some background on P2P:

Peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) is an efficient and innovative part of Internet architecture that has already made it easier for consumers to communicate legal (public domain documents and music and film) ideas with each other directly. P2P may now be under greater attack on Capitol Hill, since the Court didn't go as far as Hollywood and the record companies wanted. For more information, and to access a report released earlier this year by PIRG, Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America and Free Press, see our P2P page. In that report we showed that P2P technologies eliminate the congestion and cost of central servers and distribute bandwidth requirements throughout the network and therefore are an engine of growth and innovation that help to expand freedom of expression and the flow of information.

Today's Wall Street Journal (23 June 05) has an important front page story on the Baby Bell campaign to prevent municipal competition for hooking up to the Internet. It's an important battle. As we and other consumer groups often point out: Cities have long provided our roads and streets for commerce, and providing onramps to our information superhighway is just as important a government task.

"Phone Giants Are Lobbying Hard
To Block Towns' Wireless Plans" (Subscription required)describes state by state attempts by the Big Baby Bells to preempt localities from installing local broadband. After losing a battle in its home state of Texas, SBC has turned to its former Vice-President, U.S. Rep Pete Sessions, to propose draconian federal legislation, HR 2726, which would virtual eliminate municipal competition. The article also details how Issue Dynamics, a PR firm closely associated with SBC's fellow monopolist, Verizon, has created a "think tank" known as the New Millenium Research Council, to hoist views favorable to the Bell worldview before the public. IDI even details the strategy as a reason to buy its services, on its website. For more on state PIRG work on media issues, and on our opposition to the Verizon/MCI and SBC/AT&T mergers designed to put Ma Bell back together again, see our PIRG media pages.