All Things Digital

The Federal Communications Commission today released its official order sanctioning Comcast for interfering with its Internet customers’ right to access. And while the order is largely toothless, it is quite critical of the company’s so-called “network management practices” and its laughable efforts to downplay them.

The FCC’s 67-page order (PDF) all but calls Comcast a liar, accusing it of using “verbal gymnastics” to justify its network-management practices, and “unpersuasive” ones, to boot. As expected, the FCC gives Comcast 30 days to explain those practices in detail and how the company plans to change them by year’s end.

And just how does Comcast plan to do that? By slowing Internet service for heavy users for 10 to 20 minutes, regardless of the programs they use, with a new system called “Fair Share.”

So instead of throttling applications, Comcast (CMCSA) will throttle subscribers.

“If, in fact, a person is generating enough packets that they’re the ones creating that situation, we will manage that consumer for the overall good of all of our consumers,” Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manager of online services, told Bloomberg. User-throttling would last for “roughly between, probably, 10 and 20 minutes,” Bowling said. After that, the heavy user’s speeds would return to normal–until the next transgression. Said Bowling, “If they continue that, we would have to manage them again.”

The HTC Dream, the first handset based on Google’s (GOOG) Android mobile platform, has been given the Federal Communications Commission seal of approval. With that last hurdle cleared, the device is ready for market–though it now looks like it may arrive a bit later than expected. A short-term confidentiality request in the documentation HTC filed with the FCC suggests that the Dream will be released in November, not September.

What can we expect from this first Android device? Sadly, the HTC documentation doesn’t offer much detail. Those who claim to have seen it, however, say it will feature a trackball and a screen smaller than the one on the iPhone. They also believe it will offer access to an upcoming T-Mobile (DT) App Store similar to Apple’s (AAPL) App Store for iPhone/iPod Touch applications. The Dream will support push email, but only via Google’s Gmail service. Finally, it will use Google’s advertising platform to serve up ads based on user interests and location. Which, as far as Google is concerned, is the whole point here. “We can make more in mobile than desktop, eventually,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said recently. “The reason is because the mobile device is more targeted. Think about it: You carry your phone with you everywhere. It knows all about you. We can use that to do a very, very targeted ad. Over time, Google will make more money from mobile advertising.”

In essence, Comcast opens its customers’ mail because it wants to deliver mail not based on the address on the envelope but on the type of letter contained therein.”

– Federal Communications Commission order

Saying it wants to “send a message to the industry that bad actors will end up being punished,” the Federal Communications Commission punished Comcast with a precedent-setting reprimand today for slowing some Internet traffic. “Comcast was delaying subscribers’ downloads and blocking their uploads. It was doing so 24/7, regardless of the amount of congestion on the network or how small the file might be,” said FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. “Even worse, Comcast was hiding that fact by making affected users think there was a problem with their Internet connection or the application. Today, the Commission tells Comcast to stop.”

Well, three-fifths of the Commission, anyway. There were two dissenting votes, which will almost certainly figure prominently in those legal options Comcast (CMCSA) says it is considering. From Commissioner Robert McDowell’s dissent:

For the first time, today our government is choosing regulation over collaboration when it comes to Internet governance. The majority has thrust politicians and bureaucrats into engineering decisions. It will be interesting to see how the FCC will handle its newly created power because, as an institution, we are incapable of deciding any issue in the nanoseconds of Internet time. Furthermore, asking our government to make these decisions will mean that every two-to-four years the ground rules could change depending on election results. Internet engineers will find it difficult, if not impossible, to operate in a climate like that. … Will other countries like China follow suit and be able to regulate American companies’ network management practices, with effects that could be felt here? How do we know where to draw the line given that the Internet is an interconnected global network of networks? Given the Internet’s interconnectivity, are we now starting a global race to the lowest common denominator of maximum government regulation, all in the name, ironically, of Internet freedom?”

To Comcast, throttling or degrading the performance of file-sharing services is a necessary traffic-management technique. To the Federal Communications Commission it’s a violation of the agency’s network-neutrality principles. On Friday, three of the FCC’s five commissioners voted in favor of punishing Comcast for that violation. “I continue to believe that is imperative that all consumers have unfettered access to the Internet,” FCC chairman Kevin Martin said in a statement. “I am pleased that a majority has agreed that the Commission both has the authority to and, in fact, will stop broadband service providers when they block or interfere with subscribers’ access.”

And just how does the FCC propose to do this?

By asking Comcast to change its ways.

Rather than sanctioning the company, the FCC will require Comcast (CMCSA) to stop interfering with Internet traffic on its network, explain to the Commission how it has blocked such traffic in the past and publicly disclose how it plans to manage its network in the future. “We would tell Comcast that they have to stop engaging in that practice,” Martin said earlier this month. “They have to disclose to the commission where they are engaging in that practice.”

The proposal will be put to a final vote Aug. 1. If it’s approved it could set a precedent that will undoubtedly inspire other Internet service providers to rethink their “traffic management” practices as Comcast has.

Well, I guess the check finally cleared. … After a nearly 18-month review, the Federal Communications Commission has finally reached an agreement to approve the merger of XM Satellite Radio Holdings and Sirius Satellite Radio. Though an official announcement is yet to be made, some outstanding enforcement matters have been resolved, and the stage is set for formal Commission approval. “I think it’s fair to say an agreement in principle has been reached,” FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told The Wall Street Journal. “We’re still trying to work out the language.”

But once the Commission’s done that, XM (XM) and Sirius (SIRI)–the only two satellite radio players in the market–can finally join to create the pay-radio monopoly they’ve long planned. “I was hoping to forge a bipartisan solution that would offer consumers more diversity in programming, better price protection, greater choices among innovative devices and real competition with digital radio,” said
Jonathan S. Adelstein, an FCC commissioner who’s opposed the merger on the grounds that it’s against the public interest to let the only two companies in a particular business combine. “Instead, it appears they’re going to get a monopoly with window dressing.”

It’s quite a road-to-Damascus conversion Comcast (CMCSA) is having these days, isn’t it?

Back in February the cable company claimed it was perfectly reasonable for it to throttle or degrade the performance of peer-to-peer file-sharing services on its broadband network. But when Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin suggested the agency was mulling action against it, Comcast had a moment of clarity. In March, it said it would work with BitTorrent to develop P2P-friendly network capacity-management techniques. And today it announced plans for an industry-wide effort to create a “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.”

The document–which is to be created with the help of other Internet service providers, P2P companies and content providers–would specify how ISPs should manage P2P applications running on their networks and how consumers should use them. Said Tony Werner, Comcast Cable’s Chief Technology Officer, “By having this framework in place, we will help P2P companies, ISPs and content owners find common ground to support consumers who want to use P2P applications to deliver legal content.”

And by announcing its plans to create this framework right before the FCC hearing on its P2P-throttling techniques to be held at Stanford (in Palo Alto, Calif.) Thursday, Comcast is hoping the agency won’t take action against it for violating its Net neutrality rules.

It’s a Comcastic day for BitTorrent. This morning the cable provider, under fire for degrading the performance of the peer-to-peer file-sharing service on its broadband network, announced plans to develop better ways to manage peer-to-peer traffic. To that end, Comcast (CMCSA) will work with BitTorrent to develop a network capacity-management technique that is protocol agnostic.

Said Tony Werner, Comcast’s chief technology officer, “This new architecture would enable many new and emerging applications and will be based upon an open, nondiscriminatory framework that could interface with or support multiple technologies. We believe that P2P technology has matured as an enabler for legal content distribution, so we need to have an architecture that can support it with techniques that work over all networks.”

Of course you do. You just didn’t realize it until FCC Chairman Kevin Martin pointed it out, right?

Anyway, like most such corporately altruistic pledges, this one has the potential to do more good than bad–or more bad than good. “… We must recognize that these are two commercial entities whose goals are, in the end, to make sure that their networks and technologies are as profitable as possible,” writes Public Knowledge’s Jef Pearlman. “One can conceive of a world where an ISP and an application developer band together to make a proprietary system in which sanctioned application data gets preferred treatment, the ISP gets greater control of the application running on your computer, and both companies are happy in the exact situation we want to prevent. Time will tell what this partnership actually means.”

After nine days of nail-biting excitement, the Federal Communications Commission’s auction of the 700 MHz spectrum is beginning to wind down.”

I wrote that over a month ago, and boy was I wrong. Though the FCC is clearly keen to end it, the auction continues to drag on with cellphone companies fighting it out over niggling little bits of 12-megahertz B-Block spectrum in Albany, Ga., Yuba City and Imperial, Calif., Ashtabula, Ohio and Hunterdon, N.J. Apparently, pushing the clocks ahead an hour this past weekend didn’t do much good.

With bidding appearing to have entered the final stretch, the auction has raised nearly $20 billion, double the sum for which the FCC had hoped. Stifel Nicolaus analysts Blair Levin and Rebecca Arbogast predict it will end this week with Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T) coming out as the auction’s biggest winners, and Google (GOOG) as a “willing loser.”

Apparently Verizon’s “America’s Choice” campaign was intended as an oxymoron. Because the company seems intent on depriving consumers of choice in the wireless marketplace.

Earlier this week, Verizon filed an appeal seeking to overturn the rules the Federal Communications Commission plans to apply to the auction next January of the coveted 700-megahertz wireless spectrum. Seems it doesn’t much care for the idea of an open network that would allow consumers to use the phones and software of their choice. In a filing to a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., Verizon Wireless said the rules are “arbitrary, capricious, unsupported by substantial evidence and otherwise contrary to law.”

The appeal drew a quick and critical reply from Google, which has pledged to meet the $4.6 billion-bid minimum if open-access requirements were attached to the auction. “The nation’s spectrum airwaves are not the birthright of any one company,” Chris Sacca, Google’s head of special initiatives, wrote in a post to Google’s public policy blog. “They are a unique and valuable public resource that belong to all Americans. The FCC’s auction rules are designed to allow U.S. consumers–for the first time–to use their handsets with any network they desire, and download and use the lawful software applications of their choice. It’s regrettable that Verizon has decided to use the court system to try to prevent consumers from having any choice of innovative services.”

And really, that’s essentially what Verizon is doing. It wants to control which phones and software applications people use on its network–which, as Jason Devitt, co-founder and CEO of Skydeck, recently pointed out, is a little ridiculous. “For some reason I have never been able to understand, I have to ask permission of Verizon Wireless to attach a computer or the computers that they now call phones to their wireless networks,” Devitt said during a July House Subcommittee hearing on wireless services.. “I have to ask their permission to run applications and services on those phones.”

Looks like there are a few more years of life left in those old rabbit-eared TV sets yet. The Federal Communications Commission this week unanimously adopted rules designed to prevent analog-only cable subscribers from losing their local TV stations’ signals for three years after the switch to digital TV occurs.

“This item, at its core, is about the consumer,” FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said in remarks before the vote. “It is about ensuring that all Americans with cable–regardless of whether they are analog or digital subscribers–are able to watch the same broadcast stations the day after the digital transition that they were watching the day before the transition. If the cable companies had their way, you, your mother and father, or your next-door neighbor could go to sleep one night after watching their favorite channel and wake up the next morning to a dark fuzzy screen. This is because the cable operators believe that it is appropriate for them to choose which stations analog cable customers should be able to watch. It is not acceptable as a policy matter or as a legal matter. The 1992 Cable Act is very clear. Cable operators must ensure that all local broadcast stations carried pursuant to this act are “viewable” by all cable subscribers. Thus, they may not simply cut off the signals of these must-carry broadcast stations after the digital transition. The order we adopt today prevents the cable operators from doing just that.”

Cable companies must now either ensure that all subscribers have the equipment necessary to view a digital signal, or convert it to analog format for those who cannot. And so the era of analog television broadcasts will officially end on Feb. 17, 2012, and not the same day in 2009, when U.S. broadcasters make the switch to digital TV.