All Things Digital

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.”

To Comcast (CMCSA), 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. “The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers’ access to the Internet,” FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Friday. “We found that Comcast’s actions in this instance violated our principles.”

And so the FCC intends to punish the cable giant for its misstep. But rather than fine the company, the Commission would force Comcast to stop interfering with Internet traffic on its network. “We would tell Comcast that they have to stop engaging in that practice,” Martin said. “They have to disclose to the commission where they are engaging in that practice.”

The proposal to sanction Comcast is will be put to a vote on August 1. And if it’s approved it could set a precedent that will inspire other ISPs to rethink their “traffic management” practices.

Comcast is apparently too busy drafting its “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” to bother attending the daylong hearing into its dubious “network management” practices. An odd decision for a company so intent on “clarifying” the practices ISPs should use to manage P2P applications running on their networks. But according to a company spokesperson, Comcast (CMCSA) “felt the issues specific to us were well covered at the first hearing, and the focus of this event should be broader than any individual company’s issues.”

Broader issues? Like reasonable network-management practices? The responsibility to deliver traffic fairly? Service disclosures? The sort of issues that might figure prominently in a “P2P Bill of Rights?”

Guess not.

Anyway, Comcast has already scrapped its policy of deliberately slowing some traffic flowing over BitTorrent and other P2P networks, so there’s really no need for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin to bust its chops anymore. As Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manger of its Internet service, told the New York Times, Comcast’s new policy is to slow traffic based on usage pattern, not application. “[Our new technique] will be based purely on individual consumption by consumers,” Bowling said. “Anything in addition to that is outside the scope of what our network management goal is.”

So the company plans to throttle traffic to the customers that use the most bandwidth. Hmmm. I wonder who those might be? The folks who use the Internet for email and Web browsing or those who use it for downloading digital media?

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.

Well, it’s about time. With 48 billion text messages sent every month in the United States and one of every eight American households using only mobile phones for communications, it’s finally occurred to the federal government that a nationwide cellphone alert system might be a good idea.

And so yesterday the Federal Communications Commission announced plans to develop an emergency-alert system that would broadcast SMS messages to cellphones and other mobile devices wherever a crisis occurs. The Commercial Mobile Alert System, as it’s been dubbed, will deliver three different types of text alerts to mobile phone subscribers: presidential alerts concerning terrorist attacks and whatnot; imminent threat alerts warning of natural disasters; and Amber Alert child abduction warnings.

Sounds like a nice comprehensive program. Too bad you won’t see it for another two years, at least. Unless you happen to live in a region like Contra Costa County in Northern California, where a tech-savvy local government is already hard at work on its own geographically targeted emergency alert system.

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.”

The Federal Communications Commission isn’t buying Comcast’s (CMCSA) argument that throttling or degrading the performance of the peer-to-peer file-sharing service BitTorrent on its broadband network is a necessary traffic-management technique.

Speaking at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said he’s considering taking action against the cable operator for violating the agency’s network-neutrality principles. Seems Martin was troubled by Comcast’s dissembling around the BitTorrent issue, not to mention its efforts to pack an FCC hearing on Net neutrality with its own employees.

“A hallmark of what should be seen as a reasonable business practice is certainly whether or not the people engaging in that practice are willing to describe it publicly,” said Martin, adding that the incident offered the commission a good opportunity to establish a precedent for future cases of this kind. “I have said in the past the commission is ready, willing and able to take action on individual complaints,” he said. “I think that is what we are going to end up doing, and I think that will end up setting an important precedent going forward: that we are willing to address individual complaints when they come in.”

We compete with Comcast with delivery of content over the Internet. What we have here is a horse race and in this contest, Comcast owns the race track, in fact, the only track in town. They also own a horse. We are being told they are only slowing down our horse by a few seconds.”

–Gilles BianRosa, CEO of video provider Vuze

The network-management hearing at Harvard University this morning is turning out to be something of a comcastrophe for Comcast (CMCSA). Called before the Federal Communications Commission today to explain why it has been “throttling” or limiting BitTorrent traffic on its network, Comcast was criticized out of the gate for the practice.

Seems some folks don’t buy the company’s claim that throttling is necessary to prevent file-sharing traffic from consuming too much bandwidth. And others–specifically, advocates of Net neutrality–feel it’s outright discriminatory. “The Internet is as much mine and yours as it is Verizon’s and AT&T’s and Comcast’s,” said U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) in his opening remarks to the commission. “The commission should be wary of the need of a significant network management position. Perhaps if we had competition, this wouldn’t be such an issue.”Such intercession into a user’s access to the Internet should not result in … the transformation of BitTorrent into BitTrickle. That’s a problematic result … whether it is purposeful or purely circumstantial.”

Comcast, for its part, insists results like those described by Markey aren’t problematic at all, but necessary. The company must “shape” file-sharing traffic to ease the strain on its network. “Independent research has shown that it takes as few as 15 active BitTorrent users uploading content in a particular geographic area to create congestion sufficient to degrade the experience of the hundreds of other users in that area,” David L. Cohen, an executive vice president of Comcast, explained in written testimony. “Bandwidth-intensive activities not only degrade other less-intense uses, but also significantly interfere with thousands of Internet companies’ businesses. Far from managing our network in a discriminatory way to benefit our own offerings–other than managing our network to make our high-speed Internet service faster and better–our limited network-management practices ensure that everyone else’s applications and services, even those that may compete with our services and use P2P protocols, work.”

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

The FCC instituted the auction’s “Stage Two Transition” this morning, requiring participants to bid more actively or withdraw. The move inspired hundreds of new bids, pushing the auction total to $19.02 billion. That said, aside from two middling bids on the Alaska C-Block license, no new bids were entered for the C Block licenses covering the 50 states.

With just a few more days to go, it’s looking more and more like the C Block will be sold to the bidder who offered $4.74 billion for the regional licenses that comprise the national C-Block license. Presumably, that bidder is Verizon. Which means that Google, which supposedly pushed the C-block auction over its $4.6 billion reserve price, thus activating its open-access provision, is off the hook. If it wants to be, anyway.

“Verizon wants more spectrum to close the gap between it and AT&T,” Stifel Nicolaus analyst Rebecca Arbogast told Forbes. “I’m reasonably confident that Google does not have the spectrum now.”

PREVIOUSLY:

• The 700-MHz Auction Is Decadent and Depraved
• We Want the Airwaves, Baby …
• The 700 MHz Club