Tech Policy

Last week, I wrote about the effort to give phone companies amnesty for illegal wiretapping. The provisions are part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) bill currently moving through the Senate. The question then was whether Senate Majority Leader would pick the version of FISA that protects the rule of law, or the one that gives the big phone companies amnesty for illegal wiretapping.

Guess which one he chose?

Sen. Chris Dodd had placed a hold on the bill, but Sen. Reid is choosing to ignore that to move the bill to the Senate floor. Sen. Dodd has promised a filibuster if the amnesty provision remains.

Cable and broadband video markets are in a period of transition. Until recently, video services were franchised by local municipalities. Some rates, such as basic cable rates, have been regulated, and the municipality had to review and approve increases.

Three years ago, the Texas legislature took franchise authority away from local municipalities, grandfathering existing franchise contracts until the end of their term.

At the same time, many of the incumbent cable video providers have been petitioning the FCC to determine there is "effective competition" in their service areas. That determination would release a locally franchised video provider from rate regulation.

Last March, the FCC returned a determination that there is "effective competition" in the Austin video market. This means that Time Warner Austin, even though it still has to operate under its franchise agreement with the City, was now released of the regulation of its rates.

Time Warner responded by imposing a massive rate increase. The cost of basic cable service was nearly doubled, from $10.50 to $19.95 a month.

Time Warner Austin and The NFL Network are battling like two burly tackles over televised football. Time Warner has pulled the NFL Network from their cable lineup. The NFL and football fans are furious, and the Texas legislature has been dragged into the melee. The NFL wants back on the air, of course, but if they get their way it will be bad news for everybody—including football fans.

The American cable market is structured as a basic subscription service, and the subscriber adds the premium content they want with extra-cost packages. The NFL Network is premium content, but the NFL wants to push it into the basic service package. That way they can collect fees for every single cable subscriber in the system—not just those who want an extra football channel.

The important message below is from the ACLU. Please consider clicking through and signing their petition.

Congress is considering a plan to offer pre-emptive immunity to phone companies that may have conducted illegal wiretaps. That's outrageous and should be stopped.

The Senate will soon vote on a bill that will fix the illegal electronic eavesdropping on Americans. Yet, we don't know if they will take up a bill written closely with the Bush administration that is dangerous to the rule of and gives immunity to telecom companies that illegally handed over the phone and email records of thousands of Americans or if they will vote on a much more reasonable bill that upholds the rule of law and does not let lawbreakers off the hook.

That's a choice that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has to make. We need to tell him to make the right choice.

Senator Reid needs to hear from every American who wants him to stand up for our privacy and not let phone companies off the hook. You can take action by signing a petition to Senator Reid now:

https://secure.aclu.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=Reid_FISA_petition3

I enjoyed the first half of Steven Pearlstein's rant in the Washington Post this Sunday. That's the one where he takes to task the iPhone purchasers who are whining about the $200 price drop.

The second half of the rant, though, confuses me

The latest rallying cry is "network neutrality." This campaign started out with the legitimate goal of making sure that consumers could continue to access whichever services or content they want, rather than having to take those offered by the cable and phone company duopolists. But lately the campaign seems to have morphed into a broader demand that all consumers should be able to pay the same monthly fee for using the Internet, no matter how much bandwidth they use or how much their movie downloads and video chats are slowing service to everyone else in the neighborhood.

The "some people say" journalism is troubling. I sure wish he'd cite a reference, because I don't know anybody who has advocated this "everything for free" stance.

Personally, I think subscribers (on either side of the connection) should pay the full and fair costs of their Internet traffic. The problem is that while there is a competitive wholesale market, the retail access market remains broken. Net neutrality regulations aren't a good thing, but they are needed pretty badly so long as the retail access market is allowed to remain broken and susceptible to manipulation by the broadband providers in this country.

You can read the full rant here: Whiny Techies (registration required)

See this 16-byte hex string:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

It an HD-DVD processing key. It's a code that allows software to unlock the content on an HD-DVD. With this code (and the right software) you can do forbidden and illicit things, like watch a movie you bought on your Linux workstation.

The industry is not pleased and is trying to get this information suppressed. They say that under the DMCA, those 16 bytes should be suppressed as an illegal circumvention device.

Their effort is absurd. Even more, it's not working.

Doest this stupidity remind anybody else of the old export-a-crypto-system one line perl script?

Update: Ed Felten wonders how an industry that has failed to suppress the copying of multi-gigabyte files could possibly believe they could succeed at suppressing a 16 byte string.

Currently if you get some document from a Texas office or agency, dollars to doughnuts it comes in some proprietary word processing format. If you want to use this document, you either have to purchase the software that matches that document, or gamble that the software you like may have reverse engineered the proprietary format and won't fumble the document too much.

I don't like it when the state tells me which software I should buy.

It would be wonderful if state used open, non-proprietary formats to store their documents. Instead of letting the state to dictate which software we should use, we could choose whichever product works best for our needs. Proprietary formats create an unfair state mandate. Open formats trust to markets to deliver the best solution.

All of us already know the benefits of open document standards. Every time we open a document on the web, we get a document in an open, standard format called HTML. Most recent versions of HTML are layered on a basic technology called the Extensible Markup Language, or XML. XML is a widely embraced, leading standard for storing structured documents.

Why can't we take the benefits that an open XML standard brings to web documents and apply them to word-processing documents?

The answer is, we can. There currently is a standard called OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications or OpenDocument for short, or ODF for even shorter. I'm not endorsing ODF, but rather citing it as an example that works right now. Other standards are possible, and that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, just so long as they are open and vendors can make their products interoperable.

There currently is a bill in the Texas legislature that would require Texas use an XML-based, open, non-proprietary format for its documents. The bill does not mandate the ODF format—or any other particular format. Instead, it calls for open standards, and allows for markets to select the technologies and software that work best.

The Texas Open Document bill is called SB 446 in the Senate and HB 1794 in the House. The bills have been referred to committee and are scheduled for hearing this Tuesday Monday (corrected 3/26).

If you have a chance take a look at the following two committees:

• Senate Committee on State Affairs
• House Committee on Government Reform

If your state senator or representative sites on one of these committees, consider shooting them a quick fax or email this weekend to let them know that you think open document formats would be good for Texas.

When Time Warner acquired Adelphia, many localities found themselves with a new cable provider. Moorpark, CA was one of them.

The problem in Moorkpark is that the cable franchise—the contract signed between a cable provider and the municipality—had service requirements that the new provider wasn't meeting. More specifically, the franchise requires that customer service phone calls are answered within 30 seconds and they weren't.

Local cable franchises typically contain service requirements—and enforcement provisions that can be invoked when the provider fails to meet them. The Moorpark City Council chose on a unanimous 4-0 vote to penalize the provider with a $25,000 fine.

This is interesting, because there is a national movement away from municipal franchises for video. Texas, has already done that. SB 5, passed two years ago, allows new video providers (basically AT&T and Verizon, the entitites that purchased this legislation) to skip local franchises.

The big problem with legislation such as SB 5 is that it does away with the build-out and service requirments typically found in a local franchise. The supporters claim that competitive markets will fix those problems, but, as this case shows, the video market must not be competitive because the problems still exist. Frankly, I'm not sure that a market where the customer choice is basically just between Brand A and Brand T can ever be competitive.

You can read more about the Moorpark, CA situation here.

Last month, I blogged about the State suing a phone carrier over bogus fees charged to phone users. I applauded the move, but pointed out that the biggest source of bogus phone fees is the state itself.

Turns out somebody at the Capitol must read my blog. This week the House passed a bill to drop the fee associated with the now-defunct Texas Infrastructure Fund. TIF was created in 1995 to put computers in schools and libraries, setup community networks, and the like.

In 2003, Governor Rick Perry declared "mission accomplished" and ended the TIF program. But the fee remained, and monies collected were passed on to the general fund. That's not right. If you are going to call it a TIF fee, then you'd best use it for "TI", not a general tax.

Oh my, Dick Armey and I agree on something. That's scary.

While paying my wireless phone bill last weekend, I was irritated over the number of bogus fees that Sprint Nextel charges.

Apparently the State of Texas thinks so too. Attorney General Greg Abbot is suing Sprint Nextel over the bogus "Texas Margin Fee", which is just a way of Sprint passing on a cost of business that should be reflected in product price.

This is wonderful—except this $0.30 fee is a drop in the bucket compared to the other bogus fees, many mandated by the state. There is the $0.40 TIF fee, which the state continues to collect, even though the Texas Infrastructure Fund has long since been disbanded. And then there are the various USF fees, which have taken a laudable goal (universal telephone service for all households) and turned it into one of the worst corporate welfare programs for phone carriers.

All in all, there are about $3.00 of bogus fees on my $35.00 bill. The Texas Margin Fee is only a small part of the problem. Maybe somebody needs to sue the Texas legislature to get them to remove the bogus USF and TIF fees from our phone bills.