Category: Media / Sociology

FCC wants free broadband service, plus content filtering

National broadband sounds like a great idea, but a recent FCC proposal looks a little less appealing.

The Federal Communications Commission is looking for a bidder to provide free broadband service in the 1.9 GHz-2.1 GHz bands, agency Chair Kevin Martin told reporters on Friday. …

There will be one more requirement for the service. A spokesperson for the Commission has told Ars that the FCC wants it to include “content filters.” For what? We asked. “To protect children,” came the reply.

As outrageous as this sounds, I can understand the FCC’s logic. If we’re to provide “the Internet” over the airwaves, then it suddenly becomes like radio and television–pervasive. That’s the argument that’s typically been used to keep smut and the 7 deadly words off of the airwaves.

Here’s the difference: television and radio are centralized distribution media. The impact of the speech regulations is rather small, since they only affect an increasingly dwindling number of speakers (that being, the broadcasters).

The Internet, on the other hand, is a largely decentralized medium of distribution. The number of speakers on the internet comes close to the number of users; thus the impact of filtering would be massive. Decentralized mediums of expression typically get more First Amendment protection, although I can’t think of a case that would be as pervasive (or more likely to over-censor) as what is proposed.

It’s amazing that, when the FCC gets serious about our infrastructure–giving a large number of Americans some substantial bandwidth–it comes with strings like this attached.

Catching up

Catching up on the news feed today. It seems to take so much longer when there’s lots of interesting stuff to read.

The bill is intended to “promote competition, to facilitate trade, and to ensure competitive and non-discriminatory access to the Internet.”

It does so by outlawing discriminatory fees for providing content, applications, or services over the ‘Net. Internet providers also have to interact fully with the networks of their competitors and provide equal access to all users and any devices they wish to put on the network. Network providers would be allowed to provide favored service to specific types of data but, if they do, they have to provide that same favoritism to anybody transmitting the data, and couldn’t charge for it.

  • FCC 2.0: Change we can believe in? (Ars): An interesting overview of what could happen at the FCC should a democrat Obama be elected (here’s a riddle: who was president in 1996?).
  • Chief RIAA Litigator Named Colorado Judge (Wired): The RIAA’s “top litigator” as an appeals judge. This might not seem as troublesome (he’s said to be a top notch lawyer) if the tactic of suing thousands of file sharers weren’t so legally and socially controversial.

Dishes with Yochai

I took a great suggestion this morning and did my dishes while watching Yochai Benkler’s TED talk on Open-source economics. He finished his talk with a point that I’ve brought up before–the new importance of communication law to everyone on the Internet. He says (around the 17 min mark):

So, next time you open the paper and you see an intellectual property decision, a telecoms decison, it’s not about something small and technical. It is about the future of the freedom to be as social beings with each other and the way information, knowledge, and culture will be produced. Because, it is in this context that we see a battle over how easy or hard it will be for the industrial information economy to simply go on as it goes, or for the new model of production to begin to develop along side that industrial model — [to] change the way that we begin to see the world, and report what it is that we see.

Guess it’s time to take another look at the Wealth of Networks (or, if you prefer, a free copy).

Legal limits on hobbies-homebuilt Macs?

The week of weird connections continues…

Macworld talks about the homebuilt Mac hobby community. One thing stuck out for me:

One approach—which appears to be the approach Apple’s taken thus far—is to simply ignore these hobbyist hackers. Since there’s no real measurable impact on Apple, fighting the hobbyists may be more trouble than it’s worth.

The article then goes on to describe some of the benefits for Apple.

One of the issues I’m hoping to address in my dissertation is the role that the law plays in people’s hobbies (specifically, copyright and groups like mash-up artists).  The quote above captures a sentiment that is often felt by hobbyists, but to the contrary, many media companies feel the impact is not negligible and that it is worth the trouble. There are so many fascinating connections here: between the law against the hobby, the market for the machines protected by the law, and the desire to express a connection to the party that could change their mind and sue you. I never would have thought of any of this in the context of hardware.