Republican Presidential hopeful John McCain has been mocked as an Internet illiterate because he does not use it, a characterization that is unfair according to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a senior policy advisor and technology point person for the McCain campaign. Speaking during an interview on C-SPAN’s “The Communicators” series (scheduled to air Saturday and Monday – more info here), Holtz-Eakin said “As a political matter, we’ve seen a pretty aggressive attempt by the opposition to portray John as out of touch somehow with the technology community when in fact he has a superb record on technology issues in the Congress.”
Although McCain himself may not be an active Internet user, “he is in touch with what Americans are doing on the Internet, he has a family, he has kids who use the Internet, he has a daughter who has a blog,” Holtz-Eakin said. “I think it’s an unfair characterization” to say that McCain is out of touch with an activity so central to most voters’ lives. “He’s more in touch with America than any other human being I know.”
Holtz-Eakin also offered insight into how a McCain administration would approach a variety of telecom and tech policy matters. He reiterated the general themes that emerged in McCain’s broader economic plan such as tax credits for R&D and immigration reform to enable more international scientists, engineers and technologists to work in the U.S.
As I posted earlier, Comcast came out today with a monthly bandwidth cap limit beyond which broadband customers are considered to be consuming "excessive" bandwidth. The cap is 250 GB and it will become company-wide policy starting October 1. (That's a lot of data...given current usage levels, although some commenters have pointed out that as HD video becomes more prevalent, 250 GB might not look so generous.)
According to Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas, less than 1% of Comcast's customers exceed this cap, with the median usage pegged at 2 to 3 GB per month. Comcast says that 250 GB is equivalent to downloading 125 standard definition movies or 62,500 songs.
This delineation, however, has nothing to do with Comcast's impending implementation of a "protocol agnostic" network management program that has been spurred by the controversy surrounding Comcast's P2P throttling initiatives. The 250 GB cap is merely a way of making transparent what has been company practice for years; namely to pull the plug on bandwidth "hogs."
Comcast came under fire for cutting off "excessive" bandwidth consumers without first informing them what constitutes excessive usage. The 250 GB, now incorporated into Comcast's acceptable use policy, makes explicit what has been implicit all along.
Customers who exceed the 250 GB limit will get notified of this fact in their monthly bills, Comcast's Douglas says. Comcast won't provide a monitoring tool so that users can track their bandwidth consumption levels. Such heavy users "will know what tools exist" for tracking consumption. "More than 99% of our customers don’t need such a tool," according to Douglas.
Customers who exceed the limit will also be given the option of upgrading to a commercial tier of service, typically costing many times over the monthly rate charged for residential broadband service. Contrary to earlier reports, Comcast won't charge extra fees on a metered basis if a customer exceeds the caps although "that is something we're looking at," Douglas says.
Even if only 1% of Comcast's customers could hit the cap's limits, every customer could theoretically be affected by the protocol agnostic management plan Comcast is developing. "They're both important programs for Comcast for how we manage our network and whether our customers have a good experience," according to Douglas, although the 250 GB cap is a "totally different topic."
Update at end of post.
As usual, Karl Bode broke the news today that Comcast, the nation's top cable operator and the second largest broadband provider in the U.S., will implement a 250 GB broadband cap starting in October as part of the company's shift to a protocol agnostic network management scheme.
According to sources, customers who exceed this limit will be charged $15 for each 10 GB over the cap. Although consumer advocates and cap foes are likely to raise a ruckus over this limitation, in reality it's a generous cap, at least by current bandwidth usage standards. Moreover, it's a huge improvement over some of the bandwidth caps being tested or implemented (check out the crazy low limits in place at Sunflower Broadband) and it certainly beats Comcast's current practice of throttling P2P applications.
More troubling to me is something else that Karl reports -- there has also been "consideration of a new system whereby users who received more than four DMCA letters in a twelve month period potentially faced account suspension." Hollywood and the record industry have been pressuring broadband providers to carry their water both domestically and internationally, urging these third parties to cut off customers who are alleged to have violated copyright laws.
Two incidents this week at the Democratic National Convention make me a little worried. First, Salon's Glenn Greenwald got hassled by private security and was threatened with arrest for videoblogging outside an AT&T-sponsored party for Blue Dog Democrats, an event that was supposedly held to thank the conservative Democrats for their assistance in securing telecom immunity in warrantless wiretapping situations.
If you watch the video, you'll see that Greenwald kept moving farther and farther away from the event, as instructed by security guards, but the distance wasn't enough. The cops were called to push Greenwald even farther away from the party - they intimated that Greenwald could be arrested for violating the law.
In the second incident, an ABC producer was actually arrested for taking pictures on a public sidewalk outside the Brown Palace Hotel. He has been charged with trespass, interference, and failure to follow a lawful order because he was taking pictures of Democratic Senators and big donors leaving a meeting.
The biggest political party-fest of the year is underway in Denver at the Democratic National Convention. The conventional wisdom holds that the big political conventions are no longer sources of news -- we already know, for example, who will get nominated and who the vice presidential candidate is.
The real value of actually attending the big show is networking, behind-the-scenes gossip and, most of all, partying. And unlike regular political campaigns, the big parties' national conventions aren't subject to FEC donation limits, so special interests and corporate lobbyists can open the money spigots to throw some pretty impressive parties, receptions and other events.
Corporations, unions and lobbyists have already raised $112 million to fund the two major conventions, with most of that money going for...good times. Despite recent campaign finance reform laws, which generally bar lawmakers from accepting meals or gifts from special interests, loopholes exist (finger food is OK, entertainment is fine so long as 24 non-Congressional employees are there, etc. ) that will allow sponsors to schmooze with national legislators and other personages at the conventions.
Among some of the biggest sponsors at the Democratic National Convention are telecom, tech and media giants. Colorado-based Qwest is the single biggest corporate sponsor at $6 million and the controversial Kanye West concert, a highlight of the convention, is funded by the RIAA.
However, no comprehensive list of convention sponsors is available and accurate records of who paid what won't be available for months. So, I scanned available resources (mostly an excellent table produced by the Campaign Finance Institute) and came up with the following list of tech, telecom and media giants who are spending big in Denver:
The big buzz today in TV technology is the announcement by Yahoo and Intel of the Widget Channel, a TV application framework that will allow consumers to play around with Internet applications while watching TV or viewing video on other devices. Based on a set of technologies that make up the "Yahoo Widget Engine" and a new family of Intel system-on-chip media processors for Internet-connected CE devices, the widgets are aimed at allowing the long-dreamed-for capability of clicking on screen prompts to check out sports scores, chat with friends, read the news, all while the video is playing on the screen.
For folks (like me) who have for years sat through countless demos by tech giants and start-ups alike which display exactly this kind of Internet connectivity on TV sets, an announcement like this generates this response: Oh brother, not another effort to bring the Internet to TV sets. But two things about the Widget Channel seem promising.
First, the effort has garnered a lot of interesting partners including Blockbuster, CBS Interactive, CinemaNow, Cinequest, Disney-ABC Television Group, eBay, GE, Group M, Joost, MTV, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Schematic, Showtime, Toshiba and Twitter. More importantly, the nation's top cable company, Comcast, has jumped aboard, promising to test the Widget Channel by the first half of 2009 on Comcast's interactive programming guide using Tru2Way technology.
But great partners alone won't cut the mustard. Just ask Microsoft -- its interactive TV platforms do what the Widget Channel does and much more and the software giant has had dozens of blue-chip partners over the years, all to no avail.
The FCC today issued the full text (Word) of its order punishing Comcast for its throttling of P2P applications. The very strongly worded document minces few words as it assesses Comcast's claims that the throttling constitutes "reasonable network management" practices.
The FCC confidently concludes that Comcast's practice is discriminatory and hence runs afoul of its 1995 2005 Internet policy statement.
The record leaves no doubt that Comcast’s network management practices discriminate among applications and protocols rather than treating all equally. To reiterate: Comcast has deployed equipment across its networks that monitors its customers’ TCP connections using deep packet inspection to determine how many connections are peer-to-peer uploads. When Comcast judges that there are too many peer-to-peer uploads in a given area, Comcast’s equipment terminates some of those connections by sending RST [reset] packets.
Comcast's selective interference of Internet traffic stops consumers from using applications of their choice and discourages the development of technologies that can maximize users' control over the information they want to receive, more violations of the FCC's Internet policy, the order concludes.
As to whether this interference constitutes reasonable network management, which is permitted under the policy, the FCC sees no rationale for the throttling and accuses Comcast of "verbal gymnastics" to justify the practice.
Comcast tries to avoid this result by arguing that it only delays peer-to-peer applications, and that the Internet Policy Statement, properly read, prohibits the blocking of user applications and content, but not mere delays. We do not agree with Comcast’s characterization and instead find that the company has engaged in blocking. As one expert explains: “It is never correct to say that Comcast has delayed P2P packets or P2P sessions, because the P2P traffic will never flow again unless the end system initiates a new session to the same device, even though it now believes that device is unable to continue a transfer. The argument that terminating a P2P session is only delaying because a device may attempt to initiate a new session some time later is absurd. By this incorrect argument, there is no such thing as call blocking; there is only delaying.
The FCC all but calls Comcast a liar when recounting the history of the controversy that led to this order.
In an eerie coincidence, three things today bring the issue of "white spaces" to the forefront. First, the WSJ's Amy Schatz has this high-profile piece about the FCC's examination of whether these soon-to-be-unneeded gaps of spectrum can be used as a third broadband pipeline, a powerful wireless pathway that Google co-founder Larry Page likens to "Wi-Fi on steroids."
The big fears about using white spaces for broadband services, concerns mostly trumped up mostly by TV broadcasters and professional sports, is whether white space wireless devices would interfere with broadcast TV transmissions and wireless microphones -- Schatz offers some interesting color on a recent field test of prototype devices at the Redskins' FedEx Stadium.
The second thing that raises the profile of white spaces is Google's launch of a supposed public interest initiative called Free the Airwaves, which the search giant dubs a "call for action for everyday users."
(Back after another inadvertent blogging break...summertime and the living is easy - plus I've been playing as a day trader in the stock market. More on that later.)
CNET's Declan McCullagh has this illuminating investigative article about a "secret" DC lobbying organization called the Law and Media Group (LMG), which, among other things, has been active in placing op-eds in various publications on behalf of its clients, most notably Comcast and Microsoft.
It's not illuminating that either company would hire a "public affairs" firm to help it sway opinion with ghost-written editorials placed by seemingly non-affiliated individuals (a pro-Comcast editorial published in the Harvard Crimson and ostensibly written by a Boston area community organizer was probably penned by an LMG staffer) or form a phony coalition (the Corn Growers Association suddenly opposed a Yahoo-Google ad pact).
The numbers are in and it's official: telco-delivered broadband growth nosedived during Q2 08. According to a tally of the top nine cable operators (Brighthouse Networks, Cable One, Cablevision, Charter, Comcast, Cox, Insight, Mediacom and Time Warner) and the top four incumbent telcos (Qwest, AT&T, Verizon and Embarq), the U.S. cable industry captured four out of five net new broadband subscribers during Q2 08, a sudden surge in success that is almost wholly attributable to a suprising drop in telco broadband gains.
During the quarter, the top cable companies combined added a net 669,375 new broadband customers, fully four times the 155,000 net broadband customers added by the top telcos combined. Cable's share of all the companies' (cable + telco) net broadband customer gains was 81%, up sharply from cable's 56% share of the growth during Q1 08 and only 44% share in Q2 07.
For at least six years now, most of Wall Street and the media world have known that AOL is a sinking ship, destined to go under from the weight of its dial-up heritage and corporate parent woes. What's always been a mystery is why Time Warner couldn't see what the smart money saw.
The media giant issued its Q2 08 earnings results this morning showing, once again, that AOL isn't getting any healthier despite billions of dollars in accquisitions (Advertising.com, Bebo and others) all centered on propping up the perpetually failing online unit. During the quarter, AOL continued to lose access subscribers, although as CEO Jeff Bewkes pointed out during the company's earnings call, the 604,000 net subscribers lost is the lowest loss level since AOL jettisoned its subscriber model.
AOL's subscriber loss was expected, but the online unit continued to post deteriorating ad revenues amidst an online ad boom and despite the elaborate efforts by Time Warner management to create a one-stop ad shop in its complex Platform A initiative. During the quarter, AOL generated $430 million in ad revenue, a quarter-to-quarter decline of 11%.
In keeping with the virtually universal theme this earnings season, Time Warner Cable issued its Q2 08 earnings results (PDF) this morning, showing continued robust growth in broadband, digital voice and digital service subscriptions, even as overall basic subscriber counts notched down.
During the quarter, TWC added a net 201,000 high-speed subscribers, a run-rate about 7% higher than the net adds during Q2 07 and a gain that constituted "more net adds that the two largest phone companies combined even through their geographic footprint is three times the size of ours," CEO Glenn Britt said during the company's earnings call. "The clear implication is that we’re continuing to take residential broadband share." By quarter's end, TWC served 8.125 million high-speed customers, representing almost 31% penetration.
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