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FCC to Permit Complete Media/Telecom Consolidation
rhwalker22 writes "Today's Washington Post has a piece reviewing some of the major decisions the Federal Communications Commission will be making in the next few months, moves that could fundamentally rewrite the rules for the broadcast media and Internet service providers. Excerpt: 'Opponents of the proposed rules fear that, taken together, they ultimately could lead to a few powerful conglomerates controlling the flow of electronic information, from programming of television and radio news and entertainment to owning the pipes that connect people to the Internet.'"
i thought the editors(especially that idiot michael) loudly proclaim they don't link to registration required articles. But this WashingtonPost article requires a short registration before seeing the article.
So why did this story get posted? Because its a pet issue of Michael? Please explain this hypocrisy to me.
Thanks.
Well, we broke up Humpty Dumpty (Bell) and now we're putting them back together again. Yeah, the US is definitely in the consumer's corner.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
"trust me on this one. yes, we do have plans to merge with at least three other companies, mostly medium-sized regional providers. what we haven't told you, however, is that this merge will allow us to provide high-end DSL service to residences across the country for less than $10 / mo."
Sure, with 1GB download cap, no uploading and service contract which forbids using P2P software?
I don't see how unrestricted high-end DSL can cost $10/mo.
He used to spout crazy shit about the CIA running drugs too.
It's a sad commentary on the world when current events seem like a cheap rehash of "Illuminatus!"
Crap, he's probably right about the aliens, too.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It would be, umm.... nice to know how much the media corps 'donate' and how much the oposition donate, not that there's anything dubious about the desision.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
SBC won't want to share with the 3 CLECs we deal with. They won't play nice, they'll simply up the rental fees until the CLECs are gone.
I don't want to hear any whining from SBC about how it costs too much to share either. We (at our little telco) know that's a lie... Everyone at the small ILEC/CLECs know -- and so do the people at SBC. But people with money always win... *shrug*
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
I guess us libertarian geeks will just have to set up our own channels of communications.
Does anyone know if it's feasible to build local wans around the country and then start linking them together to create a "public" internet? I'm thinking about routing in particular. Is there anyone already working on something like this?Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Someone had this quote in their sig on another thread:
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power" -- Mussolini
Needless to say, I saved it!
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
In a hurry, messed up the links. Sorry for the repost.
Of course!
One promising GPL one is Locust World, which combines a bootable Linux distro with the AODV routing software, 802.11 drivers, NAT functionality, and more. The AODV libraries are open source, and you could apply this to just about any wireless medium. More info about AODV in general here.
And of course, the company I work for has a proprietary solution, but it is dependent on using our 802.11b card for the time being. That, and we aren't mass producing hardware at the moment. The tech is certainly there though! Mesh networking with 802.11 is just extending the topology of the wired internet to the wireless world.
As far as routing goes, ad hoc on-demand routing (implemented by the AODV libraries I mentioned above) is probably the best solution for building a scalable network. Wireless links are inherently unreliable, so a pure distance vector algorithm like RIP isn't the best solution, and routing updates on a large network would have a lot of overhead with many nodes.
Forgive me if I glossed over the subject, hopefully other can fill in the blanks =).
i just spent two weeks vacationing in snowy canada (i live in california) and while i was there i had the opportunity to learn about canada's internet. in short, it kicks ass. it is very fast, very resilient, very regulated, and most importantly, very cheap. the canadian government has been developing and regulating broadband since before anyone knew what broadband was and their investment has surely paid off. how does digital cable service AND broadband internet for $40/month sound? that's 40 candian dollars, or a little over $30 dollars american currency. not only that, but it's purported to be more resilient than the internet2 project that is just barely getting off the ground in the states. canada's regulated deployment scheme has made it one of the most wired nations in the world. we could learn a lot from them.
Prior to the DCMA, the owner of copyrighted materials had the right to duplication and distribution of his/her creations. These rights were subject to the abuse of organisations like the RIAA for instance, but at least the artistic community held the rights until they (often naively) negotiated them away.
With the DMCA, safe harbour provisions were created that transfered the right of distribution away from the creator into the hands of the distributor the moment the creator posted his/her material on the net. In effect the creator of a work lost the right to distribute and duplicate their work - without any negotiation or need for the creator to be compensated.
Thus, a company that owns content (which is presently not made available on the net) would be at a disadvantage because the moment they post it - they would effectivly lose control over distrribution. This ruling by the FCC will fix that. By merging media interests with distribution interests the combined mega corporation controls both the distribution as well as retaining control of their copyrighted materials - IE the problem is fixed.
Collateral damage includes anyone who is not powerful enuf to be a major carrier and/or who does not have a significant amount of internet content - enough to make them attractive enough for a large telecomunications interest to want to climb into bed with them.
Slashdot falls into this category. With no means of negotiating a sweetheart "convergance" contract with a telecommunications carrier, slashdot will get hosed on bandwidth charges. Meanwhile, having lost the "right to copy" their presumably copyrighted materials (DMCA transfers these rights to the carriers) Slashdot is unable to participate in the HUGE revenues that stem from the delivery of same to the consumming public.
What a sad commentary on manipulation of the unfolding cyber world.
This development is NOT in our interest! It certainly should be considered rather draconian by anyone aspiring to make a living utilizing the technologys presently being developed for cyberspace.
This group will include most webmasters, many systems admins, most HTML and CGI programmers and probably most of the flash programmers. The group includes a lot of wanna-be-professional web developers and artists - many of whom are doing brilliant work and may never know why the job offers they were hoping for didn't develop.
If anyone things this is an overestimate of the damages - then consider the number of layoffs in the dot.bomb sector. A good place to read on this is at fucked company
Over at FC, Pud declares that these were just shitty business plans and that any company that does not make a profit will simply go out of business. Ya, Pud is pretty ruthless - might not have a heart.
The point IMHO that Pud is overlooking is that some outfits like Slashdot.org do a RATHER GOOD JOB and they also are feeling a cash squeeze. Perhaps its a bad business plan... but I rather think the issue is having your work taken without compensation and being given no access to a rather HUGE revenue stream that this work helps to create.
Let me ask - if it were not for great websites like Slashdot, why would people like us bother to subscribe to an ISP? We pay our ISP's for access to this material and our ISP's pay their upstreams. Somewhere along the way over to the slashdot servers the money flow stops.
Slashdot is a very popular website - even so they have little market clout in the eyes of upsteams. So little slashdot with little bargaining power is placed in the situtation that they can either pack up their bags and go home - or try to find some way to fund the operation.
Meanwhile, if there are say 100,000 slashdot readers then "we" pay at least $25x100,000 = $2,500,000 per month for our interent access. In my case with the dropping content, I find that the docs over at gnu and a few other open source projects makes it worthwhile for me to have a dedicated connection. In total - slashdot probably represents over 10% of the total internet content I look at. I would be very happy if a percentage of the money I pay each month found itself flowing into the pockets of SlashDot.
But without any distribution clout - that isn't likely to happen.
Meanwhile we should expect that organizations like CNN, TSN, and so forth will find they can make good money distrubuting THEIR content - because THEY will have enough clout to bargan for an inside seat in the distribtution game.
In effect, the rest of us subsidize them because the content they have could NEVER create the net.