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Content Filtering Pulled From Free Broadband Proposal
huzur79 writes "Electronista is reporting that Kevin Martin, Chairman of the FCC, has dropped the content filtering provisions from the proposal for free wireless broadband service, according to an interview with Ars Technica. Previous drafts of the plan required protection methods to prevent users from accessing objectionable content, such as pornography. 'I'm saying if this is a problem for people, let's take it away,' Martin said.
The proposal has received criticism and opposition from a variety of groups including the Bush administration, wireless companies, and consumer interest organizations. T-Mobile has argued that communicating data on the allocated frequency bands will cause interference and quality degradation. Civil liberties groups argue that the FCC would overstep its authority and violate the Constitution."
Inconceivable!
The FCC has been overstepping it's authority for a LONG time.
The FCC exists to dole out a limited public resource, content (and esp obscenity) has never been part of it's mandate and represents little more then a moral power grab.
Knowing that I'll be able to get online when I'm on the road (even with a low-quality-but-better-than-dialup connection) is worth a minuscule portion of my tax dollars. Government ventures aren't supposed to be profitable, they're supposed to be beneficial. Not paying ten bucks a day for net access at a hotel definitely falls under 'beneficial' in my books.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
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Come on, the FCC is not an evil agency by any stretch. It does have a legitimate role in issues like frequency allocations - there is only so much spectrum to go around.
It also has a great role in the enforcement of technical standards like those that prevent one user from interfering with another's use of the airwaves.
Only if the FCC interferes in the actual content of the communications can it be considered to be entering the category of "evil". Or if they mandate the use of a patented "standard" as a condition of use of the public airwaves, they are certainly at least in bed with "evil".
That said, I actually applaud the dropping of a well-meaning but ill-concieved idea.
It looks like the Chairman haas understood that what he originally wanted was impractical, infeasible, and really a bad idea.
It's okay to propose something stupid, so long as one listens to the reasons for those who object to it and doesn't respond by a "digg in the heels, fight, and whine" attitude when the suggestion and it's rationale is challenged.
A great deal of the difficulty in the various internet regulatory issues seems, to me, to arise from the fact that the provider of the last mile connection and the provider of the internet access are almost always one and the same(and, worse, even reform proposals tend to assume that they will always be so, without even cursory examination). This is tricky because the two things really exhibit rather different behavior.
Last mile network connections, wired or wireless, are pretty close to natural monopolies. On the wireless side, there is only so much spectrum, and it isn't exactly a fluid market, and there are only so many locations where you can get zoning permission and whatnot for a tower. On the wired side, legacy environments are duopolies at best, phone company and cable company; while any new deployments run into the fact that(considering the pull itself, plus right-of-way hassles and all the rest) the fixed cost of doing a pull of any bandwidth capacity is huge, while the cost of pulling a high bandwidth line as opposed to a low bandwidth line is much smaller. It isn't quite as bad as roads, where multiple runs are generally not even physically possible; but still an oligopoly at best, monopoly at worst.
Internet access, on the other hand, has the potential to be a properly competitive market, once enough end users are aggregated at a central point. If all relevant structures in a town or geographic region are connected to a peering point, choosing any service from any provider who reaches that point is literally a matter of switch configuration, and could be largely automated.
The trouble is, as long as the two distinct services are provided by the same entity, you have massive incentives for the people who own the last mile connection to mess with the internet access, hence all the net neutrality issues, and this content filtering stuff. We need to separate the two: treat the network link between you and the peering point as a natural monopoly similar to water mains, roads, or electrical lines(whether this means regulated private monopoly, public utility administered by private contractors, or public utility administered by public employees is a matter of implementation). This portion would be simple: dumb pipe of X speed between you and the peering point. Anything from the peering point to the internet at large would be pure free market, internet access at higher or lower speeds, quotas or no, filtering or not, various numbers of static IPs, access to various other things over IP, etc.
The government wants to gives us free wireless broadband, now without content restriction.
This is the same government that conducted warrantless wiretapping. If they own the bitwaves, there's less barrier to the same occurring.
If there's restrictions, people wanting privacy will go elsewhere. If the restrictions are lifted, people will be more likely to feel safe using it for more sensitive matters. The government will be more able to catch more people.
Can anyone conceive of a better way for the government to maximize its chances of catching people doing things they find undesirable while minimizing its chances of getting in trouble and so having to stop?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Actually, it is likely that these "bandwidth hogs" are INCREASING your available bandwidth. How fast of a connection do you think you would have if no one ever maxed out their 56k modems. We certainly wouldn't be seeing 6mbps connections being rolled out. We wouldn't likely even see 256kbps lines. It is the guys that are watching HD movies off of netflix and running bittorrent 24/7 that are creating the expectation that we need faster internet. They are the ones that are fighting the good fight so that you and I can get good speeds tomorrow.