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FCC Chair Genachowski Resigns; What Effect on Net Regulation?
New submitter RougeFemme writes with news of Friday's announcement that FCC chairman Julius Genachowski will step down in the next several weeks (also at Politico), and asks "Obama promised us the continuation of a free, open Internet. Will the resignation of the FCC chairman have any affect on that 'net neutrality'?"
Will the resignation of the FCC chairman have any affect on that 'net neutrality'?"
Probably not, a lot of Obama's voters care about that issue but the next republican administration will probably affect net neutrality since their campaigns are funded by people with a vested interest in tearing it down (starting with Rupert Murdoch and his lobotomised puppet Glenn Beck).
That right there should tell you how that will turn out.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
What company will be his new employer: Comcast? Verizon?
it's pretty goddamned ridiculous that one person can presumably have so great an effect on the freedom of us all in a way that goes well beyond national boundaries or the ability of any single individual to know if they're doing the right thing.
Damn, this stupid post snuck through my HOSTS file again!
PROOF apk sucks donkey dick.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/f-c-c-commissioner-to-join-comcast/
Four months after the Federal Communications Commission approved a hotly contested merger of Comcast and NBC Universal,
one of the commissioners who voted for the deal said on Wednesday that she would soon join Comcast's Washington lobbying office.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
There isn't going to be another FCC chairman for at least 2 years then. There is no way anyone will clear congress. Any position that is vacated will not be filled so long as the republicans have more than 39 seats in the senate. They don;t care who it is or how important their job is, they will fillibuster any and everyone because Harry Reid agreed to leave them that power instead of stripping it.
Every one of Obama's campaign promises comes with a expiration date...
While the transition from analogue to digital OTA television was decades in the making, Julius Genachowski saw the actual cut-over event as an opportunity to supply newfound spectrum to the suddenly burgeoning wireless data and mobile phone industry segments. Genachowski was the driving force in trying to squeeze down the amount of broadcast spectrum that had been given long ago to analogue OTA TV broadcasting. Historically, the reassignment of analogue UHF TV channels 70 through 83 to other industries in the 1980s was accomplished with very little difficulty, but in the digital OTA TV transition the UHF TV channels 52 through 69 were reassigned to wireless data broadcasting as part of the entire project. For consumers and most OTA TV broadcasters, the first transition seems to have worked well, such that 1080i or 720p ATSC High Definition TV with Surround Sound is commonly available in major U.S. markets using MPEG2 data transport streams. Having overseen that massive transition successfully, Genachowski proposed a next wave, in which the "white space" gaps surrounding OTA TV stations in the UHF TV band (channels 14 through 51) would be assigned to wireless devices. Unfortunately this is where technology appeared to be outstripped by reality, as well-known TV signal propagation effects were to be somehow conquered by "white space" devices in their routine operation. Likewise, the new devices were not to harm existing TV signals. Realistically, the potential for interference has been seen to be too great a risk to the TV broadcasters, and debate has raged. Not to be dissuaded by the likely failure of the "white space" plans, Genachowski has spearheaded a move to once-again cut the available OTA TV broadcast spectrum via a "repacking" all TV stations into yet a smaller spectrum slice (fewer number of channels) by such proposed methods as the change of compression from MPEG2 to the superior MPEG4 data transport standard, which allows 1080i or 720p ATSC streams using much less bandwidth than the MPEG2, therefore requiring much less space on the broadcast spectrum. Such a hardware-based transition would be a huge cost burden to consumers as their existing ATSC TV tuners would be rendered as obsolete as the old analogue NTSC ones now are. Broadcasters have fought hard to prevent or resist such a repacking, pointing out with a sense of victimization that at no time has Julius Genachowski seriously proposed similar technical overhauls of the mobile phone and/or WiFi industry with the onus that they use their allotted spectrum in more efficient ways. From the consumer perspective, with the rapid and ongoing churn of technology in the hand held and mobile device marketplace, products are made obsolescent in only a few years, while in regards to TV reception consumers expect and demand many years of expected service from their existing hardware. Transitions occur frequently in the mobile phone and wireless industries, but are extremely disruptive to OTA TV consumers and broadcasters. So, from the perspective of the OTA TV broadcasters, Genachowski's exit is not a sad occasion.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
First off, it should be understood that the existing "net neutrality" rules (FCC Rules 47CFR Part 8) are being challenged in the courts, and odds on will be overturned. That's because they were designed to be overturned! They were a political feint designed to get past the last elections before the (DC Circuit) court got to them, which will be this year. Before adopting Part 8, the FCC suggested other rule options that would have been legal, but they put flagrant errors in their actual Order, as if to say "overturn me!". (The biggest one was hanging it on Section 706, basically a legal footnote, which doesn't grant that power, rather than Title II of the law, which could, if applied correctly, which would probably have opened the telco networks a bit more.)
This is a good thing. The rules, were they to stand, would be very dangerous.
The commercial Internet did not get created by government-imposed rules; it was however created because government-imposed rules on the telephone companies required them to allow ISPs to use their facilities. The key rule, dating back to 1980, was called Computer II. So ISPs could lease lines for business and do dial-up for consumers. And until 2005 ISPs could lease DSL for consumers too. Then the FCC, which had shifted in 2001 (hmmm... who took over that year?) to become very strongly in cahoots with the Bell companies (SBC/ATT, VZ, Qwest). They "deregulated" the phone companies, allowing them to not provide access to ISPs, so the phone companies could be the only ISPs on their DSL and fiber networks.
Telco networks were common carriers. They had to be absolutely, totally content-neutral, as they were tariffed as "dumb" bit pipes. ISPs are legally treated as "information" providers, which grants editorial control and is meant to be the content, not the carriage. They are largely used like carriers, but that's because the carriers suck so bad.
It was a couple of months after that FCC move that the term "network neutrality" came out. It was a terrible idea, meaning that because there was no competition any more for Internet, just cable vs. telco, the Internet itself should become content-regulated. So spammers, pirate CDNs, and other miscreants would have the right to congest your ISP and your ISP would not be allowed to do anything about it. They could do "reasonable network management", though, which means, basically, "whoever makes the most campaign contributions wins". Small ISPs would be creamed; Verizon (the law firm with an antenna on the roof) could do anything, including block much-wanted content.
Julius did very little to fix this. Until 2011 he had a real hard-on for Verizon FiOS, though when VZ said they were discontinuing its expansion, he got ticked. The previous Chairman, Kevin Martin, hated hated hated Comcast (which is run by Democrats); Julius G was friendly to them. But didn't change the FCC's anti-competitive trajectory very much. Wall Street likes monopolies. Julius is a Wall Street kind of guy (a VC).
So long as people argue for Internet content regulation ("network neutrality"), instead of for a free choice of ISPs ("open networks"), they'll be spinning their wheels. Alas, the next Chairman (probably Wheeler, Kornbluh, Sandoval, Levin, or Strickling) is unlikely to change much. Susan Crawford would really shake things up, but is probably too controversial to get the job.
Now why in the world would anyone give up such a powerful position? I know, he's going to donate all his time and energy to charitable organizations. Yeah, I didn't really think so either.
... you can be sure you won't be getting it.
Vampire Bueller's Day Off.