Tag: Public Knowledge

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Progressives’ Anti-Merger Mania

The proposed merger between the cable systems of Charter Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks has brought out the usual poseurs in opposition.  I speak, of course, of such as Common Cause, Consumers Union, and Public Knowledge (all of which are wrong in their usual and tiresome way, but not certifiable), and their more extreme kin, Media Alliance and Free Press.

As it happens, there exists a bridge between these armies of progressivism in the person of former FCC commissioner Michael Copps.  Since leaving the FCC, Copps has flocked to the aid of those organizations he favored when he was a commissioner.  So it is that the gentleman is now on the board of Free Press and a “special adviser” to Common Cause.

Which, of course, is why it’s important to know the kinds of things he’s saying about the merger.  Writing in Common Dreams (“Breaking News and Views for the Progressive Community”), Copps relieves himself of opinions like these:

This merger would create a new Comcast – a national cable giant with the ability and the incentive to thwart competition, diversity, and consumer choice….  >> Read More

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.  The full version of this article appeared in The Hill on Feb. 9, 2016.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Who’s Behind the Push for Net Neutrality?

If “net neutrality” were a life form, it would be classified as a simple organism.  And that lack of complexity, as it happens, is its very appeal to certain “progressives,” garden-variety regulators, and large Internet companies, who see in government regulation of the Internet opportunities to cement and extend their franchises.

The brave and gifted Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Ajit Pai, and former commissioner Robert McDowell, are doing all they can to point out the many already identifiable problems, as well as potential pitfalls, that line the path of this regulatory nightmare.  Among those problems are higher user fees to consumers, a slowdown in the rate of investment in broadband infrastructure, regulatory creep, and the wrong kind of example to set before foreign dictators and tyrants.

Alas, none of this is likely to deter the three Democratic FCC commissioners, as instructed by the White House, from passing this regulation.

What has not been much discussed in all of this is the role in the promotion of net neutrality played by some of the actors: activist groups like Free Press, Public Knowledge, and Media Matters; huge grant-giving foundations like the Ford, Soros, and Knight foundations; and companies like Google.   >>Read More

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Net Neutrality: Fast Lanes and the Usual Suspects

You can sometimes judge the quality of a thing by those who oppose it.  In the case of FCC Chairman Wheeler’s plan to allow the sale of “fast lanes” by Internet service providers, we have the usual suspects.

There is, for instance, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), about whom it’s impossible to say a single flattering thing, and organizations like Public Knowledge, Common Cause, and Free Press, whose role, these days, is to be the routinely embarrassing coiners of nonsensical slogans like “Net Neutrality: The First Amendment of the Internet.”

So these, and more, have been roused to high dudgeon by a plan that would allow ISPs to give Internet content providers the opportunity to pay more for a speedier route to consumers.  (Oh no, not that!)

The Media Institute has spent a lot of time with “net neutrality,” and we were pleased that under former FCC chairman Genachowski the FCC adopted a “lite” form of it.  But we also said it was a solution in search of a problem, and that the only lasting effect of it would be to set a precedent for regulation of the theretofore unregulated Internet.

Still, judging by the negative reaction to the modest plan offered by Wheeler – a plan that was in direct response to a court order, and that reportedly keeps in place restrictions against all the kinds of dastardly things ISPs were falsely accused of planning to do – there’s a core of people who can’t get away from the “cause.”

One of the more flamboyant of the bunch is former FCC commissioner Michael Copps, who, on the subject, is reported to have relieved himself of this nugget: “If the Commission subverts the Open Internet by creating a fast lane for the 1 percent and slow lanes for the 99 percent, it would be an insult to both citizens and to the promise of the Net.”

Time will tell whether more people think it’s Wheeler’s plan, or Copps’s statement, which is the greater insult.

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Julius Genachowski and Broadband Billing

Comments made earlier this week by FCC chairman Julius Genachowski have raised hackles at organizations like Free Press and kindred groups.  The occasion was the Cable Show in Boston, and the offending subject was what is called “usage-based billing” – the radical notion that people who use more of a thing should pay more than those who use less.

In a Q&A session with Michael Powell, former FCC chairman and current CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, Genachowski avowed that there was much to like about broadband providers basing their charges on usage (rather than on a one-size-fits-all basis).

This wasn’t the first time Genachowski had endorsed this practice – it was part of the net neutrality regulations that the FCC promulgated a couple of years ago – but it was enough to provoke the simple folk at Free Press into eruptions of their usual blather.

The last time broadband billing was discussed in this blog (April 2009), the news was Time Warner Cable’s decision, under fire from people and organizations like Free Press, Public Knowledge, and Sen. Charles Schumer, to suspend their trials of this kind of billing in a handful of cities.

As reported at the time, the air was thick with celebration as the “victors” issued triumphant statements on the occasion.  Triumphant no more, they have been reduced, in response to Genachowski’s comments on Tuesday, to broadsides and bromides like this one from Matt Wood, policy director of Free Press: “The data caps being pushed by the biggest cable companies are bad for consumers … and the FCC should be investigating these caps, not endorsing them.”

But enough about broadband billing per se.  The more noteworthy thing about Genachowski’s comment is that this marks at least the third time that he has demonstrated his independence from the louder voices among communications policy outfits.

The first time was with the FCC’s adoption of what came to be called “net neutrality lite,” and the second was when he hired Steve Waldman to head up the agency’s “future of media” report, a document that steered clear of the most intrusive and inappropriate kinds of recommendations that had been proposed for it.

None of this is to say – nor would the gentleman necessarily welcome our saying – that Mr. Genachowski is the very model of what one looks for in an FCC chairman.  Though the net neutrality regulations are much better than what they might have been, better still would be no such regulations at all.

Still, in an environment as divisive as Washington’s, it’s probably a good idea once in a while to step outside of it all and give credit where credit is due.  So props to Julius Genachowski for his embrace of usage-based broadband billing.  ’Tis a fine thing he’s done.

                                     

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

 

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Funding Net Neutrality … And Worse

There are so many things wrong with the FCC’s codified “net neutrality” rules, the kindest thing one can say about those responsible is that they were all born yesterday.  But criticism of this monstrosity abounds already, and given the potential for it to be wholly or partly undone by the courts or Congress, no further discussion of its many flaws is either timely or necessary.

Just before Christmas, however, John Fund wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal that ought to be required reading for every media and communications mogul in America.  Titled “The Net Neutrality Coup,” Fund recounts the role played by a handful of large grant-giving foundations, and the beneficiaries of their largesse (“paid clappers,” in Ted Turner’s immortal phrase) in the promotion of this cynical creation of the “media reform” movement.

Perhaps the greatest value in Fund’s piece is his finding that most of those foundations that provided the lion’s share of funding for net neutrality were also among the biggest sources of funding for the earlier (and even worse) mischief, “campaign finance reform.”

Fund identifies by name a total of six grant-giving foundations and four operating organizations.  They are, among the former: the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Joyce Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the John and Catherine MacArthur Foundation.

The four operating groups are Free Press, Public Knowledge, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the New America Foundation.  What all of these groups – funders and recipients alike – share in common is that, to varying degrees, they are all liberal-leaning, or “progressive,” as they yearn to be called nowadays.

Missing from this list is another billion-dollar grant-giving group – the Knight Foundation – which, through the Knight Commission, has itself peddled  net neutrality, along with such pap as the need for greater funding of public broadcasting, and tax credits for investigative journalism.  Though we won’t know for sure until its report is issued, the FCC appears to have adopted the Knight Commission’s recommendations as a kind of blueprint in its approach to the commission’s so-called Future of Media initiative.

The reason all of this should be of the greatest importance to everyone, but particularly to titans of media and communications, is simple: The communications policy views of grant-making groups like the Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation (not to mention Free Press) are inimical to the well being of media and communications companies.

It’s not entirely clear why the “progressive” moneybags’ lavish spending has not incited individuals with different political views, many of whom have amassed great wealth in the media and communications business, to fund non-profit organizations with more pro-business communications policy views.  Perhaps it’s because some of them, having gotten theirs and now in retirement, no longer care much what happens to the industry of which they were once a part.  Or maybe it’s because many don’t think of themselves, or want others to think of them, as “conservatives,” whatever that means in the context of communications policymaking.

But a likelier explanation is that many fail to understand what a threat to their own and their industry’s welfare some of these groups actually pose.  Perhaps because businessmen are very good at lobbying, and understand the ins and outs of PACs, they don’t see the need to engage their critics in the worlds of academia or think tankery.

It’s a mistake, that, because in truth it’s the people who deal in ideas – intellectuals and artists, activists and policy wonks – who are often the engines in the development of policy issues in which legislators and regulators are but the last people to board the train.  Witness, for instance, net neutrality.

As John Fund puts it, in the conclusion of his WSJ piece, “So the ‘media reform’ movement paid for research that backed its views, paid activists to promote the research, saw its allies installed in the FCC and other key agencies, and paid for the FCC research that evaluated the research they had already paid for.  Now they have their policy.  That’s quite a coup.”

                                                
The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not necessarily of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Net Neutrality: Solving Nonexistent Problems the Old-Fashioned Way

For all the reaction it elicited, Chairman Genachowski’s plan for codification of the so-called net neutrality rules, as suggested in a speech he gave Dec. 1, amounts to too little revealed, much less resolved, to allow for fully confident assessment.

This said, it’s not too early to observe that any public policy that is roundly condemned by Free Press, the Media Access Project, and the Nation magazine can’t be all bad.  And condemn it they have.  Under headlines like “Is FCC Peddling Fake Net Neutrality?” and “FCC Chair Genachowski’s ‘Fake Net Neutrality’ Scheme Threatens Internet Freedom, Digital Democracy,” the left’s unhappiness is as loud as it is music to the ears.

On the other hand, the chairman’s proposal has also attracted heavy fire from members of Congress, many but not all of them Republicans, and from the two Republican commissioners at the FCC.  In Congress, the general animus centers on the feeling that the FCC should at least consult with, if not defer to, the members about such things, while Republicans are especially angry that the chairman’s plan anticipates action before the newly elected members of the House and Senate are even seated.

Meanwhile, the service providers are somewhat divided, with some of them content to wrap things up in a way that falls far short of what they had feared, while others are troubled by the apparent lack of a sunset provision, and by the unsettled nature of many important details.

So philosophy on parade it is not.  It is, instead, equal parts partisan politics, an acknowledgment of the way the world works, and 100-proof deal making.  As such, it’s unsatisfying – like taking a shower with your socks on – but it’s not a complete surprise.  As reported here, it’s always been clear that Genachowski had the inclination, and the votes, to proceed with some kind of “net neutrality” scheme, even as it also has looked ever more problematical for him to go the whole nine yards, as in Title II “reclassification.”

More than this, there are aspects of the apparent plan – like its embrace of consumption-based billing – that are deeply satisfying.  It wasn’t all that long ago that Time Warner Cable had to abandon plans, in consequence of noisy opposition from the usual troglodytes, to do some trials of this kind of thing.  Charging more of those who use more is the way we price most things, of course, but that didn’t prevent groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge from piling on in opposition to TWC’s plans, nor from gloating when the company withdrew its proposed trials.

For now, the whole of this matter can be reduced to some questions, not all of them answerable.  Is Title I regulation better than Title II?  Yes.  Is this the best result one could reasonably expect from this FCC?  Probably.  Is it wise public policy?  No.  Will the FCC’s action, whatever it is, be the end of the matter?  Depends.  If, sometime in the future, a party with standing decides to sue the agency on the claim that it lacks authority to regulate the Internet in this way, it will have a viable argument with some case law to back it up. And if that lawsuit were to be resolved in a way that (once again) ordered the FCC out of the Internet regulation business, well, so much the better.

                                                
The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not necessarily of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

Posted on By Patrick Maines

Time Warner Cable and Consumption-Based Billing


Time Warner Cable has had quite a bumpy ride for the past couple weeks.  Having announced earlier a plan to conduct trials of a consumption-based billing policy, in which users would be charged based on the amount of data they download and upload, by week’s end the company was obliged to suspend the trials altogether.

What happened in between were the protests of some customers and bloggers, the usual mischief of some of the “public interest” lobbies (they’re from Washington and they know what you want), and most importantly, the intervention, as critics, of a congressman (Massa) and a U.S. senator (Schumer).

Aside from the fact that broadband users who consume unusually large amounts of bandwidth, downloading movies and the like, would have to pay more, it’s not immediately clear what’s wrong with consumption-based billing.  That is, after all, the way we pay for most things, and it protects those who use less from having to subsidize the payments of those who use much more.

No matter.  In an age when information “wants to be free,” and everyone is entitled to everything, arguments based on marketplace economics are probably not going to persuade a lot of people, and certainly not grandstanding members of Congress.

Which is why, at the end of last week, Glenn Britt, Time Warner Cable’s CEO, announced a suspension of the trials scheduled for later this year in Rochester, N.Y., Austin and San Antonio, Texas, and Greensboro, N.C.

In a display of their usual savoir-faire, several of the “public interest” moguls were full of gloating, like that of Timothy Karr of Free Press: “We’re glad to see Time Warner Cable’s price-gouging scheme collapse in the face of consumer opposition.  Let this be a lesson to other Internet service providers looking to head down a similar path.”

Only slightly less tiresome was the statement of Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge: “The company properly listened to its subscribers, the public and policymakers, all of whom (emphasis added) were highly critical of the proposition in the first place.”

The celebrations, however, may be a bit premature.  What Time Warner Cable said was that it was suspending the trials, not abandoning consumption-based billing, and that in the meantime it was going to deploy measurement tools, a kind of “gas gauge,” that would allow users to see how much bandwidth they were using each month.

Assume that some months from now it transpires that the vast majority of users consume bandwidth in amounts that would qualify them for the lowest and cheapest tiers, while only a small minority would have to pay at the highest rates.  Now that would be awkward, wouldn’t it?