On Thursday’s Radioshow: Uncertain Futures – Tim Hwang Analyzes the New FCC

“Uncertain Futures” is a new report that reviews the background of the new and returning FCC Commissioners, making educated guesses about what lies ahead for our communications environment. Co-author Tim Hwang will be on this week’s mediageek radioshow to discuss what’s in store for important issues like network neutrality and media consolidation. Hwang is a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and authored the report along with Erikk Hokenso, based at the University of St Andrews in St Andrews, Scotland.

The mediageek radioshow airs live this Thursday, August 20 at 9 PM Central time on WNUR 89.3 FM in Evanston-Chicago, IL and online at www.wnur.org. If you have questions or comments for Tim Hwang send them to me by email – paul(at)mediageek(dot)net – or by twitter. The syndicated podcast will be posted Sunday night, or you can listen to the show on any of the thirteen other affiliates listed at the radioshow site.

If you can’t help but watch…

Although I know it’s best just to wait until tomorrow morning when all the polls have closed and the votes have been counted (we hope…), it’s hard not to keep your eyes glued to the car wreck that is election night news coverage. But if you want to break away from the mainstream, at least Paper Tiger TV is here to help with coverage that focuses on big issues besides just who’s ahead.

This New York City based public access television group is producing live election coverage tonight, 10:30 – 11:30 PM EST. If you’re in Manhattan, watch Manhattan Neighborhood Network Channel 67. Or you can tune in online at mnn.org and at indypendent.org.

More details after the jump…
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You Get What You Pay For

Well, not necessarily YOU exactly, unless you happen to have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to congresspeople this year. But if YOU are AT&T, then you’ve gotten a pretty good return on the $1.7 million you’ve donated to federal candidates this year.

67% of AT&T’s donations have gone to Republicans, and as a result the House has passed its speedy entry into the cable TV market with the COPE Act, and the commerce committees in both the House and the Senate have rejected Network Neutrality.

But AT&T is not alone. Millions more have been donated from across the telecomm industry, again with a majority going to Republicans.

The National Journal has more details on the Capitol Hill garage sale.

Sure, you might get to vote. But is your one measly vote worth as much as the $260k Virginia Sen. George Allen raked in from telecomm?

Ted Stevens Goes Postal

On today’s radioshow I reported on a half-baked pamphlet that Senate Commerce Committee Ted Stevens is distributing to fellow Senators to promote his telecom bill and oppose network neutrality. Click here to take a look at the pamphlet yourself [PDF].

Public Knowledge’s Alex Curis asks some good questions about the pamphlet:

• Has a congressional committee itself (not a lobbyist or public interest org) ever advocated for a piece of legislation with a promotional brochure?
• Is this a proper role of a committee?
• What would members of the committee who didn’t vote for the legislation have to say about it?

Tubes, not Trucks — Sen. Stevens Explains the Internets

One of the most wonderful things about the Senate Commerce Committee is that it is chaired by a doddering old man from Alaska who rarely demonstrates a clear understanding of the technologies his committee oversees. Not that we should be surprised about relative tech ignorance on Capitol Hill, where enough Congresscritters were willingly bamboozled by a CD full of static that the NAB claimed represented the interference caused by a 100 watt station to a multi-thousand watt station.

Wired’s 27B Stroke 6 blog highlights a stupefying portion of Alaska’s Ted Steven’s comments on network neutrality and the internet from last week:

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.

We aren’t earning anything by going on that internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people [...]

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

For a round-up of some less confused, more disingenuous interpretations of net neutrality from members of the House, listen to the June 9 edition of Media Minutes [direct link to MP3 - 4.8 MB].

Political Economy by Any Other Name Is Apparently a Fresh, New Idea

Perhaps this is nothing new, but I’m starting to really notice a severe lack of awareness of critical traditions within the A-list blogosphere/digerati culture.

Back in March, Andrew took note of a proposal to create a new “interdisciplinary discipline’ of Critical Information Studies, which he concluded, “sounds very like the areas covered by Political Economy of media.” The original proposal was floated by cultural historian Prof. Siva Vaidhyanathan, and picked up by BoingBoing.

Today I’m reading BoingBoing myself and find a post about the political disenchantment of Mitch Kapor, the original designer of Lotus 1-2-3. And what is his insight?

I’ve become completely convinced that we need to begin a process of fundamental political change in the U.S., not in the form of a new party per se as a new multi-faceted movement of ideas, organizations, and cultures, based around a vision of democracy which is fundamentally open, participatory, and decentralized.

Wow? Really? Open, participatory democracy? Them’s some pretty radical ideas there.

Please forgive my sarcasm, but I guess what annoys me most is not that Kapor’s unoriginal. It’s that now when these critiques come out of the mouth of the digerati it’s like they’re heretofore unseen insights about the political condition. And the a-list bloggers that spread the word seem equally ignorant of the critical tradition of the last 150 years as explored and explicated by scholars, activists and radicals.

Kapor follows up with his analysis that “Politics is Architecture:”

When it comes to building a new movement, the converse proposition, “politics is architecture” holds true as well. The architecture (structure and design) of political processes, not their content, is determinative of what can be accomplished.

Can someone please hand this man some Weber, Marx or Chomsky books (or Cliff’s Notes of them)?

I guess I should be at least somewhat happy that a central argument of Political Economic analysis comes so obviously and without apparent precedent to someone who sort of comes from the business side of the internet universe. But the failure to historicize these ideas, or even attempt it, does a disservice to all. Both because it fails to make linkages with vibrant movements that are taking concrete action this very moment, and because it threatens to create another instance of reinventing the wheel.

Even if we just look within the young world of the blogosphere there are thousands (if not millions) of bloggers like me who have been punching away at the modern political economic machine from a critical perspective, be it reformist, socialist or anarchist. We’ve been criticizing the very structure of western capitalist governments, the collusion of elected representatives and industry, and the myth of the free market, obeyance to which devolves into corporate oligarchy.

This isn’t a matter of sour grapes — I’m quite well aware that my own critiques are built upon a strong foundation of thought and scholarship that I have read and studied for the last sixteen years or so. I may have the occasional insight that I think is an original moment of praxis or synthesis. But under no circumstance do I presume that I’m knitting newly developed ideas about the modern capitalist state.

And if Kapor’s recent revelations are your first introduction to these ideas, then I’m glad you’ve also stumbled onto my words here. My advice is that you take a moment or more to read and understand other similar perspectives, and especially look into the field of Political Economy which has been addressing these fundamental problems for a very long time.

Catch Up on Your Indecency

Last Thursday the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on “Decency,” and the hearing’s video is now available on-line at the Committee’s website, along with printed statements from the invited guests who gave tesimony.

I did short report on the hearing on last Friday’s radioshow, available for listening online. You can also read that headline.

The IPTAblog has a series of podcasts taking a much closer look at the hearing and issue, blow-by-blow (via BuzzMachine).

The National Journal’s Insider Update on the Telecom Act reports that Stevens Touts Progress On TV, Radio ‘Indecency’, and in an earlier story surveys the regulatory landscape, noting that Technology Changes ‘Decency’ Landscape For The FCC.

House OKs End Date for Analog TV, Poorest Households Set To Get Screwed

This is a story I’ve been following on the radioshow, though not so much on the blog. Monday the House passed a bill that sets Feb. 17 , 2009 as the date when your analog TV officially becomes obsolete, and all stations must broadcast exclusively in digital.

One of the big controversies, besides the transition date, has been how much money will be allocated to help households buy converter boxes allowing their analog TVs to receive digital signals. The Senate and House Democrats have been pushing for a bigger allocation, while House Republicans want less. This money will come directly from the proceeds resulting from the auction of broadcasters’ old analog spectrum, so, essentially, House Republicans want more of that cash for pork barrel.

The new compromise conerter box fund is $1.5 billion, which was agreed to by Republican negotiators from the House and Senate — note that Dems were left out of this one. Households can request up to two $40 coupons towards the purchase of converters, which are expected to sell for about $65 — no free ride for those who can’t or won’t buy new TVs.

And the ride may be even more expensive for cable TV subscribers who still receive an analog signal. The cable industry is disappointed that the House bill didn’t address their ability to downconvert stations’ digital signals to analog for their subscribers — primarily households who subscribe to “basic cable” which usually only includes around 13 channels, mostly local broadcast and public access. Cable companies may be allowed to downcovert local broadcasts, but they will have to negotiate that right individually with each broadcaster — they were hoping to get blanket approval from Congress.

Arguably, the poorest households are amongst those that only subscribe to basic cable and thus are those most at risk for losing some local channels–at least for a while–when they go digital in 2009. The poorest households most likely won’t be able to afford new digital TVs, and will have to hope they can score converter box coupons.

I’ve been reading about digital and high-definition TV since the late 80s — it’s certainly been on the wish list of videophiles for a long time. But I’ve also been torn about it. While I can appreciate the aesthetic improvement that high-definition brings to the table, I am doubtful about how much broadcasters will actually exploit this capability, and am also cynical about whether this improvement is worth the cost of transition to digital broadcasting.

Visiting friends and relatives, I’m often struck by how bad their TV picture looks, even with new sets. While the TV may be capable of a high quality picture, poor adjustment (like super high contrast and brightness settings), poor cabling and often just bad reception via antenna or cable TV add up to poor results. And it also seems like most people don’t care so much. It’s only wack-o middle-class videophiles like me who pay such close attention.

And the broadcasters know this. They know that high-def is great marketing, and certainly will bring the most affluent viewers on board, but they also know that the average household is going to see little real-world gain. What the broadcasters are in it for is the ability to squeeze more channels into their broadcast. In essence, they’re getting a 2, 3 or 4 for 1 deal, and viewers have no choice but to go along, paying for the privilege.

At this point it really doesn’t matter whether digital television is real improvement for viewers, and viewers have really never been given a voice in the matter. For employed middle-class guys like me, upgrading to a digital TV is more of a nuisance than a burden. But what about households worried about the next paycheck and next meal?

Sure, you can argue that TV isn’t necessary for life, and that maybe people would be better off without television. I certainly know many people who choose not to own or watch TV. But I don’t think such a choice should be forced on people. For all its ills, television is still an important communications medium, especially for people who, for whatever reason, don’t use the internet, newspapers or other media.

At its core, the digital TV transition is a handout to broadcasters and the electronics industry — a government-sponsored program forcing the entire country to buy new TVs and converter boxes so that broadcasters can squeeze more channels into their allocated spectrum. You might get a better picture for some programs, and you might get an extra channel or two of stuff that you’ll like and find valuable. But you might also just get some extra shopping and informercial channels, too.

This isn’t a luddite argument, and it’s not a rant against the idea of digital TV. Rather, the transition to digital broadcasts could have happened in any of a number of ways — even in ways that would have preserved analog broadcasts alongside digital for a longer time. But it happened this way for two reasons: one, the public was never consulted and, two, it increased the spoils for broadcasters (despite their whining), electronics manufacturers, and Congress.

In 39 months, when you have to shell out for a new TV or converter box, or have to pay more to your cable company to keep receiving the same channels, thank the NAB and Congress for your TV tax.

Senate Communications Hearing Orgy with our Spectrum and Internet Rights in the Middle

Perhaps responding to criticism that he’s been dragging his feet on comm stuff, Senate Commerce Committee Chair has schedule a virtual assload of hearings for the first 11 weeks of the next session on various communications related issues.

My guess is that this is all prep work for the forthcoming Telecommunications Act of 2006, and will be where the Bush Administration and their telco-entertainment-corporate-cabal will unveil their wish list for wrenching every last bit of control over the spectrum and internet. With hearings like “Broadcast and Audio Flag” and “Internet Neutrality” these will be very important hearings to watch.

The hearings are:
Thursday, Jan.19, 10 a.m.; Decency

Thursday, Jan.19, 2:30 p.m.; Internet Pornography

Tuesday, Jan. 24, 10 a.m.; Video Franchising

Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2:30 p.m.; Video Content

Thursday, Jan. 26, 10 a.m.; Competition and Convergence

Tuesday, Jan. 31, 10 a.m.; Broadcast and Audio Flag

Tuesday, Feb. 7, 10 a.m.; Internet Neutrality

Tuesday, Feb. 14, 10 a.m.; State and Local Issues and Municipal Networks

Tuesday, Feb. 28, 10 a.m.; Universal Service Fund Contributions

Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2:30; Universal Service Fund Distribution

Thursday, March 2, 10 a.m.; Wireless Issues/Spectrum Reform

Tuesday, March 7, 10 a.m.; Rural Telecommunications

Tuesday, March 14, 10 a.m.; Voice over Internet Protocol

Tuesday, March 14, 2:30 p.m.; Wall Street’s Perspective on Telecommunications

Next Battle of the Indecency War is Cable and Satellite… and Unconstitutional

Salon has an article on the forces girding for the next stage of the regulatory battle over indecency. One of the next fronts may be cable and satellite, which FCC Chair Kevin Martin would like to see subjected to indecency regs just like broadcast TV and radio. According to Salon the staff of Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Stevens has been, “reviewing new regulatory options, looking for ideas that would survive a court challenge on First Amendment grounds.”

Call me an optimist, but I don’t think extending indecency regs to cable and satellite will pass constitutional scrutiny. Even former FCC Chair Michael Powell agrees with me on that point.

The justification for the FCC’s ability to regulate indecency in broadcast rests on two basic premises about the very nature of broadcast media, as set forth in FCC v. Pacifica:

First, the broadcast media have established a uniquely pervasive presence in the lives of all Americans. Patently offensive, indecent material presented over the airwaves confronts the citizen, not only in public, but also in the privacy of the home, where the individual’s right to be left alone plainly outweighs the First Amendment rights of an intruder. …

Second, broadcasting is uniquely accessible to children, even those too young to read. Although Cohen’s written message might have been incomprehensible to a first grader, Pacifica’s broadcast could have enlarged a child’s vocabulary in an instant. Other forms of offensive expression may be withheld from the young without restricting the expression at its source. Bookstores and motion picture theaters, for example, may be prohibited from making indecent material available to children.

Both of these are very important tests that fail when applied to cable and satellite. On the first point, regarding the “uniquely pervasive presence,” cable and satellite are subscription services. You don’t just turn on a TV and get them as you do broadcast. Further, even if you own a satellite receiver, you still have to actively subscribe.

I believe that cable and satellite fail to be sufficiently “pervasive” under the Court’s definition.

Secondly, on the point that “broadcasting is uniquely accessible to children,” I think the analogy to movie theaters and bookstores is most illustrative of how cable and satellite differ from broadcast. The Court finds the barriers that these two venues present to children to be sufficient to shield them and different from broadcast. Again, with both cable and satellite, parents may choose not to subscribe to the services, or choose not to subscribe to particular channels. Further, most digital cable systems and all satellite systems allow parents to block out particular channels.

Don’t want your kids to hear the bleeped “fucks” and see the Christmas Poo on South Park? Lock out Comedy Central and you’re done.

Again, I believe the cable and satellite fail this second test, in that they are not nearly as accessible to children, and their content may be easily withheld from children without the aid of regulation.

In making this argument I don’t mean to express agreement with Pacifica. I think the metaphor that compares broadcast signals to an “intruder” is patently and “uniquely” absurd. The argument for protecting children perhaps holds a little more water, but only if you believe that children are easily harmed by a few dirty words — a belief for which there is no record of scientific proof (even while there’s substantial research indicating that violent programming may be more harmful).

What’s most interesting, and disturbing, about what Salon reports is that reactionary conservative and religious forces are preparing to fight the war over “indecency” on multiple fronts, including going after pornography by trying to outlaw it outright.

I’m pretty sure these efforts will fail — does anyone see any lasting effects of Reagan-era attorney general Ed Meese’s report on pornography? Do you even remember it?

It’s political posturing in the vain hope that the dying days of the Bush regime will have some sort of legacy besides the blood of American soldiers and Iraqi citizens, a ballooning debt and oil-driven inflation.

It’s good for us to be awake and aware, but we do no good to overreact.