I have been doing a lot of research on the other decision made on November 4th, when the Federal Communications Commission decided to make a significant portion of the television spectrum unlicensed, the so-called 'White Spaces' occupied currently by broadcasters who will be moving to digital signals starting in 2009. I'll go into this in detail, including interviewing media policy genius Harold Feld of Wetmachine, who is in many ways a guiding policymaker for the FCC and the progressive media reform space.
But the upshot is that wireless broadband is now feasible and probable in both rural and urban areas over the next few years, there will be lots and lots of gadgets to compete with big telecom in an unregulated wifi on steroids type of environment, and all of this came from a Bush-appointed FCC put under relentless pressure by progressives which actively chose to ignore furious lobbying by big telecom and the broadcasters.
Put another way, your cell phone bills are about to come down, wifi is about to get a lot stronger, and the Obama administration will have an Federal Communications Commission that, though stacked with Bush appointees, was at its tail end was far more progressive than even the Clinton administration.
I changed the wording from 'deregulation' to 'unlicensed'. I think that's both more accurate and removes the political stigma from what actually happened.
With outcries of censorship of reporters in China, it's worth noting that there are Republicans standing up against the possibility of domestic censorship, even within the Bush administration, which has become known - even within Republican circles - for its cronyism and subservience to corrupt industries. FCC Chair Kevin Martin is the latest Bush appointee actually standing up for our rights as consumers and citizens, and for the countless businesses that have not been created yet on the internet. And so, of course, the conservative business right press is going after him viciously.
Here's what's going. Some time ago, the cable giant Comcast began illegal blocking access its subscribers had to file sharing software in its first documented instance of violating net neutrality, or the principle that similar types of data on the internet be treated equally. We know that Comcast likes to censor - it blocked ads critical of corrupt Democrat Chris Carney because they included criticism of Comcast contributions to Carney - and we know that if it is not stopped, it will eventually shape the internet the way that China shapes the internet, for its own political and financial purposes. That's not an indictment of the company, incidentally, more of a recognition that powerful organizations that control communications networks and have content to sell have a business and political incentive to block alternate viewpoints and content.
Earlier this year, the Federal Communications Commission relaxed rules preventing TV stations and newspapers from owning each other in local markets. This was a very bad thing. Tonight, the Senate passed by a near universal voice vote a resolution of disapproval that would nullify this rule. It's in the House as well, and while the President will veto it, the next President will not.
If I were a media executive at a big outlet, I'd be getting very nervous about what a Democratic administration and a new progressive Congress will bring. The Pentagon Pundits scandal is the smoking gun, with the WGA strike big media lost its labor allies, and it's clear that the media executives don't get how much legitimacy they have lost. It's as if they have rerun the Quiz Show scandal, only this time with bullets and trillions of dollar.
Republican Kevin Martin, the current head of the FCC and a presumptive North Carolina politician, was shown as politically incompetent tonight. Less than 1% of the public comments supported his move to allow more media consolidation, and now the Senate is mad. A rule of thumb, Kevin, in case you're reading. You shouldn't make the Senate angry. You won't like them when they're angry.
By now you've probably heard that Comcast hired a crowd to sit in an FCC hearing on net neutrality so interested citizens couldn't get a spot to speak. The gist of Comcast's excuse is that they hired people to hold spots for Comcast employees, though those people accidentally fell asleep and stayed in their seats throughout the entire hearing. Nuts.
Interestingly, there's a bit more to the story, and it involves the cozy relationship between the NAACP and Comcast. Corporate funding of civil rights groups has been a quiet and dank hallmark of liberal politics for decades. Most of the time these partnerships are innocent, but they lead to some coincidentally problematic situations. For example, here's what else was going on in Boston around the FCC the day before the rent-a-crowd incident.
On the same day and location of the hearing, the Boston and Cambridge, Mass., branches of the NAACP plan to host a "take back our media" rally, according to a flier that was circulated on the Internet.
The flier includes quotations from several civil rights groups criticizing Martin's policies on media ownership. The Rev. Jesse Jackson was quoted as claiming Martin supports a "massive new and unjustified welfare for the rich program."
But in a statement Friday, Jackson denied making such a comment and said it does not reflect his position or that of his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. "We have always enjoyed a constructive relationship with the FCC and look forward to continuing it," the statement said.
Martin defended his efforts as FCC chairman, saying the agency has been "active and proactive in taking steps to increase minority ownership."
Most of the quotations took issue at Martin's efforts to push cable operators to offer channels on an a la carte basis. His proposal has met with opposition from the industry, which says it would hurt minority programming.
The flier initially did not include the rally sponsors. A later version, supplied to the AP by a public relations firm, included the NAACP's Boston and Cambridge branches as organizers.
According to Karen Payne, president of the Boston branch of the civil rights group, the rally was sparked by the sale of Boston radio station WILD-FM in 2006. The station's urban format was popular in the black community.
Payne said the NAACP had not authorized the release of the flier, and that as of Friday night, it was still in the draft stages.
So a flyer calling for a rally protesting the FCC under the NAACP's name, put out by a PR firm, and disavowed by the local NAACP as simply a 'draft', was going around on the same day as a net neutrality hearing that Comcast packed with a crowd they hired to prevent net neutrality advocates from attending. And on that very same day, this letter to the editor in the Washington Post attacking net neutrality shows up, from Jose Marquez of the Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology, an astroturf group sponsored by Sprint, the cell phone carrier most aligned with Comcast and the cable industry. In addition, the founder of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, a right-wing group that pushed for the privatization of Social Security in 2005, wrote this piece attacking FCC Chair Kevin Martin for being a racist.
A cynic might say that Comcast, caught red-handed blocking and manipulating the internet traffic of their users is trying to divert attention from the FCC investigation and possible subpoena threat by state AG's by doing a PR campaign around cries of racism. I just think that the NAACP should be a lot more careful in how and when their name shows up when large conservative corporations would want to use their name to distract from their lawbreaking.
There's some really interesting news on the open internet front. First of all, FCC Chair Kevin Martin is now under genuine political attack. He's been setting himself up for a political run with his current tenure at the FCC for some time, buttering up powerful industries and acting as a Bush loyalist. And so this criticism from the North Carolina Democrats is a big deal.
The North Carolina Democratic Party today filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Office of the Inspector General to obtain a detailed list of Chairman Kevin Martin's recent travel.
The request comes in the wake of numerous news reports that Chairman Martin may be using public funds and his position as Chairman of a large government agency to seek elected office in North Carolina.
"Members of Congress who are running for office are closely regulated to ensure that they are not campaigning on the taxpayer dollar - why shouldn't Kevin Martin be held to the same standard?" said NCDP Chair Jerry Meek.
"Our citizens deserve to know whether their taxpayer dollars are being used for Kevin Martin's political gain," Meek said....
Chairman Martin has a long history within the Republican Party. He served as lawyer on Kenneth Starr's Whitewater investigation team and was a key player in the 2000 Bush-Gore election recount where many African American votes were systematically discounted. Martin also served as deputy general counsel for the Bush 2000 campaign; and led the transition team's effort to pick new FCC Commissioners, including himself on the short list of potential nominees.
"Mr. Martin has been a longtime crony of the conservative movement and the Bush Administration," Meek said. "We are concerned this conservative operative may be misallocating public funds to seek higher office and we want to get to the bottom of it."
In the past month, the U.S. Congress has also launched an investigation into Mr. Martin's stewardship of his agency. Other FCC Commissioners have commented that Martin has failed to inform them or the public of proposed agenda items and rules, creating an agency that lacks transparency, arrives at predetermined conclusions and completely disregards public commentary.
Jerry Meek at the North Carolina Democratic Party has reinvigorated that party. It's a fascinating use of leverage.
Meanwhile, Connect Kentucky is being damaged by Art Brodsy's earlier revelations about the organization. Their latest bill went down to defeat.
The telecoms have not had a good week. They've had to deal with us pesky bloggers on FISA, which they thought they'd have quietly by now. They lost their champion in the CBC, largely because of his support for their agenda and his . Their pet project Connect Kentucky is getting smacked. And now their owned and operated FCC Chair is feeling heat because he's associated with them.
I wouldn't want to be in their very expensive shoes right now.
Via our good friends at Freepress, we learn that Kevin Martin at the FCC went ahead and relaxed media ownership rules so that media companies can own both newspapers and broadcast outlets in the same market. Over twenty Senators, including four Republicans, blasted Martin for doing this.
The public outburst against this is tremendous. Media consolidation will be reversed in the next few years. It's a winnable battle, as the public at large does not like broadcast industry lobbyists and billionaire media tycoons like Sam Zell and Rupert Murdoch.
I've spent a bunch of time bashing telephone companies over net neutrality, wiretapping, and just generally being horrible control freaks. Cable companies though are just as unethical and bent on controlling access to content. Harold Feld is bringing word that the FCC is about to rule on regulating cable monopolies to force them to include more independent and minority-owned stations.
The agency is also preparing to adopt a rule this month that would make it easier for independent programmers, which are often small operations, to lease access to cable channels.
And Mr. Martin has been circulating a plan that would use the finding on cable television dominance to set a cap on the size of the nation's largest cable companies so that no company could control more than 30 percent of the market.
When cable was deregulated in 1984, few believed it would become the dominant way that Americans would receive video. In case it did, to prevent cable from having ridiculous market power, Congress wrote that if 70% of Americans subscribed to cable, the FCC would regulate cable in the name of diversity. Cable is fighting tooth and nail, with both anti-regulatory arguments and disputes over the number of Americans who have cable (though of course they won't release numbers of their own subscribers).
It's a complete bad faith assault from the cable industry so Time Warner and Comcast can get bigger and control more content.
The politics here are interesting, and winnable. FCC Commissioners Kevin Martin and Michael Copps want to regulate the industry, but Democrat Jonathan Adelstein and Republican Deborah Tate are unsure, and Robert McDowell is opposed. This is the single best opportunity to break up the power of the cable companies and get more progressive content on TV.
I'll be watching to see how Adelstein votes. FCC politics is byzantine, but it's not always partisan and the amount of power they wield over the information channels Americans have is simply immense.
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By now you've probably heard that Comcast