Countdown to Convergence

Cities and broadband (part 2)

I've been dark in this corner for quite some time (from a combination of factors, including a book project related to this topic), but I'm trying to return to regular posting.

But first, a brief response to a worthwhile comment, to an earlier post at the P-I about cities and cable TV franchises.

The comment:

"I can't fault the cities that decided to have nothing to do with public access. There are flourishing community media centers and public access channels throughout the country, but the effort to support these efforts is not trivial and there are always other demands for time, attention, and resources."

What's that supposed to mean? You fault city administrators for failing to step up to their public obligation to engage the communications revolution and then let them off the hook for dropping or ignoring public access?

The point is any real gains to be had in this so-called "revolution" will be made by committing and time and resources to claim public space and resources currently controlled capitalist corporations. The funding model for public access TV should be applied to all kinds of public media - i.e. corporations that exploit public space for profit should be required to share a portion of that space, and fund alternative community uses of that space or bandwidth.

Thanks however, for pointing out that municipalities provide a major roadblock for the realization of public media. Any access advocate can tell you that cities have retarded the development of public access TV far more than any cable company.

My (very belated) response:

I was being a little bit tongue-in-cheek at that point.

Of course it's wrong for municipalities to skirt their responsibilities to provide for public media, but I've reluctantly concluded that changing this attitude will probably not start at the local level. Cities look to their peers and state governments for guidance on such things and both look to Congress for direction on what's required, what's acceptable. 

My personal strategy is to keep repeating "U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, post offices, post roads = fundamental government responsibility for democratic communication" over and over again.

Feel free to sing along.

To the folks in charge of the last mile

Next week, members of the Washington Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors will hold their annual meeting in Yakima. I'm not able to attend, but here's what I would have said if I could:

Hello, WATOA members,

With all due respect to the AWC meeting next door, you may be the most powerful people in the state of Washington. I know you don’t FEEL like powerful people, responsible as you are to managers, department heads, and elected officials. But hear me out.

Today, we are fully engaged in a communication revolution. Every communication industry, telephone, cable TV, broadcast TV, radio, movie, music, and all branches of the publishing industry, books, newspapers, and magazines, are being shaken to their foundations.

Add up all the employees of these immense culture industries. Add the total annual revenue of all these industries, calculate the market capitalization measured on the stock markets of the world. Those are immense numbers, hundreds of billions of dollars.

And all of it, every last employee, every last dollar is dependent on the decisions you are going to make in the next few years. Does that sound extreme?

Every one of those industries is being reshaped from the ground up by the tsunami of the digital transition. Every form of communication and entertainment is either delivered digitally or soon will be. And all that digital delivery, that ocean of information, needs to flow through pipes or over airwaves in your jurisdictions.

You may not control or even influence all of these distribution channels, but the remaining bottleneck, the proverbial last mile belongs to you and the decisions you make, the recommendations you make to the people you report to, and the elected officials they are responsible to, will have an enormous impact on the future of these immensely powerful culture industries.

I only ask you to exercise this power wisely.

I recently learned that a 16-city consortium negotiating with Verizon for video franchises in the northern part of the Puget Sound region has already made a fateful decision. “We won’t be asking for a P-E-G fee, because none of the cities want any public access channels. We’ll be asking for an E-G fee,” was the quip I heard.

To someone who remembers the optimism of the 1970s when regulations for public, educational, and government channels were first adopted, this was a sad realization.  Decades ago, cable TV was heralded as the answer to all the problems perceived to flow from TV broadcasting—too few channels, overly commercial programming, timid corporate newsrooms. If only we knew then what cable TV would turn into in the years ahead. I can’t fault the cities that decided to have nothing to do with public access. There are flourishing community media centers and public access channels throughout the country, but the effort to support these efforts is not trivial and there are always other demands for time, attention, and resources. 

But I want to remind WATOA members of one of the pillars of our democratic way of life:  Article 1, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution gave Congress the authority—and the responsibility—to provide funding for post offices and post roads. It shouldn’t take much imagination to make the leap from 18th-century post offices to 21st-century broadband networks and digital communications technologies.

The delivery methods have changed but the fundamental principle still applies: It is the responsibility of government to promote and support the flow of information that democratic self-government depends upon.

Sadly, we’re at a time when every level of government has forgotten this lesson. We rely on so-called “free markets” to deliver us the news and information even though the companies that dominate those markets have done so primarily by manipulating the legal and regulatory frameworks created in Washington, D.C., in 50 state capitals, and, in some ways, in city halls across our country.

By supporting the free flow of information, I do NOT mean that cities should simply continue the unfortunate trend of folding some selected cultural and civic programming into what used to be the “government channels” and rebranding this as “community programming.” 

It is no safer to let City Hall be the gatekeeper for information about local communities than it is to let questions of war and peace be debated primarily on cable channels owned by defense contractors or private empire builders who need government approval for their expansion plans. 

The trillion-dollar failure to hold a full, complete debate over the decision to invade and occupy Iraq was a massive systemic failure of our existing communication system and the communication policies that created that system.

It is not fair to single out WATOA or the limited leverage that WATOA members have over our complex communication system. But the failure of all levels of government to understand how badly broken our current communication system is, and the failure to understand the possibilities for reform and improvement created by the digital communication revolution is deeply disappointing.

We all need to step back—citizens, staff, and elected officials at all levels alike—and look at the larger possibilities of the digital communication revolution. We need to see and understand just what a huge opportunity this really is. We may never get a better chance to create a system of communication that supports and strengthens democratic self-government.

As sweeping and all-encompassing as this revolution is, we may never get another chance, period.

Over-the-air TV content may get "flagged"

Some of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering around the transition to digital TV got a little more visible recently.

The news that NBC inadvertently blocked people from recording a couple of shows last week spotlights how digital technology and especially "digital rights management" might work down the road a bit in 2009.

Windows Media Center enables home computers to function as digital video recorders. Apparently, NBC persuaded Microsoft to build into Media Center the capability to honor the so-called broadcast flag. In an article in CNET today, Greg Sandoval explains why that's important.

What is a broadcast flag? The term "broadcast flag" has taken on several meanings, but it is best known for describing a set of proposals made by the FCC. The commission wanted those that made television software and hardware equipment to honor the flag, a code that broadcasters can insert into the data stream of digital-TV shows that typically place restrictions on the copying of shows.

The courts ruled against the FCC's plan in 2005, saying the regulator couldn't force electronics makers to interpret TV signals a certain way. Since then, those software and hardware companies have had the option of deciding whether to design their systems to obey the broadcasters' flags.

Will this make a difference to any other TV viewers? Back to Greg:

One important point to note is that broadcasters frequently block DVRs from recording TV content that isn't broadcast "over the air" (i.e. received by an aerial). Premium cable channels can prevent the recording of movies delivered via video-on-demand, or VOD.

But what broadcasters haven't done before is to try to systematically block the recording of content delivered over analog channels or over-the-air digital. That doesn't mean that they won't, according to Danny O'Brien, a staffer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for Internet users and has launched its own investigation into the NBC block.

O'Brien notes that broadcasters have always felt threatened by TiVo and other devices that help viewers skip commercials. "What the broadcasters and content owners have always wanted is a veto over new technologies," O'Brien said. "They want some way of controlling the powers of devices that they don't like. That's what the fight over the broadcast flag was about."

It's important to note that the flag rules were never meant to ban the recording of over-the-air digital broadcasts. They were designed to wall off content, and prevent mass reproduction and piracy. But Vista's remote copy control apparently goes much further and may forbid the recording of broadcast TV shows.

(excerpted)

To date, it is unclear whether any broadcaster has intentionally tried to use the "copy never" or "copy once" commands to limit recordings from over-the-air digital or basic cable. It's safe to say the practice isn't common. But EFF says the block of American Gladiators proves that it can be done, and O'Brien expects that broadcasters will be under pressure to try it in the future.

McDermott wants analyst scandal explained

At the very bottom of my biography, there’s a line that says I used to be a “military public affairs officer.” That’s a fancy way of saying that my first real job after college was editing an Air Force base newspaper in Florida.

I was a very small cog in the vast machinery the Department of Defense (DoD) uses to keep the American people aware of what we’re getting for the roughly half-trillion dollars we give the Pentagon every year. There are strict rules on how that “public information” money is spent, and there have been some significant controversies about whether or not the DoD has crossed the line between keeping the public informed and trying to influence public opinion improperly.

Last month, the New York Times broke an important news story about a long-term effort by DoD public affairs staff to use retired military officers as “message force multipliers” on cable and broadcast TV networks.

To his credit, CNN and Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz noted that none of the TV networks involved, including CNN, have picked up the story or made any explanation of their role in presenting a blatantly one-sided view of one of the most important stories of the day.

I wrote to Rep. Jim McDermott about the apparent illegality of the DoD conduct and the shameless disregard of First Amendment responsibilities by the TV networks we depend on to give us a clear picture of the day’s events.

This is his answer:

Dear Bart:

Thank you for writing me regarding the recent New York Times article revealing undue influence by the Pentagon in TV news war analysts. I appreciate the time you took to share your thoughts with me on this important issue. While the Pentagon has stopped defending this program and announced its suspension, I am concerned that this program is inconsistent with Sec. 8001 of the FY 2008 Defense Appropriations bill, which prohibits propaganda by the Department of Defense. In light of that, I have joined Congressman DeFazio and others in sending a letter asking the Committee on Appropriations to specifically prohibit funding for this program in the FY 2009 Defense Appropriations bill. I have also written to the Pentagon's Inspector General (IG) along with Representative DeLauro, to demand an explanation for the program's existence and to ask whether the IG believes it to be illegal, or feels that military contracting waste and fraud and abuse occurred.

Rather than attempting to communicate openly with the American people, the Pentagon has relied on deception as a means to further their agenda and portrayal of the war in Iraq. The New York Times, after successfully gaining access to 8,000 pages of Department of Defense e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and an extensive Pentagon "talking points operation," has concluded that "these records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated." I am especially troubled by the repeated referencing of the ostensibly objective military analysts as "message force multipliers" or "surrogates" who could "be counted on to deliver administration 'themes and messages' to millions of Americans 'in the form of their own opinions.' "

America's free press is sometimes referred to as "The Fourth Check" in our government's system of checks and balances. Having an open, unbiased and objective media is of paramount importance, especially with regard to the coverage and analysis of war. This article has highlighted the intentional breaking of this system by the Department of Defense, as well as the Pentagon's apparent ability to get around its own internal watchdogs. The activities undertaken by the Pentagon should have been revealed by the Department's Inspector General; not by a newspaper that needed to resort to suing the DoD for information.

Please be assured that I will remain vigilant in this matter. Thank you again for contacting me about this important issue.

Sincerely,

Jim McDermott
Member of Congress

If you run into Brian Williams or Katie Couric, you might want to ask them what's up with this.

Guess which industry?

This morning, the NY Times op-ed page has a strong pitch for increased government regulation of a key sector of the American economy from a surprising source: a former industry CEO. 

Money quote is this:

Market-based approaches alone have not and will not produce the ______ system our country needs. We do not need to return to the overregulation of the past, but some government intervention is required.

Now the fun part. Guess which industry this comes from. If you guessed “telecommunications” because of the focus of this blog, sorry to disappoint you. If you guessed “financial services” because of the increasingly obvious meltdown of the past decade's efforts to chainsaw any obstacles to greater industry profits, sorry again.

No, the latest industry to come out with a plea for the government to step in and save capitalists from capitalism is the airline industry. 

That’s right, the poster child for the Milton-Friedmanesque proposition that government only messes things up, the number one example for the cult of deregulation: the airline industry.

If I had a nickel for every time I’d heard someone say "We know that deregulation is always and everywhere the best solution for everything because look at how successful the airline industry was," I could afford a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Here’s the full quote from Robert Crandall, former CEO of American Airlines:

Market-based approaches alone have not and will not produce the aviation system our country needs. We do not need to return to the overregulation of the past, but some government intervention is required. The objectives of a national aviation policy should be to enable people to move easily from one place to another, to assure safe, courteous and on-time service for consumers, and to improve the financial performance and international competitiveness of America’s airlines.

Read the whole article to savor the irony in full. Fundamentalists who worship at the altar of an “unregulated” telecommunications marketplace, please, please take note.

Dead tree net neutrality

The Seattle P-I is the first mainstream news outlet to pick up on a story that illustrates a crucial issue about communication policy. 

Amazon.com recently announced that it was going to disable the “buy” buttons on books in its catalog offered by print-on-demand (POD) publishers who fail to contract with Amazon’s in-house POD service.

It takes a bit of explaining to get the details in order, but basically this is the dead tree version of the debate over net neutrality. Amazon is open to dealing with any number of outside POD publishers—but if you want to actually sell books on their platform, you’ll need to use their services and agree to their contract terms.

In the Internet world, the issue of net neutrality is not so much that Verizon or Comcast would completely block Web sites it didn’t like—although that potential is always there. The fear is that Verizon or Comcast might sign business deals with deep-pocketed competitors and deliver bits from those sources faster than bits originating from garage-level startups or budget-starved independent content sources.

In the dead tree version of this game, Amazon is telling independent POD publishers: agree to our terms, print your books in our warehouses, or you can’t come onto our platform at all.

As a first-time, would-be author with a niche book on a little-understood topic, I know I can’t demand the same shelf space at Barnes & Noble that Stephen King or Joanne Rowling gets. What I believe I should have is the right to choose my own publisher and bargain for the best terms I can get without being told that if I want to list my book in the dominant online retailer’s catalog, my publisher or I have one and only one choice for printing services. And, oh, by the way, please sign here to give away your right to sell your books to anyone else at a discount.

For more details, see Writer’s Weekly here or a summary by a leading self-publishing consultant here. Amazon’s statement is here and a response from the WA Attorney General is here.

Was 'open access' worth it?

The NY Times has an article this morning on Google’s 700MHz auction strategy, triggered in part by the Google Public Policy blog post I mentioned yesterday.

The article has a quote from AT&T that’s worth looking at carefully.

Ralph de la Vega, President and Chief Executive of AT&T’s wireless unit, said in a news conference Thursday that his company was pleased with the auction’s outcome. But he noted that the Google-backed conditions on the C block had an effect on pricing.
“People put a premium on spectrum that is not encumbered by excessive regulations,” Mr. de la Vega said.

The man from AT&T obviously wants people to think that “encumbering by excessive regulations” is a bad thing because companies will pay extra money to avoid regulation.

But connect the dots between that philosophy and another item in today’s NY Times, a column by Floyd Norris:

“It is no coincidence that the crisis of 2007 and 2008 had its origin in unregulated financial products traded in unregulated markets. Ever since the Great Depression, the government has tried to limit the leverage available to the public in the American stock market. But regulators, led by Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, thought innovation would be hampered, and financial activity driven overseas, if there were any attempts to impose limits on leverage in the unregulated markets.” (emphasis added)

Would Bear Stearns pay extra or take on extra risk to avoid scrutiny from pesky regulators? Was Enron happier to move vast asset swaps off the books to avoid bothersome disclosure requirements? Would Southwest Airlines pay extra to avoid all those picky FAA inspectors causing trouble? Well, yeah.

Does that mean letting banks, airlines, and energy gamblers run rampant in glorious, regulation-free “competition” would be good for bank customers, airline passengers, or homeowners? Uh, not really.

Why did AT&T pay more for “unencumbered” spectrum?  Because they believe they can make more money with a monopoly business model. Since those monopoly rents are going to come out of our pockets, possibly for decades to come, I’m happy to see a little less auction money up front in return for open access competition.   

I’ll bet there are a lot people today who wish Bear Stearns, Enron, or WorldCom had been “encumbered” with a bit more regulation.

From the Google war room

Two Google lawyers have posted an interesting "what I did during the auction" item at the Google Public Policy Blog.

As Richard Whitt and Joe Faber tell the story, they spent three weeks behind closed doors, "with billions of dollars at stake with every mouse click."

Only now, after the FCC lifted its ban on discussing the auction, can any of the participants describe what they were up to.

The post offers only a broad outline of their perspective on the auction and says little to resolve the big mystery: Did Google really want to win spectrum rights for itself or just drive the price up past the point where new rules requiring open access would kick in?

But I did enjoy this note:

"In fact, in ten of the bidding rounds, we actually raised our own bid—even though no one was bidding against us—to ensure aggressive bidding on the C Block."

Auction theory is a truly arcane overlap of math and econ, well above my head, but clearly the rules for anonymous bidding did what they were supposed to do.

What I’ve been up to

I haven’t been blogging much recently, because I’ve been enjoying one of the rarest perks in modern American life: a 30-day paid sabbatical.

The technology marketing company that I work for, Washburn Communication, has given paid, 30-day sabbaticals to every employee who has reached five years of service to the company. The company is clear that the practice depends on business conditions and workloads, but I’m the second person in the company to enjoy this amazing gift.

The next in line, my colleague Chris Lemoine, is still planning his next travel adventure. Me, I stayed home and wrote a book. 

The 10 chapters, now posted in the upper corner of this blog, are a work in progress. Oprah may never be interested, but this is a topic that’s been brewing and storming on my mind for at least a decade, and it’s a great feeling to have this much down on paper and on the Internet.

The short summary is that having covered business, technology, politics, and religion in my days as a newspaper reporter, I want to make the spiritual and religious case for media reform and net neutrality.

That may seem a stretch, but the issues, as I see them, are as fresh as a Google news alert and as timeless as the complaints of the prophet Micah. 

Take a look and let me know in comments what you think.

What journalists need to do

Obituaries for the newspaper industry are already being written. Last week, the industry reported the steepest decline in revenues in more than 50 years, and no one seems to know how to stop the death spiral where lower revenue means fewer journalists and fewer journalists leads to fewer readers, which leads to lower revenue.   

Neither Business Week media columnist Jon Fine nor journalism professor and historian Eric Alterman, in a lengthy analysis in the current New Yorker have any idea of how to change this trend or how to prevent serious damage to the profession of journalism and practice of democratic self-government. 

Casting aside all false modesty, I’m here to provide the answer. 

What newspaper journalists need to do is train their readers to replace them.

I used to be a professional journalist, and I know how deeply the notion that trained, professionals are indispensible to the practice of journalism. I’ve been away from the profession for many years, and I also know how shallow and self-serving this idea is, even if Walter Lippmann did think of it first.

Here’s the deal. There are three reasons why daily printed newspapers should start revising their business models for an interactive digital world.

1. Readers outnumber journalists 1,000 to 1.
2. Readers are smarter than journalists.
3. Readers know more about their lives, their neighborhoods, and many of the institutions that shape their lives.

Most journalists sneer at the idea that pajama-clad pontificators on the Internet can ever replace the work they do. Bloggers, they claim, merely rehash the news that some professional has collected, slathering on a layer of opinion and prejudice, and serve it up cheap on the Internet. There’s some truth to that, but it’s hardly the whole story.

Consider the three points above.

Number one hardly needs discussing. Number two should be clarified that there are plenty of smart journalists, but the range of experience and education is pretty narrow. The upper reaches of the profession contains plenty of people with law degrees or training in sciences. But the body of readership, with a 1,000-to-1 numerical advantage includes PhDs in everything from accounting to zoology.

But the real knowledge gap is not in academic training, but life experience.

How many newsrooms employ people who are former building contractors, people who’ve run small businesses, who’ve owned working farming, who’ve worked in research labs, law enforcement, environmental protection, or delivering social services? Of course every newsroom, large or small, has some people who have life experience outside journalism.

But the body of readership contains a much, much wider swath of all these factors, age, education, training, experience, and dare I say it, wisdom.

Harnessing that experience and putting it to work in the service of the larger community is a subject for another day. But that’s where the “training the readers” comes in, and it’s where newspapers and the people who employ them could find that rarest of qualities, hope for the future. If they’ll only look for it.