ManyMedia

Defining the term “broadband” is hard enough, given the various competing interests working to have the FCC see things their way. But defining the term by identifying exclusionary uses is, well, AT&T. Ars Technica was on top of this filing, and wrote up their concerns in AT&T to FCC: gaming is not “broadband,” but an added service. Specifically, AT&T is instructing the FCC to disallow certain uses of your Internet access, specifically online gaming, as part of the defining what “broadband” is.

They WHAT? That’s right, their testimony advises the FCC that AT&T knows best what we should do with our Internet access.

In testimony submitted to the FCC, AT&T advises that they (by way of the government) need to define what we can (and shouldn’t) do with our Internet access:

Specifically, the Commission must first define the discrete set of applications and online capabilities that must be made available to all Americans to achieve the Recovery Act’s goals.  As discussed below, for residential customers those services should include basic web-browsing capability, email, and online services ….  Thus, the task at hand really is not about “defining broadband” in the abstract.

The testimony continues (with my emphasis):

There are a host of aspirational broadband services that are beginning to emerge in this country, as well as myriad sophisticated applications involving streaming video, real-time voice, and the like.  All are no doubt “broadband” services.  But for Americans who today have no terrestrial broadband service at all, the pressing concern is not the ability to engage in real-time, two-way gaming, but obtaining meaningful access to the Internet’s resources and to reliable email communications and other basic tools that most of the country has come to expect as a given.

So AT&T wants to be free to deliver itty-bitty “broadband” to the rural folks.  AT&T is redefining “access” to meet a more traditional incumbent monetizing strategy: set sites low by defining a bare minimum, then find “aspirational” uses that they can bill extra for. The Ars article is worth a read. However, lessons can be learned from gamers that benefit corporate boardrooms as well. John Hagel and John Seely Brown wrote an article in last January’s BusinessWeek: How World of Warcraft Promotes Innovation. The article describes how various elements of online gaming can benefit the business mindset.

Companies seeking to thrive in a world of increasing uncertainty and accelerating change will need to foster this disposition among their own executive team and employees. They would be well advised to take a closer look at World of Warcraft, both in terms of the approach taken to foster this disposition and as a potential recruiting ground for employees who can bring this attitude and approach into the company.

AT&T isn’t looking broadly at providing access to the Internet. This is an example of Not Neutrality. AT&T has a plan, and your dreams may not be part of it.

Content, Life, Network, Policy access, ATT, broadband, definitions, FCC, Internet, Net Neutrality, online gaming, Policy

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) of the Department of Agriculture released their initial 121 page “Notice of Funds Availability” (NOFA), the “stimulus program” for “broadband” projects. (I note with some consternation that the NOFA is specifying a tool (broadband) rather than the end goal of providing access to the Internet.) One of the major challenges in this NOFA is that it is designed to promote projects in unserved areas. The reason this is a challenge is that obtaining numbers for communities that are served, under-served, or unserved are difficult to come by, and even harder to prove.

Geoff Daily of AppRising has an intriguing idea. In his article Why Not Force Incumbents To Show Which Areas Are Served? Daily points out that the definitions underlying rural Internet access subsidies are rather problematic because they effectively limit funds to only the most rural areas (by excluding marginalized urban areas), and allow the incumbent telephone interests to refute claims of service by the upstarts. To address this problem:

I’d like to propose an alternative solution: why not force incumbents to show which areas are already served by threatening to consider all areas unserved that they don’t produce verifiable data for showing that they offer service there?

By doing this we’ll save applicants from wasting a lot of time and money collecting data that already exists, plus we’ll also enable them to know if the area they’re putting together a project for qualifies for subsidies before submitting their application. Additionally we’ll be able to take this data and use it to inform the broadband maps we’re charged with creating.

On the carrier side, we give them a clear reason for why they should give up their data on the availability of their services so as to insure we’re not subsidizing duplicative investment. And at the same time we can remove any appearance of prioritizing the protection of private service provider interests over making real progress in the deployment of broadband.

Hey, the incumbents have the real numbers. Why not make good use of them?

Network, Policy, Uncategorized access, incumbents, Internet, SOHO Nets, stimulus, underserved, unserved

Perhaps it should be no surprise that when it comes to real access to the Internet, the government is swayed by promises of “broadband” and claims of existing “competition.” Federal stimulus funds are hard enough for some service providers to come by. Now we learn that municipalities wishing to provide Internet access to their citizens are targeted for exclusion. Telephony Online’s article Broadband stimulus details separating likely winners, losers, states:

One group of broadband stimulus hopefuls that has been in large part swept out of the running by the specifics of the plan is individual municipalities of any size. Though the stimulus plan stoked broad interest from municipalities earlier this year, many of them have been frustrated by the program’s preference for “underserved areas,” which the government has defined as areas where where at least half of all households lack broadband, where fewer than 40% of households subscribe to broadband, or where no service provider advertises broadband transmission speeds of at least 3 Mb/s.

Those rules sent the city of Northfield, Minnesota, for example, which had hoped to secure stimulus funds, back to the drawing board in its efforts to finance its plans. Melissa Reeder, Northfield’s information technology director, told the local press, “Honestly, I don’t think there’s a single Minnesota city that would qualify.”

This policy decision is short-sighted and will not deliver on the promises of Federal stimulus funds. Now you can expect to pay twice (once in the form of taxes to pay for the stimulus funds and once for your ISP bills) for more of the same.

Network, Policy access, broadband, Internet, muni nets, municiple networks, Policy, stimulus, stimulus funds

New swiss army knife-type tool called Phatbot will lead to new wave of spam and DDOS attacks with P2P-based shared resources.

By some estimates, hundreds of thousands of computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system have already been infected worldwide. The tool, a program that security researchers have dubbed ‘Phatbot,’ allows its authors to gain control over computers and link them into P2P networks that can be used to send large amounts of spam e-mail messages or to flood Web sites with data in an attempt to knock them offline.

Content access, ddos, denial of service, Microsoft, P2P, shared resources, spam, Windows, zombie

One might think Berkeley would know better… Saturday’s DRM conference day is at the Bancroft Hotel, in a room that has neither power plugs (only 3 outlets to my knowledge, one in use by video crew, another by transcription team) nor anything resembling net access (the university is right across the street. You’d think they’d get bleed from the wireless on-campus, but apparently not). I won’t get to blog the day until afternoon.

Life access, Bancroft hotel, no Internet