User Submitted Blog Post: Friday FCC fish wrap

The fun continues to fly unfettered at everyone's favorite mediator of media regulation mayhem: the Federal Communications Commission. Time for your rundown of some of the week's activities and future frolic.

Second net neutrality showdown

If you happen to be in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley region this Thursday, you might want to check out the FCC's second hearing on Internet network management, to be held at everyone's favorite educational theme park for the hyper-rich: Stanford University. The speakers for the event's two panels have not been named, but the names of the panels have been named: "Network Management and Consumer Expectations" and "Consumer Access to Emerging Internet Technologies and Applications."

To recap: the FCC began investigating whether to enact some serious net neutrality rules after Associated Press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation proved that Comcast's ISP system interferes with the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing protocol. At the FCC's Harvard Law School hearing on this matter, Comcast insisted that it did not do anything wrong and it will never do it again. The cable giant's VP David Cohen said the company just does some fiddling around with downloads at periods of high volume; no big deal.

Since then the FCC's Chair Kevin Martin has showed some backbone on this matter, insisting that the agency will finish its investigation of Comcast by late June, and sounding pretty critical of Comcast too sometimes. Comcast, however, has proven to be a rather formidable opponent: cutting a rather superficial press conference type deal with the BitTorrent company (as opposed to the protocol) and hailing so-called P4P advances as reasons why the agency need not press on with this issue.

All this will doubtless get tossed around at Stanford this week, hopefully with toilet paper handy. I have every expectation that all the Big Gods will be there, maybe even His True Holiness Lawrence Lessig. You can expect Comcast to explain that they've fixed everything up even more than the company fixed everything up just prior to the Harvard circus, at which it was revealed that Comcast paid people to come to the event and sleep, thus keeping some activists out of the room. You can probably listen to the festivities on the FCC's Web site here (but they haven't posted the link yet). My favorite moment at the last hearing was when one of the Commissioners (Robert M. McDowell) said he'd keep his questions brief because he'd drunk a lot of coffee and water and needed a break.

DTV spanking

On the 10th, a whole bunch of retailers got fined by the FCC for doing digital transition (DTV) related bad stuff they should have known better than to do.  They're still selling and shipping analog TV sets that will be completely obsolete after February 17th, 2009, the last day of analog broadcasting. We're talking Best Buy, Fry's, Circuit City, CompUSA, Sears, Polaroid, Precor, Proview, and Walmart.

Best Buy got socked $280,000 for selling analog TVs. Circuit City got hit with a $712,000 bill. Walmart took the prize with a $992,000 head noogie. They could have avoided this fate by just putting a teeny weeny label on the clunker saying "Dear Consumer: After February 17th 2009 this television set will be a useless piece of furniture sitting in your bedroom. And why are you putting a TV set in your bedroom anyway? Don't you know that studies indicate that couples who don't put TV sets in their bedrooms have more sex?" Ok. Something more moderate, like what the FCC mandates:

"This television receiver has only an analog broadcast tuner and will require a converter box after
February 17, 2009, to receive over-the-air broadcasts with an antenna because of the Nation's
transition to digital broadcasting. Analog-only TVs should continue to work as before with cable
and satellite TV services, gaming consoles, VCRs, DVD players, and similar products. For more
information, call the Federal Communications Commission at 1-888-225-5322 (TTY: 1-888-835-5322) or visit the Commission's digital television web site at: www.dtv.gov."

All this continues to indicate that nobody gives a rodent's rump about the DTV transition, least of all the broadcasting industry and its suppliers. I can't wait for February 18th of next year, when at least ten million people by my estimation go for their video fix and discover that the dealer got hit with a digital drive-by.

Then there are a bunch of scofflaws making TV sets without V-Chips, those little programming add-ons that allow our nation's parents to program their tubes to filter out indecency. Not that most of them do, but they should, if for no other reason than to relieve the FCC of the task of applying its moronic community decency standards to the broadcast industry. Here's the rogue's gallery and their penance:

· LG Electronics $1,700,000
· Philips Consumer Electronics $450,000
· Sanyo Corporation $375,000
· Vizio, Inc. $370,000
· Panasonic Corporation $320,000
· Westinghouse Digital Electronics $210,000
· Audiovox Corporation $20,000
· Total $3,445,000

Mind you, these are all consent deals. The company is exonerated and voluntarily agrees to pay a bunch of money and get its act together. In exchange: no bad marks on the firm's record. All is forgiven. Everybody wins, especially the United States Treasury, which gets all the money and sends it forthwith to Iraq.