UK taxpayers may be on the hook for a very big bill if BT gets concessions from regulators in return for building a fiber to the home network. It seems the Brit’s telco monopoly is trying a few tricks form the US telco’s playbook by selling a lofty goal with numbers that simply don’t add up. If that’s the case, the end result will be lots of taxpayer investment, less competition, stagnating network upgrades, and higher prices. Lets hope for the sake of UK residents that  their regulators are not as easy of a patsy for the telco siren song as they have been here in the US.

Unless you’re using Enron math, BT’s new plan to connect 10 million homes — roughly 40 percent of the United Kingdom — with fiber networks at a cost of £1.5 billion doesn’t quite add up. At today’s conversion rate, that’s about $3 billion — or $300 to wire up each of these proposed 10 million homes.

BT hopes this will help it stave off competition from rivals who have started to use their new backbones and the latest technology to eat into its broadband business. Cable operator Virgin, for example, plans to use DOCSIS 3.0 to compete with BT. The incumbent has been reticent about upscaling its infrastructure over concerns that it would spend billions and then be forced to share with upstarts, the way it does now. By comparison, the new plan is closely tied to regulatory concessions and includes some sort of investment protection from Ofcom, the British regulator. (GigaOm)

If there was ever any doubt about it, the USF as a means to provide service to the under served has been a complete disaster. From it’s beginning it’s be a money pot for the telcos and bureaucrats. According to a newly released GAO report, nothing has improved.

“There is a clearly established purpose for the high-cost program,” GAO concluded, “but the FCC has not established performance goals or measures.” Specifically, the agency hasn’t set across-the-board benchmarks for its recipients for “intermediate and multiyear periods.” Translation: the agency hasn’t established meaningful expectations at all.

But that’s not the worst of it. GAO basically says that the USF’s audits of carriers aren’t really audits. “Carrier data validation focuses primarily on completion and not accuracy”—a polite way of saying that USF auditors make sure all the data is submitted, but don’t check whether it’s accurate.

“These weaknesses could contribute to excessive program expenditures,” the GAO concludes. Uh, yeah—like a program that now costs over $4 billion a year.(Ars Technica)

For those of you who think the government should be involved in internet infrastructure, this may give you reason to doubt the wisdom of your position.

The RIAA keeps claiming that artists are being kept in poverty by greedy radio stations who don’t pay for play, even though radio play is the industry’s top promotional tool, and bittorrent thieves. Outside of the “A” listers, very few artists have been paid much of anything by the big music companies who distribute their work.  Lyle Lovette provides a fine example of how even a top selling artist can come up short when dealing with the labels. Most would consider a 4.6 million album seller and “A” list performer who is treated well by big music, but even “A” listers come out empty handed in many cases.

 Lyle Lovett says he has “never made a dime” from album sales during his two-decade career, and hopes to rectify that situation when his contract expires. The eclectic country singer has two more albums on his deal with Curb/Universal, his home since 1985, and figures the horizons are wide open.

“The possibilities are very exciting, I think,” Lovett told Billboard.com. “I’ve never made a dime from a record sale in the history of my record deal. I’ve been very happy with my sales, and certainly my audience has been very supportive. I make a living going out and playing shows.”

Lovett, 50, has sold 4.6 million albums in the United States since 1991, the year when SoundScan sales data were introduced. His most recent release, “It’s Not Big It’s Large,” has sold about 145,000 copies since debuting at a career-best No. 18 on the Billboard 200 last September, according to Nielsen SoundScan. (Yahoo)

Lyle Lovette’s case is not new or unique. The RIAA’s public parading of indigent artists in their golden years to push ever more draconian copyright laws is a ruse to keep attention away from its members business practices. By in large, big music, not the consumer is most to blame for the lack of payment to artists for recordings. This has been case since the industry began.

Since the invention of magnetic tape, a small number of individuals have copied and exchanged music, and the music industry has blamed them for artist’s poverty. Do you have an obligation to pay for music you hold a copy of? Yes, unless the artist freely offers it without payment. However, if you paid for a copy of the artists work, you should be able to move it to and play it on any device you like without the need to buy a new copy for each device.

The music industry needs to start paying artists fairly before blaming piracy for their plight. Unfortunately, an unchecked parasite will kill its own host before curbing it’s appetite. If big music continues operates like a parasite, it will be responsible for its own demise.

New York Attorney General Cuomo is out to make a name for himself at any cost. That’s the stock and trade of the  hyper ambitious pol in our times. The Third Pipe team supports the fullest prosecution, and persecution with extreme prejudice of those who exploit children. We do not support burning down the entire forest to rid it of it’s wolves. Hunting the wolves one by one is tedious and time consuming, too time consuming for a politician in a hurry to run for higher office. Mr Cuomo now has pressed AT&T into taking down access to a significant portion of Usenet because of what might be found there instead of directly prosecuting a tiny minority who use the Usenet to violate the law. This will effect every AT&T subscriber, not just those in New York.

The problem with burning down the forest is that smart wolves will easily outrun the flames. Then the wolves will be more dispersed and more difficult to hunt. And there will be no forest.

AT&T spokesman Marty Richter told me that the company is going to cease offering the alt.* hierarchy, which include sex-themed newsgroups but also ones such as alt.binaries.pictures.aviation, alt.binaries.drwho.pictures, and alt.binaries.pictures.vehicles. Customers will continue to be able to access third-party Usenet providers.

AT&T’s existing policy has been to investigate all complaints of child porn hosted on its servers–and promptly remove any illegal images–within three business days. That will not change. On Thursday, AT&T said it will enter into an agreement with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to consult the group’s lists in addition to complaints received from other sources.(Cnet)

House speaker Nancy Pelosi playing the Nurse Ratched role in our One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest Congress has completely lost her own grip on reality. A report on Chicago Boyz has her creating new rules forcing any member of the house to obtain her prior approval before postign any opinion on a blog, message board, twitter, etc.  Not only does this fly in the face of member’s right to freedom of speech, it pretty much voids any credibility Ms Pelosi has as a good steward of “net neutrality”.

 This was first reported to me by Congressman John Culberson (R-Tx) and I asked for approval to cite him and for any media links to this story. He provided the following link of regulations proposed by the Chair of the Congressional Commission on Mailing Standards (PDF) Congressman Michael Capuano (D-Mass) that was sent to Rep. Robert Brady, Chairman of the House Committee for Administration. The net effect of the regs would be to make it practically impossible for members of Congress to use social media tools to discuss official business or share video of the same with the public while creating a partisan disparity in what little approved messages might be permitted. It would be a very considerable error to assume that the House leadership intends to let dissenting Democratic members post any more freely than Republicans. (Chicago Boyz)

Any layman will understand that the imposition of such a rule is unconstitutional.  From a broader perspective, this demonstrates how completely out of touch and power drunk the Congressional leadership is. I hope there are enough wise people left in California to retire the Speaker in the upcoming election.

What’s worse than a misguided new requirement that every cell tower have a backup generator? How about a judge who can’t decide how to rule on the appeal? Reacting in the “public interest” after hurricane Katrina, faceless FCC bureaucrats demanded that cell towers have backup generators. Never mind that if they had existed, the said generators would be under water in the areas that lost service during the hurricane, rendering them useless. The appeal to overrule the FCC should have been granted immediately.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday put off deciding on the wireless industry’s challenge to the regulations until the Federal Communications Commission gets preliminary clearance for the rules.

After a panel of experts appointed by the FCC pointed out that many cell towers along the Gulf Coast stopped working when they lost power during Hurricane Katrina, the agency proposed in May 2007 that all cell towers have a minimum of eight hours of backup power that would switch on in the event a tower lost its regular energy source.

The loss of power contributed to communication breakdowns that complicated rescue and recovery efforts during the 2005 disaster.

Wireless companies have said the regulations were illegally drafted and would present a huge economic and bureaucratic burden. In particular, they said, the thousands of generators or battery packs required would be expensive and local zoning rules or structural limitations could make installation impossible in some places.

The FCC agreed in October to exempt cell sites that a wireless carrier proved couldn’t meet the rules. The FCC would give companies six months to report on the feasibility of installing backup power and another six months either to bring sites into compliance or explain how they would provide backup service through other means, such as portable cellular transmitters. (Yahoo)

Someone at Google thinks that Bell Canada’s network management practices are violating Canadian law. This and other recent “network watchdog” efforts by searchzilla are leading some to speculate that the company is planning greater involvement in content distribution.

“Bell claims its throttling of peer-to-peer applications is a reasonable form of network management. Google respectfully disagrees. Network management does not include Canadian carriers’ blocking or degrading lawful applications that consumers wish to use,” the company wrote in a 15-page submission to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which was made public over the weekend.

“From consumer, competition and innovation perspectives, throttling applications that consumers choose is inconsistent with a content and application-neutral internet, and a violation of Canadian telecommunications law, which forbids unfair discrimination and undue or unreasonable preferences and requires that regulation be technologically and competitively neutral.” (CBC)

In an interview with Information Week’s Mitch Wagner Internet founding father Vint Cerf makes it clear that we need more competition, and that the telecom act as enforced did not deliver this.

“What we have is not very much competition, and at best two competitors,” Cerf said. “Two competitors don’t produce the pressure of true competition.”

Given the lack of alternatives, consumers have no choice when Internet service providers block some applications (for example, Comcast and other ISPs allegedly blocking BitTorrent). ISPs will likely try to filter traffic further, blocking access to specific applications and companies to increase their own profits. And the U.S. is lagging behind other countries, notably France, the U.K., New Zealand, and the Netherlands, in broadband penetration, Cerf said.

“All of this is telling me that we didn’t get it right” when the Telecommunication Act of 1996 was adopted, Cerf said. “When we wrote it, the Internet was barely visible to the public, and probably completely invisible to Congress.” The Web itself had just started becoming popular two years earlier, Cerf said. “Maybe we should step back and ask ourselves how to do this better,” he said.

The Internet is more like they highway system than it is like the phone or cable TV system. Phones and cable TV are networks that were purpose-built for individual applications — voice and TV, respectively. The Internet is built for any application and information that you can digitize, just like roads are built for any wheeled vehicle, Cerf said.

“Maybe we should treat the Internet more like the road system, look for ways of creating incentives to make the Internet more accessible to everyone, and less likely to be abused by the private sector,” Cerf said. (Informatuion Week)

I take exception that the act in and of itself was a failure. It was not originally conceived and written for the Internet, but in the days of dial up, it worked. When dial up was the most common mode of access, competition was fierce and robust. We need to take a careful look at what made that possible. The incumbents with the right of ways were required to carry the traffic at a regulated rate even though it was just piggybacking on a copper connection designed for voice. When broadband access became dominant, the FCC allowed carriers to push competitors off of their networks in order to “re-coop their investments”. Restoring a must carry requirement until there are maybe 5 or 6 fixed line connections to a premises just plain makes sense. This model is working in France, Japan and Korea where broadband costs are low and speeds are high -  and providers are very profitable.

Cerf’s comments will likely be used by many to make the case for a federal takeover of the internet. I don’t think that’s what he has in mind. Before we hand over our internet to the feds like the interstate highway system, it’s important to remember a few facts. The highway system took far longer to build than it should have, cost far more than it should have, and is poorly maintained even though the taxes collected for it maintenance far exceed what is actually spent on maintenance (while pols demand we pay more!)

If you think things are bad now, imagine an interstate highway style net where you’ll have to pony up more for less, tolerate endless closures for maintenance, and lag even farther behind the rest of the world with no alternative. I think it’s far better to admit that the market is not open to competition, and remedy that problem instead.

Massachusetts taxpayers will soon be subsidizing the same carriers who are not providing universal broadband coverage to provide said coverage. With the population density even in rural Mass, one would think a determined service provider could work this out without public funding. Unfortunately without competition, there is no incentive.

The measure was approved 144-0 on Monday afternoon. Rep. Denis E. Guyer, D-Dalton, earlier filed an amendment raising the bond bill’s funding to $40 million.

“The additional $15 million in funding will allow us to reach further in our efforts to provide broadband access to both unserved and underserved communities, rather than having to choose one or the other,” said Guyer in a statement. “This is incredibly important for my constituents and the commonwealth as a whole.”

Many of the communities Guyer represents have no access to high-speed Internet.

The bond bill was unveiled last August by Gov. Deval Patrick as a way to encourage investment in broadband capacity in rural and suburban areas.

The legislation would create a broadband incentive fund for developing public and private partnerships to invest in broadband infrastructure tools like conduits, fiber and wireless towers. The fund would be managed by a division of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative.

Some 32 communities statewide have little or no Internet access, primarily in Western Massachusetts. Other regions are locked into monopolies with no choice of provider. (iBershires.com)

If you’re in Pittsburgh, you’ll have you chance to join the masses donning torches and pitchforks to attend an FCC forum on July 21st. I wish the Thirdpipe team could attend, but we are in fly over country in Texas (we would attend if someone wanted to sponsor our trip). For those of you who can, we encourage you to attend and  let the commissioners know that they are not serving your interests.

 The FCC has announced (pdf) that they’ll be holding a public hearing on “broadband and the digital future” on July 21, at 4PM EST, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The FCC has recently held hearings on network neutrality at both Harvard University and Stanford University. This particular hearing will instead focus on competition and broadband deployment. (Broadband Reports)