FCC: Broadband A Civil Right!
by FileHunter | July 23, 2008 in Tech News | No Comments
“No matter who you are, or where you live, or how much money you make … you will need, and you are entitled to have these tools (broadband) available to you, I think, as a civil right,” said FCC commissioner Michael Copps during yesterday’s broadband hearing in Pittsburgh. Users around here enjoy fighting over whether broadband is a luxury or necessary utility, but suggesting it’s a civil right is a new wrinkle. Yesterday’s meeting was a mish-mash of various ideas, with nothing even close to consensus. From CNET:
It would take work to be more vague than the event’s official title: “Broadband and the Digital Future.” So speakers veered haphazardly between spam, pornography, media ownership, database privacy, computer prices, Net neutrality, mobile provider pricing, bandwidth caps, Webcasting official meetings, and piracy on peer-to-peer networks. And that was just in the last hour.
The FCC website has the speeches from three of the commissioners (Tate, Copps, Adelstein), and a video of the event should be posted here in time. The FCC has announced they’ll be holding yet another public hearing, this time in Brooklyn on July 30, according to an FCC press release. But why? More rhetoric doesn’t accomplish anything, and the current FCC has shown they aren’t interested in implementing new policy.
The FCC’s first two hearings had an actual purpose: addressing transparency in network management and Comcast’s packet forgery. That ended with Kevin Martin announcing that Comcast would be wrist-slapped. But now it’s getting harder to decipher what the hearings are actually supposed to accomplish. Not that Mark Cuban’s thoughts on 3D basketball aren’t really, really fascinating, but what’s the actual point?
