Content Filtering Pulled From Free Broadband Proposal

huzur79 writes "Electronista is reporting that Kevin Martin, Chairman of the FCC, has dropped the content filtering provisions from the proposal for free wireless broadband service, according to an interview with Ars Technica. Previous drafts of the plan required protection methods to prevent users from accessing objectionable content, such as pornography. 'I'm saying if this is a problem for people, let's take it away,' Martin said. The proposal has received criticism and opposition from a variety of groups including the Bush administration, wireless companies, and consumer interest organizations. T-Mobile has argued that communicating data on the allocated frequency bands will cause interference and quality degradation. Civil liberties groups argue that the FCC would overstep its authority and violate the Constitution."

The FCC doing something vaguely intelligent?

Inconceivable!

Re:

Not really, it is still only a proposal, meaning there is still time to modify it to be stupid before it becomes official policy.

Re:The FCC doing something vaguely intelligent?

Actually, I would be willing to bet that the proposal won't be modified to include filtering. That will come afterward, when the entire thing is up and running and they could wait for moral "advocacy" groups to complain continually and run campaigns to persuade people that unfiltered internet access is the worst thing in the world for the children and everything else. Then, they can proceed with whatever filtering, moral policing and otherwise they want to, and (they hope) lots of vague legislation letting them monitor and limit the people even more.

I would absolutely love to be called a conspiracy theorist, and have that supported by a complete lack of the above happening.

Re:

Nah, if you were a real conspiracy theorist(or sane human being) then you'd know that they will still monitor and data-mine the fuck out of it and give the data to advertising and anti-dissident goverment agencies. This half-assed display of "we're fighting for your privacy" is utter bullshit, just like every other human-run outfit which seeks to alter your perception of reality.

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Sure, watch where I tunnel my SSH traffic and the rates I send it at. I don't care. You're providing me free internet.

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By this logic every product/service is within the federal government's reach -- because if something still was not, they would just need one person to drive across a State's border and buy it.

Fortunately, this logic is not applied to much -- but it is already applied to radio and TV. Which is an outrage.

Unfortunately, that ship sailed long ago:

Wickard thus establishes that Congress can regulate purely intrastate activity that is not itself "commercial," in that it is not produced for sale, if it concludes t

Re:

Yeah, but the problem is, the US Gov't excells at doing senseless, stupid things in record time. Logical, intelligent things, that takes decades to accomplish.

Don't worry, they'll make it even dumber in no time.

yes, but...

>Civil liberties groups argue that the FCC would overstep its authority and violate the Constitution.

The FCC is on the way into history - don't these groups read the papers...?

FC Isn't Evil

Come on, the FCC is not an evil agency by any stretch. It does have a legitimate role in issues like frequency allocations - there is only so much spectrum to go around.

It also has a great role in the enforcement of technical standards like those that prevent one user from interfering with another's use of the airwaves.

Only if the FCC interferes in the actual content of the communications can it be considered to be entering the category of "evil". Or if they mandate the use of a patented "standard" as a condition of use of the public airwaves, they are certainly at least in bed with "evil".

That said, I actually applaud the dropping of a well-meaning but ill-concieved idea.

It looks like the Chairman haas understood that what he originally wanted was impractical, infeasible, and really a bad idea.

It's okay to propose something stupid, so long as one listens to the reasons for those who object to it and doesn't respond by a "digg in the heels, fight, and whine" attitude when the suggestion and it's rationale is challenged.

But wait a minute...

you say yourself that interfering with content is "evil", then you say that the concept was well-intentioned.

Aside from the contradiction (which I do not think you intended), I say that the idea that it was well-intentioned is giving Martin and friends far too much benefit of doubt. On the contrary, it was a political move, for the blatantly obvious purpose of sucking up to a certain group of voters and businesspeople.

Martin has been called out before for doing exactly the same kind of thing... and di

Aus to follow?

Interesting that the FCC makes this move before the Australian Government on their respective filtering proposals.

Overstepping?

The FCC has been overstepping it's authority for a LONG time.
 
The FCC exists to dole out a limited public resource, content (and esp obscenity) has never been part of it's mandate and represents little more then a moral power grab.

Re:Overstepping?

Check out Section 5, item (D), bullet (d) of the Radio Act of 1927, which created the Federal Radio Commission. The FRC morphed into the FCC in 1934. Specifically, the Secretary of Commerce is given the right to terminate the license of operators who transmit "profane or obscene words of language". You can view the text of the act here [netins.net]

This has been part of the FCC's mandate from the very beginning. It has been upheld by the courts, for instance in "FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation".

How do they make money?

The whole free wireless internet access is not going to be all that cheap to build to the requirements of 95% of the population in 10 years.

If you give free 768k access, it is going to be enough for quite a lot of people. For people who need more, you are normally competing with existing solutions in the market, thus you will have hard time selling them.

Maybe FCC hopes for someone to be stupid enough to build it and go bankrupt and then someone else to buy it for a small fraction of the building cost. In su

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From what I can understand they're hoping to dish out 10-100mbps speeds on the same bands as analog TV were once on.

For once, I'd say the tax payers on both sides of the border should help pay for this, but that it remains government-managed (or whatever is best for a public service).

Re:How do they make money?

Knowing that I'll be able to get online when I'm on the road (even with a low-quality-but-better-than-dialup connection) is worth a minuscule portion of my tax dollars. Government ventures aren't supposed to be profitable, they're supposed to be beneficial. Not paying ten bucks a day for net access at a hotel definitely falls under 'beneficial' in my books.

It's still a dumb idea

Not that I am opposed to getting something for free, but the bandwidth on the proposed free wireless band represents less than five megahertz of spectrum. That's simply not enough to provide a significant number of people with broadband internet, at least not with the kind of network topography this band is proposed for.

How much throughput that could equal is going to depend on the way that the system is set up, how much noise there is on a given frequency, dopler shift and what kind of spectrum management is used, but no matter how you cut it it won't be much. Assuming only one to one overlapping of cells (which is very generous) and very low noise you might get a total of 4 megabits combined up and downstream to be shared by all users in a given area.

By comparison, wifi uses about 80 mhz of total space on the spectrum with up to 20 mhz assignable to a single channel connection.

If the FCC wants to give away free wireless internet they need to find a bigger block of spectrum for it.

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That's simply not enough to provide a significant number of people with broadband internet, at least not with the kind of network topography this band is proposed for.

I bet it will kill the market for text messages with 1000x markups though.

low bandwidth only

In the long ago, one reason to restrict p0rn and other questionable content was simply to limit the bandwidth of the user or the disk space used at the service. This is one reason why some many services did not carry the alt.* groups. Sure this is where all the real ware p0rn was and still is, but that was secondary to the issue of the cost of hosting.

But now lots of legitimate services need high bandwidth, netflix, iTunes, even youtube, and most kids are used high speed connections that let them play games and watch videos. They need the bandwidth. So many would say we can no longer use bandwidth as a proxy, and need filtering. I disagree.

To me the best way to make sure that the most people can use this, and not just for play, is to limit the speed to .5 Mb/sec. Those who need the service will appreciate it, and those who can afford something faster will buy it. I would love to have free, reliable internet access even at 300 kb/sec. It might be a bummer for people who just want to play, but for most work it is fast enough.

Your problems of low bandwidth

are not caused by those with high bandwidth. Your problems are because of your communications supplier(s). And perhaps your geographic location.

Blocking the bandwidth of others (except in your own small local area) will not make your own performance better.



"You cannot embiggen the small by shortening the tall. You cannot enrich the poor by impoverishing the rich." - Abraham Lincoln

Last mile connection and "internet access"...

A great deal of the difficulty in the various internet regulatory issues seems, to me, to arise from the fact that the provider of the last mile connection and the provider of the internet access are almost always one and the same(and, worse, even reform proposals tend to assume that they will always be so, without even cursory examination). This is tricky because the two things really exhibit rather different behavior.

Last mile network connections, wired or wireless, are pretty close to natural monopolies. On the wireless side, there is only so much spectrum, and it isn't exactly a fluid market, and there are only so many locations where you can get zoning permission and whatnot for a tower. On the wired side, legacy environments are duopolies at best, phone company and cable company; while any new deployments run into the fact that(considering the pull itself, plus right-of-way hassles and all the rest) the fixed cost of doing a pull of any bandwidth capacity is huge, while the cost of pulling a high bandwidth line as opposed to a low bandwidth line is much smaller. It isn't quite as bad as roads, where multiple runs are generally not even physically possible; but still an oligopoly at best, monopoly at worst.

Internet access, on the other hand, has the potential to be a properly competitive market, once enough end users are aggregated at a central point. If all relevant structures in a town or geographic region are connected to a peering point, choosing any service from any provider who reaches that point is literally a matter of switch configuration, and could be largely automated.

The trouble is, as long as the two distinct services are provided by the same entity, you have massive incentives for the people who own the last mile connection to mess with the internet access, hence all the net neutrality issues, and this content filtering stuff. We need to separate the two: treat the network link between you and the peering point as a natural monopoly similar to water mains, roads, or electrical lines(whether this means regulated private monopoly, public utility administered by private contractors, or public utility administered by public employees is a matter of implementation). This portion would be simple: dumb pipe of X speed between you and the peering point. Anything from the peering point to the internet at large would be pure free market, internet access at higher or lower speeds, quotas or no, filtering or not, various numbers of static IPs, access to various other things over IP, etc.

Take it away

'I'm saying if this is a problem for people, let's take it away.'

Translation: We can always put it back in later.

Do I Have To?

The government wants to gives us free wireless broadband, now without content restriction.

This is the same government that conducted warrantless wiretapping. If they own the bitwaves, there's less barrier to the same occurring.

If there's restrictions, people wanting privacy will go elsewhere. If the restrictions are lifted, people will be more likely to feel safe using it for more sensitive matters. The government will be more able to catch more people.

Can anyone conceive of a better way for the government to maximize its chances of catching people doing things they find undesirable while minimizing its chances of getting in trouble and so having to stop?

Re:Degradation

which is why the telecom industry tried to dissuade the government from pursuing plans for a free public wireless network. first they claimed that public wireless wasn't viable, and that all attempts to create such networks by governments have been huge failures. and now they're changing the reason for their opposition to claims of "interference and quality degradation."

it's ridiculous that they're even given a voice on this issue when they have such a conflict of interest. the only people whose opinions should be solicited is the public. just hold a nationwide referendum. if people want a public national wireless infrastructure, then it should be created. the technology has been available for a while and has been proven to be sound. San Francisco and many other smaller cities here in California already have open wireless networks, and there's no evidence that it has any impact on cellphone networks or any other communication systems.

Re:How Bad is Filtering? - Very Bad...

Actually, it is likely that these "bandwidth hogs" are INCREASING your available bandwidth. How fast of a connection do you think you would have if no one ever maxed out their 56k modems. We certainly wouldn't be seeing 6mbps connections being rolled out. We wouldn't likely even see 256kbps lines. It is the guys that are watching HD movies off of netflix and running bittorrent 24/7 that are creating the expectation that we need faster internet. They are the ones that are fighting the good fight so that you and I can get good speeds tomorrow.