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Was The FCC Comcast Investigation A Farce?
Editorial: More than meets the eye to Martin's 'consumer advocacy'

Anybody who has studied Kevin Martin's tenure at the FCC, and his recent crusade against Comcast for P2P throttling, probably finds this latest consumer advocacy shtick a little hard to swallow. Martin is no consumer advocate: this is an FCC boss that dismisses rural broadband penetration concerns as unfounded whining, has stripped consumer protection laws wherever possible, and has fought tooth and nail to keep accurate broadband data out of the hands of consumers.

Consumers must be fully informed about the exact nature of the service they are purchasing and any potential limitations associated with that service.
-FCC Boss Kevin Martin
Martin has protected and empowered the nation's broadband duopoly at every turn -- almost always thanks to short-sighted, profit-centric policies lobbied for by incumbent phone providers. Suddenly he loves consumers? Suddenly he's concerned with transparency and accountability? Om Malik believes Martin's more interested in political fortunes than ISP honesty:
quote:
...it is a calculated bet by Martin, who is rumored to be contemplating running for US House of Representatives after he leaves FCC. No wonder, he has been campaigning hard to chastise Comcast, and perhaps censure them for an undeniably lamentable act. My inner cynic believes that this so called punishment is nothing but a smart tactic by Martin to show that he is on the side of network neutrality and champion of open access and the people.
I'm sure that Martin's political ambitions certainly play a role in the FCC boss pretending he's a consumer advocate. He's certainly an ambitious and political animal, highlighted by his use of indecency issues to gain support from "family values" organizations. Given his term as FCC boss could last until 2011, he could be trying to sell himself to the Obama or McCain campaigns. But I can't stop wondering if Martin's new found obsession with ISP "transparency" doesn't have a larger motive than just politics.

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The technology media and industry lobbyists have spent the last few weeks debating whether the FCC has the authority to police Comcast. What most of them fail to note is that Martin has always known that the FCC's network neutrality principles (pdf) aren't law, and probably won't even be enforceable -- because he designed them that way. Martin knows he's putting on a dog and pony show. But why?

While consumer advocates are cheering the FCC decision as a network neutrality victory, and pro-free-market types are lamenting Martin as the worst sort of socialist evil-doer, Comcast really won't see more than a wrist slap. Note the only real change, insiders tell me, is that Comcast may impose a 250GB monthly cap, and start charging users $15 for each 10 GB over the cap they travel. I'll repeat: the only real result of the investigation is bad press for Comcast and an industry push toward caps and metered usage. Who benefits?

Throughout the investigation, Martin, for the first time ever, repeatedly pretended he was really concerned about ISP transparency. What's more transparent than metered billing? Martin's close friends at AT&T have stated they're going to test usage-based billing this year, and have proclaimed that usage-based pricing is "inevitable." At the most recent in a series of feel good FCC hearings, AT&T was sure to highlight just how transparent they are, while dropping vague hints that usage-based billing could be the answer to all of our problems.

While the cable industry frequently complains that Kevin Martin really hates them, he didn't just start picking on them out of spite. AT&T and Verizon's lobbying prowess have a little something to do with it. If Martin is, as history has shown, primarily a lap-dog for AT&T, what better gift than to give AT&T's top competitor a year of negative press, while warming consumers to metered billing? Like Time Warner Cable, metered billing would help AT&T control and profit from broadband video alternatives to their U-Verse IPTV service.

The best case scenario is that Martin is just pretending to champion network neutrality in order to further his political future. The worst case scenario is that Martin and AT&T are using the throttling investigation to begin warming consumers to an immensely unpopular pricing model. If the latter, expect the hard sell for metered pricing to drop this fall, with a heavy push coming from AT&T and their various policy mouthpieces.

Just food for thought.

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Mr Matt
join:2008-01-29
Eustis, FL

2 recommendations

Mr Matt

Member

Don't think about this matter to much!

The entire Bush Administration is corrupt. Consider the situation with the Justice Department. If you think about corruption in the FCC to much you head will explode.