Moyers at National Conference for Media Reform 2008

Lessig Keynote at National Conference for Media Reform

Bad News: I’m a fascist

Woo hoo! That unbelievable moron Bill O Reilly called me a “lunatic,” a “fascist,” and “anti-American.” Does this mean I have now arrived as a progressive?

I just got back from the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis – an amazing event. Paraphrasing McChesney and Nichols, “media reform” describes the broad goals of a movement that holds that consolidated ownership of broadcast and cable media, chain ownership of newspapers, and telephone and cable-company colonization of the Internet are bad for our culture and for democracy.

Apparently this is “lunacy” and “far left” to O Reilly, which shows that he is is a total jackass, and more importantly, that he is completely out of touch with the actual “center” of American politics. The only people who believe that big media are beneficial to the public are the people who own them and their sock puppets like O Reilly. Word.

Comcast caught blocking access to public hearing on Internet management practices

This is truly amazing. I have been told this happens at FCC hearings, but here Comcast is caught red handed and then admits to paying random people to sit through Monday’s (Feb. 25) public hearing held by the FCC in Boston to investigate Comcast and other ISPs blocking practices. (See my previous posts on this blocking: AP Report: Comcast Blocking Certain Web Traffic and More About Comcast Internet Blocking.)

Comcast does this to prevent the actual public, people who care about these issues, from attending the hearing and providing testimony that is antithetical to the company’s practices of throttling traffic (mostly from peer-to-peer services) with ZERO TRANSPARENCY. FreePress has photos of these hired human roadblocks actually asleep during the hearing. (see video below). Wow.

Best headline on this: Comcast is Blocktastic!. See also this article from Save the Internet

Happenings

Top bidders put up 2.78 billion in opening rounds of spectrum auction

FCC approves Comcast takeover by private equity firm Bain (w/ heavy ties to Mitt Romney)

FCC puts out new localism rules, Adelstein calls thems bunk

Afghan journalist sentenced to death for distributing an article deemed to have “insulted Islam”

Whack-a-Murdoch

Whack-a-Murdoch if you dare. Excellent.

Marx, Engels, Schmidt?

In preparation for an independent study this summer, I’m trying to learn more about Marx’s conception of culture. This is oversimplified, but foundationally Marx argues that our consciousness does not determine our social being, rather our social being, our means of organizing our economic existence, gives rise to and conditions our consciousness, our ideologies, our culture.

In a recent interview, Wired Magazine’s Fred Vogelstein asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt a seemingly simple question. He wanted to know: “How should we think about Google today?”

Schmidt answered:

Think of it first as an advertising system. Then as an end-user system – Google Apps. A third way to think of Google is as a giant supercomputer. And a fourth way is to think of it as a social phenomenon involving the company, the people, the brand, the mission, the values – all that kind of stuff.

Maybe it’s just me trying to create connections between classical theory and this here modern life, but it’s interesting how folks (myself included) like to think about Google first and foremost as a paradigm shifter. After all, “free and accessible information for all” is their corporate ideology. Now we’ve got all the knowledge in the world at our fingertips, information wants to be free, and so on. Yet the man who makes the big decisions says “first we are an advertising system, fourth (not second or third) we are an ideology.”

New Media/Old Media Culture Clash

This is an interesting article from Clive Thompson in New York magazine that frames the billion dollar Viacom/YouTube copyright lawsuit in terms of a culture clash between institutions of new and old media. Thompson argues that Google (owner of YouTube) follows a “meritocratic nerd logic” that fundamentally contradicts Big Media’s traditional m.o. that relies on dog-eat-dog competition for ad revenue, acquisitions, and extreme copyright protection.

I think Thompson over simplifies some things, like the “pure” logic behind Google search results, but the overall approach of the article really speaks to the way digital media challenges certain conventions of how businesses operate. His prediction at the end of the piece seems astute as well.

Yet despite the culture clash, the odds are strong that Viacom’s case will never get to court. It is more likely a tactic designed merely to drive Google to abandon its high-minded talk about a win-win future and cough up real money for rights. This will probably work, because neither wants to risk a legal precedent that screws its business. Both Google and Viacom might actually benefit from keeping the legality of YouTube fuzzy and letting their negotiators hammer out a truce. They’ll learn to live together. But they’ll never understand each other.

Big Media is used to throwing its collective weight around to establish at least somewhat clear delineations between winners and losers, between content they own (and completely control) and content that belongs to someone else. Clearly this is much harder these days, but it can still be done (Napster anyone?). The trade-off now is that new media is a little less “new,” a lot richer, and a whole lot more pervasive. When YouTube gets a hundred million video views a day, do you really want to yank your content?

This is where the rubber meets the road

The other day my neighbor handed me this article from NYU Sociologist Eric Klinenberg in the March/April Mother Jones magazine. Here’s the headline/byline:

Breaking the News: It’s not the Internet that’s killing newspapers. It’s the equity-chasing investors and their friends at the FCC who have put outsize profits before a free press.

This piece is excellent – it most likely stems from Klinenberg’s new book Fighting For Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media. I haven’t read it yet, but it seems to encapsulate a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is incorporating ethnographic research and media analysis to form a basis for institutional media critique. I need to find out who else is doing this, but clearly Klinenberg is a master in this area. I heard him interviewed on Bob McChesney’s Media Matters radio program, he described the goal of book is to

turn media consolidation from an abstraction into the kind of thing we recognize as affecting our lives. No matter how many times we see those charts of media ownership that show how 5 or 6 companies dominate the system and own lots and lots of subsidiaries, a key challenge for those who care about this issue is to tell human stories about it that really resonate, especially with people who aren’t already convinced that there’s a problem. The kind of media system that we have deprives us of these stories, so we need to find a way to get them told.

Here is where qualitative approaches – ethnographic works – get at the heart of issues like media ownership and telecom policy that can seem so far removed from everyday life.

This is a model to emulate…

Belgian Court Rules Against Google

A Belgian court ruled that Google News violates copyright laws by linking to articles without owners’ consent.

A Brussels court has ruled in favour of a group of Belgian newspapers which argued that the site, which lists links to news stories from around the world, used material without their consent, and ordered that the articles be taken down.

The case, which was brought by Copiepresse, a group representing 17 French and German language newspapers, including La Libre Belgique and Le Soir, may set a precedent for other newspapers in Europe, lawyers said.

Google News at most displays the headlines, a few words, and a thumbnail photograph, so if user want to continue reading they must click the links that take them to original content owner’s site. My first assumption is that news providers would welcome the clickthroughs that result from Google’s aggregator, or at least accept that this is the nature of information on the web. This case is certainly a challenge to that line of thinking. Perhaps the Belgian news providers argue that in an age when people may be more likely to just glance at headlines (guilty as charged) Google hurts their business in the long run. Google archives over 4500 sources for its news service, so I can’t imagine this really affects their business all that much, but it could set a precedent for future litigation.

Read the full Article

Media Ownership and Reform Act

Article from The Raw Story

“Media reform is the most important issue confronting our democratic republic and the people of our country,” Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) said at the Free Press National Media Reform Conference held in Memphis, Tennessee last weekend.

Hinchey told RAW STORY he plans to reintroduce the Media Ownership Reform Act (MORA) that would break up media monopolies and restore the Fairness Doctrine, which was eliminated by the Federal Communications Commission under the Reagan administration.

So what exactly is the Fairness Doctrine?

The Fairness Doctrine required that broadcasters give equal time to people who wished to express an opposing viewpoint. “Under the Reagan administration, the FCC wiped out that rule and said only businesses that operate stations can express their view,” Hinchey noted. Congress passed a bill that would have required the FCC to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, but that bill was vetoed by Reagan.

This all sounds amazing. But a sea change bill like MORA will never pass. Here’s why. In addition to reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, the bill would also:

… reinstate a national cap on ownership of radio stations, lower the number of radio stations that one company can own in a local market, and reinstate the 25 percent national cap on television ownership, among other restrictions. The bill’s no-grandfathering provision would compel media conglomerates to divest to comply with new ownership limitations.

Big Media has worked the lobby circuit for decades to get where they are, and they’ve done so in the cradle of neoliberal economic ideologies that are much larger than any one industry. The idea that they would agree to this is insane and the power they exude in Washington is real.

Taken out of context, this bill seems great. But we live in a country that fully subscribes to, and greatly benefits from, the world capitalist economy. We need to think about realistic media reform initiatives or else we’re wasting resources and momentum.

A Clear Picture of AT&T’s Ownership Structure (or AT&T-1000 )

This is exactly the sort of in-depth reporting that can help us sort through the complications of telco mergers and acquisitions.

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) on Media Reform

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA), Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, gave the keynote address at the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis, Tennessee last Saturday, Jan. 13. He spoke specifically about the need for diversity and localism in media ownership, linking these structural traits of the media industry to the overall diversity of content. He also stressed for bi-partisanship:

Both Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, have a stake in media diversity. So, we should not paint this as a partisan picture. Neither is the debate over Internet freedom and the issue of so-called “network neutrality”. The coalition that supported my network neutrality fight last year in the Congress included Free Press, the ACLU, and Moveon.org – but also the Gun Owners of America, the National Religious Broadcasters, and the Christian Coalition.

In national telecommunications policy, our guide stars for decades have been three core principles: universal service, localism, and diversity. In recent years we have had to update them to encompass two new factors that have buffeted our laws and regulations: the rise of digital technology and fierce global competition. The task has been to preserve and enhance these values even as technology evolves.

The communications revolution has the potential to change our society. Unless we continue to revere localism and diversity we risk encouraging a new round of “communications cannibalism” in mass media properties on both the national and local levels that would put real progress in bolstering minority ownership of media even further away.

On the other hand, if we do it right, and remain true to the course set by these guide stars, the telecommunications revolution has the power to bring rich, new educational and entertainment opportunities to our homes, classrooms, and offices.

I believe we can do it right and will continue to fight to make national telecommunications policy reflect our highest aspirations as a society.

Markey has some provacative ideas on media policy and he seems to be a genuine advocate for the public interest. Read his remarks at FreePress. Needless to say, I was sad to miss this conference. Next year…

How AT&T’s Concession May Help Net Neutrality Proponents in the Long Term

One of the telecommunications companies’ major arguments against net neutrality legislation has been the supposed haziness of the term itself. In a debate facilitated by the Wall Street Journal, industry lobbyist Michael McCurry asked “what exactly is the definition of ‘network neutrality’ anyhow?” This sentiment has been expressed throughout the life of the discussion. “How can we possibly legislate if we cannot clearly define the concept,” has been a mantra of the telcos, and rightfully so.

Now it seems as though the industry has answered its own question and in the process, possibly aided their pro-neutrality opponents. By expressing in writing, under contractual agreement, exactly how they define and plan to uphold net neutrality (for two years), AT&T and BellSouth have seemingly removed a leg of their own arguement against legislation.

In advance of that brewing battle in Congress, the very words to which AT&T agreed negated one argument that telephone and cable companies had used against their Internet opponents last year — that net neutrality is so vague, it could not even be defined.

“This language is crafted as a practical implementation of neutrality,” Columbia University law Professor Tim Wu wrote about AT&T’s concessions. “As the first working rule, it may serve as a model and an experiment for what follows.”

Read Full Article from Tom Abate, San Francisco Chronicle, 1-7-07

From the same article, a decent overview of the net neutrality issue:

Most people may find it difficult to understand what all the fuss, is about given that net neutrality raises issues as big and complex as, well, the Internet.

Blair Levin, ex-aide to former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt and now a telecommunications adviser for the Stifel Nicolaus investment bank, offered this primer:

Until recently, the telephone and cable companies that own the two wires leading to the American home also pretty much controlled what services were delivered over those wires. They essentially controlled both the transport layer — the wire — and the service layer that traveled over the wires, be it a television show or a telephone call.

But broadband — or high-speed — Internet changed this. Now the same wire — whether the phone company’s DSL or the cable company’s modem — can carry any service from e-mail to a movie from any vendor in the world.

The crux of the debate is that wire owners want a free hand to charge Internet companies a bit extra for speedier service. Creating preferential delivery deals would make the new broadband world more like the old world, in which the wire-owner had greater control over what flowed through its lines, Levin said. Conversely, net neutrality advocates fear this pricing power will allow phone and cable companies to pick which Internet services get the fastest and best delivery.

FCC Commissioners Statements regarding AT&T-BellSouth Merger

FCC Chairman Martin and Commissioner Tate issued a joint statement regarding the recently approved merger of AT&T and BellSouth that made AT&T the largest telecommunications conglomerate in the US. The back story is this: The merger was previously stalemated because democratic FCC commissioners Adelstein and Copps, at the bequest of consumer and advocacy groups, refused to let the merger go through without provisions for net neutrality. The merger occurred earlier this week shortly after AT&T agreed to maintain neutral network business practices for two years.

Martin and Tate:

The conditions regarding net-neutrality have very little to do with the merger at hand and very well may cause greater problems than the speculative problems they seek to address. These conditions are simply not warranted by current market conditions and may deter facilities investment. Accordingly, it gives us pause to approve last-minute remedies to address the ill-defined problem net neutrality proponents seek to resolve.

Adelstein:

A historic merger warrants historic conditions. I don’t pretend that we addressed every possible issue presented here or that it is possible, or even appropriate in this context, to try to rectify years of decisions that have undercut competition. Yet, drawing on the full record, I have tried to counter-balance the effects of this transaction by asking for meaningful conditions that protect the open and neutral character of the Internet, benefit consumers by promoting affordable broadband services, and preserve competitive choices for residential and business consumers.

Network Neutrality is an extremely complicated issue (see my previous post w/ video for one side of the argument). There are good arguments for and against regulation, but my bias leans toward protecting the historical underdog, the citizen, contra big business.