The girl in pink will not be changing into a blue dress after all. AT&T finally threw up its hands after months of wrangling with the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice. It has dropped its $39 billion bid to merge with T-Mobile.
AT&T will instead pay $4 billion to T-Mobile’s parent company, Deutsche Telekom — money obviously better spent building out wireless broadband for consumers.
Kicker #1: Deutsche Telekom will unload T-Mobile one way or another — and now likely in a way that would not have benefited the public as much as letting the deal go through with AT&T.
Kicker #2: AT&T, which is just about maxed out on high-speed wireless spectrum, has watched its competitors make deal after deal to expand their spectrum. The latest is Verizon (emphasis mine):
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House Republicans’ recent attempt of June 15 to eliminate funding for the FCC’s “Open Internet Order” is the most recent of many objections to the Commission’s support of the plan known as “net neutrality.” An amendment to the Financial Services Appropriation bill which passed in the House, the proposed funding cut is not expected to survive, as President Obama has vowed to wield his veto pen in favor of the highly controversial Order.
Of the many malapropisms that clutter the airwaves and mass media, the term “net neutrality” is among the worst. It might be better translated into “regulation” or “communization” of the internet, rather than a matter of free speech, as it is often touted by its proponents. The Heartland Institute sums up the issue very well:
Supporters of net neutrality legislation seek to expand the Federal Communications Commission’s regulatory powers over the Internet through new mandates that would define and regulate access to the Internet. The proposal would prevent network providers from providing tiered service, where customers could pay for different levels of access. This is, essentially, a crude form of a price control.
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Worry not, scared Americans. The government bureaucracies that brought you the eternal “Orange Alert” in airports is now stepping up their efforts to protect you from terrorist attack by plugging into your cell phone.
Emergency officials will soon be able to blast critical alerts to anyone with a cell phone in a certain section of the city.
If Times Square needs to be evacuated because of a bomb threat or if a hurricane is bearing down on Queens, warnings will be bounced from cell towers. …
The system — called PLAN or Personal Localized Alerting Network — uses cell phone towers to send messages to everyone currently in a certain area, regardless of whether they’re visiting from out of town or have a phone registered elsewhere. People won’t have to register in advance to receive the alerts.
Gotta love the creativity of government busy-bodies, especially when it comes to anagrams like “PLAN.” Seems fitting, but they could have done a lot better. How about PANIC, the Personal Alert Nonsense In Cellphones Or: Plying Asinine Nanny-state Intrusions Casually? ? Or maybe: Prying About, Not Including Consent?
The program starts in New York, but will quickly spread nationwide — and will be pretty much mandatory.
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America’s traditional “Tax Day” has arrived (though returns aren’t due until Monday, April 18). Not coincidentally April 15 also marks the cinematic release of Atlas Shrugged—Part 1. The timing could not have been planned more appropriately, as our federal government hovered on the brink of a shutdown just last week, states are unable to balance their budgets, and a malaise not witnessed since the Carter administration seems to have gripped our nation.
The film and the book it’s based on deal with steel industrialists, railroad magnates, and other captains of economic activity, but it’s not hard to see the themes of Atlas Shrugged as applying to current government policy toward the Internet. In fact, the artists who adapted Ayn Rand’s 1957 tome might’ve made the film more relevant to today’s audiences by updating key plot elements to apply them to the Internet.
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The National Journal reported Monday that the White House will likely veto any House attempts to scuttle the FCC’s net neutrality rules:
“If the president is presented with a resolution of disapproval that would not safeguard the free and open Internet, his senior advisers would recommend that he veto the resolution,” according to a Statement of Administrative Policy issued by the Office of Management and Budget.
This hardly comes as a surprise, as the Prez and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski have been carrying on like British boarding school mates in an E.M. Forster novel for the past two years. Or perhaps I’m granting too much literary credence to these two old Harvard Law School chums who more than likely never passed notes cribbed from Percy Shelley to one another.
I’m thinking a more fitting comparison might be Greg Marmalard and Chip Diller from the film “Animal House.” You know the type, brown-nosing, white wine-sipping Ivy League types conspiratorially performing the bidding of Dean “Google” Wormer to stifle Faber College – which, in this scenario, is a stand-in for the wild and wacky Internet.
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The Consumer Federation of America contends major online content distributors such as Netflix should be taxed in order to funnel more money through the slush-fund boondoggle known as the Universal Service Fund (USF).
This plan—essentially taxing content providers to pay for Internet service provider (ISP) upgrades—is especially absurd coming from a group that is a vocal proponent of “net neutrality,” a policy based on the idea that such charges are “unfair” or “unjust.” Apparently our lean, efficient central government is the only entity capable of fairly determining which companies should pay and which should be subsidized. [click to continue…]
Full disclosure: I’m a snob. Increasingly, I shun popular culture for the esoteric film, theater, literature and music given far wider exposure on National Public Radio than on commercial stations. While I’m in confessional mode, I should add that I’m rooting for the future of the network, as I’ve been a daily listener of NPR for more than 30 years.
I do this despite what I perceive as an obvious left-leaning news bias, a perception that has increased since the release of James O’Keefe’s recent guerrilla video wherein NPR suit Ron Schiller has harsh words for Tea Partyers and Republicans and a negative assessment of conservatives in general. The more NPR staff protests, the more evidence surfaces displaying its decidedly liberal bent.
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The Heartland Institute has technology experts on staff who weighed in on the merger of AT&T and T-Mobile. Bruce Edward Walker, managing editor of InfoTech & Telecom News and myself said this was good news, and hoped the FCC would not muck things up too much — and slow down the benefits we’ll all accrue in our digital lives.
So it’s nice to see someone as smart at Entropy’s Bret Swanson ratify that notion. He writes today at Forbes.com:
Buying rather than building new capacity improves service today (or nearly today) — not years from now. It’s a home run for the companies — and for consumers.
Bret notes that “we’re nearing 300 million mobile subscribers in the U.S.” and we should see an additional 60 million Americans connected wirelessly via “tablets, kiosks, remote sensors, medical monitors, and cars” by 2014. That’s a staggering number. As for AT&T, Bret notes that mobile data traffic on the company’s network “rocketed 8,000% in the last four years” — thanks, in large part, to the popularity of the iPhone and AT&T’s joint venture with Apple.
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As someone tasked with keeping up on research in two arenas — education policy and tech policy — my job always get a lot easier when the issues merge. Sometimes, though, that merger isn’t so appealing to the rest of humanity — especially the ones that fall into one of the following categories:
- Pays taxes
- Has a phone bill
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On Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment hat would prevent the Federal Communications Commission from using any federal funds to enforce the net neutrality rules it approved in December. (It is attached to the “continuing resolution” Congress needs to pass by March 4 because the former Democratic Congress failed to pass a budget for the second consecutive year.)
The Heartland Institute has been covering the net neutrality issue for years. Here are the statements on this issue by Bruce Edward Walker and me.
Bruce Edward Walker, managing editor of InfoTech & Telecom News, research fellow for technology policy at The Heartland Institute:
“The FCC’s authority to regulate the Internet was cut from whole cloth to begin with. Only Congress may grant such power over the Internet. Yesterday’s vote to block funding for the FCC’s net neutrality rules adopted in December is a stern congressional rebuke directed at Chairman Julius Genachowski and commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Michael Copps, reminding the FCC it cannot create rules, it can only enforce them.”
For more comments, contact Bruce Edward Walker atbwalker@heartland.org.
Jim Lakely, co-director of the Center on the Digital Economy at The Heartland Institute:
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