Civil Defense - a weblog by Joshua Breitbart

Kat Aaron has a great piece on Katrina reconstruction in the most recent episode of Informed Dissent, Pacifica’s special midterm election coverage. Listen to the mp3.

Looks like Catholic sports fans are getting it from both ends.

Last week, Comcast bumped the Catholic channel, which among other things broadcasts mass to shut-ins and the elderly, off of its basic tier and up to the more expensive digital tier. As with Comcast SportsNet, the cable giant is using must-have content to squeeze dollars out of its subscribers.

Sadly, at the end of my two-week run as the Philly Future Featured Blog, only 13 new people have signed onto Free The Flyers. Worse still, the Nationals have taken away the best reason for us all to meet up at a sports bar. But there are 263 of us, so we should do something.

Last week, I talked about the state franchising bill currently on the table in Harrisburg. Word is, the bill is stalled and might not make it through this session. The sticking point is “buildout,” with Verizon wanting to be able to choose where it builds and municipalities and consumer advocates wanting requirements to provide service to the rich and poor, urban and rural alike.

Verizon is still pushing like heck, though, so phone calls from constituents continue to be important and useful. Prometheus Radio Project, usually focused on issues of radio rather than TV, is hosting a page that explains who to call and what to say about Senate Bill 1247 / House Bill 2880.

Pondering how one might begin to compete with Comcast in Philadelphia, last week I ended a “meditation” with an imagined scenario in which News Corp purchased Earthlink.

I don’t want anyone to think I see that as any sort of fundamental solution. Choosing between a bundled wireless partnership and a monopolistic or even duopolistic triple play is not a choice that transforms our relationship to our communications infrastructure, at least not the way community ownership or even true open access does. But any competition would weaken Comcast and thereby strengthen other strategies for addressing its monopoly.

In fact, there are provisions in the contract Wireless Philadelphia negotiated with Earthlink that would give our city some protection in the event of a buyout.

Minneapolis, on the other hand, just signed a deal with a local Internet builder that needs a large up-front payment from its anchor tenant, the City itself, to afford the construction. Becca Vargo Daggett points out in her response to the contract that US Internet must seem like low hanging fruit to an AT&T just entering the wi-fi market or to the rapidly-expanding Earthlink. The contract offers no protection against a change in ownership.

Read more: Ownership Matters

The FCC is actually reconsidering its rules on ownership as we speak. Basically, the FCC would allow one company to control an even larger share of a local or the national market than it already allows. It would also remove a prohibition, sometimes waived, against one company owning a daily newspaper and a broadcast outlet in a single market.
The largest media corporations, like Time Warner, News Corp, and Disney, seem blase about the current process. The main beneficiaries would be

For New Yorkers, if you want to learn more about it and speak to the Democratic members of the FCC, there is apparently a public hearing on media ownership at 6 pm, on Thursday, October 19, at Hunter College, hosted by the National Hispanic Media Coalition. I’ll provide more details as they come in; that event has not been highly publicized yet.

NHMC and many others are more focused for now on the official FCC hearings in Los Angeles. Those hearings will be in two parts on October 3: one in the middle of the day at USC with bigwigs and perhaps the corporate media and the other in El Segundo in the evening after working people get out of their jobs.

(Apparently they picked El Segundo not because they were such A Tribe Called Quest fans, but because the brother of one of the Republican commissioners is the mayor. Thanks for that find, Harold.)

If you can’t wait for or get to one of those events, you can submit comments via an online comment form from StopBigMedia.com, the main hub for information on the FCC’s “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.” And NPRM is the official step the FCC takes to open a window for comments ahead of a rule change.

Read more: What is my comment worth?

Comments work very differently at the FCC than they do in Congress.

Representatives can take your advice or leave it and make they’re decisions based on any whim or reason of their choosing. The FCC is supposed to base its regulations on evidence and sound reasoning so they can demonstrate that the rules are in the public interest. That was basically what the federal judge said in Prometheus Radio Project vs. FCC (2004), which halted the 2003 round of deregulation.

So it’s an especially big deal when the FCC buries, burns, or ignores reports that contain evidence that deregulation hurts consumers and local communities, aside from it being further evidence of secrecy and malfeasance in the federal government. One of the reports said consolidation in television station ownership resulted in less local news coverage; the other said deregulation of the radio industry had resulted in marked consolidation.

It seems absurd to me that the FCC could still try to weaken already meager restrictions on ownership in the wake of that scandal and in the face of that evidence, but what do I know.

Petri Dish at Prometheus Radio responded to the unearthing of the first report with a statement calling on the FCC to incorporate the testimony submitted to the “Localism Task Force” in 2003 with the current ownership proceedings.

Apparently, Michael Powell used procedural measures in defiance of logic to separate out the issue of localism from the issue of ownership, creating a “localism docket” that was separate from the “ownership proceedings.” The thousands of people testifying on such things as the importance of local news had their impact muffled.

I didn’t totally understand that, so I instant-messaged Hannah, also from Prometheus, about it. She said it would be a “retroactive victory for all of those people who commented.”

5:45:27 PM Hannah: if the localism docket is combined with the media ownership rulemaking
5:45:40 PM Hannah: each instance of a person mentioning abuse or lack of action or bias by a local outlet
5:45:46 PM Hannah: or positive action by a local outlet
5:45:53 PM Hannah: has to be researched and supported or refuted
5:45:54 PM Hannah: and/or
5:46:01 PM Hannah: can be used in a judicial review of the rulemaking
5:46:23 PM Hannah: so what was offered as a comforter to millions of angry americans who suddenly couldn’t speak on the powell ownership docket
5:46:33 PM Hannah: become building blocks for another media infrastructure in the martin docket
5:46:34 PM Hannah: there!
5:46:39 PM Hannah: I WILL PUT THAT IN A BLOG
5:46:40 PM Hannah: HOW ABOUT THAT
5:46:41 PM Hannah: hahaha
5:46:53 PM Josh: if you don’t, I will

Hannah is actually on Counterspin today. Apparently Janine Jackson wanted to talk about a slightly different idea that Hannah actually did write about on her blog.

She pointed to the example of the MITRE study, an independent study commissioned by the FCC to investigate claims from NPR and the NAB that additional LPFM stations would interfere with existing broadcasters. The study proved the claims false, but it derailed LPFM for three years and counting. But since there was this study, even Congress now seems to understand that the FCC should expand LPFM licensing.

She questions why industry claims that loosening restrictions on ownership will not interfere with the public interest should not be investigated just as thoroughly. The released reports demonstrate a quantifiable impact of deregulation. The FCC should have to commission an independent report to determine what the impact of further deregulation would be before actually implementing any changes.

Not only could this cause a significant delay in the process as the MITRE study did for LPFM, but it would help shift the argument towards facts and real-world impacts, which would tend to benefit our side, the factinistas.

The further result, as she points out, is that comments – whether submitted to the FCC or gathered through projects like Free The Flyers – become hard evidence, as the localism docket should be.

This points to another strategy for responding to the Comcast monopoly: patient documentation of the impact of that monopoly, which then becomes the basis for an antitrust case in court (as some are already trying) or a public interest case before the FCC.

My friend, Anna Lappé, is in town to share the wisdom and recipes from her book, “Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen.” Here are the details from my inbox:

Monday, September 25, 6:00pm
@ The White Dog Cafe
3420 Sansom Street
Philadelphia, PA
Reservations required: (215) 386-9224
http://www.whitedog.com/09252006.html

Anna Lappé, co-author with her mother, Frances Moore Lappé, of the national bestselling Hope’s Edge, returns to White Dog for an evening of conversation and rabble rousing. Anna’s latest book, Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen, brings the globalization and corporate control story to food rights and our health. Grub also highlights the growing food justice and sustainable agriculture movements. Not just a guidebook on what to eat, where to get it, and why, the second half of Grub showcases more than a dozen seasonal menus by co-author Bryant Terry. The tantalizing recipes come with soundtrack and wine suggestions and tips for throwing your own Grub party. The book’s mantra and re-definition of Grub: Healthy, local, sustainable food should be accessible to all of us.

I haven’t been to one of these White Dog “Table Talks,” but this is one instance where I would definitely plop down the $36 for the food and discussion (discounts for students and seniors).

My father just published a pretty remarkable article in the Italian independent film journal Cinemascope. In it, he covers the 125-year cinematic history of work, from Lumière to YouTube, in 15 pages. It’s a story of control and disappearance.

To help you cut through Cinemascope’s in-your-face but unlinkable Flash animation, I’ve posted a pdf of the article here:

• The Controlling Image: Cinema Power, Labor Power, by Eric Breitbart

My dad has been making documentaries since 1966 when he got out of the Army. He’s currently completing a project on Robert Indiana, a sculptor every Philadelphian should know.

He’s also a great writer and seems to be getting back into it lately. He recently published a piece on the French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville recently in the New England Review: “Call Me Melville.” It’s shorter than the Cinemascope piece and quite accessible even if, like me, you don’t know much about French cinema.

I also recommend his book on the photographs of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, A World on Display. It includes reproductions of many of the photographs he used in his movie on the fair along with a 90-page essay putting them in context.

You can buy the book on Amazon for $50-85, depending on condition. (I guess I should have kept the shrinkwrap on my copy!)

Thanks for writing more, Dad! And a Happy New Year to everyone.

As I promised on Monday, my first article on GovTech’s Digital Communities site went up to today. Philadelpha plays prominently in the article. Check it out.

The article is a much-expanded version of something I posted to this blog last month.

I’m very excited. My next article will be about the way cities, including Philadelphia, are planning to spend their new “digital inclusion” revenue.

Thank you both for this information. The upshot is satellite providers will go out of business because they can’t compete with pay-TV providers that can also offer broadband.So there will only be two choices: the phone-video company and the video-phone company, unless you want to live on your cell phone. Right?

So, in Philadelphia, Verizon and Comcast will ultimately be the only possible service providers. Comcast already owns this city. Verizon will only consider extending service to Philadelphia if they get the legislation they want from Harrisburg (where the House Consumer Affairs Committee is holding a “wrap-up cable competition meeting“).

And even then they still won’t because Comcast is not required to license their local SportsNet to them, thanks to a special dispensation from the FCC. So we will have Comcast and only Comcast, with no end in sight.

Is Philadelphia completely screwed?

The only hope for Philadelphia out of this state legislation is a pledge from Verizon that they will build out the entire city of Philadelphia and a pledge from Comcast to license local content to its competitor. It’s far from my media utopia, but that seems like a fair exchange to me.

Public access stations should be allowed to opt-in to a “local content license package” for all of the local channels, with the fee divided by viewer share, or to license their channels on their own. This would make a new line of revenue available that would expand if the station got more viewers in the first case or if it offered better content in the second.

Rural areas are messed up for a different reason. The only place where satellite service has been growing is in more sparsely-populated areas where the wireline companies don’t reach. If satellite goes out of business, that option is shot. Without a cable, fiber optic, or satellite option, they are out of luck for TV and the World Wide Web. I’d love to hear what they want from the legislation to address that problem.

Now that I think about it, there is a third option for Philadelphia: Earthlink WiFi bundled with DirecTV.

(I’m told Verizon is already offering a bundle in Philadelphia that includes satellite TV. Has anyone else seen this? This might also be on option for fulfilling universal buildout requirements.)

The problem is, that might work in Philadelphia, but DirecTV can’t survive on Philadelphia alone. However, Earthlink is building or trying to build wireless broadband networks throughout the country. So maybe Earthlink should just buy DirecTV. Or maybe News Corp should buy Earthlink.

Uh oh.
Josh

-

At 1:55 PM -0400 9/19/06, Harold Feld wrote:
>My take: http://www.publicknowledge.org/articles
>
>Harold
>
>At 09:44 AM 9/19/2006, lcintron texasmep.org wrote:
>>As many of you might have expected, the slicing of our airwaves has been
>>completed with the final results: US COs 1087 licenses to US Residents 0.
>>
>>To see the official release and/or listing of TOP bidders and/or ’small’
>>companies that they applied as, vist:
>>http://wireless.fcc.gov/auctions/default.htm?job=auction_summary&id=66
>>
>>NOTE: Link takes you all to a complete listing of who/whom/what as well as
>>a map of the US that shows the areas of wireless coverage. For those
>>attempting to address FCC concerns SAY TODAY IN AUSTIN, might be helpful
>>towards low power FM as additional research.
>>
>>Thanks for your time.
>>
>>Louis A. Cintron
>>Systems Administrator
>>Texas Media Empowerment Project
>>http://www.texasmep.org
>>lcintron texasmep.org
>>_______________________________________________
>>Activist mailing list
>>Activist mediatank.org
>>http://www.mediatank.org/mailman/listinfo/activist
>
>_______________________________________________
>Activist mailing list
>Activist@mediatank.org
>http://www.mediatank.org/mailman/listinfo/activist

Monopolia Comcasticus has dealt our campaign another blow. Comcast and Time Warner have effectively knocked satellite television out of the game by outbidding them in an auction for the largest chunk of our airwaves ever put up for sale.

It foils our plan because we were hoping that a satellite provider with SportsNet could be a viable option for television service in Philly. But a TV or “video service” provider without a broadband option with which to bundle and augment the TV is not viable in this day and age, so industry thinking goes.

DirecTV was hoping to use the new spectrum for wireless broadband. Without it, DirecTV’s owner, Rupert Murdoch has taken to calling the going-nowhere property a “turd bird.”

The Comcast-Time Warner venture, under the name SpectrumCo, spent $2,377,609,000 to foil our and DirecTV’s plans [pdf]. My bumper sticker-bar crawl pledge must have really spooked the big C!

The top bidders were T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless, which spent about $4 billion and $3 billion respectively. They say they’ll use the spectrum to send broadband video to your phones.

100 other companies won licenses for different parts of the spectrum in different parts of the country, but don’t think we’re about to see 100 flowers bloom. As I have done many times before, I refer you to the always-on-point Harold Feld for his analysis of the auction. (Here are the complete results.)

So where does this leave us? RCN, whose one-time offer to compete with Comcast was laughed out of City Hall, is out of the question. They’ve now been laughed completely out of business, unable to stand up to their larger competitors.

We are on our way to a towering duopoly. Thanks in large part to the FCC and Congress, we are being pushed into choosing the video-voice-data bundle from the formerly-just-voice (Verizon) or the formerly-just-video (Comcast).

Under current law, Verizon needs to strike a deal, called a franchise, with City Council to offer video service in the city. They’re trying to change that law in Harrisburg to let them get once franchise for the whole state, as well as through the Senate Bill 2686 that Free The Flyers is aiming at and that would give them a national franchise.

I wrote about the prospect of “state franchising” in April, when I posted my testimony to the House Policy Committee on the matter. (See the agenda from that hearing.) That testimony included a request to close the Comcast Loophole. The State Senate is also considering the matter. (Senate Bill 1247, House Bill 2880.)

You can get regular updates on these bills from Free Press. The House Consumer Affairs Committee held a hearing on SB 1247 today at 9:00 am in Bethelehem’s Town Hall. The State Senate Communications and Technology Committee held a hearing in Media, PA, on August 8.

The way state franchising generally breaks down, the phone companies and alleged free marketeers support it, while the cable companies, local governments (who would lose their franchising authority), and consumers generally oppose it.

It gets a little dicey, though, once the horse trading begins because the truth is we are dying for some cable competition, especially in Philadelphia. It’s just a question of whether that’s what Verizon and Harrisburg are offering us.

Here are the goals the local governments are hoping to achieve:

The coalition’s principles are . . . foster free competition; ensure good video customer service through service provider compliance with local regulations; require timely full build-out of community-wide video service; retain local governments responsibility and authority over the municipal rights-of-way; preserve franchise fee revenues and foster the development of public, educational and governmental channels; and, streamline the franchising process through innovative procedures that are consistent with these principles.

Beth McConnell, Director of PennPIRG, which is a member of the Grassroots Cable Coalition, testified at the August 8 hearing [pdf / text].

Like the local governments, she asked for “universal build-out” or some requirement that state franchisees provide service to everyone and not just the rich; provisions for public, educational, and governmental access channels; and maximum preservation of local authority, whether in franchise fee assessment or in controlling public rights of way where cable or phone companies run their wires. She also pushed for an open system through incentives for leased access to the video channels and net neutrality in broadband.

(The devil is in the details of those build-out requirements. Harrisburg has a track record of being extremely lax in enforcing buildout requirements on Verizon. We talk frequently about the municipal broadband restrictions in Act 183. But the main point of the bill was to erase from memory the deadline the Commonwealth had placed on Verizon to provide broadband throughout the its coverage area and give it a new deadline well into the future.)

I didn’t see any mention of the Comcast Loophole in her statement. However, she smartly points out places where the state could provide incentives or disincentives for certain actions even when it does not have the authority to require or ban them. This would be the same way it could deal with the loophole, though it’s hard to imagine that they would. It’s clearly not something Comcast is interested in negotiating away if they managed to hold onto it through the Adelphia merger.

The objectives Beth offers would probably provide the best results as far as consumers statewide are concerned, but Philadelphia is in a unique spot compared to the rest of the Commonwealth and the country.

Here are the characteristics that make us look at this issue of state and national franchising in a way that no one else does:

1. We are the largest city without an active public access channel to preserve (though we could lose our claim on the ones we’re not using). That has been a major motivator for opposition from community media, but it doesn’t quote apply here, except out of love for Pittsburgh and Reading and places that do have it.
2. Comcast has disproportionate influence over our local government. To the extent we preserve “localism,” which in principle I support, we consign ourselves to Comcast’s rule.
3. We are the most monopolized television market in the country: Comcast owns our major venues, our local sports teams, broadcasts of the local sports games, cable television throughout the entire city, and the soon-to-be-dominant ticketing service… for starters. That makes us the least inviting to a new entrant into the market.

Comcast owns our major venues, our local sports teams, broadcasts of the local sports games, cable television throughout the entire city, and the soon-to-be-dominant ticketing service… for starters. That makes us the least inviting to a new entrant into the market.

The only thing that Philadelphians can care about when they look at these bills in Harrisburg is when will Verizon start offering a TV service that includes Comcast content to all of the neighborhoods of Philadelphia? We should support a bill that makes this more likely and oppose one that makes it less likely.

This may seem callous, especially to people in rural areas, but forcing a build-out to those parts will be tough under any circumstances. Were it able to offer broadband, satellite could be the solution for rural areas, but alas. As it is, satellite providers will probably have to content themselves with that market and they will be closed out of the Internet.

For Verizon to enter the Philly market, they would still have to strike a deal with Comcast for SportsNet – the deal DirecTV couldn’t strike – to make it worthwhile for them to offer video service here.

A Verizon FIOS subscriber in our area told me (FIOS is their branded service for fiber optic broadband and, where allowed, video) that a district manager guaranteed that Verizon would be offering video service in Philadelphia in the near future. The subscriber was skeptical, knowing what he knew about the Comcast Loophole, but the district manager promised that Verizon had deep pockets and would make it happen.

I’m not so sure. An industry analyst told me Verizon has said bluntly it does not intend to build here. Too many poor people for their tastes. Not enough “triple play” customers. That’s my assumption. Why attack the fort when there’s all this low hanging fruit in the form of small, wealthy municipalities?

So it’s not clear that closing the loophole would solve our problem even if they took care of it in Harrisburg or DC. It is still an egregious anticompetitive measure and a regulatory scheme that is particularly offensive to Philadelphians, so we should continue to publicize the issue and work to correct it.

But with the results of this wireless auction the terrain has clearly shifted. The problems run much deeper than SportsNet. We might have to rethink our strategy for getting access to the content we want.

In the meantime, it seems the State Senate Communications and Technology Committee will consider SB 1247 at its next meeting on September 26 and they may be making changes to accommodate the concerns of local governments.

You can contact the following State Senators before then and say that you oppose SB 1247 because it doesn’t close the Comcast Loophole and won’t actually impact my range of choices for cable:

Republicans
Senator Robert Wonderling, Chair: (717) 787-3110
Senator John Rafferty: (717) 787-1398
Sen. Gibson Armstrong: (717) 787-6535
Sen. John Pippy: 717-787-5839
Sen Bob Regola: (717) 787-6063

Democrats
Sen. Connie Williams , Minority Chair: (717) 787-5544
Sen. Vince Fumo: (717) 787-5662
Sen. Leanna Washington: (717) 787-1427
Sen. John Wozniak: (717) 787-5400

I will try to submit something in writing to them based on past Free The Flyers comments before then, but, as I said, it’s a busy week. 256 and counting, by the way.

One lone person used the Free The Flyers comment tool since yesterday despite some much appreciated links to this blog from Philly Future bloggers (thanks for the links!) and from Hannah in her great post today on the shady goings on at the FCC.
So we are sitting at 251 and I’m starting to think we might need those bumper stickers for the sports bar crawl.