In order to simplify my life and give the company that pays me the full value of my work and energy, I will now be posting to my blog on the People’s Production House website. RSS feed coming soon.
Archive for Time Warner
City Council members, PPH, and Common Cause call for delay in FCRC vote
As reported in Crain’s NY Business, consumer groups want franchise delay. After taking our concerns to the public hearing yesterday, we will join City Council members on the steps of City Hall today at 11:00am.
At the press conference, Councilmember Gale Brewer (chair of the Technology in Government Committee), Councilmember Tony Avella (chair of the Zoning and Franchise Committee), Susan Lerner from Common Cause/NY, Russ Haven from NYPIRG, Chuck Bell from Consumers Union, and I will call for a delay in the Franchise and Concession Review Committee vote on the proposed cable franchise for Verizon to permit greater public scrutiny.
A deal of this magnitude deserves more than a passing glance from the public and our elected officials. It will largely determine how we watch TV, make phone calls, and use the Internet in New York City for the next 20 years. The fine print tells you that this franchise is not designed to serve all New Yorkers equally. Verizon wants it rubber stamped before enough of us notice.
For my specific concerns with the deal, read my testimony here. The response from DoITT to these concerns were insufficient. For example, when Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer asked why the penalty for a missed appointment dropped from a month of free service to $25, the answer was that “competition” will ensure good customer service.
Even if that were true, the new, lesser consumer protections will soon be written into the new Time Warner and Cabelvision franchises and go into effect immediately citywide. Meanwhile, the “competition” from Verizon that is supposed to provide a new and improved protection will go into effect slowly and unevenly. Huge portions of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens will have no competition and weaker protections for the next 4-9 years. That’s just bad policy.
For other criticism of the hearing schedule, see Bruce Kushnick, “Is New York City and Verizon trying to slip one by you?” and Broadbandreports.com, “Interested In Pretending You Have Influence On Verizon/NYC Deal?”
Although this might be getting ahead of myself, this whole situation shows that we need procedural reforms in the franchising process:
- The public notice of hearings needs to be more extensive.
- The proposed franchise agreement needs to be made available for public review.
- There needs to be more time for public review.
- We need a Cable Franchise Oversight Committee with direct community participation.
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Verizon FiOS proposes citywide buildout
Yesterday, Verizon proposed to build a fiber optic network covering all of New York City. The proposal comes just one day after the City’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) published notification of the RFP for cable television providers, which is how you know DoITT’s RFP (request for proposals) and Verizon’s proposal were worked out in tandem over months of closed-door negotiations.
Verizon is offering to finish the installation by midyear 2014, provide a public safety INET (institutional network), pay franchise fees equivalent to five percent of gross revenues on cable TV service, channels for public access. As the precise details emerge and once I’ve had a chance to read the RFP, I’ll give you my assessment on the fine points, but that doesn’t sound like enough off the bat given the scope of the deal.
A hearing from the Franchise and Concession Review Committee is forthcoming. I will keep you posted on that. You should plan to attend.
For background and a discussion of the issues at stake, see the article I just published with Gotham Gazette: Fiber Optics: Bringing the Next Big Thing to New York
This is another example of a phenomenon you may have heard or read me describe before: The general policy and market rules of media simply do not apply to New York City. Other cities are having trouble attracting or holding onto a $20 million investment for a wireless network while New York has a company proposing to invest $5 billion over 6 years to build a fiber optic network and become the second (third or fourth if you count satellite) entrant to the video service. Keep in mind that the incumbents are not citywide: Time Warner and Cablevision currently divide the city between them:
(Click the image to see the map of current franchise areas.)
The scale is hard to fathom. It’s like $100 per person per year or $300 per household, of which there are about $3.1 million – though that’s not counting businesses. It’s around $3 million per year for each of the city’s 322 square miles – as if all those square miles cost the same or were worth the same.
But the rate the money goes into the city is not the most important number. The important number is how fast it goes out. How much will Verizon make off each person, business, or square mile, and over what time frame? Once they put this infrastructure in place, they are going to hold on tight and make as much money as they can off of it. And anyone who wants to compete at the speed levels Verizon will be offering will have to match their massive investment.
We might only get one shot at building a fully fiber optic network for our city. We should try to get it right.
Report from the Queens hearing of the Broadband Advisory Committee
The NYC Broadband Advisory Committee held its fourth public hearing on Monday, March 3, at LaGuardia Community College in Queens. Much thanks to New York Greater Metropolitan Area chapter of the Internet Society for documenting the hearing. His detailed summary and a full audio recording is available on the ISOC-NY website.
The highlight for me was when former Senator Larry Pressler, who authored the 1996 Telecommunications Act said, “If it is found that in New York City the spectrum and the broadband is not totally out there, that would be a tale that needs to be told.” Indeed.
Councilmember Brewer asked him a question about E-Rate, the federal program to fund Internet access in schools and libraries, and he agreed that it needs to be revisited. As it is now, the federal government tightly restricts E-Rate funds so they can’t even be used to cover access for administrators; they can’t pay for necessary hardware or training; and they can’t support public access, even though schools pay for bandwidth to be available 100% of the time while school is only in session about 15% of the time. In other words, E-Rate is easy money for the big Internet service providers.
If the BAC, or even just Brewer, is pondering reforms to federal policy, that is an extremely positive development. To date, very few municipal broadband task forces have addressed themselves to this area, even though there are many current regulations that hamstring their efforts to improve local infrastructure and expand high speed Internet access. Any worthwhile municipal broadband plan must include policy reform at the federal level.
Although I had already testified at the first hearing in the Bronx, I testified in Queens to offer new suggestions for increasing public engagement in the process, specifically among immigrants who are not aware the process is going on or who cannot attend daytime hearings.
I tried to play a couple of clips from interviews we’ve done – Arturo Mendoza, a construction worker who lives in Ridgewood, Queens, (in Spanish) and Beverly from Canarsie, Brooklyn (in English) – but we ran into technical difficulties. Ironically, that just drove home the point that we need to do more to include people like Arturo and Beverly – working people with limited access to the Internet – in the city’s broadband expansion deliberations, since they’re the ones the process is supposed to serve. (Many more clips are available on the DEI section of the PPH website.)
Councilmember Brewer responded positively to that notion and said she had just been discussing it with Andrew Friedman of Make the Road NYC. She suggested a supplemental event with that specific focus. PPH is now exploring that possibility with our partner organizations. I’m also preparing a brief to distribute to the city’s ethnic press through the New York Community Media Alliance.
I should be clear that, while some people who should be a part of the process have not been able to participate, the Broadband Advisory Committee, Brewer’s office, and Diamond Consultants (working for the NYC Economic Development Corporation) have included a vast range of perspectives. Diamond surveyed library patrons in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, and a random sampling of public housing residents from across the city. While the library survey was only in English, the NYCHA survey, which was distributed by mail, was in English, Spanish, simplified Chinese, and Russian.
Those surveys are each only one of many sources of information for Diamond’s report, which could be released anytime in the coming weeks. The report will include a presentation of findings, as well as a complete plan for expanding Internet access throughout the five boroughs. The Broadband Advisory Committee is also supposed to present a report within a year of its inception, which would be April 17 if you start the clock from their first meeting.
The BAC will be holding its Staten Island hearing in the near future. I’ll post details when I have them.
Queens public hearing of the NYC Broadband Advisory Committee
On Monday, the New York City Broadband Advisory Committee is holding its Queens public hearing:
WHEN: Monday, March 3, 2008, from 1pm to 4pm
WHERE: LaGuardia Community College, 31-10 Thomson Avenue, Long Island City, NY 11101
Sorry for the late notice, but I just found out yesterday. It’s not even posted on the BAC’s blog. (I’m actually getting an error when I try to load the page right now.)
If you have any questions, post them as comments below. I hope you can be there, though once again the hearing is in the middle of the day. I plan to attend and record it to audio, so stay tuned for updates.
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Testimony from State Assembly hearing on net neutrality
I was finally able to post my testimony from last week’s State Assembly hearing on net neutrality. I’m working on an article about the hearing and will post more thoughts on it soon.
You can read the net neutrality advocates’ press release here.
Also check out Tim Karr’s article on the hearing.
NYC Broadband Advisory Committee Brooklyn public hearing
NEW YORK CITY BROADBAND ADVISORY COMMITTEE
PUBLIC HEARING
The New York City Broadband* Advisory Committee is gathering public testimony on the state of Internet access in New York City and is seeking suggestions for improvements.
Broadband Advisory Public Hearing
Tuesday, May 22nd
Noon to 3 pm
in the Courtroom hearing room in the Brooklyn Borough Hall
209 Joralemon Street in downtown Brooklyn
(*Broadband means fast Internet, though how fast is up for debate.)
For updates from People’s Production House and recordings of previous hearings, visit www.digitalexpansion.net.
It is especially important for people and organizations that aren’t connected to the Internet to attend this hearing. The Committee will be recommending solutions for extending Internet access throughout the five boroughs. If they only hear from business leaders or laptop-toting hipsters, then that is who their solution will serve. But if you engage this process now, you have an opportunity to shape how we will communicate across our city for the next 100 years. The Committee and the city need to know that you are paying attention to this process and care about its outcome.
People’s Production House is working to ensure that all New Yorkers get heard as these critical decisions are being made. We encourage you to attend this hearing and to share what you know about how the Internet works or doesn’t work for you and your community.
Please contact us if you have any questions or if we can help in any way. We’d be happy to talk to you or your members in person, over the phone, or through email to explain more about the process, and help you envision New York’s Internet future.
More details…
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Get Omnibus: Weighing the New York Omnibus Telecommunications Reform Act of 2007
I’m heading up to Troy, NY, this morning for a “New York State Strategy Session for the Future of Community Media & Media Justice.”
Today’s get-together at the Sanctuary for Independent Media is a precursor to a larger event tomorrow called interAct Troy!, a community driven skill share and party. It’s a great chance to check out the Sanctuary, visit friends up there, and promote the Allied Media Conference.
There will also be the second round of the strategy session with Dee Dee Halleck, George Stoney, Michael Eisenmenger, and Steve Pierce, which is a not-to-be-missed combination of folks, especially if you care about New York and the future of public access television.
The focus of today’s discussion is the “Omnibus Telecommunications Reform Act of 2007,” sponsored by State Assembly Member Richard Brodsky. The bill is a mammoth one that would have extensive impact on the lives of every single person in New York who uses the Internet, telephone, or television.
This bill represents an interesting moment in the life of state franchising for video service. Last year, as you may recall, Verizon and AT&T spent tens of millions of dollars trying to pass national franchising legislation called the COPE bill through Congress. Simultaneously, they pushed similar legislation in a number of statehouses.
The telcos’ goal was to smooth their entry into the TV market and they did not mind clear-cutting local media in the process. Many cities in Texas have already lost their public access channels as a result of the state franchising legislation there.
From what I know, the idea of proactive, public interest-based state franchising legislation was initially put forward in Pennsylvania by Beth McConnell, then of Penn PIRG (now with the media reform umbrella group the Media and Democracy Coalition). Here’s Beth’s August 2006 testimony on a Verizon-sponsored state franchising bill:
While we do not believe state-level franchise legislation is necessary, we would support streamlining the franchise negotiation process by creating a strong, pro-consumer state agreement that could serve as a fall-back in instances where a local agreement cannot be reached in a reasonable period of time.
The idea emerged from the unique circumstances in Philadelphia, where I was briefly the coordinator of the Philadelphia Grassroots Cable Coalition that included Penn PIRG and others. TV watchers in that town were suffering under a Comcast monopoly.
The cable giant is based there and basically gets to write its own franchise agreement, with little oversight from the local government. It also controls all of the local sports programming, which it has historically used to its competitive advantage. (Much to the surprise of Free The Flyers followers, Verizon was able to ink a deal late last year for Philly sports programming on its FIOS system.) Philadelphia also has no active public access channels.
So, from that perspective, Philadelphia residents had nothing to lose and maybe a little to gain from a Verizon statewide franchise. I laid this out pretty extensively back then in a post called “Is there hope for pay-tv competition in Philadelphia?”
Since the local franchising process was so clearly broken in Philadelphia, it would seem to make sense to seek redress in Harrisburg (where Verizon holds greater sway).
(The idea of a ‘good’ state franchising bill also has roots in the Alliance for Community Media’s pragmatic approach to the COPE bill. Vermont has a statewide franchise and a healthy public access system, but that comes from an earlier era and the state’s size makes franchise aggregation sensible.)
The main extra-legislative force behind the NYS bill is the Communication Workers of America, especially the New York Local. They think “The NYS Telecommunications Reform Act is the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread…”
The fact that CWA wants the state to require and to subsidize telecommunications deployment is no surprise. But the bill contains provisions for net neutrality, which CWA has previously opposed. Seems like the influence of the Local may have had something to do with that.
Albany being Albany, there is no way to know what will happen to this bill (A03980 for those of you keeping score at home). Spitzer might try to kill it so he can push his own plan for broadband deployment in New York. Or telco lobbyists could try to rewrite the bill.
The CWA and Brodsky, along with media reform organizations like Consumers Union, NYPIRG, Common Cause, and Free Press, will be holding a press conference to tout the bill in Albany on Tuesday, the 15th. Stay tuned here for my thoughts on that, a report on today’s meeting in Troy, and a breakdown of the bill itself.
New Threat to Small Publications
If you thought things were bad for small publications, Time Warner is working with the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) to raise postal rates for small publications.
The PRC is supposed to be an independent agency, but earlier this year they rejected a postal rate increase plan offered by the U.S. Postal Service. Instead they opted to implement a complicated plan submitted by media giant Time Warner, according to Free Press.
As Robert McChesney explains, “Under the plan, smaller periodicals will be hit with a much larger increase than the big magazines, as much as 30 percent. Some of the largest circulation magazines will face hikes of less than 10 percent.”
The IPA used to be the engine of response to these challenges. Fortunately, Free Press has picked up that slack:
For individuals: Send a Letter to Congress and the Postal Service
For publications: Sign the Letter to the Postal Board of Governors
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Written Testimony of Joshua Breitbart, Policy Director, People’s Production House, before the New York City Broadband Advisory Committee, March 30, 2007
Good morning. My name is Joshua Breitbart. I am the Policy Director for People’s Production House (PPH). PPH trains middle and high school students in public schools and low-wage and immigrant workers from across the city to be radio journalists. That includes analyzing how the media works and learning how to change it.
I would like to thank you, the members of the Broadband Advisory Committee, for holding this public hearing. I would also like to thank Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, Bronx Community College, and the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation for hosting this event, and Council Member Gale Brewer for her work initiating this process.
PPH and its partners have a stake in this discussion because the Internet is the most promising outlet to distribute the kind of immediate, hyper-local content our partners produce. Licensed space on the radio dial is limited, especially in this town. Television also has a high barrier to entry. Newspapers are more open, but they aren’t so good for audio recordings.
The Internet is an accessible, two-way, multi-format medium. At least it could be accessible, which is why I say it’s “promising.” A lot of the people we work with don’t have the kind of meaningful access to the Internet that would allow them to make and distribute their own content and to receive the content of their peers. We would like you to help us do something about that.
I don’t know as much about broadband in New York City as you all do, but in some circles I am considered a knowledgeable person about these issues. I write for a think tank and an industry publication. I’ve testified before a city council, spoken to the media, and given presentations at conferences. I am a principal in a small consultancy. But I’m not going to tell you what I think meaningful broadband infrastructure looks like for New York City.
The most important thing I’ve learned about municipal broadband as I’ve observed and analyzed the processes in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Boston, and elsewhere is that there is no cookie-cutter solution, no easy answer. The critical thing to finding the right solution is having the right process of working towards that solution.
Here are the keys, as I’ve come to understand them, to a healthy process, one that minimizes conflicts and leads to solid results:
- Sustain open participation beyond the initial public hearing stage, through the entire process and continuing even a solution is implemented.
- Promote horizontal relationships among stakeholders rather than hub-and-spoke relationships that all connect to this committee or to any one person or organization.
- Unite stakeholders around shared technology rather than dividing them into tiers.
- Incorporate existing human resources wherever possible to avoid redundancy and to build on existing relationships.
- Be open with whatever information you gather: publish documents, test results, and regular updates on an accessible website and make them readily available to people without Internet access.
The fact is, the people that have the most at stake in this discussion are not folks like me, white dudes with laptops and DSL connections at home. It’s the folks who have no access, or very limited access to the Internet. People’s Production House has a corps of eager reporters ready to work with you to engage that constituency.
This hearing is a great first step in that direction. It’s the first time that I know of that the general public of New York City has been invited to dream about what broadband might look like in our city. I am excited to see where this takes us.
In closing, again, I would like to thank all of the members of this Committee for your time and energy and for your commitment to New York’s communications future.
Civil Defense - a weblog by Joshua Breitbart 