Save Access

from: Silican Alley Insider

BitTorrent CEO: Rethinking Media Store, No Business Impact from Comcast

If [Comcast is] thinking about ways to manage networks they should do it openly and publicly, especially when they haven’t been able to keep up to world standards in terms of the speeds of the networks in the first place.

from: NY Times

Verizon Gets Cozy With P2P File - Sharers

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 14, 2008

Filed at 2:09 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- Peer-to-peer file sharing, the primary vehicle for online piracy, has been as unpopular with Internet service providers as it has been popular with users.

from: Ars Technica

Congress dons rubber glove, prepares probe of FCC chairman

By Matthew Lasar | Published: March 13, 2008 - 05:11AM CT
Federal Communications Commission Chair Kevin Martin has two weeks to deliver a truckload of written records to Congress related to over a dozen hot-button FCC issues and policies. They're being demanded by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair John Dingell (D-MI), who sent Martin the request letter today, cosigned by Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the ranking Republican on the Committee.

from: All Voices

Eliot Spitzer and the FCC
by Matthew Lasar San Francisco
Mar 11, 6:36 PM

The news media is having a great day with the revelation that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer paid for sex with prostitutes. Behind the scenes, corporate criminals are breaking out the champagne. As Attorney General of the Empire State, Eliot Spitzer championed the consumer and feasted on white collar crooks. Not only that, Spitzer's zeal often forced those around him in government to do their jobs better, whether they wanted to or not.

from: Wet Machine

Comcast to Illinois: I loves Me The Market Power!
Harold Feld

As reported on BroadbandReports.com, Comcast has greeted former Insight customers transferred to Comcast as part of unwinding a partnership with a 6% rate hike. Thanks to all the delightful cover given to Comcast by Congressional Republicans, who declare that all is “A OTAY” in Cableland, the Comcast guys are no longer even pretending that the rise in rates has anything to do with cost. Rather, as Comcast rep Libbie Steh told the Springfield Journal Register in a rare attack of honesty: “increased costs are not a factor this year.” Rather:

Note: AT&T is moving closer to the "Quadruple Play" by bundling wireless services with the usual cable/TV/phone triple play. Subscribers will have all their essential communications services locked into one provider's network and quite likely for extended contracts (that's very 'consumer' friendly). And as Big Brother to the government, AT&T will riffle through everyone's data communications at will to ensure subscribers are on the up and up. AT&T also just raised pricing 400% on SMS text messaging and 600% on Multimedia messaging - as one site points out, that's a data transfer charge of $1,000 per MB for SMS. Whose world?

from: Broadband Reports

Martin Side Stepped Forced FCC Exit
As the cable industry faces potential lose-lose FCC situation
05:20PM Tuesday Mar 11 2008 by Karl

FCC boss Kevin Martin has recently been accused of making the cable industry his personal whipping boy. Some of that is legitimate criticism, given he frequently hammers the cable industry for things the phone companies are also doing (note his attack on cable astroturfing while ignoring similar tactics by the phone industry). But some decisions are (his a la carte, indecency pushes in particular) Martin's attempt to appeal to "family values" groups with one eye on a post-FCC North Carolina political career.

from: The Mountain Press

County's legislators support change to help AT&T

By: DEREK HODGES Staff Writer
March 10, 2008

"I've gotten more correspondence from voters on this one issue than I have about anything else since I got elected," State Sen. Raymond Finney, R-Maryville, said. "I've been amazed at just how strongly people feel about this."

from: New Haven Register

Hartford Public Access May Be on U-verse After 18-Month Delay

March 8, 2008
By Luther Turmelle

Local public access television channels could make their debut on AT&T’s U-verse system by sometime next month, 16 months after the service was launched in the state, company officials said Friday.

from: Record Journal

Regular channels on AT&T sought for community access [extended report]
by George Moore
MyRecordJournal.com (CT)
03/07/08

HARTFORD - Public television officials and others argued before the state legislature Friday that AT&T should be required to offer community access and government television as regular channels in its new U-verse television service.