Category: Broadband Policy
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Royalty-Free Standards Can Be America’s Broadband Advantage
I have filed comments (available here) to the National Broadband Policy Notice of Information (09-51). Excerpt from the executive summary: Open standards, and particularly royalty-free standards, are the very foundation of the Open Internet as we know it, and Internet leaders are vocal that open and royalty free standards are essential to its future. So…
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Patent Fights Fuel US DTV’s Slide from World Stage
The “FATT” is fighting back this week in comments filed at the US FCC against the “Coalition United To Terminate Financial Abuses of the Television Transition” (CUT FATT) proposal to address patent overreaching in the US DTV system. Filings from Valley View, Philips/LG Electronics, Funai, Thomson, ATSC, Harris, Zenith, MPEG LA, Philips/Qualcomm, and Retire Safe…
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Carterfone is Not Enough: The Missing Broadband Policy Link
Royalty-free standards, the very foundation of the Open Internet, are not even mentioned in the FCC’s 60-page Broadband Plan notice of inquiry. Surprising? Not really. Bridging even first principles of the Internet era to the realities of telecommunications policy since 1934 is a high order challenge for communications policy scholars, regulators, and network practitioners. But…
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Why Did the FCC Broadcast the Broadband Plan Kickoff in a Proprietary Format?
Yesterday’s kickoff of the FCC’s Broadband Plan proceedings were broadcast over the Internet in a proprietary video format. Worse, it was likely converted from a standards-based format to a proprietary format before it was put on the Internet! (The tip-off is that the closed-captioning overlay was already composited in). Clearly, a proprietary broadband internet would…
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Broadband Recovery Needs A Policy Preference for Royalty-Free Standards
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the “Recovery Act”, has allocated an unprecedented $7 Billion to broadband and has launched a new chapter of broadband policy in the US. The coming months will inspire an accelerated debate and consideration of what this can, and should, mean, on many levels from tactical grant-making to…