Monthly Archives: February 2013

Is there a “Silver Lining” of Sequestration?

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Friday, absent Congressional and Presidential action, the Budget Control Act’s Sequester kicks in, forcing across-the-board spending cuts of $1.1 trillion spread out over nine years, with $85 billion cuts coming in 2013.  Without question, this reduction in federal spending will impact the economy, particularly as we measure it.  Government spending is a component of aggregate demand, and reduced demand in the economy will have its consequences.  Also, government spending is a component of Gross Domestic Product (about 23% of it), and since recessions are indicated (in part) by declining GDP, a cut in federal spending increases the probability of an Continue Reading »

The FCC Contradicts Their Facts (Again) To Justify Expanded Broadband Regulation…

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Last year, we released a paper entitled Justifying the Ends:  Section 706 and the Regulation of Broadband (and forthcoming, Journal of Internet Law) where we demonstrated how the Federal Communications Commission deliberately ignored its own evidence to support expanded regulatory jurisdiction over IP-based services.  With the release of its new Measuring Broadband America Report last week, the FCC once again undermines its factual predicate for Internet regulation.  Let me explain. Over the last several years, we have seen the Federal Communications Commission put forth a rather clever argument to expand its regulatory authority over broadband services.  Under Section 706(a) of Continue Reading »

The Misuse of International Broadband Rankings Continues…

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According to a just-released report by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) entitled The Whole Picture:  Where America’s Broadband Networks Really Stand, “Despite the frequent claims that the United States lags in international broadband comparisons, the studies cited to support this claim are out-of-date, poorly-focused, and/or analytically deficient.”  We couldn’t agree more, and extend our kudos to Richard Bennett, Luke Steward, and Rob Atkinson for a thorough and dispassionate analysis of broadband deployment and adoption across developed economies.  Indeed, I suspect ITIF’s report will become the ”go to” document of the most current basic statistics on where the U.S. Continue Reading »

Copyright and Wireless Carterfone…

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Recently, a renewed interest in long-term contracts and the practice of locking handsets to networks has emerged from an unlikely source:  Copyright law. Making a very long and complicated story short, under Section 1201(a)(1)(A) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), it is unlawful to circumvent certain technological measures employed by or on behalf of copyright owners to protect their works.   That said, copyright law always embeds some balance between owner and user, and Section 1201(a)(1)(B) limits the prohibition for subsection (A) by exempting those persons who are “adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make Continue Reading »