Liveblogging FCC hearing in Pittsburgh

Here’s the video link. (Didn’t hear Congressman Doyle, Martin, or Copps.) Adelstein: (Misstates findings of Pew study on broadband adoption. Price is not really the issue, lack of interest is.) Complains about smackdown by the Third Circuit. Tate: Don’t forget about piracy and the children. McDowell: Don’t dry up the capital. Engineers solve engineering problems, … Continue reading “Liveblogging FCC hearing in Pittsburgh”

Here’s the video link.

(Didn’t hear Congressman Doyle, Martin, or Copps.)
Adelstein: (Misstates findings of Pew study on broadband adoption. Price is not really the issue, lack of interest is.) Complains about smackdown by the Third Circuit.
Tate: Don’t forget about piracy and the children.
McDowell: Don’t dry up the capital. Engineers solve engineering problems, not politicians and bureaucrats. Applause.

Panel 1:
Mark Cuban, Blog Maverick: Special-purpose networks better at what they do than the generic Internet. Multicast is the game-changer for IPTV, but it departs from the generic Internet model. Right.

Jon Peha, CMU professor: Second bite at the apple for this CMU professor, who mis-stated effect of TCP RSTs on P2P streams. Raised some obvious questions about copyright that have already been talked to death.

Mark Cavicchia, CEO, Founder & Director, WhereverTV: FiOS is fast, black helicopters are everywhere. Volume-based pricing puts him out of business. He sells a piracy-enabler.

Nathan Martin, DeepLocal: Last-minute replacement, carrying on about SMS. It’s harder to get text messaging agreements with telcos than on the Internet.

David Eun, Google: We are good, we give (other people’s) content away for free. We love diversity. No mention of collaboration with China, but let’s of back-slapping for democratizing the world. This is rich. Complains about the powerful and the rich. What’s Google? Touts free speech and innovation, open platform, etc.

John Heffner, Conviva: Digital media impact on the Internet, content providers. Great demand for pipes, thousands of times what we have today. Data center can’t scale (bad for Google.) P2P can potentially serve lots of users, but today’s P2P is inefficient. (Hey George!) The dude is not too exciting. but quite thoughtful.

Matthew Polka, President & CEO, American Cable Association: 1100 cable companies, many with less than 1000 customers. Capital is scarce for upgrades. If you want unbundling, talk to the content providers.

Jake Witherell, Sim Ops Studios: We make 3D worlds, and it’s cool. Digital literacy is important to us, whatever that means. User-generated content, Web 2.0, yada yada open Internet is cool, yada yada. The future is not widely distributed. These guys are really brief.

Jeff Lawrence, Intel: Horizontal content distribution, home networking is cool, please force STBs to add an Ethernet connector. He actually has a braided ponytail. Doesn’t like Firewire, but it was an FCC mandate. What does that tell you? Touts DLNA, one of the most dysfunctional standards groups ever. My goodness.

Questions:
Copps: Hey Cuban, can the Internet save independent programmers?
Cuban: Yeah, I know about all this. The more choices you have, the lower the ratings. The cost to get yourself heard on the Internet is immense, but I want my show on cable.
Copps: Is the Internet really being threatened by technology?
Nathan Martin I’m going to diss Google. They’re a dominant company, and they control what you see on the Internet. Google-opoly is real.
Peha: Mumble.

Adelstein: How can you tell what’s legal and what’s not?
Peha: People look for content by snooping P2P.
Adelstein: Hey Mark, I read your blog. What about local distribution?
Cuban: Why not put popular content on the cable network?

Tate: What about piracy?
Eun: What rights does the uploader have? Content ID system will try to verify that uploader owns the content he offers. (He had nothing to say about the Google-opoly remark.)
Cuban: Other side of the coin. Google is saying we can steal first, ask questions later.
Eun: We can’t be responsible because we’re for freedom. We don’t like them false positives. (Jesus, this is rich.)
Cuban: Google can find porn, but it can’t find copyright violations. Is this magic?
Eun: We use the community to flag porn.
Cuban: Come on.
Tate: Efficient use of other networks is interesting. Have you talked to operators about this?
Cuban: Yup, we used to do it actually, but Yahoo killed it. P2P can’t do it, but multicast can.

McDowell: Bigger the pipe, more you can use. What about apps that use lots of bandwidth?
Heffner: We actually use P2P multicast.
McDowell: Is P2P killing your members’ networks?
Polka: Yup.
McDowell: How are they addressing it?
Polka: Fatter pipes, and maybe something else too.

Kevin Martin: Here’s where I think you agree:
1. Reform program access rules.
2. Video distribution reform.
3. Google and Cavicchia are worried about limits on Intellectual Property theft.
4. Intel wants better home networks.

Clap.

See Second Panel here.

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