FCC

An appeals court has tossed out the $550,000 fine the FCC imposed against CBS for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the 2004 Super Bowl. I can hear the Christian right screaming now.

The FCC is finally doing something I agree with:

The head of the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday he will recommend that the nation's largest cable company be punished for violating agency principles that guarantee customers open access to the Internet.

The potentially precedent-setting move stems from a complaint against Comcast Corp. that the company had blocked Internet traffic among users of a certain type of "file sharing" software that allows them to exchange large amounts of data.

"The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet," FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told The Associated Press late Thursday. "We found that Comcast's actions in this instance violated our principles."

Martin said Comcast has "arbitrarily" blocked Internet access, regardless of the level of traffic, and failed to disclose to consumers that it was doing so.

The traffic that Comcast was blocking was BitTorrent traffic. Sure there is a lot of pirating going on with BitTorrent, but there is also a lot of legitimate transfers, such as downloading different Linux builds. Also Comcast does not have the right to act as judge, jury and executioner in deciding what is legal and not.

This can be viewed as a small victory for net neutrality, but that fight is far from over. In the end we need to see the internet regulated more like a public utility, than a private sector service. The internet has become a too important factor in day to day operations around the world to not be benefited the same protections.

It must be done. A commissioner for the FCC is asking for an investigation into the 60 Minutes blackout in Alabama during the Don Siegleman story. If they don't investigate then they just took a big dump on the red, white and blue.

I have had some questions and comments about my post the other night regarding the radio frequencies that were utilized by emergency services. While most have just been wondering why this change in FCC rules ever came to being, I have had a couple emails telling me I am wrong, as well as go further and blame Clinton for it.

I want to go into more details of the downfalls of the new radio systems used by public safety. I was on a local fire department in the 80's and early 90's. Our town had a Motorola office located in our district, so we were one of the first fire departments in the nation to use this new system. I also had the convenience of growing up with a father who is a radio/electronic genius (he was offered to head up the FBI's communication division in the 1980's, but turned it down), so I have learned a lot about radio frequencies over the years, as well as worked in electronics repair. This put me in a key position when our fire department made the change in the 1980's.

First off, I have dug into NewsBank to get an article regarding the changes. This article is from the January 12, 1987 edition of the Lexington Herald: