Tag Archive for: neutrality

FCC Republicans refused to give Congress net neutrality documents

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(credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

The two Republican members of the Federal Communications Commission have refused to give Congress documents needed to complete an investigation into the FCC’s net neutrality rulemaking process, according to a lawmaker.

“Your refusal to cooperate with the Committee’s request is unacceptable, it obstructs our investigation, and it prevents the Committee from having a complete or accurate understanding of the circumstances surrounding this rulemaking,” US Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Maryland) wrote in a letter to FCC Commissioners Ajit Pai and Michael O’Rielly yesterday.

There are “serious questions” about “Pai’s efforts to organize opposition to the proposed rule with outside parties,” Cummings’ office said in a related press release.

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Technology Lab – Ars Technica

As AT&T falls behind T-Mobile in streaming, an executive blames net neutrality

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Unlike some of its competitors, like Comcast and T-Mobile, which have released products that some believe violate the FCC’s net neutrality regulations, AT&T was apparently forced to shelve several new products as a result of the new regulations.

Speaking at the Phoenix Center’s annual U.S. Telecoms Symposium earlier this week, AT&T senior vice president Bob Quinn said that, since the FCC reclassified broadband as a utility, the company has “had to shelve a bunch of stuff because we’ve got to wait and see.”

The new legal environment has also restricted AT&T’s ability to develop new services, Quinn said at the event. 

“Since the Open Internet order came out we’ve had weekly calls with the business units and literally 15 lawyers who are all trying to figure out whether that stuff we’ve invested in … would be a violation of the order,” he said, according to a Politico report. 

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Network World Colin Neagle

BlackBerry issues futile call for ‘app neutrality’

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App neutrality? Honestly?

This proposal by BlackBerry – actually sent to U.S. lawmakers yesterday – calls for the government to compel the likes of Netflix to make their applications work with the likes of BlackBerry whether business considerations justify it or not.

From a blog post based on that letter to Congress and carrying the byline of BlackBerry CEO John Chen.

Unfortunately, not all content and applications providers have embraced openness and neutrality. Unlike BlackBerry, which allows iPhone users to download and use our BBM service, Apple does not allow BlackBerry or Android users to download Apple’s iMessage messaging service. Netflix, which has forcefully advocated for carrier neutrality, has discriminated against BlackBerry customers by refusing to make its streaming movie service available to them. Many other applications providers similarly offer service only to iPhone and Android users. This dynamic has created a two-tiered wireless broadband ecosystem, in which iPhone and Android users are able to access far more content and applications than customers using devices running other operating systems. These are precisely the sort of discriminatory practices that neutrality advocates have criticized at the carrier level.

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Network World Paul McNamara

Obama promises to promote net neutrality, broadband

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U.S. President Barack Obama promised to push for net neutrality rules and for more transparency in the government’s surveillance programs during his State of the Union address late Tuesday.

In a speech largely focused on the U.S. economy and aiding the middle class, Obama also promised to push for the deployment of next generation broadband networks, as he outlined in a preview to the State of the Union a week ago. The president has called on the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to pass strong net neutrality rules and to roll back state limits on municipal broadband projects.

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