Tag Archives: music tech policy

Net Neutrality (Mike Mills, Senator Al Franken, & FCC Chair Julius Genachowski on CSPAN)

If there’s a way to embed the CSPAN video player, I’m not smart enough to figure it out. The first video is the only one to feature Chaiman Genachowski being played onto the stage by a New Orleans brass funk band (at approximately 41:30:00)

THE FUTURE OF MUSIC POLICY SUMMIT 2009.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Georgetown University

Senator Al Franken and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski delivered keynote addresses at the 2009 Music Policy Summit at Georgetown University. Among the topics they addressed were use of the Internet as a distribution mechanism for music, censorship and access issues, market competition, and the role of the FCC in regulating the Internet in a fair manner.

Washington, DC : 54 min.

Also available, from today:

FCC VOTES TO MOVE FORWARD WITH NET NEUTRALITY RULEMAKING PROCESS
Today

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) met and voted to move forward on Chairman Julius Genachowski’s open internet proposal. The net neutrality rules, if passed, would prohibit internet providers from favoring or discriminating against online applications. The FCC will have a period of hearings and comments on the proposal before a final vote is taken.
Washington, DC : 1 hr. 38 min.

FCC decision regarding Comcast and Net Neutrality

Today FCC Commissioner Kevin Martin climbed out of Comcast’s colon long enough to cast the tie-breaking vote in a complaint by users of Comcast’s high speed service who have had their Internet access blocked or otherwise interfered with based on their usage of file-sharing services:

Kevin J. Martin, the commission’s chairman, said the order was meant to set a precedent that Internet providers, and indeed all communications companies, could not keep customers from using their networks the way they see fit unless there is a good reason.

“We are preserving the open character of the Internet,” Mr. Martin said in an interview after the 3-to-2 vote. “We are saying that network operators can’t block people from getting access to any content and any applications.”

The case also highlights the broader issue of whether new legislation is needed to force Internet providers to treat all uses of their networks equally, a concept called network neutrality. Some have urged legislation to make sure that big Internet companies do not discriminate against small companies or those that compete with their video or telephone services.

[read the whole article in the New York Times]

You can read much, much more at the Save the Internet website maintained by the Free Press Action Fund

here's something fun:

You think history doesn’t repeat itself?

But now we are facing a very new and a very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the video cassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank tape. And it is like a great tidal wave just off the shore. This video cassette recorder and the blank tape threaten profoundly the life-sustaining protection, I guess you would call it, on which copyright owners depend, on which film people depend, on which television people depend and it is called copyright.
-Testimony of Jack Valenti, President of the MPAA, April 12, 1982