Finally, Net Neutrality is Within Sight
Today, we celebrated. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has signaled that the Commission is finally making real progress on net neutrality. But the fight isn’t over by a long shot.
Proponents of net neutrality claim that big telecom companies seek to impose a tiered service model in order to control the pipeline and thereby remove competition, create artificial scarcity, and oblige subscribers to buy their otherwise uncompetitive services. Many believe net neutrality to be primarily important as a preservation of current freedoms. Prominent supporters of net neutrality include Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet Protocol, and Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web.
See also: Secret Multi-Billion Dollar Wireless Scam, Reed Hundt’s True Legacy
Until recently “net neutrality” was little more than a buzzword to most Americans, an arcane concept within an equally arcane sector of telecommunications law. But fierce resistance to a plan proposed last spring by Chairman Wheeler that Internet advocates said would have undermined net neutrality — the concept that all data on the Net must be treated equally by Internet service providers (ISPs) — has pushed this once obscure idea into the DC limelight.
Joshua Kopstein at Al Jazeera America –
“The plan Wheeler announced last May would have permitted ISPs such as Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner to give faster, priority access to sites and services able to pay for it as long as those deals were deemed commercially reasonable. But in a surprising about-face, he is now proposing rules that ban that practice by treating wired and wireless broadband Internet as a public utility under Title II of the Telecommunications Act — much like the telephone system.”
But Wheeler has changed his tune for the better –
“The Internet must be fast, fair and open. That is the message I’ve heard from consumers and innovators across this nation,” Wheeler wrote today in an article for Wired. “That is the principle that has enabled the Internet to become an unprecedented platform for innovation and human expression … The proposal I present to the commission will ensure the Internet remains open, now and in the future, for all Americans.”
This sudden turnabout of recent months has shocked the big telecoms and even net neutrality advocates, who until recently had relatively few powerful allies in their corner. Read more
The Economics and Marketing of Madness
Based partly on the work of Thomas Szasz (The Manufacture of Madness*) and produced by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, an anti-psychiatry group – The Marketing of Madness is the definitive documentary on the psychiatric drugging industry. Here is the real story of the high income partnership between psychiatry and drug companies that has created an $80 billion psychotropic drug profit center. (source: TopDocumentaryFilms.com)
But appearances are deceiving. How valid are psychiatrists’ diagnoses – and how safe are their drugs? Digging deep beneath the corporate veneer, this three-part documentary exposes the truth behind the slick marketing schemes and scientific deceit that conceal dangerous and often deadly sales campaigns.
*In his seminal work, The Manufacture of Madness, Dr. Szasz examines the similarities between the Inquisition and institutional psychiatry. His purpose is to show “that the belief in mental illness and the social actions to which it leads have the same moral implications and political consequences as had the belief in witchcraft and the social actions to which it led.”
In this film you’ll discover that… Many of the drugs side effects may actually make your ‘mental illness’ worse. Psychiatric drugs can induce aggression or depression. Some psychotropic drugs prescribed to children are more addictive than cocaine.
Catalyst House: A Bit of History!
July 16, 2011: With the release of the Summer 2011 newsletter The Catalyst! CAT turned 12 years old – July 16th, 1999, was the official launch of Catalyst House, when a small eclectic (and eccentric) group of visionaries and innovators decided to engage in a new business model that emphasized philanthropic entrepreneurship, social justice, and a bit of radical chic.
For the past 3-years, our CAT eNEWS has emphasized ‘small business intel’ – but our 12th birthday marks the return of our traditional editorial bent – mid market service and integration, strategic alliances, and more!
No, we certainly haven’t abandoned our small business guidance role – Small Business Intelligence and Updates are alive and well at our Catalyst House Blog, the ADMAX Marketing Blog and the www.CatalystHouse.BIZ Blog.
A bit of history –
The name Catalyst House was bestowed upon it by that marvelous name-smith and CAT Advisor Fred Lehrman
In nostalgia of the day, the very first newsletter issue of Catalyst eNews can be found here –
Volume-1 Issue-1 September 1999 may be found here.
We initially started Catalyst House, Inc., summer of 1999, while I lived in Cambridge, Mass. shortly after I returned from Brazil, working on a very special project with officials of that country and the founder of AOL Clive Smith.
Secret Multi-Billion Dollar Wireless Scam
Reed Hundt’s True Legacy
Last month we politely called it a “Great Airwaves Giveaway” – how major telecoms had ripped off the system by gaming billions in airwave licenses without proper compensation, with a little help from the FCC dating all the way back to the early 90s FCC of then Chairman Reed Hundt.
Well, it gets worse, so now the gloves are off: AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon gamed the regulatory system and were able to garner over $8 billion worth of discounted spectrum by posing as “very small businesses.” It was a massive rip-off of wireless spectrum that blocked legitimate small competitors from offering services, as they were “out-bid” by deep-pocketed impostors.
Is this the legacy that past FCC Chairman Reed Hundt is so proud of? (see Reed Hundt’s latest and The Great Airwaves Robbery)
On May 11, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing astutely titled, “The AT&T/T-Mobile Merger: Is Humpty Dumpty Being Put Back Together Again?”
At the hearing, Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, raised a fundamental challenge: “At present, four companies control nearly 90 percent of the national wireless market. The proposed acquisition would further consolidate an already concentrated market for wireless communication.”
SOURCE: David Rosen and Bruce Kushnick | AlterNet
The four companies that control the market (and their estimated market share) are: AT&T (26.8%), Verizon (26.0%), Sprint (22.9%) and T-Mobile (11.0%). With the merger of AT&T and T-Mobile, AT&T (44.0%) and Verizon (30.5%) will control nearly three-fourths of the market; Sprint’s share will increase to 16 percent; and the rest of the providers will drop to 6.3 percent.
If history is our guide, the FCC will approve the merger and come up with loosey-goosey voluntary commitments. And Verizon will most likely seek to acquire Sprint. This will return the U.S. to a wireless duopoly.
In 1984, when AT&T was broken up, only two wireless licenses were allowed per market. The local Bell Operating phone companies received one of the licenses for their entire territories and the second license was put up for bid.
The Great Airwaves… Giveaway?
In the early 90s, we fought hard against the advent of high bid auction of commercial airwaves. (See USIMTA/USIPCA Lobbying History & Airwaves Auction Winner) We argued at the FCC and before Congress repeatedly, until we were hoarse and blue in the face, that auctions of communications spectrum, like cellular phone and wireless broadband frequencies would stifle competition and freeze out the several thousand small independent “wildcatters,” whom we represented … and who we were, as well.
But we always assumed that once an auction mechanism replaced the lotteries of construction permits (ie, FCC licenses) that the airwaves would in fact be sold to the big players.
But alas, since 1993 when spectrum auctions were mandated by Congress, the US Govt. has quietly given away well over a half trillion dollars in spectrum (90% of all licensing, in fact!) that was supposed to be auctioned to the highest bidder. A 2007 study demonstrates that the lotteries that were occurring prior to 1993 were much more honest and transparent. Well duuhh.
“The third rail of spectrum policy is the rotten, special interest politics that has driven lawmakers to give away the public’s airwaves to private interests without public compensation. In the vast stream of government reports seeking to reform spectrum policy since 1993, one looks in vain for more than a token acknowledgement, let alone a serious and sustained discussion, of this giveaway.”
The Art of Spectrum Lobbying
America’s $480 Billion Spectrum Giveaway:
How it Happened, and How to Prevent it from Recurring
USIMTA/USIPCA – started 1990
Lynnea was the founder of two small business-based wireless trade associations – USIMTA and USIPCA – and has lobbied on Capitol Hill and at the FCC where she has spoken out strongly against the cable TV monopoly, illegal spectrum warehousing and ill-conceived congressional schemes to auction our nation’s precious airwaves to the highest bidder. Lynnea is a founder and former CEO of a Washington DC telecommunications consulting and management company that had holdings in several operating and near operating wireless communications systems and companies.
USIMTA Newsletter Spring 1992 Washington DC
USIMTA Newsletter Fall 1992 Washington DC
USIMTA Newsletter Spring 1993 Washington DC
