FCC Considers Broadband, Digital Future at Pa. Hearing

American Cable Association joins entrepreneurs, academics, public for FCC hearing on broadband.

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 7/21/2008 5:59:00 PM

House Telecommunications & Internet Subcommittee vice chairman Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) likened so-called mash-up artists, who sample audio and video clips to create original work, to dolphins caught “in the tuna network of digital piracy.”

That colorul metaphor came at a Federal Communications Commission hearing on "Broadband and the Digital Future" at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh Monday, where the commissioners heard from online veterans and startups, academics and the public.

FCC chairman Kevin Martin, who presided over the meeting, used the opportunity to point out again that cable bills doubled over the past decade, tying it to the need for greater video competition from new sources, like Internet-protocol TV. He also raised the issue of a la carte and program unbundling.

Martin did give cable props for investing $100 billion over the past 10 years in infrastructure upgrades, but he also paved the way for the Pittsburgh-based American Cable Association to make a pitch for changes to program bundling and retransmission-consent regimes.

The ACA said unbundling programming and fixing retrans would make it easier for them to offer broadband, which they have to do despite "unique challenges," including the cost of maintaining a network among widely spread homes and the difficulty of accessing capital.

Any increase in bandwidth cost, including paying for unwanted channels, has a direct correlation with smaller operators' ability to provide broadband, said ACA president Matt Polka. Small cable operators have no leverage with larger programmers that demand carriage of unwanted channels, Polka said.

The American Civil Liberties Union took the opportunity of the hearing to take broadband networks to task for "deep-packet inspection," which is networks' ability to inspect packets of information as they traverse the network in real time. The issue has raised privacy concerns on Capitol Hill, particularly as it relates to targeted advertising based on Web-surfing habits.

“The ACLU also urged the commission to scrutinize the growing practice of Internet-service providers examining their customers’ Internet habits," the ACLU said in written comments. "Using deep-packet inspections, ISPs know everything we do online. DPI allows ISPs to have access to all of your searches, friends and family, anything you read and e-mail, any sites you visit and any comments you post. DPI is a virtual strip search for you and your computer."

HDNet chairman Mark Cuban put in a pitch for 3-D TV, saying it was going to become a fabric of the future, but that it would also take a lot of bandwidth.

He said that while the Internet should be open, there must be room for "application-specific" networks that are "reasonably open" but provide the necessary bandwidth.