While FCC assesses the impact of its enforcement program by periodically reviewing certain program outputs, it lacks the management tools needed to fully measure its outputs and manage its program. Specifically, FCC’s Enforcement Bureau has not set specific enforcement goals, developed a well-defined enforcement strategy, or established performance measures that are linked to the enforcement goals. FCC measures outputs, such as the extent to which it takes enforcement action within its statute of limitations requirement for assessing fines or the time it takes to close investigations, but it does not measure outcomes such as the effects of its enforcement actions on levels of compliance in certain areas.

Enforcement Bureau officials told us that the bureau has not set specific goals and performance measures because its priorities are constantly changing. Officials explained that the Enforcement Bureau is responsive to a number of stakeholders—Congress, Commissioners, the public—and the priorities of those stakeholders change. In addition, the Enforcement Bureau is responsible for enforcing a wide range of rules and issues, and current enforcement priorities may not be future enforcement priorities.

This is a first in a series of site updates to take place this weekend, as I prepare to embark on another hiatus: I have my final preliminary exam to take, a dissertation proposal to write, and must defend those and all my other work to-date in order to remain in grad school. This "ABD" decision process will conclude in early May. Then, immediately, I'm heading abroad for a conference.

So, get your fix now, because the next one probably won't be ready for another couple of months.

You can imagine my dismay when I read last spring that Comcast declared its intent to buy out Insight, and recently I received a letter in the mail informing me that I would officially become a Comcast customer in short order.

Although AT&T may be bureaucratically and technically inept, Comcast is the most aggressively arrogant of the broadband-trust bunch. For example, the company's instituted mysterious "bandwidth caps" on users who use "too much" of their connections, and has now been conclusively indicted in the court of public opinion for interfering with and/or cutting off the connections of customers who use applications Comcast doesn't like, such as peer-to-peer and video-streaming software - even business-friendly applications like Lotus Notes.

So, upon formal notice that I was now, for all intents and purposes, another one of Comcast's bitches, I called the company's customer support system (1-800-COMCAST) to ask three simple questions:

1. What is the "mystery bandwidth cap" which I must not exceed to lose my service?

2. Can I use peer-to-peer software on my Comcast connection if I am using it for legitimate purposes, such as sharing music I made myself that has no copyright?

3. Will Comcast's terms of service prohibit me from publicly disparaging the company at the risk of losing my Internet connection, as AT&T has previously tried to do?

My first call to Comcast got me transferred to six different departments, none of whom could answer my questions. Upon the sixth transfer, I was put into Comcast's "circular hold" file, where I waited for ~30 minutes before hanging up.

I called again. This time I was only transferred twice, to someone in "Internet tech support," who informed me that, indeed, the use of peer-to-peer and other software is prohibited on Comcast's network. My specific question was, "If I use peer-to-peer software to share information that is NOT copyrighted, can you put a notation on my account or something to stop your network security people from resetting or otherwise interfering with my connection?" The Comcast representative's answer was, "No." So I followed up: "Does this explicitly mean that the use of such software is prohibited on your network?" The answer: "Yes."

This is new: in the past, Comcast has publicly reserved the right to "shape" or "throttle" network traffic in order to reduce "network congestion," but this is the first I've heard of a Comcast rep telling a customer NOT to use peer-to-peer software AT ALL.

I then asked (again) about Comcast's mystery bandwidth cap. And again, I was transferred several times, eventually to a woman who told me there WAS a cap, but she didn't know what it was, especially since I was a newly-assimilated Comcast customer. This leads me to believe that Comcast's bandwidth cap is variable, depending on which portion/region of Comcast's network you're connected to, and whether or not that portion of their network is robust enough to handle heavy traffic.

Finally, I asked the woman if she could answer a terms-of-service question. She told me to hold again - and then hung up on me.

Comcast and AT&T are not alone in shredding Internet freedom so blatantly now: Time-Warner is trial-testing metered bandwidth usage, and Verizon and Qwest aren't exactly friendly to the principle of network neutrality, either. At a time in our nation's history when "freedom of choice" has been conflated to something akin to a Constitutional right, the country's broadband environment belies the hype.

I filed some comments today in the FCC's proposed rulemaking that would give AM radio stations access to FM translators. The comments essentially boil down all the random thoughts I've posted here in the past about the matter, and present them in a more formal and constructive, and slightly less caustic manner.

Not like they'll amount to anything, though: after re-reading the FCC's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking more closely, it's obvious the agency's really leaning in the direction of the NAB's desire. In addition, a cursory check of the FCC's Consolidated Data Base System reveals that more than a dozen AM radio stations have already applied for special temporary authority to run an FM translator, and at least one has been formally approved. Many of these applications cite the ongoing proceeding as justification for operation. Talk about creating "facts on the ground," eh?

A lawsuit to challenge the ruling is in the works, and members of Congress are yelping as their constituents call all pissed off (and rightly so); they're pondering taking actions ranging from a "resolution of disapproval" of the FCC's cross-ownership action, to a bill formally repealing the FCC's decision, to a campaign to scrutinize and overhaul the FCC itself next year. The latter option would definitely be the most interesting to observe - anytime an agency goes into the legislative woodshed for restructuring, it's going to disrupt business as usual. Regardless, this issue is far from finished, and still has the potential to undertake several dangerous iterations.

In the midst of the media ownership hullabaloo, presumably as a move to mollify some of its critics, the FCC released another Report and Order and Notice of Proposed rulemaking regarding the LPFM radio service. This is the agency's first bona-fide effort to both protect and truly expand LPFM to a majority of the country. Not only has the FCC formally committed to opening another LPFM station application window (date TBA), but it acknowledged the need to take the technical straightjacket off the service and prioritize its existence more fairly relative to other FM stations, especially translators. Not only did the FCC explicitly conflate the LPFM issue with the proliferation of translator stations, but it in effect came down on the side of LPFM - a somewhat radical turn in policy, if effectuated.

The Prometheus Radio Project has written an excellent summary of the new and proposed changes to the LPFM service, and rightfully notes there's a lot more work to do:

It is important to note that while this order made a substantial improvement, it was improvement of a nearly intolerable situation. This report and order comes nowhere near what fair-minded people would consider a just regulatory system for community radio. It is a patchwork of ameliorations of previously established unfair policies—policies which essentially give low power groups table scraps and never gets near a more fundamentally just system of broadcast ownership. We appreciate the efforts of the people at the Commission to improve the situation, but also we resonate with people at the grassroots who will see these various improvements and cry out that this is a pathetic substitute for the kind of community radio policy that we should have.

Predictably, the National Association of Broadcasters announced its opposition to an LPFM expansion, stressing its aged refrain that trying to "shoe-horn" "hundreds, if not thousands, of additional LPFM stations...into an overcrowded radio dial without causing considerable interference simply defies the laws of physics." This, of course, flies in the face of the NAB's ongoing attempt to do just that, by giving AM radio stations beleaguered by digital interference mass-access to FM translators.

Meanwhile, unlicensed microbroadcasting continues, relatively unencumbered by FCC nonsense. You wouldn't think so by a first glance at the numbers, though: at its current pace, the FCC's Enforcement Bureau will be able to claim that it carried out - on average - one enforcement action per day against a pirate station in 2007. A great example of how to lie with statistics.

It's important to reiterate that the number of enforcement actions carried out does not directly correspond to the actual termination of unlicensed station operations. The FCC typically makes multiple contacts with a station when it finds them, and each contact generates a data point. For example, a case involving a microbroadcaster in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who was just issued a $10,000 Notice of Apparent Liability this month, actually generated eight data points in our Enforcement Action Database - two visits and a warning letter issued in 2006 (3) and four visits followed by the NAL this year (5). It appears to be common practice now for FCC agents to generate multiple warning letters for single-station cases: one (or more) for individuals who can be tied directly to the station, and at least one for the owners of the property from which it operates. These are all counted as their own data points, and this inflates the perception of enforcement activity.

However, this is not to deny that there is much more FCC action taking place against pirate stations now than ever before. You are free to manually count the number of parties affected by the FCC this year, but I'd guess that it would come out somewhere north of 100. By and large, though, this activity remains purely administrative - visits and warning letters. These have multiplied fairly dramatically, and the time between initial contact by FCC field agents and the issuance of a follow-up station warning letter has been cut to a month or less. In some especially active areas of the country, the escalation of cases to threats of actual penalty takes place now over the course of months, not years. Even still, the number of stations fiscally penalized (or threatened with such penalties) in 2007 constitutes less than 10% of the total enforcement activity, and you can count the nunber of station raids on one hand.

Two interesting trends come out of this year's FCC enforcement activity. The first is that the nation's "pirate radio capital" seems to have shifted, enforcement-wise, from southern Florida to the New York metropolitan area, with a lively satellite scene in New Jersey. Secondly, a significant number of today's microbroadcasters are operating to serve ethnically identifiable audiences, audiences so far off mainstream radio's radar screen as to be effectively invisible. Some of these stations operate as commercial ventures. Several have been fined, and most (if not all) have been able to plead their cases down to nominal amounts. You can bet, in these cases, as one person "gets dinged" the gear simply moves along to a new home.

In sum, as always, it pays to be cautious and well-informed, but by and large the radio cops are still paper tigers; opportunity is still tied to risk, and that's ultimately a call the microbroadcaster must make. The fact that there are so many of them out there, however, speaks for itself - keep in mind we only document the ones who get caught.

Is HD Radio a Farce? - A good collection of information on what's happening both within the radio industry and among consumers, who, by and large, seem to be holding their noses once they get a whiff of those "secret stations between frequencies."

HD Radio on the Medium Wave (AM) Band - An excellent, if somewhat disorganized, collection of coverage about the increasing problems with AM-HD interference.

Stop IBOC Now! - A coalition of broadcast engineers who are opposed to the deployment of a "new and improved" technology which may, in effect, destroy at least one of the broadcast bands. There's been rumblings of dissatisfaction within the broadcast industry for a long time now about the prospects of HD Radio, but this is the first quasi-organized campaign of people who intimately understand the technology and are well-aware of its shortfalls.

In related news, the "HD Radio Alliance" has committed to spending another $230 million to market the technology to the public. This brings the running-total of marketing expenditure for HD to $680 million. Note that this is not a direct cash outlay - the Alliance (some of whom have already turned off their digital transmitters) is counting airtime that they'll use to play pro-HD spots as part of their expenditures.

Meanwhile, in Canada, the Digital Radio Co-ordinating group, a large part of which includes the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, has issued a report recommending that Canadian stations not adopt the FM-HD protocol. (Many Canadian stations have already gone digital with
an alternate system). According to the DRCG,

Based on the evidence currently in hand, the DRCG considers that it would be risky for Canadian broadcasters to proceed at this time with an unrestricted roll-out of HD Radio services in the FM band, in the manner implemented in the US. There is no ground-swell of radio listener interest in this technology so far and the lack of inexpensive receivers, as well as unique new programming services, continues to make it difficult to market HD Radio to the public in the US.