skydeck

Kevin Martin and the Four Freedoms

May 3, 2007 | 1 Comment

Carriers like to tell Congress and the FCC that the wireless market is so fiercely competitive that consumers are perfectly served and no regulatory changes are necessary - apart from changes that the carriers want, of course. Most people in the tech community disagree, but recoil at the idea of going to Washington and engaging in a political process that looks like the opposite of entrepreneurship. The telcos smile at our idealism, hire more lawyers than engineers, and roll all over us.

I went to see FCC Chairman Kevin Martin speak at a meeting of the Churchill Club in Mountain View this morning. In conversation with George Anders from the WSJ, he spoke about the 700 MHz auction, how consumers will be affected by the end of analog broadcasts, leveling the playing field for set-top boxes in the cable industry, the proposed merger between Sirius and XM, sex and violence in the media, E911, and the Skype petition. That tells you how much impact the FCC has on the technology industry.

At the end I asked him whether the FCC’s so-called four freedoms - the freedom to access content, to use any application, to attach non-harmful devices to a network, and to obtain service plan information - were fundamental statements about the rights of consumers, regardless of how much competition there is in the marketplace. He said yes, and that in the context of the wireless industry, the only question is how best to guarantee those rights.

I hope he works that out soon. I have a Broadband Access card from Verizon Wireless. Their terms of service restrict the devices that I can connect to it, the kind of content I can look at, the applications I can run, and until recently they refused to say how much bandwidth I was allowed to use each month - only that I could be disconnected for going over the secret limits on their Unlimited Data Plan.

If you’re reading this outside the US, substitute your own regulator. In the UK, Truphone now claims that Vodafone has not merely crippled VoIP on the Nokia N95, but is blocking customers from dialing Truphone numbers.

Posted by: Jason
Categories: ThisIsBroken, Mobile Market