It helps to be cute when you’re an endangered species.
The California Public Utilities Commission is one step closer to extinction, at least in its current form. The assembly utilities and commerce commerce overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment yesterday that would strip the CPUC of its special, independent status under the California constitution and give the legislature the job of deciding how utilities of would be regulated, or not.
Broadband infrastructure subsidies are off the table in Sacramento, thanks to a coordinated campaign by AT&T staff lobbyists and the cable industry’s political front organisation, the California Cable and Telecommunications Association (CCTA). Assembly bill 1758 was pulled by its author, assemblyman Mark Stone (D – Santa Cruz) after it became clear that the California assembly’s utilities and commerce committee was going to spike it at its meeting this afternoon.
Minimum speeds for guaranteed broadband infrastructure loans from the federal agriculture department have been raised. The Rural Utilities Service (RUS) opened another round of loans earlier this month, and upped the benchmark speed for both area eligibility and funded infrastructure from 4 Mbps download/1 Mbps upload to 10 Mbps down/1 Mbps up, for wireline and fixed and mobile wireless projects.
That brings the RUS minimum speeds in line with other federal broadband subsidy programs, particularly the Connect America Fund program run by the Federal Communications Commission, which will be giving more than half a billion dollars to incumbent telephone companies in California alone.… More
The official vote tally for assembly bill 2395 has been posted. That’s the bill that would let AT&T shut down its wireline networks in rural and inner city areas and replace them with lower capacity but higher cost and higher profit margin wireless systems. It was clear from listening to the audio feed that a big, bipartisan majority of the California assembly utilities and commerce committee favored the bill, but the rules allow votes to be silently added to the roll, or even changed, before the meeting officially ends.… More
Blackberry’s sole remaining selling proposition – security – has gone up in smoke with the revelation that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has the master key to decrypt messages on consumer phones. Investigative stories by Vice and Motherboard document how the Mounties read encrypted messages, and leave little doubt that it was with the company’s active assistance…
Neither the RCMP, nor BlackBerry ever confirmed where the global key actually came from and the documents shed little light on the matter.
The RAND corporation published a study about self driving cars that comes to a mathematically obvious conclusion, while completely missing the public policy point. The study starts with the fact that one person dies in a U.S. traffic accident for every 100 million miles driven. Then it dives into a really complex statistical analysis…
Given that fatalities and injuries are rare events, we will show that fully autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries.
California’s senior U.S. senator wants software, hardware and telecoms companies, and pretty much everyone else in the high tech universe to keep a master key to their encrypted products and services. And turn the key anytime a court tells them to do so. The draft of a bill by senators Diane Feinstein (D – California) and Richard Burr (R – North Carolina) says…
A covered entity that receives a court order from a government for information or data shall— (A) provide such information or data to such government in an intelligible format; or (B) provide such technical assistance as is necessary to obtain such information or data in an intelligible format or to achieve the purpose of the court order.
AT&T is one step closer to getting blanket permission to yank its copper networks in rural California, and replace them with wireless service as it pleases. On a lopsided vote, the assembly utilities and commerce committee voted to move assembly bill 2395 along toward a full floor vote. Written by AT&T and carried on its behalf by assemblyman Evan Low (D – Silicon Valley), the bill would allow AT&T to replace legacy analog voice telephone networks and service with any functional equivalent, so long as it’s capable of calling 911.… More
Charter Communication’s purchase of Time Warner and Bright House cable systems in California should be approved if the company sticks to promises that it has made and to agreements it has reached with parties that previously opposed the deal. That’s the draft decision offered by Karl Bemesderfer, an administrative law judge with the California Public Utilities Commission.
Bemesderfer’s proposed decision will go to a vote of the full commission next month. In it, he says that the deal does have some negatives – greater market concentration, for example – but Charter’s promised upgrades and changes to the way it does business makes up for it…
Weighing Charter’s commitments to increased Internet speeds, increased numbers of wireless access points, less onerous contracts, more effective competition in the enterprise space, unbundling of services, equal treatment of content providers and greater diversity in hiring, contracting and programming, all of which will be made explicit conditions of approval of the Transaction, against the increase in concentration of the market for broadband Internet access without the threat of discrimination against competing content creators, we conclude that the benefits of the Transaction outweigh its drawbacks and the Transaction satisfies [the section of the public utilities code that says that such deals must “be beneficial on an overall basis to state and local economies, and to the communities in areas served by the utility”].