AT&T; has turned up the volume on Google Voice in a filing with the FCC.

At issue is Google’s decision to block calls that are routed to certain rural areas with higher than average termination costs.

Google questions regulating its service – a web application – the same as traditional phone services, but AT&T;’s letter claims that at the end of the day, Google Voice is routing PSTN to PSTN calls.

AT&T; calls Google’s behaviour – actions by one of the leading advocates for net neutrality – hypocritical:

Google’s double-standard for “openness” – where Google does what it wants while other providers are subject to Commission regulations – is plainly inconsistent with the goal of preserving a “free and open” Internet ecosystem.

The AT&T; letter raises interesting questions of how far open access regulation should go.

Google’s call blocking begs an even more important question that the Commission must consider as it evaluates whether to adopt rules regarding Internet openness. If the Commission is going to be a “smart cop on the beat preserving a free and open Internet,” then shouldn’t its “beat” necessarily cover the entire Internet neighborhood, including Google? Indeed, if the Commission cannot stop Google from blocking disfavored telephone calls as Google contends, then how could the Commission ever stop Google from also blocking disfavored websites from appearing in the results of its search engine; or prohibit Google from blocking access to applications that compete with its own email, text messaging, cloud computing and other services; or otherwise prevent Google from abusing the gatekeeper control it wields over the Internet?

While these are hypothetical cases being raised, so are most of the concerns behind the additional rules being sought by those advocating special net neutrality legislation.

Is AT&T; using a reductio ad absurdum argument against Google as part of its net neutrality campaign?

How far would open access regulation extend?

Last week’s release of our report [pdf, 944KB] on the state of broadband services in Canada has led to some interesting dialogue. As an aside, let me state that I was willing to tolerate some of the more juvenile name-calling in engaging some critics on Broadband Reports, but yesterday’s use of Nazi metaphors crossed a line, making it very clear that my participation was not welcome.

I hope to be able to deal more completely with yesterday’s release of a study [pdf, 2.92MB] from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society in a later posting.

That study was commissioned by the FCC in July with the following terms of reference:

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University will conduct an independent expert review of existing literature and studies about broadband deployment and usage throughout the world. This project will help inform the FCC’s efforts in developing the National Broadband Plan.

The report will be the subject of comments to the FCC over the next few months, helping to inform the FCC’s National Broadband Plan.

Preliminary examination seems to indicate that many of the Harvard rankings appear to incorporate the same problematic data points from reports and measurement tools that we have already discussed, but I will reserve commentary until I have an opportunity for a more complete review of the 232 page report.

I noticed that the Harvard report speaks of the benefits of examining high rankings in one metric versus a lower than expected ranking under another metric.

Keeping an eye out for these kinds of discrepancies allows us to identify false “successes” and false “failures,” or be more precise about what aspects of a country’s performance are worth learning for adoption, and which are worth learning for avoidance.

I agree that looking at such discrepancies are important, for these reasons, as well as to help detect errors in the data itself.

It was precisely such discrepancies that helped us immediately detect the errors in OECD’s use of arbitrary advertised price and speed data.

It is not clear why the Harvard researchers did not explore their own discrepancies, such as its statement on page 111:

[Canada] does not appear in the rankings for prices of very high speeds, because there were no offerings of service speeds of 35Mbps or higher in Canada in September of 2008.

Contrast this with Videotron’s 50Mbps service showing up 3 pages later in the chart on page 114. Had such flaws been detected in their data, would the same conclusions have been drawn about Canada’s regulatory framework?

It isn’t as though the researchers accepted the OECD data as delivered. Other obvious errors in the OECD data were detected and results were massaged to account for them, such as Slovak Republic reporting of FTTH on page 55. Considering the report was commissioned just 3 months ago, the task of scrubbing the data may have been too daunting.

The most rapid commentaries on the FCC-commissioned study came from folks eager to see how Canadian’s measured up. Like checking out the pictures without reading the articles.

Who will give this latest report a fair and full review from a Canadian perspective?

Conventional news is a tough business these days. The erosion of ad revenues and the fragmentation of audiences have bankrupted many papers and seen a fundamental change in the ways news is gathered and presented.

Monday night’s episode of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show opened with a critique of CNN that was triggered by the news network ‘fact-checking’ a Saturday Night Live sketch that was critical of President Obama.

Stewart and his team looked at CNN’s poor record of fact checking on its own programs.

Fact checking is the function of news. That is the public service they provide.

CNN isn’t alone; a lot of news outlets aren’t doing that kind of fact checking. Where is the critical analysis of numbers, checking methodology.

Too many interviews on CNN end with “We’ll leave it there” as Stewart showed in rapid succession. Too many misleading studies are just being “left there” without appropriate critical analysis.

I can relate to this segment from The Daily Show.

Are “facts” going to be determined by the loudest voices or majority opinion?

A quick look at a Wired story about a new internet statistical report led to a number of tweets proclaiming the decrease in relevance of P2P traffic. Successive re-tweets added commentary – not all accurate.

The first asked if anyone would tell the CRTC:

P2P is sooooo 2007. Hopefully someone will tell the #CRTC. http://bit.ly/1QjIs3

A few re-tweets later, we saw a re-tweet, dropping a couple syllables in “so” and adding commentary stating “study finds big drop in P2P traffic”:

P2P is so 2007. Hopefully someone will tell CRTC.[study finds big drop in P2P traffic] http://bit.ly/1QjIs3

That one got re-tweeted with another editorial addition:

So does this mean Rogers will drop the bit cap? study finds big drop in P2P traffic] http://bit.ly/1QjIs3

But, in reality, there was no drop in P2P traffic reported in either the study or the Wired article. The article spoke of a drop in the proportion of total internet traffic, with P2P file sharing dropping from 40% in 2007 to 18% today.

To look at P2P traffic totals, you need to see what total internet traffic was doing in that 2 year period. According to a recent report on a Telegeography release, total internet traffic is up 188% (up 79% in 2009 and 61% in 2008). As a result, total P2P traffic appears to have actually increased 25% in the 2 year period – hardly a “big drop”.

Smaller than average growth is not the same as a decrease. Will someone tell the CRTC that little factoid?

Twitter’s 140 character limit shouldn’t mean a sacrifice in accuracy.

Commenting on the efforts of Google Inc to build a massive digital library, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said the Internet should not be exempt from copyright laws.

The German government has a clear position: copyrights have to be protected in the Internet

Last year, I posted a story about France acting on hate content being imported over internet networks.

Are Europeans going to lead in treating digital and conventional content within a technology neutral legal framework?