FCC approval is the last thing standing in the way of AT&T; (NYSE: T) connecting with Bell South (NYSE: BLS), which, at $82.2B, is the largest telcom industry merger in US history.

The US regulator is currently deadlocked along party lines with 2 commissioners on each side of the issue. Democrat commissioners are said to be seeking concessions from AT&T; prior to giving their assent to the deal. The Justice Department gave its approval on Oct. 11, with no competitive concerns nor requiring the divestiture of any assets. The takeover has also been approved by regulators in 18 states.

FCC chair Kevin Martin is moving to permit commissioner Robert McDowell to vote on the issue, breaking the tie. McDowell once worked for COMPTEL and had previously declared a conflict of interest.

Concessions could include: wholesale price caps on access to AT&T;’s local lines; divest unused wireless spectrum; pledges to not discriminate against certain Internet traffic; and, offer reasonably priced naked DSL service.

The complaints sound familiar to observers of the regulatory frameworks around the world. Will partison politics in the US regulator affect the conditions of approval? Are conditions on mergers really the best way to regulate, if the rules don’t apply to all ILECs?

Technorati Tags:
ATT, FCC, Bell South, Net Neutrality

The deal has closed and the world’s largest telecommunications equipment vendor has a new name and logo: introducing Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU). I wrote a little piece this past summer about rebranding and the caution that needs to be taken in changing a corporate identity. Alcatel-Lucent has (so far) decided to keep both names. I guess Alcacent sounded too much like a remedy for after my Super Bowl party.

Like the smudged effect of the former Lucent red coffee-cup stain, the company’s new logo is a stylized version of an infinity symbol that looks as if it is drawn by hand. Embedded within the symbol are likenesses of an A and an L. The signature color of the new logo is purple (which goes so nicely with the my own homepage).

Patricia Russo, Chief Executive Officer of the combined Alcatel-Lucent is quoted saying:

Our new logo represents the endless possibilities for the future and our commitment to being a strong and enduring ally for our customers around the world.

Will the double corporate name be as strong and enduring?

In the past two weeks I have heard rumours that Bell is considering dropping its award winning campaign featuring those lovable beavers, Frank and Gordon. Is there any truth to it?

The beavers won the Best-of-the-best award in 2006 from the Canadian Marketing Association, and they were recently featured in Marketing magazine. A few sources have suggested that they are not popular enough with the right people.

Take our survey (in the left column) and we’ll pass on the results.

Tell your friends. Save the beavers!

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Update: [December 6, 5:25 pm]
The results were a draw: 50% of you said ‘Save the Beavers’; 50% wanted politically incorrect winter coats. Must be that wind chill that settled in.

Technorati Tags:
Bell, Frank and Gordon, CMA

In mid-October, I wrote a piece about reasonable expectations of privacy. I asked a number of questions in that article:

In a world connected by public internetworking, what is a reasonable expectation of privacy? This is is not an easy question to answer. Are average users taking the steps to protect their privacy? Do average users know the kind of personal information that is being dropped along the way as they surf the net?
…
How do we balance individual privacy rights with the real need to modernize investigative tools for law enforcement? How do we make sure that users’ reasonable expectations of privacy are in fact reasonable?

Alec Saunders asked a valid question in response to that posting:

What needs are not being met with existing law enforcement tools, AND what laws would have to change in order to meet those needs.

It turns out that the existing laws are just fine. How do ISPs respond to lawful requests for information? I asked David Butt, a former prosecutor with an extensive concentration on internet child exploitation cases, to help understand the issues.

He writes:

Internet child abuse investigators routinely need bare bones subscriber information (name and address) from ISPs to conduct their investigations. A question commonly asked by ISPs and privacy advocates is, why shouldn’t the police use a search warrant to get that bare bones subscriber information? There are seven really good answers to this question.

1. Bare bones subscriber information is not the kind of private information that requires a search warrant. The highest court in Canada, the Supreme Court, has clearly said so.
2. Every other business in Canada must supply this kind of bare bones customer information to the police upon request. There is no principled reason why ISPs should be exempted from the rules that apply to every other business.
3. PIPEDA has a specific section in it whose purpose is to authorize the granting of this bare bones subscriber information to police. ISPs therefore have specific statutory authority to rely upon.
4. Police services are always understaffed and over worked. The demand for policing services always exceeds the available supply. Therefore, adding unnecessary burdens on police by requiring them to go to the trouble of getting legally unnecessary warrants prevents police officers from devoting their limited time to more important work. The result is that the whole community suffers unnecessarily.
5. Search warrant requirements under Canadian law are onerous. A typical search warrant, even for bare bones subscriber information, may often run to more than 40 pages in length. This will require several hours of work by an officer, sometimes many officers. It will involve at least two visits to a judge. Given the limited availability of judges, the entire process may take days. All of this effort is legally unnecessary and therefore a complete waste of public funds.
6. Bare bones subscriber information is necessary to identify the location of the suspect so that the case can be conducted by the local police service. If a search warrant were necessary for every such bare bones request, the police service in the city where the ISP head office is located would be obliged to do a great deal of onerous search warrant work simply to pass the file on to another jurisdiction when the bare bones subscriber information comes back. This places not only an unnecessary but a disproportionate burden on police services in those cities that host ISP head offices.
7. Other democratic countries, that fully respect privacy rights, require businesses to supply this type of bare bones subscriber information to the police upon request. Internationally, the practice is routine.

The Canadian ISP industry has come up a ‘letter of authority,’ after coming to a consensus that needing to obtain a search warrant was impractical. Tom Copeland, head of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, was recently quoted in a news story saying that in most cases, ISPs will co-operate with a search warrant or a so-called ‘letter of authority,’ but he acknowledged it’s not always the case.

It’s going to be a management decision by each and every ISP but I think the trend, especially when it comes to child exploitation, is to co-operate with law enforcement – subject to them providing some basic lawful authorization.

What causes ISP management not to cooperate with these agreed processes?

Your comments are welcomed.

Technorati Tags:
Alec Saunders, David Butt, Online Rights, lawful access, CAIP, Mark Goldberg