The Government and Accountability Office (GAO) has concluded that the Federal Communications Commission does nothing with about four out of every five consumer complaints that it puts into a database and investigates. Even worse, the GAO could not discern from its survey of the FCC's complaint process why the FCC takes no enforcement action with 83 percent of the complaints it looked into from 2003 through 2006. "Without key management tools, FCC may have difficulty assuring Congress and other stakeholders that it is meeting its enforcement mission," the GAO report warns. That's putting it mildly. If the FCC does set up some serious net neutrality guidelines for ISPs like Comcast, how can P2P application users and other consumers know that the agency will take their comments seriously?

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The news media is having a great day with the revelation that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer paid for sex with prostitutes. Behind the scenes, corporate criminals are breaking out the champagne. As Attorney General of the Empire State, Eliot Spitzer championed the consumer and feasted on white collar crooks. Not only that, Spitzer's zeal often forced those around him in government to do their jobs better, whether they wanted to or not.

To cite only one example, in the summer of 2005 Spitzer launched a campaign against radio payola. The smart set had long ago concluded that payola was inevitable. After all, the government had cracked down on it in the early 1960s, and yet here it was still around.

Read the rest at Allvoices.com 

Speaking at Stanford University Law School on Friday, Federal Communications Commission chair Kevin Martin offered a rough draft of how the FCC will deal with the controversy over Comcast's interference with P2P applications. Martin told his audience that he found Comcast's behavior "troubling" and that the agency is "ready, willing, and able" to take action on the problem, which could be a ominous sign for the cable giant.

"These issues are not only important on the domestic side, in terms of entrepreneurship and potential innovation that occurs in the United States," Martin told the gathering, "but that they also send an important message from the international perspective in terms of the message that we've been sending out that the Internet should be an important tool for democracy and empowering individual users on a going forth basis."

Read the rest at Ars Technica. . . .  

The furor over Federal Communications Commission Chair Kevin Martin's move to relax the agency's newspaper/TV cross ownership ban got a little more political this week as Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) introduced a resolution on Wednesday disapproving of the December 2007 decision. The Senate statement declares that the new rule "shall have no force or effect." Democratic presidential rivals Barack Obama (D-IL) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY) have both co-sponsored the declaration along with seven other Democrats and four Republicans.

None of those Republicans include the GOP's choice for the White House, Senator John McCain of Arizona. How will McCain vote on this issue? If past performance is an indicator, he'll oppose Dorgan and support the FCC's ruling. More

The Federal Communications Commission has extended its proceeding on how to make radio and television more local. That's good, since most of the commenters so far have been religious broadcasters who accuse the FCC of attempting to impose Secular Humanism on them.  Now the public has until late April to comment and until June 11 to reply to comments, which is a nice chunk of time. 

Here's my Ars Technica story on what's been posted so far in the proceeding.

The fallout continues from Charles McGrath's essay "Is PBS Still Necessary?", published in the New York Times on February 17th. Public television's Newshour has, understandably, paid close attention to the piece, inviting its fans to post response comments on . Here's one I'll bet the PBS suits especially like:

I find the comment of the New York Times writer [McGrath] , "Jim Lehrer, 73, has been with “NewsHour” since 1975, so long that some of his early viewers are now in assisted living," to be both condescending, and a cynical attempt to lead readers to a discriminatory judgment. This article (Is PBS Still Necessary?) is contemptible and beneath the 'dignity' of the New York Times. The News Hour with Jim Lehrer is the best news program on television.

To be fair to the poster's feelings, McGrath no doubt intended to be provocative when writing the essay, eg. his left-handed dismissal of accusations of left-wing bias:

XM and Sirius Satellite Radio disclosed on Friday that they would continue to make the case for their merger until May 1, but a coalition of civil rights groups, led by an ambitious black entrepreneur, wants the Federal Communications Commission to set conditions for the union that would establish a new, minority-controlled satellite radio broadcaster. Chester C. Davenport has done more than offer his own scenario for the XM/Sirius marriage; he's changed the tone of the debate. More