Lex Ferenda

This week, we learned that municipal Wifi is under discussion here in Dublin. Great. But there’s a sting, of course: it might not be “real” wireless, despite the great claims at ‘bridging the digital divide’. In fact, councillor Naoise Ó Muirí explained it well on RTÉ radio (RealAudio), when he agreed with the presenter’s suggestion that this would be “yellow pack broadband” and volunteered that services like VOIP should be blocked. Hello Net Neutrality Debate.

There’s also this laughable press release from IBEC’s telecoms forum, arguing that municipal wifi would lead to redundancies, network congestion and a flood to end all floods (note: not all of the above may be a true and accurate report of IBEC’s comments). Guess we have an idea of what lies ahead. If these lads had been around at the time of the first public libraries, they would have offered a great defence of the poor booksellers and their starving children. “Libraries won’t cure the digital divide. More bookstores will”. Heaven forbid if anyone should get a good public service system - obviously we are served brilliantly by the current broadband market in Ireland!

Antoin draws attention to the role of schemes like Fon in achieving the City Council’s goals. In Montreal, something similar is well underway in the Ile Sans Fil project.

There’s an informative tender notice on etenders.gov.ie (not etenders.ie!) Note: apparently the key document is unreliable, but I can’t give a direct link, so email me if you run into trouble. And the Municipal WiFi website has oodles of information on how this could be done. Lawrence Lessig has been arguing that properly implemented municipal wifi can help solve the problem of anti-network-neutrality trends: recent Wired column, older conference speech.

The American University Law Review has a brilliant article on the legal issues relating to municipal wifi in the US:

H Travis, “Wi-Fi Everywhere: Universal Broadband Access as Antitrust and Telecommunications Policy”

Should be required reading for anyone involved in the Dublin proposals. This article from December’s Federal Communications Law Review has a good summary of how the debate has played out on that side of the Atlantic. Note that in the US, there have been moves (supported by the big market players) to try and ban local authorities from helping their citizens to get access to information. A worthy cause, as outlined above. The IBEC intervention indicates that this element of the American debate will form part of ours in the very near future.

Kudos to Darius Whelan at UCC, who has added an event submission form to the already-excellent Events Guide on the Irishlaw.org site. Another fine addition to an invaluable service. It looks like a busy few months ahead, so hopefully the form will make life easier for the good Cork people behind the Irish Law Site!

I have a theory that Cork is Ireland’s new tech capital.

The BBC has gone out for final consultation on ‘on-demand’ services (the proposed iPlayer system). This is under the new ‘public value test’ under the BBC Charter, and the Trust (which replaces the olde Governors). The recommendations aren’t bad (the Trust assessed the BBC’s proposed scheme of services):

o The market creation effects of the new proposals were likely to be considerable and likely to bring substantial benefits to consumers.
o Series stacking and, for seven-day TV catch-up over the internet, the ability to hold a downloaded programme for up to 13 weeks before viewing, could have a negative impact on the competitiveness of the market and should either be substantially reduced in scope or removed from the proposals.
o The provision of recordings of live classical music and book readings as non-DRM audio downloads could have a negative market impact. The MIA says that book readings should be excluded from the service, and the range of classical music specified more tightly or excluded.
o A platform-agnostic approach (i.e. not reliant exclusively on Microsoft’s DRM
solution) would lessen the adverse impact of the proposals on the market for media
player and DRM software and would increase the consumer benefit.
o The internet-based proposals could mean that consumers incur extra broadband internet costs.
o If the BBC wishes to extend the proposals to include non-BBC content or specially commissioned content there should be a further MIA.

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