WASHINGTON, DC — It has not been Federal Communications Commission Chair Kevin Martin’s month. First the Third Circuit Court of Appeals overturns the $550,000 fine assessed to CBS for its 9/16th of a second exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, calling Martin’s pet policy “arbitrary and capricious” – and now his proposal for a purer-than-pure national broadband service is being called “unconstitutional and unwise” by 22 different public interest groups.Already under fire from professionals within the wireless industry for perceived tech flaws, Martin’s dream of a free, national wireless broadband service that would pour income into Uncle Sam’s treasure chest via ad revenue from third-party regional providers – without a drop of sex to sully the innocent or offend the sensitive – is taking hits from social advocacy groups of all kinds.
Calling the plan a “governmental mandated ‘blacklist’ of websites,” the Center for Democracy and Technology, People for the American Way, the Public Interest Spectrum Coalition, the Von Coalition, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Booksellers Association, Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, and 15 other groups stand opposed to the plan’s proposed content filtering.
Claiming in a filing that the system would interfere with the internet “so dramatically that the usefulness of the service would be radically reduced,” the groups warn about an inevitable backlog of lawsuits if it is implemented.
According to the protesting public interest groups, not only does the plan run afoul of the First Amendment, it disagrees with the Supreme Court’s stated opinions on indecency and “would censor content far beyond anything ever upheld by any court for any medium.”
The FCC plan would allow an auction bid winner to roll out service in the Advanced Wireless Service-3 band, provide 95-percent of the country with service over a decade at 768Kbps, and install filtering or blocking tools that restrict “images and text that constitute obscenity or pornography and, in context, as measured by contemporary community standards and existing law, any images or text that otherwise would be harmful to teens and adolescents.”
With the plan defining the minimum age for an online minor to be 5 – and content appearing on the free national service to be universally appropriate for that user – critics worry that an enormous amount of information would be blocked.
“This prohibition would plainly infringe on the rights of adults to access broad categories of lawful speech,” the groups insist. “The FCC can not constitutionally serve as a censorship board that selects which internet websites should be available to all Americans.”
Meanwhile, T-Mobile contends that the FCC’s plan to take over the AWS-3 band will result in “extensive, widespread, and unpredictable” interference to mobile devices running on the nearby AWS-1 band.
