The US cops for the information superhighway were unable to find the on-ramp yesterday morning, as a server malfunction delayed streaming of the FCC’s monthly meeting. “Our media server is currently experiencing technical difficulties. The webcast of this meeting will resume in-progress as soon as the problem is resolved and the link below is re-activated. Please reload this page to check the current status,” read the FCC’s web page for viewing Commission meetings.
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t proved to be not really a big problem, since it was resolved in just a few minutes and the meeting was more than an hour late starting anyway. Plus, the only broadcasting item, on DTV cable carriage and retransmission rights, was pulled from the agenda. All that remained were three items pertaining to the Wireline Competition Bureau, which gave Commissioner Michael Copps (D) an opportunity to rant about what a poor job the FCC had done on gathering data on broadband Internet deployment and access to Americans of various income levels and ethnic backgrounds. Chairman Kevin Martin (R) really didn’t disagree with Copps, although he was much less agitated, and especially noted a need to keep an up-to-date definition of what constitutes “broadband,” since the definition the FCC has been using is laughably slow by today’s Internet standards.
