The Challenge of Providing Landline Service When Returns Diminish

Over the past few years, what started as a dull rumble about the abandonment of landlines by telecommunications companies (read: Verizon, CenturyLink and AT&T, among others) has grown into a medium roar.  Most recently, the Michigan and Colorado legislatures have been confronted with requests, driven by the telecommunications giants (insert “duh” here) to allow the existing, old, occasionally crumbling landline infrastructure to die a natural death in favor of other technologies, primarily those driven by the internet (VoIP, among others including WebRTC) as well as the plethora of wireless devices.

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Telephony Metadata and the Fourth Amendment

The firestorm created by Edward Snowden’s release of classified information earlier this year has forced at least some of the government’s “dirty little secrets” about its monitoring of both citizens and foreigners out into the open. This note will briefly examine the legal issues confronting both the National Security Agency (NSA) and FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court with respect to the release of telecommunications metadata to federal agencies.

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Net Neutrality: The Next Round

On Monday, September 9th, long-time litigants Verizon (among others) and the Federal Communications Commission met for another round in the dispute over the long running battle known as “Net Neutrality.” The two key questions at the root of the ongoing saga are whether providers of internet services can discriminate between those customers that they serve, and whether the FCC—or any entity for that matter--has the legal authority to regulate the internet.

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Paying Attention to Third Party Telemarketers

I hate to beat a dead horse, but despite all sorts of newly enforceable regulatory hurdles, those obnoxious telemarketing calls keep coming.  The good news is that the FCC, as the lead agency enforcing the newly tightened telemarketing rules, is taking action, but the bad news is that the calls keep coming because they are effective. Not at my house, and not likely at yours, but someone’s buying what telemarketers are selling. Just like any hungry sales person knows when obstacles are placed in the path, you work around them.  Telemarketers and those who rely on their services are no different than any other industry that is quasi-regulated.  As new legal and regulatory hurdles are placed in front of them, telemarketers devise creative ways to re-interpret or completely ignore them altogether.

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A Novel Approach to Internet Regulation

When the subject of “network neutrality” or “open internet” come up, most people glaze over (or run quickly in the other direction). However, there is a case currently before the D.C. Circuit, brought by Verizon against the FCC, whose outcome could affect many beyond the original parties.

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