Author: Jon Brodkin

The White House has urged Republican lawmakers to give up efforts to strip the Federal Communications Commission of regulatory powers and tens of millions of dollars in budget funding. President Obama's senior advisers would recommend that he veto the House of Representatives' budget bill for fiscal 2017 because of these and other provisions.

The Republican budget proposal "includes highly problematic ideological provisions," like ones that "prevent the Federal Communications Commission from promoting a free and open Internet and encouraging competition in the set-top box market, impacting millions of broadband and cable customers," the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement of administration policy yesterday.

The budget plan includes sections delaying or preventing implementation of the FCC's net neutrality rules, which were just upheld by an appeals court despite a lawsuit filed by broadband providers. With the case possibly heading to the Supreme Court, a budget rider would prevent enforcement of net neutrality rules until broadband providers have exhausted all appeals. The budget plan would also prevent the FCC from stopping unjust and unreasonable pricing and data cap practices, regardless of the lawsuit's outcome.

Charter and its new subsidiary Time Warner Cable (TWC) have been overcharging customers at least $7.2 million per year for equipment and service, a US Senate investigation has found.

Time Warner Cable over-billed customers nationwide an estimated $639,948 between January and April of this year, which projects to a yearly total of $1,919,844. Charter, meanwhile, "informed the [Senate's investigative] Subcommittee that it over-billed customers by at least $442,691 per month," the report said. That works out to overcharges of at least $5,312,292 per year. When added to Time Warner Cable's overcharges, that's $7.2 million that customers paid in erroneous charges over and above the already high prices of cable TV.

The report was released today as senators grilled cable company executives from Charter, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, AT&T-owned DirecTV, and Dish on customer service and billing problems. The Senate report, as well as video of the hearing and transcripts of cable executive testimony, is available here.

Stop us if you've heard this one before: Comcast has done something wrong to one of its customers and didn't make it right until he contacted a reporter.

A story in Consumerist yesterday tells the tale of Robert, who was incorrectly charged $1,775.44 and couldn't get it back for more than 18 months.

"Comcast even admits the money shouldn’t have been debited from Robert’s bank account, but now says it’s his responsibility to sort the mess out with his bank," the story said.

Google Fiber has signed a deal to acquire Webpass, a high-speed wireless ISP, Webpass announced yesterday.

"By joining forces, we can accelerate the deployment of superfast Internet connections for customers across the US," Webpass founder Charles Barr wrote. "Webpass will remain focused on rapid deployment of high-speed Internet connections for residential and commercial buildings, primarily using point-to-point wireless."

Google Fiber has yet to comment on the deal, which is expected to close this summer pending regulatory approval. We've contacted Google Fiber to get more information on how the acquisition fits into its expansion plans, and will provide an update if we get one.

The US Federal Communications Commission is trying to figure out exactly how much trouble is being caused by radio noise.

Many devices emit radio frequency energy that could interfere with radio services and increase the "radio spectrum noise floor," essentially the sum of all unwanted signals. The FCC is planning to study changes to the noise floor from human-made sources over the past 20 years.

It's commonly believed that "the noise floor in the radio spectrum is rising as the number of devices in use that emit radio energy grows," but the FCC said it hasn't found much quantitative data to support this presumption. As a first step toward the FCC producing such a study, the commission last week asked the public for input on the proper design of the study and input on the problem itself.

Linux developers are going to have more than one choice for building secure, cross-distribution applications.

Ubuntu's "snap" applications recently went cross-platform, having been ported to other Linux distros including Debian, Arch, Fedora, and Gentoo. The goal is to simplify packaging of applications. Instead of building a deb package for Ubuntu and an RPM for Fedora, a developer could package the application as a snap and have it installed on just about any Linux distribution.

But Linux is always about choice, and snap isn't the only contender to replace traditional packaging systems. Today, the developers of Flatpak (previously called xdg-app) announced general availability for several major Linux distributions, with a pointer to instructions for installing on Arch, Debian, Fedora, Mageia, and Ubuntu.

The Federal Communications Commission plan to boost competition in the cable set-top box market may need some changes to shore up enough votes.

While Chairman Tom Wheeler and his Democratic majority led a 3-2 vote on the proposal in February, Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel is pushing for changes before it hits a final vote.

Now that the FCC has received public comments on the plan, "It has become clear the original proposal has real flaws and, as I have suggested before, is too complicated. We need to find another way forward," Rosenworcel said in a statement published by Broadcasting & Cable yesterday.

A Chinese supercomputer called Sunway TaihuLight now ranks as the world's fastest, nearly tripling the previous supercomputer speed record with a rating of 93 petaflops per second. That's 93 quadrillion floating point operations per second (or 93 million billion).

Sunway TaihuLight surpassed another Chinese supercomputer, Tianhe-2, which had been the world's fastest for three consecutive years with speeds of 33.9 petaflop/s, according to the latest Top500.org ranking released today. Top500 rankings are based on the Linpack benchmark, which requires each cluster "to solve a dense system of linear equations."

"Sunway TaihuLight, with 10,649,600 computing cores comprising 40,960 nodes, is twice as fast and three times as efficient as Tianhe-2," the Top500 announcement said. Sunway TaihuLight is one of the world's most efficient systems, with "peak power consumption under load (running the HPL benchmark)... at 15.37MW, or 6 Gflops/Watt."

Google Fiber's new terms add a clause familiar to subscribers of other large Internet service providers: customers who want to sue the company must now instead submit to arbitration.

The Google Fiber terms were updated last week with a note that they now "require the use of binding arbitration to resolve disputes rather than jury trials or class actions." While the clause allows cases in small claims court, it otherwise forces customers to waive the right to bring legal actions against the ISP. Arbitration must be sought on an individual basis, as the clause also prevents class arbitration.

The previous terms of service did not have the binding arbitration clause, though they did limit Google Fiber's liability to the amount customers pay to use the services. (The Consumerist published an article on the change yesterday.)

Cable companies still oppose the Federal Communications Commission's attempt to open up the set-top box market but seem to have resigned themselves to accepting some form of regulation.

Industry representatives met with FCC commissioners and staff yesterday to say they are willing to comply with a requirement to deploy applications for third-party set-top boxes using open standards. The apps would have to include all linear and on-demand TV content, but apparently they would not have to allow recording.

This isn't quite what the FCC says it wants. The commission proposed rules that would force pay-TV providers to make video programming—and the right to record video—available to the makers of third-party devices and software. Under the FCC's model, makers of third-party software and equipment could create their own user interfaces through which cable TV subscribers could access their programming. The solution would be similar to CableCard, but it wouldn't require a physical card.