WASHINGTON (Reuters)—Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin on Wednesday urged Congress to toughen laws protecting telephone subscriber records in the wake of the discovery of several online data brokers.

He urged Congress to specifically make it illegal to commercially sell phone records, boost penalties the FCC can impose on violators and allow the agency to require carriers to get customer permission before data can be used for marketing.

“The disclosure of consumers’ private calling records is a significant privacy invasion,” Martin told the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which held a hearing on the practice.

The FCC, state attorneys general, lawmakers, and the Federal Trade Commission are all investigating the practice of companies that offer to obtain and sell telephone subscriber information.

Read more

Related Articles

AT&T is being sued in federal court for allegedly violating the Constitutional rights of Americans by enabling the National Security Agency to spy on citizens without court authorization.

In a class action suit filed Jan. 31, the Electronic Frontier Foundation accused AT&T of playing an instrumental role in “a secret and illegal government program to intercept and analyze vast quantities of Americans’ telephone and Internet communications.”

The EFF charged that the carrier violated customers’ First Amendment right to free speech and Fourth Amendment right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and also broke several wiretap and telecommunications laws.

The surveillance program, which was first revealed by The New York Times in December, was authorized by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“But the government did not act—and is not acting—alone,” the EFF alleged in the lawsuit filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. “The government requires the collaboration of major telecommunications companies to implement its unprecedented and illegal domestic spying program.”

Read more

Related Articles

Time Warner (which owns Business 2.0, my employer) is still be trying to stabilize the AOL-ship, as indicated by the fourth quarter 2005 earnings report. But the good news for the company comes from its broadband and VoIP business. For starters, the company added 265,000 broadband subscribers during the quarter and 909,000 in the full year 2005. That’s roughly 4.8 million subscribers, or 25% market penetration (of service-ready homes passed.) The company says this is the fourth consecutive quarter in which net residential high-speed data subscriber additions surpassed 200,000.

Time Warner’s VoIP service, simply called added another 246,000 subscribers in the quarter, 880,000 in the full year and now has a total of 1.1 million VoIP subscribers, representing 7% of eligible homes passed. And from the look of it, the VoIP business is accelerating. I am looking forward to Comcast, Cox and Cablevision data to get a sense of how much portion of the VoIP business they picked up so far.

Related Articles

While I was busy chasing down stories about Google’s earnings, finishing up my story for the magazine, the blogbees were doing their thing, trying to make sense of disparate bits of information, and assembling them into a honey pot about Google’s VoIP plans. Atleast the click-to-call strategy! Apparently, the company has signed a deal with VoIP Inc., and will be using their service for its click to call offerings and connecting to the PSTN. One should assume that Google is going to use VoIP Inc. for its Google Talk to PSTN connection service.

VoIP Inc has a colorful past. It was a tea importer, a business that might have enjoyed higher profits than cheap calls. (Read that Light Reading Story Very Very Carefully…. you might get a laugh out of it…especially paragraph Four.) It might, use a third party to interconnect to PSTN because it wouldn’t want the hassle of dealing with all that, but lets wait for that. Mark Evans has some thoughts … excellent as always.

Related Articles

Skibare, one of the Hat Trick Club’s founding members sent along an interesting factoid to me this morning. It seems that Time Warner Cable is really getting hot with VoIP. What is also obvious is that the bundle offer seems to be taken by almost 90 percent of the new subscribers based on the additions.

This report matches up with the excellent research from Level 3’s Cynthia Carpenter that has been circulating around the industry. Cynthia led an exhaustive study to help the consumer facing carriers and MSO that clearly showed that bundles and incentives are what drive adoption, not Price or cost savings.

Now only is she knows who will win the Super Bowl?

Keith advised that-

Time Warner Cable added 265,000 residential high-speed Internet subscribers and 246,000 digital
phone subscribers in the quarter.

Related Articles