videoconferencing – Techdirt (original) (raw)

FCC Finally Stops Prison Telecom Monopolies From Ripping Off Inmates And Their Families

from the actual-good-news dept

The FCC has announced that it’s taking more direct aim at prison phone and videoconferencing monopolies that have a long history of ripping off inmates and their families.

According to an agency announcement, the FCC has voted to further lower price caps on prison phone calls and closed a loophole allowing companies to charge exorbitant rates for intrastate calls.

“Under the new rules, the cost of a 15-minute phone call will drop to $0.90 from as much
as 11.35inlargejailsand,insmalljails,to11.35 in large jails and, in small jails, to 11.35inlargejailsand,insmalljails,to1.35 from $12.10,” the FCC said.

The agency said the new rules will also cut the cost of video visitation calls to less than a
quarter of current prices, while requiring per-minute rate options based on consumers’ actual usage. The new rules will take effect in January of 2025 for prisons with more than 1,000 inmates, and in all smaller jails starting in April of 2025.

However terrible telecom monopolies are in the free world, they’re arguably worse in prisons. For decades, journalists and researchers have outlined how a select number of prison telecom giants like Securus have enjoyed a cozy, government-kickback based monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services, resulting sky high rates (upwards of $14 per minute at some prisons) for inmate families.

Most of these pampered monopolies have shifted over to monopolizing prison phone videoconferencing. And the relationship between government and monopoly is so cozy, several of these companies, like Securus, have been caught helping to spy on privileged attorney client communications.

Previous efforts to rein in prison monopolies were undermined by the Trump FCC and former FCC boss Ajit Pai, who worked for prison phone giant Securus before his time at the agency. Trump and Pai pulled the rug out from under the agencies own lawyers’ feet while they were trying to defend their efforts in court, resulting in a legal loss.

But the 2023 passage and signing of the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act clarified the agency’s authority giving it the ability to finally implement reform. That law was named after a grandmother who had begged the FCC to take action nearly two decades earlier.

Filed Under: fcc, inmates, monopolies, prison, telecom, videoconferencing

Verizon Fails Again, Shutters Attempted Zoom Alternative BlueJeans After Paying $400 Million For It

from the heckuva-job,-brownie dept

Thu, Aug 10th 2023 05:29am - Karl Bode

Pretty much every time Verizon wanders outside of its core competencies (operating telecom networks, lobbying to hamstring competition, undermining the most basic of regulatory oversight), the telco amusingly falls flat on its face. It’s quite honestly starting to get a little weird.

Whether it’s the company’s Go90 video streaming platform, its video joint venture with RedBox, its news website Sugarstring (which you may recall tried to ban reporters from talking about surveillance or net neutrality), its app store, its “me too” VCAST apps, the billions wasted on Yahoo, the effort to run Tumblr into the ground, or any of a dozen other attempted pivots, Verizon has failed. Usually semi-spectacularly.

During peak COVID Verizon spent somewhere around $400 million to acquire BlueJeans, which was pitched as a videoconferencing alternative to Zoom. But of course in typical Verizon fashion the app went nowhere, and in an email to users Verizon stated they’ll be shutting the service down August 31. In the email, Verizon paints the app nobody has heard of as “award winning”:

BlueJeans is an award-winning product that connects our customers around the world, but we have made this decision due to the changing market landscape.

These repeated failures by Verizon would be less of an issue if the company didn’t have such a long history of skimping on essential broadband network upgrades. Whether it’s New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, the telco has a long history of taking tax breaks, subsidies, or regulatory favors in exchange for promised DSL to fiber network upgrades that somehow never fully materialize.

While with the other hand, Verizon adores simply setting vast swaths of money on fire to please Wall Street’s myopic lust for “growth for growth’s sake” projects, even if execs routinely lack the chops to manage any of the efforts. With Verizon now facing major financial remediation headaches due to a lot of lead in their cables, much of that cash would probably come in handy.

Despite endless pretense, telecoms can’t innovate. At least outside of finding creative new ways to over-charge captive customers or undermining government oversight. It’s not clear how many examples we need before Verizon and the folks pouring money into these doomed projects figure that out.

Filed Under: app, dsl, failed pivot, fiber, innovation, telecom, videoconferencing
Companies: bluejeans, verizon

Videoconferencing Is A Nice-To-Have, Not A Need-To-Have

from the and-so-it-goes dept

Over at Network World, a reporter is noting that videoconferencing has supposedly been “the next big thing” since 1988 or so, and wonders why it still hasn’t really caught on among a mainstream audience. Certainly there are some corporate users, and some people use it to talk to their family via webcams — but it’s still relatively rare. In response, I’d first point out that the promise of videoconferencing as the “next big thing” goes back well before 1988. There was a ton of hype around AT&T’s plans to offer videophones back in the 1960s — and it went nowhere. The reasoning is the same as it’s always been. In most cases there’s simply no need or no desire to have a video connection. You can accomplish just as much with voice communications, and the video is often seen as more of a negative than a positive. For a video call you need to make sure you look presentable, which isn’t great for unplanned calls. It also doesn’t let you do anything else while you’re on the phone. In other words, it offers very little benefit and has some serious downsides that make it less than useful for many users. So, no, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that after 45 years or so, there still isn’t all that much interest in video conferencing.

Filed Under: videoconferencing