Brief thoughts on the news of the FCC approval of the NBCU/Comcast Merger (not the merger, just the news)
I've found four interesting things about the news of the FCC's approval of the NBC Universal/Comcast merger (not the content of the news, but the news itself):
Popular Coverage:
No one linked to the FCC statements as released online! Not the Associated Press, not ReadWriteWeb, not Ars Technica. Not a very big point, but you'd think that since this information is out there, even the more web-savvy services (like RWW or AT) would at least link out. But this might be pertaining to my next point.
FCC's releases are in proprietary formats.
You can only download the FCC's statements as PDFs (proprietary to Adobe) and as Word DOCs (proprietary to Microsoft). They are not available in RTF, ePub, ODT, TXT, or even HTML. I find it interesting that a governmental comission whose purpose is to ensure that, among other tasks, the airwaves are used in the public's interest chooses to use proprietary formats to distribute their information. Of course, both of these formats are widely understood and there are several applications (even open sourced ones) that can read these formats, but you'd think they would at least use HTML as a more open format that doesn't even require one to have additional software: the ultimate in accessibility.
FCC's releases are available with a permalink, but deeply hidden
The FCC has a "one page" that contains links to all the news releases and statements, but it's hidden in the Office of General Council, and I only discovered it by noticing a small box on the Media Bureau's page (it's not even in the headlines!).You can see them all on several parts of the FCC's page, but there is never any link to the collection of links on the OGC's page.
It's also worth noting that most of the FCC's other pages, like Reboot and the Broadband Plan, are far more modern in terms of design and operation than the FCC's own page. The age of the FCC's website is most clearly seen in the Kids Zone.
The FCC Twitter account hasn't announced anything
The FCC has an official, and verified, Twitter account, but they have not linked to what is probably the most anticipated FCC ruling since the 700 MHz spectrum auction and the National Broadband Plan. This may also be a problem due to the problem noted above: there's no one place to link. In case you're reading this way off in the future (or you can't access it), attached are screenshots (in PNG and PDF) of the Twitter account from about an hour after the announcements were made.
Notice that most of the posts on their account have little to do with actual policy, so it's likely that there never was any plans to link out to the statements and news release, because it is seen as outside the intended scope of the Twitter account.
I'll be doing an actual, fully fledged blog post once I've had a chance to read the actual statements from all the comissioners and make some notes. I've had to convert the documents from DOC to RTF in order to have a good reading experience on my eReader (I could use PDFs on it, but then there are odd line breaks everywhere, which makes it harder to read).
