U.S. Senate: READI Act 2019 re-introducted

Michael Thomas mike at mtcc.com
Thu Oct 24 23:48:07 UTC 2019


On 10/24/19 4:01 PM, Sean Donelan wrote:
> U.S. Senators Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and John Thune (R-S.D.) 
> reintroduced the Reliable Emergency Alert Distribution Improvement 
> (READI) Act today (October 24, 2019).
>
> The READI Act would:
> [...]
> Explore establishing a system to offer emergency alerts to audio and 
> video online streaming services, such as Netflix and Spotify;
> [...]
>
>
> The READI Act is support by NCTA – The Internet and Television 
> Association, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), the 
> Internet Association, CTIA – The Wireless Association, and the 
> Wireless Infrastructure Association.
>
> Due to its bi-partisan co-sponsors and industry support, this bill is 
> likely to pass.
>
> As I've stated before, I think network emergency alerts should be 
> built into the underlying smart assistant layer (i.e. apple siri, 
> amazon echo/fire, roku, google/nest home, etc.) instead of each 
> content provider or internet provider.


Content provider is pretty ill defined -- everything is "content". But 
I'm not sure why it should reside in smart assistants either. What if I 
don't want or use any of them? They're awfully invasive. And it doesn't 
seem that you need them for amber alerts, and the new earthquake alerts 
here in california. What would be good imo is to define how alerts are 
sourced and distributed and put requirements on what devices need to 
implement it, but leave the actual UI a design decision. That's a pretty 
well tested route in the past cf, ietf and other standards bodies that 
don't touch UI with a ten foot pole.

Mike




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