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November 14, 2007
Obama has released his tech policy. It’s terrific, and squishy only in the difficult places where politicians always get squishy: How exactly are you going to enforce Net neutrality and get the telcos to behave? etc. (Disclosure: I am a volunteer advisor to the Edwards’ campaign on Net policies. Edwards’ stance is also really good. And I’m glad to have candidates trying to out-open-Internet each other.)
October 12, 2007
if you love the Internet and want to keep it free, I think the Democratic candidate with the best Internet policy ies is John Edwards (Disclosure: I am an unpaid consultant on Internet policy to the Edwards campaign). He’s got progressive positions on Net Neutrality, the 700MHz auction, amd broadband access. The guy who just won an Oscar for best Nobel Peace Prize and Elizabeth Edwards would also be great Net candidates.
And here’s Matt Stoller on Hillary as a Net candidate:
… Here’s Clinton’s ‘Innovation Agenda‘ . Notice what’s missing? That’s right, net neutrality.
And here’s a tip as to what she’s really planning.Establish a national broadband strategy called Connect America
Clinton is citing a program called Connect Kentucky as a national model for expanding broadband penetration. Connect Kentucky, which is embraced by the telcos as a way of warding off net neutrality and a real internet policy, defines broadband as 256k, which is about 500 times slower than what’s in Japan…
October 9, 2007
Drew Clark of the Center for Public Integrity is giving a Berkman lunch about the Media Tracker project. [As always, I’m paraphrasing, missing things, getting things wrong. You can always hear the entire talk at Media Berkman.]
In 1934, the Fed Communications Act was passed and the FCC was created. It got authority over radio and the Bell system. “So, for many years you had effectively two sides of the FCC: The wireless side and the wired side.” The past couple of decades has made that much messier. Drew’s group watches the FCC.
He shows the Media Tracker. Type in a zip code and it searches 5 million records and it shows the which media are available there, including TV radio, cable, broadband and newspapers. IT shows that for 94306, Clear Channel has 13 stations. Media Tracker provides three different views and lots and lots of detail, including type of license and parent company. And, of course, you can slice by media company as well, seeing not only how many outlets they own, but also how much they’ve donated to each political rep. Then you can click on a member of Congress to see all the contributions she’s received from individuals and companies in the media sector. (Here’s Google. Here’s Comcast.)
The Media Tracker is part of the Well Connected project which also includes blogs, investigative reports, and the telecom portal at Congresspedia.
Drew also talks about FCC Watch, still in beta. But the work they’ve done on the 700MHz auction gives a taste of what’s to come. They scrape the ex parte summaries every hour to see who’s lobbying which commissioners. (Frontline is the most active lobbyist on this issue, followed by the CTIA .) You can click all the way through to see the summary of a particular lobbyist’s phone calls to a commissioner. You can easily see who, say, Chairman Martin is meeting with.
Q: You’re familiar with Connect Kentucky…?
A: Connect Kentucky has gained a lot of traction in the past year, for some good reasons. It’s a state-led initiative, housed in a non-profit. It started out to get tech deployed in deprived communities. They connect data about broadband availability. It’d be good to also know about competitors, speeds, and prices. Drew would like to build a system for tracking all of this nationally.
Q: (ethanz) I’m dumbstruck to find out that companies are required to register every telephone call their lobbyists make. But what are the data sets that you can’t get? What are the crown jewels that should be available and aren’t?
A: 1. Broadband competition, speed, and price. 2. More detailed reporting about the Congressional lobbying. 3. Do that for the states as well . 4. Likewise for lobbying disclosure for international.
Q: (jpalfrey) We’ve been interested in a distributed app that you download onto your PC. The ONI is interested in this as a way of gathering data about which sites are being filtered, but you could do this for speed tests as well. It’d have three checkboxes: Check for malware, check for filtered sites, and check speeds.
A: eCorridors has a distributed speed test (using NDT, an open source network diagnostic tool) that does something similar.
Q: (doc) How about harnessing the power of the crowd?
A: We want to do that.
Q: (me) Has the ONI thought about having say, Google Tools include its reporting sw as an opt-in? It could also gather Dave’s data.
A: ONI has so far only aimed at “gold standard” data. But we have a project for developing this distributed software, which would provide useful data but not totally trustworthy.
Q: [missed it]
A: This is both a journalism effort and a citizen data effort.
A: Newspapers will be gone in 20 years. It’s time to play taps and move on. We have to think creatively and work collaboratively in some new ways. It has a bright future but a very different future.
Q: (jp) What difference is this info making?
A: It’s always hard to tell. The openness of the Internet is of the same value as the traditional values enshrined in our Constitution.
October 8, 2007
David Isenberg lays out a history of common carriage as part of an argument for Net Neutrality.
You should also note his quoting of Jim Hoffa on AT&T’s decision to censor messages it considers critical of AT&T.
August 24, 2007
Comcast users are complaining that they are no longer able to seed their torrents, so that they are unable to use the popular BitTorrent protocol to share large files. It seems that Comcast has decided that it doesn’t like that use of the Internet, so apparently they have simply turned it off.
If true, this is an example of why we need not just Net Neutrality, but Net Neutrality with teeth.
August 17, 2007
Matt Stoller has YouTubed Michael “the good FCC Commissioner” Copps connecting AT&T’s censoring of Pearl Jam with the need for Net neutrality. (At another level of the stack, so to speak, David Isenberg shows the disconnection. They’re both right.)
Matt has a second YouTube in which Commissioner Copps explains how the reclassification of Internet carriers in 2005 meant the loss of the Net neutrality that used to be the law of the land.
August 16, 2007
In what sounds like a promising move, the commonwealth has appointed Anne Margulies as our Chief Information Officer. Margulies is currently the executive director of MIT’s inspiring OpenCourseWare project. She’s the fourth CIO in two years, so let’s hope she’s there long enough to do some good. (Here’s a podcast of a session at the Berkman Center she led.)
A predecessor, Peter Quinn, resigned after false charges were leveled against him, suspiciously after he championed requiring the commonwealth to use only software that supports open standards, i.e., not Microsoft. David Berlind has the full story on that requirement.
So, Margulies is not entering a humdrum environment. Her commitment to openCourseWare is a good sign.
[Tags: massachusetts cio anne_margulies open_courseware mit open_standards ]
August 15, 2007
Susan Crawford goes through the details of the FCC’s decision about the rules for auctioning off the 700MHz chunk of our (yours and mine, sisters and brothers) spectrum. The quick overview is that the closer you look, the worse it gets, and it doesn’t start off that great to begin with
August 12, 2007
David Isenberg points to the toothlessness of the FTC and writes that the lesson of AT&T’s censoring of Pearl Jam is that the providers of content ought not to be allowed to own the Net tubes through which that content moves
August 1, 2007
I was confused about the anonymous bidding process chosen by the FCC as it auctions off our hope the 700mH spectrum. So, I asked Harold Feld, who kindly wrote back with the following explanation (used with permish, of course):
Anonymous bidding: Until now, the FCC has published at the end of each
round who bid what for every license. This is called an “open”
auction format. When the FCC created this format, it was thought that
maximizing the information available to bidders would maximize
efficiency of the auction and thus maximize revenue.After more than ten years of FCC auctions, it has become obvious that
the theory is completely, utterly and horribly wrong. What open
bidding does is allow parties to signal each other and to target new
entrants for attack. Through open bidding, the largest incumbents
exclude new entrants and divide the licenses among themselves cheaply.
The smaller players go along, because they survive by avoiding
direct conflict with the bigger players and also like to exclude new
entrants.Under anonymous bidding, the FCC only provides the amount of the
highest bid on each license at the end of the round. Thus, everyone
can see what bid they must beat, but they do not know who has bid on
the license. Nor can they see other bids besides the winning bids,
which can be used for signaling. This makes it much more difficult
for incumbents to rig the auction in their favor because they cannot
coordinate attacks on new entrants and they cannot enjoy the benefits
of a reputation for retaliation.Greg Rose has done two important studies on anonymous bidding. The
first was a ten year longitudinal study of FCC auctions for the Center
for American Progress (with Mark Lloyd). The other was two studies on
last summer’s AWS auction for New America Foundation.Here are links to the studies:
Initial post on anonymous bidding
Post with link to CAP study
Post with links to AWS studiesCombinatorial bidding, which the FCC approved for the 6 REAG licenses
in the “C” Block, is a way to minimize the “exposure risk” and
encourage people to bid more aggressively. Here’s the theory.
Suppose I want to build a national footprint, but I’m afraid I won’t
win all the licenses necessary. I am therefore afraid to bid at all,
because I may get stuck with licenses I don’t want and have to sell
them at a serious loss.With combinatorial (or “package”) bidding, I am only required to pay
for the licenses if I win the entire package. If I don’t win the
whole package, all my winning bids are rendered null and void. So I
can now bid agressively without fear and am encouraged to enter the
auction and try for a national footprint.The big potential new entrants, like Google and the DBS companies,
wanted package bidding. So did AT&T and Verizon. We at PISC
supported it because it encourages a national new entrant and doesn’t
make it that much easier for the incumbents, who are likely to win
anyway.
I rely on Harold’s blog, as well as his other writings, for help understanding the complexities of this stuff… [Tags: fcc harold_feld 700mh wifi ]
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