Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
By Winter Casey, Reporter, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, November 17, 2009 - The consulting firm Empiris LLC joined a host of cable and phone broadband network related entities on Tuesday when it slammed a recent study from Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society on broadband policy.
In July the Federal Communications Commission commissioned the Berkman Center to review the existing literature and studies on broadband deployment and usage throughout the world to inform the FCC’s development of a National Broadband Plan. The FCC is sought
public comment on the study through November 16.
Empiris held a teleconference with bloggers Tuesday to discuss its problems with the report. Empiris argues that the study failed to provide an accurate summary of broadband policies in other countries and advances “conclusions that conflict with the evidence found in existing research.”
“The central question for developing broadband services and the infrastructure required to deliver them is how to provide the requisite incentives for carrier investment in such infrastructure,” noted Robert Crandall, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a senior expert for Empiris, in a statement. “The Berkman Study ignores this issue, focusing instead on a policy of intra-platform competition that has been thoroughly discredited in...
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Thursday, October 1st, 2009
By the Staff of BroadbandCensus.com
The Family Online Safety Institute announced the list of confirmed speakers for its 2009 annual conference to take place November 4th and 5th in Washington, DC. Speakers include child online safety expert Danah Boyd, Online Safety Technology Working Group co-chair Anne Collier, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children board member Larry Magid (Collier and Magid are co-founders of online safety group ConnectSafely).
Also scheduled to speak are OSTWG member and parental controls expert Adam Thierer and Attorneys General Patrick Lynch and Rob McKenna of Rhode Island and Washington state,...
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Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
Editor’s Note: The following commentary is written by Andrew Feinberg, Deputy Editor, BroadbandCensus.com. The news operations of BroadbandCensus.com strive to produce accurate and objective reporting about the national broadband plan, the broadband stimulus, and wireless broadband.
We do run commentaries by outside individuals and entities. Please send them for consideration to commentary@broadbandcensus.com. In this piece, Andrew Feinberg offers his perspective on one of the big news items of the week. The opinions below do not express the company view of either Broadband Census News LLC, or of Broadband Census Data LLC. See below for more information about BroadbandCensus.com.
By Andrew Feinberg, Deputy Editor, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, September 23, 2009 – Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski's announcement of his intention to codify the commission's 2005 Internet Policy Statement into actual, enforceable federal regulations using a valid legal process drew expected reactions from the usual parties.
Everybody in this debate means well. I will not suggest evil motives on anyone's part, because my observation as a journalist is that everyone involved in creating and sustaining today's online ecosystem wants it to succeed.
But sometimes hyperbole can exceed the reality of the situation. Yesterday, Adam Thierer and Berin Szoka, two senior fellows at the Progress...
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Saturday, September 12th, 2009
By Christina Kirchner, Reporter-Researcher, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, September 9, 2009 – The second panel at the Federal Communications Commission’s “consumer context” panel on September 9 focused on the tools and techniques that will enable consumers to utilize new broadband-friendly applications.
The continuing growth of possible uses of the Internet brings “good stuff” to consumers; but doing so safely was a cause for discussion.
“For the past nine months, we have noticed that over 65 million people are checking their Facebook’s using their mobile devices,” Timothy Sparapani, director of the public policy for Facebook.
Do children and adolescents who post online do so with an awareness of the privacy consequences associated with doing so, panelists asked. Sparapani said that Facebook was in the process of refining its privacy disclosures for that reason.
“Children need to gain media literacy. They need the ‘rules of the road’ for the internet,” said Sparapani.
To make this possibility a reality, Alan Simpson, director of policy for Common Sense Media, said, “This calls for the funding and implementing of digital literacy.”
With the digital literacy, the lessons would include policies for security and privacy as well as policies of “authorship and authority of information found on the internet,” said Simpson. He also said that...
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Friday, June 12th, 2009
By Andrew Feinberg, Deputy Editor, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, June 12, 2009 - Hill staffers and online safety said Friday that two bills currently before Congress take very different approaches to issues of cyberbullying and online.
Speaking at a panel sponsored by the Family Online Safety Institute, CEO Stephen Balkam said that the key question is whether or not it is possible to legislate internet safety. Over the past decade, multiple commissions of countless experts have determined that there is "no silver bullet" to protecting young people as they venture online.
Instead, the consensus of each succeeding study has been that a "combination of tools" is required, and that "education is key," he said. A similar study in the United Kingdom reached many of the same conclusions, he said.
And while Balkam noted the panelists represented widely differing viewpoints on the best way to approach the problem, he would not minimize the seriousness of the issue: "None of us will deny challenges exist," he said.
"Children and adults today have... come to rely on the Internet for everything," said Mercedes Salem, legislative counsel for Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif. Sanchez is the sponsor of the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, which would impose criminal penalties for severe harassment...
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Monday, August 18th, 2008
Blog Entries
By Drew Bennett, Special Correspondent, BroadbandCensus.com
ASPEN, COLORADO, August 18 - The Monday morning panel at the 2008 Aspen Summit examined the fundamental protections provided to 3rd party Internet providers and users (
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act) and considered recent common law developments that might upend some of the protections previously afforded to 3rd parties like ISPs and even blog administrators. Thanks to Section 230, everyone from Comcast to Wordpress to Facebook to
techliberation.com are
not considered to be "publishers" according to legal definitions and are theoretically free to facilitate Internet speech, commerce, and other exchanges rather than police them.
- Adam Thierer, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Digital Media Freedom, The Progress & Freedom Foundation (moderator)
- Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies, Cato Institute.
- Chris Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer and Head of Global Public Policy, Facebook, Inc.
- Eugene Volokh, Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
- Kent Walker, Vice President and General Counsel, Google Inc
While the panelists disagreed to some extent on the question of whether Section 230 can be called a blanket immunity, the legislation is clearly seminal. As Kent Walker stated: "There has always been rules for one to...
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