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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Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
By Drew Clark, Editor, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON – September 29, 2009 – From the beginning, BroadbandCensus.com has aimed at providing academics, consumers, government officials and industry with the high-quality data needed about the state of broadband throughout the country.
We believe in public and transparent broadband data. Without public and transparent broadband data, each of these constituents are lacking in what they need.
It is heartening that the highest levels of the Obama administration see and espouse the virtues of transparency and of a data-driven approach to broadband policy.
Again today, it came clear that the FCC now seeks to do that which BroadbandCensus.com has been doing since February 2008 – comparing actual speeds with advertised speeds – on an even more finely grained basis.
Now comes the hard part: translating the rhetoric and positive feelings about public and open broadband data into concrete decisions that will drive better-quality broadband data.
Last week I began this five-part series during One Web Week. I focused on the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain broadband data in 2006, and on the founding of BroadbandCensus.com in the fall of 2007.
Much has happened on broadband data in the past week: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced a new...
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Monday, September 28th, 2009
By the Staff of BroadbandCensus.com
A Congressional workshop will examine the proper application of antitrust policy to the information technology sector and scrutinize the direction the new administration is taking. The workshop will occur on October 16 in the Rayburn Office building. The workshop has the potential to explore how the application of government antitrust law can significantly affect innovation and investment, for good or ill.
The event is expected to focus on innovation and whether pro-competitive, pro-consumer behavior in high-tech may differ from such behavior in more traditional industries, as well as on how antitrust enforcement balances the risks of failing to stop potentially anticompetitive activities.
The panel will be moderated by Thomas Lenard of the Technology Policy Institute and will feature:
- David Evans, University of Chicago and University College London;
- Douglas Melamed, Wilmer Hale, former Acting Assistant Attorney General, Antitrust Division;
- Philip Weiser, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for International, Policy and Appellate Matters, Antitrust Division;
- Joshua Wright, George Mason University School of Law; and
- Jonathan Zuck, Association for Competitive Technology
IT firms have characteristics that make antitrust enforcement more complex, including significant amounts of intangible capital, supply- and demand-side economies of scale, and rapidly changing markets characterized by continuous innovation. The new administration...
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Monday, September 21st, 2009
By Drew Clark, Editor, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, September 21, 2009 – Broadband data is important for the future of our country – and public and transparent broadband data is even more important.
Today, at this moment, new Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski is making a speech in which he is highlighting the vital principle of public and transparent broadband data.
For three years now, this principle has been the core belief animating my efforts as a journalist, and as the entrepreneur founding BroadbandCensus.com. Now, as we enter the fourth year since this saga began, it’s time to take stock and reflect on what BroadbandCensus.com has accomplished.
And with One Web Week having arrived, I’d like to lay out this history from a personal perspective. In this series of blog posts, I’m going to speak about what we’ve been through, who we have worked with to advance the principles of public and transparent broadband data, and what we ultimately aim to achieve at BroadbandCensus.com.
- Part 1: The debate begins with the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in 2006.
- Part 2, on One Web Day: The founding of BroadbandCensus.com in the fall of 2007.
- Part 3: The Broadband Census for America Conference in...
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Saturday, July 25th, 2009
By Douglas Streeks, Reporter-Researcher, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, July 25, 2009 - Advertisers need to consider consumers’ right to privacy when they collect information on individual internet consumers, a panel of academics, non-profits and industry officials agreed on Friday.
The experts spoke during a panel discussion sponsored by the Technology Policy Institute, a market-oriented think tank on technology issues.
Emphasizing the success of the Internet as an unregulated medium, Florida Republican Rep. Cliff Stearns said it is important to treat any such legislation with caution.
Stearns said that “only the consumer” knows how he or she feels about the information being collected about him.
Still, increased transparency and choice would help in resolving the conflict between advertisers’ needs for information and consumers’ privacy.
Any legislation passed should apply the same privacy rules to similar types of companies collecting the same type of information for the same reasons, he said, and parties accountable only for what they know and control.
Besides the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, Stearns suggested that a new agency could be formed for this type of regulation.
During the panel discussion that followed Stearns’ remarks, Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of information technology and public policy at the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University, said that...
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Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
By Douglas Streeks, Reporter-Researcher, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, July 21, 2009 – A panel of broadband experts agreed Monday that the Universal Service Fund should direct more of its funding to low-income areas and away from exclusively focusing on rural high-cost areas, where funds are not being spent efficiently.
The experts spoke during a panel discussion sponsored by the Technology Policy Institute, a market-oriented think tank on technology issues.
The term universal service, said Jonathan Nuechterlein, a partner at Wilmer Hale law firm, has two different meanings.
One meaning has to do with funding for broadband in high-cost areas where deployment is expensive, regardless of the residents’ income, and the other has to do with funding for low-income areas.
“Funding broadband,” said Nuechterlein, “is expensive” and is going to “increase the burden on the companies that end up subsidizing it.” One way to ensure that this money is spent efficiently is to “narrow the scope” by only funding broadband in “genuinely unserved areas,” he said.
The whole “cluster of issues” dealing with universal service legislation, said Nuechterlein, “is tied with inter-carrier compensation.”
Traditionally, small rural carriers depended on carrier-to-carrier networks to fund their expenditures, but because there are now ways to avoid public access charges, the whole system is...
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Monday, July 13th, 2009
By Douglas Streeks, Reporter-Researcher, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, July 13, 2009 - A group of academic and industry representatives agreed Monday that some government regulation will be necessary to ensure a robust and competitive broadband market and continued innovation. The group spoke during a panel discussion sponsored by the Technology Policy Institute.
Public Knowledge Legal Director Harold Feld said government policymakers have made a shift in how they think about broadband from merely a service to an entire ec0logy. While past policies focused on the number of lines laid and producer incentives, Feld said that going forward, new policies will focus on how all of these factors act together and affect our economy as whole.
But whether the role of government will be to "nudge the participant" into action or "actually building something" itself is still up for debate, he said. “Ten years ago, we thought convergence would create competition at every level,” but “whether competition is enough to meet our policy goals” is still unclear, he said.
Any debate must knowledge that the market is functioning well and is competitive, Verizon Communications Associate General Counsel David Hill said. Hill cited studies showing more than 90 percent of people in the U.S. have access to broadband...
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Monday, June 8th, 2009
From BroadbandCensus.com Weekly Report
WASHINGTON, June 8, 2009 – The NTIA faces a choice between scoring broadband grants according to a common criteria, or meeting the manifold objectives of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, panelists said at the Broadband Stimulus National Town Hall Meeting on June 4.
Speaking at an event co-hosted by BroadbandCensus.com and TV Worldwide, Joanne Hovis of Columbia Telecommunications Corporation said that the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Agency and the Agriculture Department’s Rural Utilities Service must be cognizant of multiple objectives as they design their scoring system.
Scott Wallsten of the Technology Policy Institute said that it was as important to track projects that are not funded by the broadband stimulus effort as it is track those that receive funding. That way, researchers and policy-makers can have the most complete picture of the impact that stimulus spending has had on the broadband landscape.
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