Category Archives: Public Policy

Internet Deconstructs Spin?

Joe Trippi thinks the Internet changes politics from spin to something better:

Internet activism is spelling the end for the age of spin, the online campaign guru Joe Trippi will warned two British politicians, suggesting that the rules for dealing with “old media” no longer apply.
…
“Command and control … [is] a disaster in the peer-to-peer social network world.”
— Does the Internet Spell the End of Political Spin? By Tania Branigan, The Guardian. Posted June 15, 2007.

Dave Weinberger suggests more or less the same thing, somewhat less optimistically, Continue reading →

None Should Be Favored

What’s the theory behind the recent postal rate changes? The Chairman of the Postal Board of Governors spelled it out 27 years ago:

“…none should be favored and none benefited. Each party pays the cost of service it consumes, not less, and does not bear the cost of others’ consumption.”
— James C. Miller III and Roger Sherman, “Has the 1970 Act Been Fair to Mailers?” in Roger Sherman, ed., Perspectives on Postal Service Issues 63 (1980).

And the Postal Regulatory Commission is following that theory. Continue reading →

Postal Radio?

What’s the point of a free press if it can’t be delivered?

To the surprise of many independent publishers, in February the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC), the body in charge of determining postal rates, rejected a rate-hike plan that was submitted by the U.S. Postal Service, the people in the business of delivering the mail for the past 215 years. This plan was widely understood to call for an approximate 12 percent increase that would have hit all publications more or less equally.
Instead the PRC adopted a revised version of an extremely complicated proposal submitted by media conglomerate Time Warner that included a number of possible discounts favoring the largest publishers.
— Postal Rates = Free Press, Rate hike pushed by media conglomerate Time Warner threaten small and medium-circulation publications, By Robert W. McChesney, In These Times May 17, 2007

Why Time Warner? Continue reading →

Presidential Spectrum

A presidential candidate sends a letter to the FCC about reallocating 700Mhz spectrum currently used by analog TV:

In recent years, the Internet has grown to touch everything and transform much of what it touches. It’s not the answer to everything, but it can powerfully accelerate the best of America. It improves our democracy by making quiet voices loud, improves our economy by making small markets big, and improves opportunity by making unlikely dreams possible.
— Edwards Calls On FCC To Make Internet More Available And Affordable, John Edwards ’08, 30 May 2007

The letter goes on to propose sensible concrete actions. So not only is this letter remarkable in that a presidential candidate sent it, but also that what he writes makes sense.

-jsq

PS: Seen on Art Brodsky.

Slow and Expensive U.S.

Speed is trivial, but you’d think we could do better than this:

The average broadband download speed in the US is only 1.9 megabits per second, compared to 61 Mbps in Japan, 45 Mbps in South Korea, 18 Mbps in Sweden, 17 Mpbs in France, and 7 Mbps in Canada, according to the Communication Workers of America.
— US high-speed Internet is slow, Submitted by Canada IFP, Press Esc, on Sun, 2007-05-20

And as we’ve seen, that list of countries could soon include Hong Kong and India, because they’re taking the problem seriously. More interesting was this was said to. Continue reading →

Speed Is Trivial

Sometimes Bob Frankston makes me shake my head in wonder:

Speed is trivial — the dial up modem completely trounced the entire Interactive TV industry thanks to the web which gave people a reason to find their own solutions without waiting for a service provider to deign to provision a path. As long as you don’t over-defined the solution you’ll get speed — it’s hard not to.
— Re: We’re Stuck In The Slow Lane Of The Information Trollway — it’s all about the billing relationship, Bob Frankston, Interesting People, Sat, 12 May 2007 20:13:50 -0400

Yes, back in the 1990s, video on demand and interactive TV were the big plans of the cablecos and telcos. They tried it. Users didn’t buy it. Instead, participants bought modems and the web boomed. Continue reading →

Content-Delivery Supply-Chain Usefulness

Susan Crawford hits the broadband nail on the head:

What content-delivery supply-chain usefulness is broadband providing?
—For, by Susan Crawford, Susan Crawford blog, 9 May 2007

That’s the question you get if you’re in a corporate strategy meeting trying to decide where this broadband thing fits in with your core competences. That plus they’ll be thinking purely in terms of broadband, because that’s their product, not the Internet. There’s nothing wrong with that, except when there are only a couple of first-mile ISPs deciding the answer for all their users. And the answer in such cases tends to be “video on demand” or “IPTV” or “our search engine”. Corporations are designed to maximize their own profits, not to think in terms of a supply chain that delivers participation, innovation, and prosperity for the general welfare. Continue reading →

Industrial Internet Policy

Susan Crawford posted a laundry list of countries that have an industrial policy (she prefers economic policy) involving the Internet:

South Korea: “the government said where they wanted to go, invested in research and development, [and invested money and made micro loans], and they’re now seeing 70% of adults (not just kids) involved in online social networks. Very high speeds, very low cost.”
Hong Kong: “also not embarrassed to talk about economic policy and telecom.”
India: its “government ‘proposes to offer all citizens of India free, high-speed broadband connectivity by 2009.’”
Japan: Have I mentioned lately that almost every Japanese can get broadband, and usually it’s ten times faster than what we can get stateside?

Now the point here isn’t whether the specific country government policies are good, bad, etc. Continue reading →

Copa, Pew, and Parents

The 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA) has bounced back and forth between lower courts and the Supreme Court ever since it was passed, until a permanent injunction was ruled by Judge Lowell Reed of the U.S. District Court for Pennsylvania in Philadelphia on 22 March. This case had already been through the Supreme Court, in 2004:

The big split in the most recent Supreme Court COPA decision is between Kennedy and Breyer, with Kennedy saying that there are plenty of choices of relatively-effective (and certainly less-restrictive) filtering tools out there for parents to use, and Breyer essentially saying that parents are helpless so mandated shields of various kinds should be put in place to protect kids. It turns out that, in fact, parents are knowledgeable and are giving advice to their children about what to do online.
— Pew on teenage online social networking practices, by Susan Crawford, Susan Crawford blog, Thu 19 Apr 2007 06:43 PM EDT

It turns out because the Pew Internet and American Life Project did a study on Teens, Privacy, & Online Social Networks, in which they asked things like whether teens hold back information from their online profiles and how much their parents know about what they’re doing. That, plus what Judge Reed had already determined, which is that there are pretty effective software screening products available that parents can use if they want to.

Yes, even children benefit from open participation through the Internet. Perhaps parents could learn from their children, too.