Local governments have taken the lead in U.S. broadband policy. Hundreds of communities of all sizes are making decisions about how to best deliver universal, affordable access to high-speed information networks. Many are offered seemingly attractive arrangements with no upfront cost to the city. They do themselves and their households and businesses a disservice if they do not seriously explore the costs and benefits of a publicly owned network.
In this report, we highlight five arguments for public ownership.
1. High-speed information networks are essential public infrastructure.
Just as high quality road systems are needed to transport people and goods, high quality wired and wireless networks are needed to transport information. Public ownership of the physical network does not necessarily mean the city either manages the network or provides services. Cities own roads, but they do not operate freight companies or deliver pizzas.
Category: Politics
We Can’t Tell You, It’s a Secret”
At GITA, Dr. Bill Gail of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth team addressed a question as to working with highly sensititve imagery of perhaps a national security concern and whether they might be asked to black out areas on Virtual Earth. Google had been asked to do this previously for certain areas and Microsoft wanted to preempt such situations. Gail said that Microsoft has sat down with various government agencies to ask them about these potential conflict areas that they thought might be blacked out if asked to do so. Their answer was, “it’s a secret, we can’t tell you.”
The Killing of Wifi?
There is mounting evidence that the cellular service companies are going to do whatever they can to kill Wi-Fi. After all, it is a huge long-term threat to them. We’ve seen that the route to success in America today is via public gullibility and general ignorance. And these cell-phone–service companies are no dummies.
The always-entertaining Pew Internet & American Life Project ran a survey, and the results show that 34 percent of Internet users have gone online with a Wi-Fi connection or one of those newly popular and overpriced cell-phone services. Two years ago, this number was 22 percent. Another factoid from the survey: 19 percent of all users have Wi-Fi in the home. This number was a mere 10 percent just one year ago. The last tidbit from the survey worth noting is that only 56 percent of the people who have PDAs that hook to the Internet have actually gone on the Net via their PDA. The same goes for the people who have cell phones with Internet capability; not much more than half have actually used it.
Stewart on Afghan Policy
The international community’s policy in Afghanistan is based on the claim that Afghans are willing partners in the creation of a liberal democratic state. Senator John McCain finished a recent speech on Afghanistan by saying, “Billions of people around the world now embrace the ideals of political, economic and social liberty, conceived in the West, as their own.”
In Afghanistan in January, Tony Blair thanked Afghans by saying “we’re all in this together” and placing them in “the group of people who want to live in peace and harmony with each other, whatever your race or your background or your religion.”
Such language is inaccurate, misleading and dangerous.
Afghans, like Americans, do not want to be abducted and tortured. They want a say in who governs them, and they want to feed their families. But reducing their needs to broad concepts like “human rights,” “democracy” and “development” is unhelpful.
Stewart wrote the excellent: “The Places in Between” on his walk across Afghanistan.
Some Good Reasons for Governments NOT to invest Taxpayer Money in Schemes
Finding Two. If a state plays this game it quickly reaches an absurd level. Just after the LoPresti micro-triumph New Mexico announced a $100 million investment to build…a spaceport (I really wish I was making this up). This will service Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and is obviously a necessary subsidy, because Branson, for some reason, has no cash. (See the December 2005 press release at http://ww1.edd.state.nm.us. Title: Richardson Announces $100 Million Commitment to Build World’s First Spaceport. Implicit subtitles: “Private Sector Baulks At Risky Project; We’re enlisting New Mexico Taxpayers To Provide Generous Help” and “Hooray! We’re Morons!”). Today, Kansas and Florida. Tomorrow, Low Earth Orbit. Who can stop New Mexico from operating like an aerospace banana republic? In search of good government I asked my friend Jeff Schwartz what could be done. Jeff is one of the smartest government guys I know, and he works for the Appalachian Regional Commission, which funds development work in states in their jurisdiction. “We’re on it,” he reassured me, referring me to their code (http://www.arc.gov/index.do?nodeId=1242#chap8). The ARC prohibits its money from going to “(A) Any form of assistance to relocating industries; (B) recruitment activities that place a state in competition with another state or states; and (C) projects that promote unfair competition between businesses within the same immediate service area.”
Brenda Konkel recently wondered about the City of Madison’s $700K loan to Tomo Therapy. Generally, I think governments should stay out of this. We’re all better off if they spend time simplifying processes, taxes and paperwork.
Specter’s Letter from Moscow
The murder of Anna Politkovskaya was at once unbelievable and utterly expected. She had been hunted and attacked before. I 2001, she fled to Vienna after receiving e-mailed threats claiming that a special-services police officer whom she had accused o committing atrocities against civilians (and who was eventually convicted of the crimes) was bent on revenge. While she was abroad a woman who looked very much like her was shot and killed in front of Politkovskaya’s Moscow apartment building. Polic investigators believe the bullet was meant for Politkovskaya. In 2004, she became violently ill after drinking tea on a flight to Beslan in North Ossetia, where, at the request of Chechen leaders, she was to negotiate with terrorists who had seized a school and take more than eleven hundred hostages, most of them children. The Russian Army, which had bungled its response to the siege, did no want her there. Upon landing in Rostov, she was rushed to the hospital; the next day, she was flown by private jet to Moscow fo treatment. By the time she arrived, her blood-test results and other medical records had somehow disappeared. She survived, only t be called a “midwife to terror.” The threats became continuous: calls in the middle of the night, letters, e-mails, all ominous, al promising the worst. “Anna knew the risks only too well,’’ her sister told me. Politkovskaya was born in New York while her fathe was serving at the United Nations, in 1958; not long ago, her family persuaded her to obtain an American passport. “But that was a far as she would go,” Kudimova said. “We all begged her to stop. We begged. My parents. Her editors. Her children. But she alway answered the same way: ‘How could I live with myself if I didn’t write the truth?’
Fear and Loathing the Cable Company
But then, that’s not news. I’ve been trying to get Joost working at home and was cursing it, but I was cursing the wrong party. Joost works fine at work. I can’t wait until Verizon finishes laying fibre on my street so I can get FIOS. Except Verizon hired the worst contractor imaginable to get the job done. They have been at it for more than two months on a street with fewer than 20 homes; they’ve managed to cut our cable and gas line and a neighbor’s electric line and they’re not nearly done. I’m about to go out with a shovel myself just so I can get rid of Cablevision sooner.
At least Jarvis can look forward to fiber to the home, via Verizon. Locally, AT&T is content to spend money on advertising and resell us the copper lines we’ve paid for over and over and over.
Anderson on “We Media”
Chris Anderson correctly analyzes the “we media” bubble. Change is certainly underway in the media world, but it will not, clearly be linear:
First, let’s agree that “media” is anything that people want to read, watch or listen to, amateur or professional. The difference between the “old” media and the “new” is that old media packages content and new media atomizes it. Old media is all about building businesses around content. New media is about the content, period. Old media is about platforms. New media is about individual people. (Note: “old” does not mean bad and “new” good–I do, after all, run a very nicely growing magazine/old media business.)
The problem with most of the companies Skrenta lists is that they were/are trying to be a “news aggregators”. Just as one size of news doesn’t fit all, one size of news aggregator doesn’t either.
Declining Demand for Luxury Sports Suites?
It was like watching an era of sports history being erased. In early December, construction workers sawed through the multiple layers of drywall and metal studs separating a row of skyboxes at the Seattle Mariners’ Safeco Field. They tore up the suites’ beech-hardwood floors and carted away their oriental rugs and leather furniture. By the end of the week, the eight skyboxes were gone.
In a reversal that strikes at a cornerstone of pro-sports finances — and of the way corporate America entertains — teams around the country are ripping out luxury suites. These perches have been used to justify billions of dollars in stadium construction over the past two decades. But in many cities, they are losing luster with surprising speed, partly the result of factors that couldn’t have predicted five or 10 years ago, from changes in tax laws to scandal-driven reforms on corporate entertaining.
“At GM, you can’t even buy them a cup of coffee anymore,” says Lin Cummins, the marketing chief at automotive supplier Arvin Meritor in Troy, Mich, which has let the leases expire for its suites in four different sports.
Google’s Arrogance in North Carolina: Learning from AT&T?
But it turns out that there was a lot more to the story. Google leaned hard on North Carolina lawmakers and officials, not just to get the fattest deal possible but to choke off the flow of information along the way.
According to documents obtained by The News & Observer of Raleigh, the company went beyond reasonable expectations of confidentiality to demand absolute secrecy while negotiations were under way, even asking participants to sign nondisclosure agreements; some legislators and local officials did so, but Department of Commerce officials did not. Google executive Rhett Weiss badgered Commerce Secretary Jim Fain about the state’s adherence to process, complaining, for example, when lawmakers wanted an estimate of the cost to North Carolina in lost tax revenue, and threatening to kill the whole thing if Google didn’t get its way.
Businesses need some measure of confidentiality when putting together this kind of transaction. Fair enough. But this is the people’s business, and Google’s high-handedness is an affront to the people of this state.
And then there’s that whole “Don’t be evil” thing. Google spokesman Barry Schnitt told me that the company’s negotiations with the state were “very standard.” If that’s the case, and this is standard operating procedure for the company, then something has gone wrong in Silicon Valley.
Barry Orton keeps up with AT&T’s Wisconsin Lobbying.
Yet another reason to use the excellent Clusty search engine.