The Federal Communications Commission should be at full strength come Monday. Approved by the Senate, Meredith Attwell Baker will be sworn in as commissioner on Friday. Mignon Clyburn will be sworn as Commissioner on Monday in Columbia (SC). Clyburn will be the first African American woman to serve as an FCC commissioner.
Christine A. Varney, the nation's top antitrust cop, is trying to pull off a delicate balancing act. She wants to reinvigorate antitrust policy after the laissez-faire years of the Bush Administration. Yet she also wants to avoid interfering with companies that compete vigorously but fairly. "This job is making sure the competitive marketplace is free from obstacles and barriers," says Varney, whose official title is Assistant Attorney General at the Justice Dept. "We are thinking a lot about where bottlenecks might be in certain industries. If we can break through them it would be good for consumers." Varney says the Justice Dept. will be taking a look at a range of industries including technology. She wants to update antitrust law for the Digital Age. Varney says tech businesses are unusually vulnerable to concentration of power because of what are known as network effects. The idea is that the more people join a network, the more powerful that network becomes. She thinks Justice should watch for abuse within such networks, and be ready to act quickly. "In a network setting, you can tip into a dominant player pretty fast," she says. "You want to keep the competitive playing field open and vigorous."
Incumbents choosing not to participate in the scramble for Broadband Stimulus money still need to pay attention to the process and how money is being awarded, since there is the possibility other entities could apply for, and receive, money to build broadband networks in their footprint. Thomas Cohen, partner in the Washington (DC) office of Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, Bob Tupper, consulting engineer with RVW Inc., and John Hoover, senior product manager with Tellabs, which sponsored the event, all encouraged incumbents, including telco, cable and wireless service providers, to pay attention to how stimulus money is being allocated. Because the money is being given out based on aggregated census blocks, there is the possibility that a non-incumbent can aggregate part of an incumbent's footprint into an application to meet the requirements for serving rural, remote, unserved or underserved areas, Tupper said. Under those circumstances, an incumbent has an opportunity to refute the claim, he said. Hoover advised incumbents to adopt the "best defense is a good offense" strategy and consider cost-effective ways of upgrading their broadband service through retrofits, overlays and upgrades that don't require massive deployment of fiber, but can incrementally boost bandwidth.
Robert Lentz -- the deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber, identity, and information assurance in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense -- called for a second national cybersecurity czar dedicated to handling problems and risks associated with anonymity on the Internet. Identity is at the heart of securing the Internet, he said. "In my opinion, there needs to be a cyberczar just for identity. Without that, we're going to be done," said Lentz, who said reducing anonymity is key to ensuring security and resiliency on the Net. He noted that reducing anonymity also will generate debate over "legitimate privacy concerns," too. "We need a national leader focused on this important topic, which is without a doubt a foundation for this fragile ecosystem," he said.
The Obama administration needs to restructure how interagency information-sharing initiatives are funded and implemented to encourage compliance by agencies that currently place a higher priority on their own missions, government and industry experts told House lawmakers Thursday. "Differing missions, overlapping turf conflicts, resource constraints, bureaucratic inertia and agency tunnel vision still exist and impede information sharing," said Ambassador Thomas McNamara, program manager of the Information Sharing Environment, a post within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. ISE was created by Congress in 2004 to facilitate the sharing of terrorism information across all levels of government and the private sector. McNamara, who will step down from the role on Friday, told the Homeland Security Committee's panel on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment that his replacement should be a presidentially appointed senior official with independent authority, though he stopped short of recommending that the role be moved to the White House.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski said, "I am making it clear to everyone I talk to that the country expects the FCC to be an expert agency that's focused on facts, focused on data, and that takes a hard and honest approach." Genachowski's approach is to make the agency more accessible. The FCC in August is holding two dozen open-to-the-public workshops on broadband - high-speed Internet - policy. Genachowski called them "unparalleled in the FCC history" for openness. "We're experimenting with mechanisms to make the FCC as participatory as possible," said Chairman Genachowski.
A study was to assess both the adoption and utilization of Internet technologies among businesses throughout rural Minnesota. Highlights of the study include:
1) Businesses throughout rural Minnesota continue to be characterized as small businesses;
2) 89.7 percent of rural businesses are now operating online;
3) Just 4.3% of rural businesses connect to the Internet through a dial-up connection;
4) Rural businesses are active users of the Internet and continue to integrate it into their business operations. More than half of all businesses in the study report utilizing their broadband connection for everything from selling goods and services online (56.3%) to interacting with government agencies (69.8%). Further, business owners report that securing adequate bandwidth is having a significant impact on everything from their overall cost of doing business (49.9%) to impacting increased business sales (49.3%).
5) The majority of rural businesses report satisfaction with their current connection speeds as well as the price they are currently paying; with more than 70 percent reporting satisfaction in both areas.
6) While 85 percent of rural businesses currently report that their connection speeds are currently meeting their needs, only 37 percent have confidence that their current connection speeds will adequately meet their needs 24 months from now.
[Commentary] If you take the average time spent per user per month for a site and multiply that by the number of unique visitors, you come up with a rough estimate of how much total time is spent on a site in a month— a number that seems pretty important if you want to sell attention. The New York Times, for instance, had 17.4 million visitors to its Web site in June and the average visitor spent 14 minutes and 29 seconds on the site that month. That means that readers collectively spent about 4.2 million hours on the Times site in June. So how does that compare to time spent reading the paper? The New York Times has 1.1 million subscribers who the company says spend more than thirty minutes a day with the paper. That's 16.5 million hours per month, nearly four times the total time spent on New York Times Online.
Sept 22, 2009
http://onewebday.org/
is an Earth Day for the internet. The idea behind is to focus attention on a key internet value (this year, online participation in democracy), focus attention on local internet concerns (connectivity, censorship, individual skills), and create a global constituency that cares about protecting and defending the internet. So, think of as an environmental movement for the Internet ecosystem. It's a platform for people to educate and activate others about issues that are important for the Internet's future.
Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology
HHS
August 14, 2009
10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Holiday Inn
Washington Capitol Hotel
550 C Street, SW
Washington, DC
http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/pdf/E9-18331.pdf
The committee will discuss the definition of Meaningful Use, and hear presentations from the Certification/Adoption and Information Exchange Workgroups. The HIT Standards Committee will also update the HIT Policy Committee on its progress to date. ONC intends to make background material available to the public no later than two business days prior to the meeting. If ONC is unable to post the background material on its Web site prior to the meeting, it will be made publicly available at the location of the advisory committee meeting, and the background material will be posed on ONC's Web site after the meeting.
Contact:
Judy Sparrow
Office of the National Coordinator,
HHS
330 C Street, SW
Washington, DC 20201
202-205-4528
Fax: 202-690-6079
judy.sparrow@hhs.gov
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