November 2009

ABC's Good morning America canceled Adam Lambert's scheduled appearance on the show because of Lambert's racy appearance on the "American Music Awards" on Sunday night. ABC said it doesn't think Lambert's performance would be appropriate for a morning audience. CBS rival "The Early Show" booked Lambert for Wednesday morning. It said the singer would perform live and discuss his AMA appearance, parts of which were cut when the show aired later Sunday on the U.S. West Coast.

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan team seems to be thinking reward the inefficient and to tax the affluent. For some reason the task force does not seem to be able to admit that broadband service in the United States is too expensive for a lot of people. It hints at this by noting that only 35% of adults with a annual income of under $20K subscribe to broadband whereas 88% of those with an annual income of over $100K do. It does gloss past a root cause of the relatively high cost of broadband when it notes that "areas with lower incomes have fewer competitors" and " areas with fewer competitors have higher prices." What it does not mention is that, even in areas with some competition, there are almost always only two providers: a cable company and a telephone company. A duopoly of giant, similarly motivated carriers is not normally a recipe for robust competition.

[Commentary] In the second round of broadband stimulus, we need to find solutions for streamlining the approval process, getting money out the door more quickly, and maximizing the impact of taxpayer dollars. Daily's suggestion: a fast-track partial loan guarantee program. Compared to grants, guarantees have the advantage of leverage. You only have to budget for a fraction of whatever guarantees you hand out. Whereas a dollar of budget authority can only deliver a dollar of grants, that same dollar of budget authority can be turned into ten to twenty dollars of guarantees. Government loans offer the same opportunities for leverage, but with guarantees government doesn't have to write a check and it's able to share the risk with private capital. Put simply: loan guarantees are one of the best options to stimulate broadband deployment, and yet to date we've been ignoring them. So how can loan guarantees be used to streamline the second round of RUS's BIP program? 1) Change the guarantees to cover 100% of losses up to 50% of the value of the loan. 2) Institute a fast-track approval process. The basis for implementing a new fast-track approval process is the fact that if you have a private capital source writing a check for the full amount of a loan and taking on half the risk then you can assume that that lender has done a thorough job vetting the financial viability of a project.

Interview with Cecilia Kang, Technology Reporter, Washington Post, provides a primer on Google's efforts to digitize books in libraries throughout the world. The Google Book Search project was started in 2004 and within less than a year a class action suit was levied against the company for copyright infringement by the Association of American Publishers and the Author's Guild. In October of 2008 the parties agreed to a class action settlement. However, there were several opponents to the settlement, including authors, publishers, Google's business competitors, and the Department of Justice who initiated an antitrust investigation. Kang presents details of the case and the current status of the settlement.