December 2009

Facebook, the world's No.1 Internet social network, took a step toward opening up parts of its site to outsiders Wednesday by introducing more options for user's privacy settings. The changes will make it easier for Facebook's more than 350 million users to limit who sees their musings, videos, photographs and other personal information, but will also give them the opportunity to expose a wider swathe of their information to a broader Internet audience. The move comes as Internet search engines like Google and Microsoft are increasingly interested in incorporating the growing trove of user-generated content from social media websites into their search results, and as Facebook faces competition from rival services like Twitter, in which all information is viewable to the public.

Public Knowledge President and Co-Founder Gigi B. Sohn announced that the organization will sponsor the first World's Fair Use Day on Jan. 12, 2010 in Washington, DC. The event will be an all-day celebration of the doctrine of fair use: the legal right that allows innovators and creators to make particular uses of copyrighted materials without permission of the copyright holder.

This paper reviews a key issue that the Federal Communications Commission face while considering universal service reform - the distribution of support to competing carriers - and explains how the FCC can structure this support to achieve key universal service goals while harnessing the proven benefits of industry competition. This paper offers three principal recommendations. First, the competitive process, not regulatory pre-selection of a single universal service provider, is the best means to ensure the delivery of supported telecommunications services at minimum cost to consumers. Among the many benefits of competition is its ability to constantly motivate industry suppliers to reduce their operating costs over time, and thereby limit the total support required to ensure the delivery of high quality services at affordable rates. Second, because regulators unavoidably lack access to the enormous amount of information required to implement asymmetric per-line support and to continually administer such support efficiently, symmetric per-line support policies should be adopted. Symmetric support policies will ensure that the most efficient suppliers deliver supported services, so that industry costs and support levels will be minimized on an ongoing basis. Excessive support also can be avoided by eliminating duplicative support and, if necessary, by capping total support. Third, arguments advanced by some parties in favor of asymmetric per-line support can be better addressed by defining supported services appropriately, by de-averaging support across relevant geographic regions, and by implementing a reasonable sharing of any true burdens that arise from any asymmetric carrier-of-last-resort obligations.