February 2010

A look at Federal Communications Commission member Mignon Clyburn who promises to champion consumer-focused issues.

On the national broadband plan, which is due to Congress in March, she is most interested in helping low-income, minority and rural communities get the computers and training they need to adopt broadband. She plans to zero in on the wireless industry, which she says charges too many fees and places too many restrictions on the cell phones available to consumers. The FCC is investigating both aspects of the industry.

Media ownership, and how industry consolidation will affect minority outlets, is also a top concern for her. The FCC will tackle its next media ownership review this year.

[Commentary] Super Bowl Sunday should be a time for us to put aside our political differences and let our country only be divided by one simple issue: Saints or Colts. Not according to CBS.

The network announced a few weeks ago that it would reverse its earlier policy and allow advocacy ads to air during the game, starting with Heisman-winning Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow's ad for the Christian pro-life group Focus on the Family. The ad reportedly features Tebow with his mother, talking about how she ignored medical advice to have an abortion while pregnant with him in the Philippines. Eyebrows were raised, but they were raised even higher late last week when CBS rejected an ad for gay dating site ManCrunch. CBS claimed that the ManCrunch spot is "not within the network's Broadcast Standards for Super Bowl Sunday." It's not a well-produced ad--in fact, it's probably best for all parties involved if it doesn't air--but judge for yourself if you find it inappropriate for the Super Bowl.

To complicate matters--and raise sentiment that the network is anti-gay--CBS also denied another ad for Super Bowl regular GoDaddy.com featuring the overly-effeminate ex-NFL player "Lola." Bad taste? Double standard? Or are some "issues" more appropriate to address during a football game than others?

[Commentary] Sitting in the lobby of the Taj Hotel in Mumbai, reading the front page of the local Economic Times, I was hit with a one-two-punch: the news that Google may quit the huge Chinese market in a dispute over serious cyber attacks to its facilities in the PRC, and the feeling that I was watching the opening salvo of a new, major trend in American foreign policy that has been quietly building for several years.

The reality is that Google and the other huge information and communications (ICT) companies that now dominate the U.S. economy have always punched below their weight in foreign affairs. But now that Google has stepped out ahead of the pack and taken an aggressive stance against the government of arguably the second or third most powerful country in the world, we may be witnessing a new stage in U.S. international relations: what might be called Silicon Valley's new foreign policy. We can only imagine the future contours and content of Silicon Valley's new foreign policy. But it is worth looking at how the economic information and communication powerhouses will pursue their international interests.

What would their new activism mean for trade policy? Security affairs? Regional policies? Does this buttress 'public diplomacy' policies of governments, or make them less relevant? Stay tuned to find out. There's been a lot of talk about the impact of Google's actions in China. The biggest impact of their policy innovation may be right here in the US of A.

The United States took the top spot on the 2009 Connectivity Scorecard, a research project linking increased national technological connectivity with socio-economic transformation.

Professor Leonard Waverman of the London Business School and economic consulting firm LECG put together the scorecard focusing on 50 countries using metrics such as national usage, skills and infrastructure. Waverman found that the United States leads more categories than any other nation - its person computer penetration of businesses is excellent and the nation takes top prize in secure server deployment. However, he found that consumer infrastructure does not score as highly for the United States as its other metrics and its "broadband and 3G penetration are average." The study found that fiber is being deployed on a "much wider" basis than in most other countries in the survey, but the United States still is "significantly behind" the leaders in the area.