March 2011

BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for MONDAY, MARCH 28, 2011

Find all the AT&T|T-Mobile news at http://benton.org/headlines/at-t-t-mobile ; follow us on Twitter @benton_fdn

AT&T|T-MOBILE
   Not So Fast, Ma Bell
   The Urge to Merge
   With AT&T/T-Mobile, wireless network neutrality should be back on the table
   Clearwire CEO Expresses Concerns With AT&T Deal
   Consumers Union: Block AT&T, T-Mobile Deal
   What Will Derail AT&T's Political Calculus On T-Mobile?
   Explaining Wireless Spectrum Woes
   AT&T Lobbyist Faces Beltway Test in T-Mobile Deal
   March 19-25: Is There Anything Else to Talk About?

MORE ON WIRELESS
   Chairman Genachowski Responds to Members of Congress on Data Roaming
   Optimism over US spectrum crunch
   LightSquared in contract talks

INTERNET/BROADBAND
   The Future of the Internet
   Publicly Owned Broadband Networks: Averting the Looming Broadband Monopoly
   The Cloud: Unleashing Global Opportunities
   Was Google’s Fiber Plan Just Saber Rattling?
   Paul Baran, Internet Pioneer, Dies at 84

LABOR
   High-tech industry on hiring binge in California

CONTENT
   US Internet piracy is on the decline
   Online books and copyright law

TV/RADIO
   FCC Fines TV Stations for Airing Video News Releases

TELECOM
   Oregon Public Utility Commission Approves CenturyLink-Qwest Merger
   FCC Sends USAC New Recommendations

PRIVACY
   It’s Tracking Your Every Move and You May Not Even Know
   FTC Finalizes Settlement with Data Broker Agency Charged Privacy Pledges Were Deceptive
   The Dissent: Why One FTC Commissioner Thinks Do Not Track Is Off-Track
   The 0.00002% Privacy Solution

GOVERNMENT & COMMUNICATIONS
   Internet alone cannot free the Middle East
   US Products Help Block Mideast Web
   Ethical Quandary for Social Sites

HEALTH
   HHS Announces open public comment period on the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan: 2011-2015

EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS
   Quake Area Residents Turn to Old Means of Communication to Keep Informed

MORE ONLINE
   Treasury: Make R&D credit permanent
   Long-Form Journalism Finds a Home

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AT&T|T-MOBILE

NOT SO FAST, MA BELL
[SOURCE: The Economist, AUTHOR: ]
[Commentary] Beware of habitual monopolists bearing gifts -- especially if they operate in shamefully uncompetitive markets. AT&T’s proposed $39 billion takeover of T-Mobile USA would create a dominant mobile-phone operator, with a 39% market share in America, and a near-duopoly with Verizon, the current market leader: together their combined share would be 70%. It is a mark of the mess that the United States has made of telecoms not just that such a deal is being considered, but also that a duopoly might actually bring genuine short-term benefits. All the same, it would be far better if the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Department of Justice blocked the T-Mobile merger -- and tried to reform the market instead. The bait for President Barack Obama is that the deal could speed up his commitment to make broadband available to more Americans. AT&T says the acquisition will let it expand its fourth-generation (4G) technology -- which will provide faster data connections on mobile devices -- to a further 46.5m Americans, including many in rural areas who cannot get fixed-line broadband. This is much the same argument that AT&T’s grandmother, Ma Bell, made a century ago when it lobbied successfully to be allowed to swallow up lots of other telephone operators and become a monopoly, on the ground that this was the best way to ensure decent coverage, especially in a huge country with a thinly spread population. The suspicion is that President Obama, desperate both to build some broken fences with big business and to make progress on connecting every American home to the Internet, will give in. In fact he should push the FCC to promote more competition -- by, for instance, allowing other firms to buy bulk wireless capacity from AT&T and resell it, by freeing up underused spectrum and by making local phone and cable firms share their wires. A duopoly would in the end reduce choice for American consumers, and be hard to reverse. Best to block it.
benton.org/node/54026 | Economist, The
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THE URGE TO MERGE
[SOURCE: National Journal, AUTHOR: David Hatch]
MCI and Sprint in 2000. DirecTV and Dish Network in 2002. The Google-Yahoo advertising alliance of 2008. All three megadeals were trumpeted with great fanfare … but never happened. The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division rejected the MCI and satellite television mergers, asserting that they would limit competition. The online ad deal unraveled when Justice threatened to block it. So when officials at AT&T (the country’s second-largest wireless carrier) announced a $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile (the fourth-largest) last weekend, they had clearly studied history. “The facts show that the U.S. wireless market is one of the most competitive markets in the world,” said Wayne Watts, senior executive vice president and general counsel for AT&T, at a Monday news conference. As far as he is concerned, the Obama administration should not hesitate to approve the transaction, because the cellular business is robust. Trouble is, that’s not for him to say. The newly combined behemoth would surpass Verizon as the nation’s largest wireless carrier, creating what critics say is a duopoly. (In market share, Sprint is a distant third.) Now, regulators will step in. If they foresee higher prices, fewer choices, and limited access to the latest technologies -- because only vigorous competition guarantees those consumer-friendly offerings -- they can kill or modify the deal. But first, the Justice Department has to figure out which prices are too high, how many choices are too few, and what, exactly, makes competition vigorous.
benton.org/node/54025 | National Journal
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PUT WIRELESS NET NEUTRALITY BACK ON THE TABLE
[SOURCE: ars technica, AUTHOR: Matthew Lasar]
[Commentary] Back when the movement for strong open Internet rules included a company called Google, it was generally agreed among such advocates that clear federal agency provisions against protocol blocking and unreasonable discrimination should be applied to last-mile wireless and wireline broadband connections alike. All these concerns vaporized, of course, once Google made policy peace with its Droid partner Verizon last August. The two companies then issued their famous Legislative Framework proposal that would deny the FCC even the authority to make hard-and-fast rules on its own. Suddenly the distinct and delicate nature of wireless broadband was discovered. So when the FCC finally issued its long awaited and partially Congressionally disapproved-of net neutrality rules in December, the Commission dutifully exempted wireless from all but the aforementioned transparency provision and a bar on the outright blocking of content. Now, however, with AT&T's bid to gobble up T-Mobile, all these competition rationales return to haunt their advocates. After all, in 2010 both the Department of Justice and the National Telecommunications Information Agency wondered out loud whether wireless broadband would really make the residential broadband sector more competitive. The government's decision to waive unfair discrimination provisions against wireless broadband was based on a widely vetted evaluation of the competitive nature of that market. Surely, a proposal that would result in one carrier controlling almost 42 percent of wireless subscriber share changes that assessment. The FCC, FTC, Department of Justice, and Congress must now decide how much.
benton.org/node/54023 | Ars Technica
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CLEARWIRE OPPOSES DEAL
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Roger Cheng, Shayndi Raice]
John Stanton, the founder of T-Mobile USA's predecessor and chief executive of Clearwire, criticized AT&T's proposed deal to buy T-Mobile USA, calling it a "huge challenge to competition in the industry." "This represents something we're seriously concerned with," Stanton said. He added that he would express his concerns to the government as regulators begin to scrutinize the deal. Stanton called AT&T a well-organized and disciplined company, but he added it is a "brutal competitor." He described the company's insistence on keeping the Apple Inc. iPhone an exclusive device for as long as it did "stepping on the air hose of T-Mobile."
benton.org/node/54021 | Wall Street Journal
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CONSUMERS UNION OPPOSES DEAL
[SOURCE: National Journal, AUTHOR: David Hatch]
Parul Desai, policy council for Consumers Union, appears this week on C-SPAN's "The Communicators." She makes clear Consumers Union's stance on AT&T's proposed purchase of T-Mobile: the transaction must be blocked. "I don't think there are really any conditions that could, at this point, alleviate the harms that would come out of the transaction." "AT&T hasn't shown to me why it would need T-Mobile's assets and spectrum" to achieve its post-merger goal of extending advanced 4G wireless service to 95 percent of the country, she said. "They already have the spectrum [they need]. They just haven't invested [in] or built out that spectrum." While Desai acknowledges that wireless voice prices have gone down in recent years, she said that rates for broadband data plans are on the rise. "If this venture is about mobile broadband, that obviously involves data," she said. Desai also raised concerns about the specter of layoffs, a worry shared by the Communications Workers of America, despite its early endorsement of the deal. "We will obviously be looking at that carefully.
benton.org/node/54019 | National Journal
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AT&T'S POLITICAL CALCULUS
[SOURCE: Public Knowledge, AUTHOR: Art Brodsky]
[Commentary] It’s easy to imagine the ultimate meeting in AT&T’s corporate headquarters that finalized the decision to buy out No. 4 national wireless carrier T-Mobile. AT&T Chairman Randall Stephenson is at the head of the table. He goes around the table checking with his top executives ­ Wayne Watts, the general counsel; Ralph de la Vega, who heads AT&T Mobility; Rick Lindner, the chief financial officer; John Stankey, who is in charge of business solutions. There probably were others, but those were the key players who would participate in the investor webcast. Finally, he looks over at Jim Cicconi, the chief lobbyist, who was on the dais with those other execs for the webcast on Monday morning, March 21. All the other guys are on board, but Cicconi is key. It will be his job to sell the deal in Washington. In this scenario, Cicconi’s analysis goes something like this: “All of the Republicans in the Senate and House will be with us. Even the Tea Party won't raise a fuss because they don't want the government interfering with the free market. Some Democrats might object, but we've got most of them neutralized because we have the union (Communications Workers of America) and lots of their traditional constituencies on our side. And, frankly, the Obama people, either in DoJ or the FCC, don't have the stones to stop this. They might insist on some conditions, and we'll do some negotiating, but nothing we can't handle or that would make a difference.” Who wants to bet against that scenario?
benton.org/node/54018 | Public Knowledge
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EXPLAINING WIRELESS WOES
[SOURCE: TeleFrieden, AUTHOR: Rob Frieden]
[Commentary] Yet again The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial and op-ed piece, uses snarkiness and mischaracterizations to refute legitimate concerns about AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile. See Wall Street Journal, Review & Outlook, More Spectrum, Please--AT&T bids $39 billion to get around FCC bottlenecks, A14 (March 23, 2011); Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. AT&T’s Big Bet on Spectrum Folly, A13 (March 23, 2011). These pieces reframe the issue from a question about market concentration into an endorsement of AT&T’s valiant “self-help” efforts to find adequate spectrum for consumers. They glibly ignore or dismiss the proper focus on how the deal would affect consumers, competition, innovation, employment and service prices. The Journal dismisses as hackneyed Gigi Sohn’s conclusion that allowing two or three ventures to control over 92% of the market reduces competition and choice, raises prices, reduces innovation and results in fewer jobs. See PBS News Hour, How Will Consumers Fare in T-Mobile, AT&T Merger? (March 22, 2011). Once upon a time even the Republican Party of Teddy Roosevelt acted to prevent marketplace distortion caused by monopoly “trusts.” When a market lacks robust competition few operators do not have to spend sleepless afternoons innovating and striving to operate more efficiently.
benton.org/node/54016 | TeleFrieden
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JIM CICCONI
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Edward Wyatt]
Like many other big corporations, AT&T annually blankets power brokers with token holiday gifts, but the cupcake campaign was notable for its military precision. A three-page spreadsheet, stamped “AT&T Proprietary (Internal Use Only),” detailed how the desserts were to be deployed to each of the 63 Federal Communication Commission offices: four dozen were assigned to the enforcement bureau, 10 dozen to the wireless divisions, 12 cupcakes to each of four FCC Commissioners, and 18 to Chairman Julius Genachowski, and so on. As it turns out, AT&T had begun its $39 billion courting of T-Mobile about the same time. The resulting deal, announced a week ago, would transform the industry if approved. It would narrow the field of major wireless providers to three and vault AT&T into the No. 1 spot, ahead of Verizon; consumer advocates say the combination will lead to higher prices. As interested parties lobby for and against the merger, one person will be pulling at the levers of power more often and with more influence than anyone else, according to both friends and foes: AT&T’s chief lobbyist, James W. Cicconi. A master strategist, Cicconi (pronounced si-CONE-ee) internalizes the art of regulatory and legislative war — and Operation Cupcake is but one of the efforts to come out of his shop. Tutored by James A. Baker III in the ways of politics in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Cicconi, 58, plays hardball — literally, as a pitcher in an adult baseball league, flinging fastballs toward batters more than a decade younger. His roots are in Texas, and he never forgets the lesson of the Alamo: the Texans lost. Other battles have different lessons for him. He once took his staff on an overnight retreat to Gettysburg (PA) where it toured Cemetery Ridge and Little Round Top and absorbed lessons on battlefield tactics. In 13 years at AT&T, Cicconi has helped guide the company through roughly a dozen mergers, large and small, and he has made his share of enemies in Washington. As a testament to his power, however, few of them will criticize him on the record.
benton.org/node/54053 | New York Times
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IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE TO TALK ABOUT?
[SOURCE: Benton Foundation, AUTHOR: Kevin Taglang]
Our Headlines have been dominated all week by AT&T's proposal to buy T-Mobile USA for $39 billion -- so much so, you may ask, Is there really anything else to write about it? Not to be too redundant, here's a look at what we've been reading this past week. Ryan Chittum at the Columbia Journalism Review noted that early coverage of this deal has done a good job of emphasizing:
the bold consolidation the deal would entail,
a very distinct impression that this deal could be bad news for consumers, and
a bold test of just how weak antitrust enforcement has really gotten in the US.
AT&T and Deutsche Telekom announced the deal on March 20 just ahead of the US wireless industry's annual confab in Florida. AT&T would gain T-Mobile's 34 million wireless subscribers, network infrastructure and spectrum licenses (AT&T would increase its spectrum holdings by almost 60 percent.). Deutsche Telekom will get an approximately 8 percent (but no less than 5 percent) ownership interest in AT&T -- and a seat on AT&T's board. Here's the benefits the companies are promising from the deal.
http://benton.org/node/53957
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MORE ON WIRELESS

DATA ROAMING CONCERNS
[SOURCE: Federal Communications Commission, AUTHOR: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski]
Earlier this year Republicans on the House Commerce Committee sent Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski a letter warning the FCC to not take any action on proposed data roaming rules without first answering the Members' concerns about the FCC's authority to do so. On March 17, Chairman Genachowski answered saying that for nearly 30 years the FCC has required roaming in one form or another to "continue to foster the development of seamless automatic roaming services for all [ ] subscribers in the nation." He said he believes data roaming arrangements are best negotiated between mobile providers in light of commercial considerations. Accordingly, he does not support a common-carriage mandate for data roaming. But FCC staff has recommended that a data roaming rule is necessary to ensure vibrant competition in the mobile marketplace, to unleash billions of dollars of investment that is currently sidelined, to create thousands of new jobs and to meet the consumer demand for seamless nationwide coverage, be it for voice or data. The FCC will vote soon on rules that require a facilities-based provider of commercial mobile data services to offer roaming arrangements to other such providers on commercially reasonable terms and conditions, subject to various limitations designed to account for and protect the legitimate interests of the companies that would be providing roaming.
benton.org/node/54002 | Federal Communications Commission
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SPECTRUM CRUNCH
[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR: Andrew Parker, Paul Taylor]
AT&T’s audacious bid for Deutsche Telekom’s US mobile phone business has provided dramatic proof of how telecoms companies urgently need more radio spectrum to cope with booming consumer demand for smartphones. By buying T-Mobile USA for $39 billion in cash and stock, AT&T would obtain a large chunk of additional spectrum to support bandwidth-hungry smartphones and tablet computers. But the looming spectrum crunch in the US is providing grounds for optimism at two companies with very different business models to orthodox mobile phone operators such as AT&T. Clearwire and LightSquared – which both hold significant amounts of spectrum – are betting they can have a prosperous future as wholesale network operators. Both are seeking to put their networks at the disposal of companies that want to provide consumers and businesses with high-speed mobile services. LightSquared and Clearwire have their critics, partly because their wholesale business model is anathema to much of the mobile industry.
benton.org/node/54045 | Financial Times
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LIGHTSQUARED CONTRACT TALKS
[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR: Andrew Parker, Paul Taylor]
LightSquared, the group behind ambitious plans for a high-speed mobile network in the US, is in contract negotiations with 15 companies that want to use the infrastructure to provide telecoms services to consumers or businesses. Sanjiv Ahuja, LightSquared’s chief executive, said that his company could increase consumer choice in the mobile market at a time of possible industry consolidation. He expressed reservations about plans by AT&T, the leading telecoms company, to buy Deutsche Telekom’s US mobile phone business, but said LightSquared’s wholesale business model could offset any consolidation by enabling other companies to offer services to consumers. LightSquared is seeking to become the leading wholesale network operator in the US by using a fourth-generation wireless technology called LTE, which supports fast web surfing on smartphones and tablet computers. Some analysts have been skeptical that the LightSquared project – the brainchild of Philip Falcone, founder of Harbinger Capital, the hedge fund – will become reality. However, Ahuja said LightSquared was in talks with at least 60 companies that were interested in using the group’s mobile network so as to offer voice or data services to consumers or businesses. “There are 60-plus discussions, and 15 of those are at a stage where we are negotiating contracts with our customers,” he said.
benton.org/node/54043 | Financial Times
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INTERNET/BROADBAND

THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET
[SOURCE: Slate, AUTHOR: Farhad Manjoo]
As mobile browsers and Web programming systems improve, the difference between sites you access from a browser and apps you download from a centralized store will surely shrink. Web sites will grow more adept at storing content locally (so you won't have to be online to use them), they'll get better at using your device's specialized hardware, and their interfaces will look and feel just as complex and responsive as those of native apps. In other words, the fight between apps and the Web will be rendered moot. The two modes of getting online will become indistinguishable—you'll reach for the Web or apps or both, depending on the device you're using. The more relevant issue is that we'll all be getting online more, and for all kinds of tasks—listening to music, watching movies, reading books, playing games, doing office work, and communicating with friends and colleagues. Sun Microsystems' old slogan, "the network is the computer," gets truer every day.
benton.org/node/54035 | Slate
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PUBLICLY OWNED BROADBAND NETWORKS
[SOURCE: New Rules Project, AUTHOR: Christopher Mitchell]
Quietly, virtually unreported on, a new player has emerged in the United States telecommunications sector: publicly owned networks. Today over 54 cities, big and small, own citywide fiber networks while another 79 own citywide cable networks. Over 3 million people have access to telecommunications networks whose objective is to maximize value to the community in which they are located rather than to distant stockholders and corporate executives. Even as we grow ever more dependent on the Internet for an expanding part of our lives, our choices for gaining access at a reasonable price, for both consumers and producers, are dwindling. Tragically, the Federal Communications Commission has all but abdicated its role in protecting open and competitive access to the Internet. Now more than ever we need to know about the potential of public ownership. To serve that need the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has published an interactive Community Broadband Map that gives the location and basic information for existing city owned cable and fiber networks.
benton.org/node/53992 | New Rules Project | telecompetitor
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UNLEASHING THE CLOUD
[SOURCE: Federal Communications Commission, AUTHOR: FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski]
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski spoke at the Aspen IDEA Project in Brussels, Belgium on March 24 about the benefits of cloud computing. Information is a form of capital, he said. As barriers to accessing funding prevent entrepreneurs, wherever they are, from starting the next great cloud computing company, barriers to accessing information prevent innovators, wherever they are, from growing cloud computing companies, improving productivity, growing GDP, and creating new industries, jobs, and opportunity. How do we begin to address these barriers? One way is to identify the inputs that make communications networks with freely flowing information possible. They are:
Robust backbone and middle-mile networks that can handle heavy data backhaul loads;
Last-mile broadband-wired or wireless-that reaches every citizen;
Spectrum for mobile broadband, so people can access the cloud wherever they are;
Interconnection among networks; and
Public policies that don't inhibit-and indeed facilitate-data flows across international borders.
But he identified five challenges faced worldwide in the provision of each of those inputs: a global broadband availability gap, a global broadband adoption gap, a looming global spectrum crunch, a privacy and security gap, and a regulatory gap.
benton.org/node/54006 | Federal Communications Commission
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PAUL BARAN
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Katie Hafner]
Paul Baran, an engineer who helped create the technical underpinnings for the Arpanet, the government-sponsored precursor to today’s Internet, died March 26. He was 84. In the early 1960s, while working at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica (CA), Baran outlined the fundamentals for packaging data into discrete bundles, which he called “message blocks.” The bundles are then sent on various paths around a network and reassembled at their destination. Such a plan is known as “packet switching.” Baran’s idea was to build a distributed communications network, less vulnerable to attack or disruption than conventional networks. In a series of technical papers published in the 1960s he suggested that networks be designed with redundant routes so that if a particular path failed or was destroyed, messages could still be delivered through another. Baran’s invention was so far ahead of its time that in the mid-1960s, when he approached AT&T with the idea to build his proposed network, the company insisted it would not work and refused.
benton.org/node/54050 | New York Times
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PRIVACY

WIRELESS AND PRIVACY
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Noam Cohen]
Tracking a customer’s whereabouts is part and parcel of what phone companies do for a living. Every seven seconds or so, the phone company of someone with a working cellphone is determining the nearest tower, so as to most efficiently route calls. And for billing reasons, they track where the call is coming from and how long it has lasted. “At any given instant, a cell company has to know where you are; it is constantly registering with the tower with the strongest signal,” said Matthew Blaze, a professor of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania who has testified before Congress on the issue.
benton.org/node/54015 | New York Times
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DO NOT TRACK IS OFF-TRACK
[SOURCE: AdAge, AUTHOR: FTC Commissioner J Thomas Rosch]
[Commentary] The media loves "do not track." In recent days, there has been a flood of news articles reporting that the Federal Trade Commission does, too. Some of those articles have even implied that the commission has endorsed particular do-not-track mechanisms. To some extent, that may be the fault of the FTC's own press releases. But in any event, this implication is wrong. The concept of do not track has not been endorsed by the commission or, in my judgment, even properly vetted yet. In actuality, in a preliminary staff report issued in December 2010, the FTC proposed a new privacy framework and suggested the implementation of do not track. The commission voted to issue the preliminary FTC staff report for the sole purpose of soliciting public comment on these proposals. Indeed, far from endorsing the staff's do-not-track proposal, one other commissioner has called it premature. I also have serious questions about the various do-not-track proposals. In my concurring statement to the preliminary staff report, I said I would support a do-not-track mechanism if it were "technically feasible." By that I meant that it needed to have a number of attributes that had not yet been demonstrated. That is still true, in my judgment.
First, there are a number of consequences if a consumer adopts a do-not-track mechanism.
Second, another issue is potential consumer confusion about the terminology "do not track."
Third, I am concerned that the recent rush to adopt untested do-not-track mechanisms might be based, in part, on a reluctance to take on the harder task of examining more-nuanced methods of providing consumers with choice.
Finally, the implementation of do-not-track mechanisms must not jeopardize competition by injuring potential competitors.
benton.org/node/53999 | AdAge
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HEALTH

HHS SEEKS PUBLIC INPUT
[SOURCE: Department of Health and Human Services, AUTHOR: Press release]
The Department of Health and Human Services' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) announced an open public comment period on the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan: 2011-2015. The Plan reflects ONC’s strategy, developed in collaboration with other federal partners, over the next five years for realizing Congress and the Administration’s health IT agenda. Despite evidence of the benefits of the use of health IT, today only 25-percent of physician offices and 15-percent of hospitals take advantage of electronic health records (EHRs). Two major pieces of legislation, enacted over the past two years, are dramatically changing the health IT landscape and providing an opportunity to modernize the way care is delivered and improve the health of all Americans ­ the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act and the Affordable Care Act. The Plan, originally published in 2008, is being updated to reflect the significant impact of these two pieces of legislation. The Plan begins in 2011, when it became possible for eligible professionals and eligible hospitals that demonstrate “meaningful use” of certified electronic health record (EHR) technology to receive incentive payments under the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Programs as authorized by the HITECH Act. The Plan describes how ONC will work collaboratively with its federal partners and the private sector to usher in a new era of meaningful use that will allow the health care system to harness the power of health IT to bring information to bear in new ways to improve care and transform the health care system. Building on meaningful use, the Plan also addresses how ONC and its federal partners will increase protections to ensure that electronic health information is kept private and secure, empower individuals with access to their electronic health information, and enhance the ability to study care delivery and payment systems. Over the past year, ONC has worked closely with its federal partners and the private sector (through the HIT Policy Committee, a Federal Advisory Committee) to update the Plan. ONC welcomes the public to submit comments on the Plan through April 22, 2011, in order to better inform its strategy.
benton.org/node/53996 | Department of Health and Human Services | HealthITBuzz
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EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS

OLD MEDIA
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Martin Fackler]
Among the casualties of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake on March 11 were modern communications networks, which proved surprisingly vulnerable. Millions of people in eastern and northern Japan, including Tokyo, lost some or all cellphone service. A total of 1.3 million land lines and fiber-optic links also went dead. While those interruptions pale in comparison to the human tragedy of the earthquake and tsunami — 27,000 people are dead or missing — the fragility of modern communications has emerged as one of the catastrophe’s sobering lessons. In a technology-crazed nation where many people were glued to cellphones and accustomed to the Internet’s nearly instantaneous access to information, being cut off has proved disorienting and frightening. Many local governments in the hardest-hit areas, desperate to reach residents with important emergency information, have reached into the past for more tried-and-true means of communication, including radios, newspapers and even human messengers.
benton.org/node/54051 | New York Times
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