April 2012

Almost a decade after a new law went into effect to strengthen health privacy protections, the number of breaches of patient records and databases across the US suggests that personal health information is not as private or secure as many consumers might want or expect. Since fall 2009, more than 400 large health care breaches affecting at least 500 people and more than 50,000 smaller breaches have been reported to the federal government.

In 2010, the Office of Personnel Management set an aggressive goal of increasing the level of telework among federal employees by 50 percent, but officials don’t know how well they’re doing with it because of shortcomings in the way data about telework is collected, according to a recent report. OPM plans to test an automated system to gather telework data from agencies this year to get more complete and consistent data, rather than relying on agency estimates as in the past. But these changes also will make it difficult to compare the data with that from previous years, as required by the Telework Enhancement Act, according to the Government Accountability Office. “OPM officials have noted that this could limit OPM’s ability to report agency progress in its first report to Congress,” GAO said. It likely will be several years before there can be meaningful measurements of progress in moving federal workers out of the office.

[Commentary] The Economist reprinted a chart from a BCG report, which purported to show the contribution of “the internet” to the total GDP of various different countries. Britain comes out on top, with an internet-to-GDP ratio of 8.3%; it’s followed by Korea, China, Japan, USA, India, and Australia. After the UK, the highest-ranking European country is Germany, on just 3.3%, while Canada lags far behind the US.

All of this was rather puzzling to me, so I spoke to BCG’s Paul Zwillenberg, one of the authors of the report. And the main thing I wanted to know, of course, was how on earth you could turn “the internet” into an annual dollar amount divisible by national GDP. “It’s like electricity. It’s part and parcel of the fabric of daily life,” Zwillenberg said, almost before I could ask my question. “It’s touching every part of the economy.” I’m inclined to agree — but you’d never dream of measuring different countries’ electricity-to-GDP ratios. So what’s he doing here? Zwillenberg did say that in ten years or so, “you won’t need to measure the internet economy because it will be totally pervasive.” But for the time being, he’s determined to measure the internet. And the way he’s doing it is very web 1.0. It seems to me that BCG’s not really measuring the internet here — it’s not measuring the hours spent watching YouTube, or interacting with friends on Facebook and Tumblr, or spreading news on Twitter, or even checking your stock portfolio or updating your billing information somewhere. It’s measuring e-commerce, primarily, which is an interesting subset of the internet, and one of the oldest, but ultimately just a fraction of what it can be. And when you’re measuring e-commerce, you’re measuring lots of things which aren’t really internet-related at all.

The broadband industry invested nearly $66 billion in the nation’s information infrastructure in 2011, with wireline providing the largest portion of capital, according to USTelecom.

Data from this 2011 research updates a data series published last year which documents the amount of capital broadband providers have invested since 1996. Through 2011, broadband providers have invested approximately $1.2 trillion. In 2011 wireline broadband providers invested nearly $27 billion, according to the study. From 1996 through 2011, wireline broadband providers invested approximately $640 billion in broadband infrastructure. Also, wireline contributed the largest portion of industry capital in 2011: 41 percent, compared to 40 percent for wireless and 19 percent for cable. High-speed fixed access and fiber core networks are essential to carry the large volume of data traffic, which has grown from the equivalent of 8.3 million DVDs per month in 2000 to more than 1.4 billion DVDs per month in 2010, and is expected to triple again over the next five years.