August 2012

Cable companies weren't interested when the federal government dangled millions of dollars to expand broadband Internet service in Lake County. But they didn't want anyone else to build a system, either. That would mean competition in small parts of the county they already serve, even if it would leave thousands of northeastern Minnesota residents and businesses without broadband.

So in 2010, when Lake County applied for federal stimulus funds to build a countywide network, it ran straight into a challenge from industry giant Mediacom and the Minnesota Cable Communications Association. The conflict that ensued is part of a national struggle. Public officials and some of their constituents argue that rural broadband is like rural electrification: It's a lifeline for small-town America that the free market will not extend. "We've been ridiculously underserved in this area for years," said Andy Fisher, who owns a Lake County bed-and-breakfast and a rural cross-country skiing lodge. The cable companies "are working in the interest of their profits. But if they're not going to serve this area, what are we going to do?"

Hispanic voters are wielding more power at the ballot box, but political campaigns have lagged in their use of media targeting Hispanics, including Spanish-language media. With that in mind, the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, which represents the interests of Hispanic businesses, announced a new initiative to track and analyze Spanish-language political ad spending in 10 key states with large Hispanic populations in the run-up to the November elections. The USHCC project, called “Speak Our Language,” will attempt to highlight the disparity between Hispanic voting power and political spending on Hispanic media, as well as the correlation between Spanish-language ad spending and positive electoral outcomes. It hopes to “hold 2012 campaigns accountable for their commitment to the country's Hispanic communities,” according to USHCC president and CEO Javier Palomarez.

Over the past several years, the Federal Communications Commission under Chairman Julius Genachowski has argued that because broadband is not universally ubiquitous, the agency may use the “reasonable and timely” standard contained in Section 706 in the Communications Act as an independent source of legal authority to impose regulation over advanced services. The Phoenix Center looks at the agency’s own data and finds that there is a profound defect with the FCC’s argument.

Specifically, the Phoenix Center demonstrates that FCC’s own financial analysis—conducted as part of its National Broadband Plan—shows that the cost of ubiquitous availability via terrestrial means (i.e., wired and wireless) exceeds any plausible measure of the benefit. In fact, the agency’s National Broadband Plan explicitly recognized that the cost of ubiquitous coverage of terrestrial broadband could not be justified, and recommended the use of “satellite broadband” as an alternative since it is ubiquitously available. Obviously, if the agency wanted to use Section 706 as the foundation for an aggressively regulatory agenda, then it needed to exclude satellite Internet service from the definition of broadband. Not surprisingly, the FCC did so. By ignoring its own evidence and by carefully defining broadband service, the FCC has successfully rigged the game to permit expansive broadband regulation under Section 706.

Strong state privacy laws continue to complicate health information exchanges' efforts to ease health-data sharing, a senior federal health technology official said. And a key to overcoming such obstacles may be greater use of meta tags.

Joy Pritts, chief privacy officer in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, told a Washington health policy gathering that some health information exchanges are not accepting electronic health records containing mental health or substance-abuse data. Their refusal stems from concerns that certain state medical privacy laws that are more strict than federal law and require individual patient agreement before their data is shared preclude exchanges' use of the information. “We're working on a number of different fronts on how to tackle this issue because we recognize, and the administration recognizes, how important it is to have substance and abuse and mental health really integrated into primary care,” Pritts said.