August 2012

Belo will offer the "It's Your Time" program, free airtime for congressional and gubernatorial candidates, for the ninth consecutive election cycle this fall. The company also announced election coverage plans: Belo's news-producing stations will televise at least one hour of political coverage each week in the six weeks prior to the general election on Nov. 6. The company's election coverage in 2012 may include debates, issue- and ad-watch programming, and interviews with local, state and federal candidates which will be streamed and archived on Belo websites through Election Day. Belo stations will also expand their election coverage this year by broadcasting several runs of debates and "It's Your Time" spots on their multicast channels and publishing political coverage on their enhanced smartphone and iPad apps. Candidates participating in "It's Your Time" each receive five minutes of free airtime — four minutes to tell viewers why they should be elected and one minute to answer a question specific to the candidate's individual race.

According to Akamai’s State of the Internet Report, Delaware is the state with the fastest connection speeds. Delaware had an average connection speed of 10.2 megabits per second in the first three months of 2012. Delaware clocked in nearly 9% faster than the average speeds in New Hampshire, the state with the second-fastest Internet connections. Vermont, Utah and Rhode Island round out the top five U.S. states. At 3.6 Mbps, Arkansas is the state with the lowest average connection speed.

• 18 US states had average peak connection speeds above 30 Mbps in the first quarter, while 31 states had average peak connection speeds above 20 Mbps.
• 19 total states saw high broadband adoption increase between 100 percent and 200 percent year-over-year.

[Commentary] Like reading, writing, and arithmetic, web literacy is both content and activity. You don’t just learn “about” reading: you learn to read. You don’t just learn “about” arithmetic: you learn to count and calculate. You don’t just learn “about” the web: you learn to make your own website.

As with these other three literacies, web literacy begins simply, with basics you can build upon. For some it can lead to a profession (i.e. becoming a computer programmer) while for most it becomes part of the conceptual DNA that helps you to understand and negotiate the world you live in. Making web literacy the fourth literacy begins with the premise that not only are humans capable of learning together--we’re doing it, contributing to peer learning online, every day of our lives. That is a major educational paradigm shift, the great gift we’ve been given by those who built the web on open architecture. Web literacy explains the world we live in and gives us the tools to contribute to that world.

[Davidson is a professor at Duke University. Mark Surman is the executive director of Mozilla.]

[Commentary] The immediate threat to the Internet as we know it is the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) scheduled for December in Dubai by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a U.N. body whose remit has thus far been limited to global telephone systems.

Members meet behind closed doors. Their policy proposals were until recently accessible only to members -- until activists forced transparency upon them through a website called "WCITLeaks." The leaked documents reveal how a number of governments -- in league with some old-school telecommunications companies seeking to regain revenues lost to the Internet -- are proposing to rewrite global international telecommunications regulations in ways that opponents believe will corrode, if not destroy, the open and free nature of the Internet. This is by no means, however, the first attempt by powerful governments to assert power through the ITU. China, Russia, and many developing countries have complained for nearly two decades that the new, nongovernmental multistakeholder institutions are dominated by Americans and Western Europeans who manipulate outcomes to serve their own commercial and geopolitical advantage. These critiques converge with the interests of former and current state-owned phone companies wanting to restore revenues of yore before email and Skype wiped out the need for most international phone calls.