February 2013

When Will the Rest of Us Get Google Fiber?

A Google spokeswoman says the company “expects to operate profitably” and that Google Fiber is neither a loss leader nor a PR stunt. If that’s true, then why isn’t it being made available everywhere?

The answer is that there are no compelling business incentives for the established players, says Blair Levin, a former U.S. Federal Communications Commission chief of staff, who helped write the National Broadband Plan and is now executive director of Gig.U, a consortium of universities trying to deploy very fast networks in local neighborhoods. In parts of the country, slower-speed copper, fast-download cable, and a few fiber networks are already built out. The cable distribution giants like Time Warner Cable and Comcast are already making a 97 percent margin on their “almost comically profitable” Internet services, according to Craig Moffet, an analyst at the Wall Street firm Bernstein Research. As Levin points out, “If you are making that kind of margin, it’s hard to improve it.” And most Americans have no choice but to deal with their local cable company.

FCC Seeks Public Comment in 2012 Biennial Review of Telecommunications Regulations

The Federal Communications Commission is in the process of conducting its comprehensive 2012 biennial review of telecommunications regulations pursuant to Section 11 of the Communications Act of 1934. This section requires the FCC to (1) review biennially its regulations “that apply to the operations or activities of any provider of telecommunications service,” and (2) “determine whether any such regulation is no longer necessary in the public interest as the result of meaningful economic competition between providers of such service.” Section 11 directs the FCC to repeal or modify any regulation that it finds are no longer in the public interest. Comments due March 6, 2013; reply comments are due April 5, 2013.

Keeping the Internet free from government shackles

[Commentary] Last year the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate unanimously approved a resolution directing the U.S. delegation in Dubai to support the multi-stakeholder model and express the United States’ unwavering support of Internet freedom. This resolution takes the radical position that if the most revolutionary advance in technology, commerce and social discourse of the last century isn’t broken, we shouldn’t be trying to “fix” it. This Congress, I will offer a bill to make this the policy of the United States. By refusing to sign a treaty that would curtail Internet freedom, we stood up to those nations that would shackle the Internet for their own purposes. We should now commit this resolve to law and affirm the United States unambiguous commitment to a global Internet free from government regulation.

Obama Is Now America's Hacker in Chief

As the possibility of destructive cyberwarfare inches towards reality, the government is scrambling to figure out who holds the keys to America's malware arsenal. Obviously, it's President Barack Obama.

The New York Times just published the findings of an investigation into a secret legal review that set out to determine who actually had the power to order a cyberattack. Given his status as commander-in-chief, Obama seems to be the clear choice, but since cyberwarfare is such a new and unknown thing, the government hasn't actually figured out the rules of engagement yet. In the past couple of decades, the power to use America's cyberweapons has been shared between the Pentagon and the various intelligence agencies. With the exception of a series of strikes on the computer systems that run Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities — an attack that Obama ordered himself — the U.S. hasn't launched any major cyberattacks in recent memory, however. This probably won't be the case in the future. So the government is working on new rules of engagement, as it realizes that the capabilities of cyber weapons are evolving at a startling rate.

Apple to Highlight Self-Published Books

Yet another sign that self-publishing is making inroads into the traditional houses: Apple will include a feature that organizes a group of popular self-published e-books together and then gives them prominent display on iBookstore.

The feature will appear under a banner titled “Breakout Books” and remain on the iBookstore’s main page for at least two weeks. This kind of display, known as “front-of –the store” attention, is greatly coveted by publishers because it helps books get discovered, driving sales. After two weeks, “Breakout Books” will remain a permanent feature on the site, though not always with such high-profile display. Apple, which has long carried self-published e-books and displayed the most popular among them, has incentive to give self-published authors a boost, partly because of price.

Washington Post Story Demonstrates the Perils of Understanding Wi-Fi Developments Through Mainstream Newspapers

[Commentary] Now that I’ve had a chance to read the front-page Washington Post story on so-called “Super Wi-Fi,” I have to confess to being extremely disappointed in the Post.

Like many others, I was taken in on an allegedly new development repackaged in an exaggerated fashion. It is another re-affirmation for me that the mainstream media is no longer up to coverage of important telecommunications-related events. In some cases, this is not the fault of the reporters, who are hard-working individuals trying to “advance” their story in substantive and newsworthy ways. What they are up against, is the medium in which they are operating: the general-purpose newspaper. To get a story on the front page of a major metropolitan newspaper, it has to be sufficiently free of technology jargon. Unfortunately, the careful use of technology jargon is what helps explain — to those who do follow telecom- and broadband-related matters — what really is the “news” of the matter. The Washington Post’s story was really all about the “white spaces” issue.

Why Does the Media Go Easy on Barack Obama?

[Commentary] Several explanations for the insufficiently adversarial attitude toward President Barack Obama fit the facts better than "liberal bias."

At the top, journalists who credulously convey the self-serving narratives of highly placed government officials or ask softball questions in nationally televised interviews are rewarded with better access.
The press always shows more deference to the president in wartime, and the War on Terrorism has afforded successive presidents a way to spend their entire time in office on war footing.
Many conservatives are ideologically committed to the proposition that the president should be almost totally unconstrained in the realm of foreign affairs. As a result, many of Obama's most questionable behavior is ignored by the conservative press -- and it is also ignored by the subset of the "establishment media" that uses partisan conflict to determine what to investigate, rather than making independent judgments about what is important to cover.
Relatedly, the particular challenges to Obama's foreign policy that the right has attempted have often been ill-chosen. Don't expect to read them harping on his violating the War Powers Resolution, a secret kill list, and a war on whistleblowers. Instead, the conservative press wasted countless pixels arguing that Obama doesn't really believe in American exceptionalism, accusing him of hating Israel, and insisting that he belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood. Even incidents like Fast and Furious or the killing in Benghazi, which merited investigation, were oversold from the beginning as if they were scandals that would bring down the Obama Administration in due course. As someone who is ready to think the worst of Obama's foreign policy and to expose every untoward aspect of it, I confess that I don't know what the right is hoping to get out of Benghazi.

Announcing We the People 2.0 and a White House Hackathon

Since we launched We the People, our team of developers has been hard at work on the code that makes the whole thing tick. Good thing, too! More than 2 million users joined We the People in the last two months of 2012 alone and some 6 million of you have logged in to the system and left more than 10 million signatures. That's a lot of citizen engagement for one application to handle, but it's done well, and we continue to release updates to the source code on GitHub and Drupal.org Today, though, we're starting the next stage of We the People's development. I'm pleased to announce that Petitions 1.0, the code that We the People runs on, is complete. We're now working towards Petitions 2.0. As a result, Petitions 2.0 is based on an application programming interface, or API, that we will release to the public in the coming months. The first set of methods, Read API, will be released in March, 2013 and will allow anyone to retrieve data on petitions, signatures, and responses. Later, we'll release a second set of methods, Write API, that will allow other websites and apps to collect and submit signatures without directly sending users to WhiteHouse.gov. With this API in place we'll be able to decouple the presentation and data layers of the application and build a new, streamlined signature process. This also means that developers who reuse our code will be able to choose which database the application relies on. Between that and our continued work on a white label theme, Petitions 2.0 will be easier for others to contribute to and reuse.

Open Government Data Spurs Entrepreneurship and Jobs

Our goal, as Presidential Innovation Fellows working with open data, has been to find, unlock, and promote the next wave of government data -- the next GPS -- that innovators can use to kickstart entrepreneurship, fuel new tools and apps, and create jobs.

When we joined the government last August, we were assigned to six different agencies, but we came up with three common goals. First, we sought to release government data in open formats that are easy to understand and easy for innovators to use. Second, we encouraged Federal agencies to treat open data as a core deliverable and as a default, not just as a nice thing to do after data have already been collected and analyzed. Third, we worked to highlight and stimulate new uses of these liberated data by private-sector companies, entrepreneurs, and non-profits.

President's Chief Technology Officer announces new round of Innovation program

"The U.S. Chief Technology Officer is a position that President Obama created when he came to office. It's really about creating and executing projects," explains Todd Park is the Chief Technology Officer of the United States. "One of the initiatives is something called the Open Data Initiatives program. This is a program that essentially seeks to liberate data, in machine readable form, from the vaults of the government as fuel for entrepreneurship, innovation and scientific discovery."

To help tackle the job of releasing all this new information as well as other big projects, the government launched a program last summer to bring in a group of techies from the business world as so-called Innovation Fellows. "We have been tremendously excited by the success of round one of Presidential Innovation Fellows program, and so we are very excited today to be launching round two," says Park. "We've actually identified a set of game-changing projects to apply technology to do massive public good. We are going to market with those projects and then seeking the best people on the planet to come and serve in government working on those projects." Park's team will be accepting applications for the next six weeks.

Benton

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