March 2013

Republican leaders of the House Commerce Committee continued their examination of the president’s broadband stimulus programs, requesting information from both the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and Government Accountability Office (GAO) regarding Rural Utilities Service’s Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP).

In a letter to RUS Acting Administrator John Padalino, the members requested information regarding the agency’s management and oversight of the BIP program, particularly its review process for awarding $66.4 million in grants and loans to Lake County. Members expressed concern that the Lake County project may be overbuilding areas already served by existing broadband providers, instead of expanding access to underserved or unserved areas, as required by ARRA.

Additionally, committee leaders requested GAO examine all of the loans and grants distributed through the BIP program. The members wrote, “As we seek to expand the deployment of broadband infrastructure in a constrained budget environment, the overbuilding of existing broadband networks using federal dollars represents a significant concern. As GAO and others have reported, access to broadband service can improve economic growth and quality-of-life. Yet, overbuilding diverts scarce budget resources from areas without broadband service to areas with service and can impede vital private-sector investment. Given the need to ensure the most efficient and effective use of federal dollars and guard against waste, fraud, and abuse, we ask that GAO conduct an in-depth analysis of work already completed under BIP.”

If you’ve been following the conversations at South by Southwest this week, you know there’s been some spirited debate about government’s use of social media. Social media in government should either measurably improve citizen services for all or reduce costs.

Some of the keys to success moving forward will depend on:

• Mainstream awareness of opportunities to collaborate. We need communities to know they can participate in the kind of engagement that Mayor Booker is talking about.
• Collaborative approaches — more integrated, cross-cutting solutions.
• Unlocked social data through APIs and analysis to empower programs, citizens and small businesses.
• Improved accessibility for persons with disabilities and the aging population.

[Herman leads Social Media in the GSA Center for Excellence in Digital Government]

Public Knowledge has proposed Five Fundamentals to guide the phone network upgrade to an IP-based system and this piece focuses on protecting all consumers.

The need for consumer protection builds upon PK’s previous two principles for the PSTN transition. The first principle states that everyone has the right to be a consumer of the phone network and that phone carriers have a duty to bring service to all Americans. The second principle promotes competition and interconnection between carriers, meaning that anyone should be able to place a call to another person, regardless of which phone company they use. Interconnection and other competition policies lead to a healthy, consumer-friendly market for phone service. Yet competition between carriers does not always guarantee all aspects of consumer protection. PK’s third principle ensures that all consumers are protected from potential harm dealt to them by their phone service providers, by enforcing privacy principles, truth-in-billing, and safety from predatory practices. It is important that the consumer protections ensured in current communications law are updated to reflect the IP-based infrastructure of the future. Today, the law explicitly protects consumers’ confidential information, and the FCC has relied on its authority over the traditional phone network to extend this protection to VoIP (voice over internet protocol) services. But the FCC has jurisdiction over other safeguards like “slamming rules” and “cramming rules” that they have yet to apply to VoIP providers.

Google’s gigabit initiative, called Google Fiber, has sparked a round of questions across the tech industry. Is Google looking to become an Internet service provider? Does it simply want to spur other ISPs into providing faster service? And why wire Kansas City rather than, say, Silicon Valley or New York? And, finally, why gigabit Internet—what does Google expect people to do with the world’s fastest broadband service?

In this piece, I’ll focus on the last two questions: What has it been like for the people of Kansas City to live and work with the world’s fastest Internet? In my next column, I’ll examine Google’s strategic interests in Fiber—why is the search company building its own Internet lines? The fundamental problem with Google Fiber: It’s totally awesome, and totally unnecessary. During my time in Kansas City, I spoke to several local businesspeople, aspiring startup founders, and a few city boosters. They were all thrilled that Google had come to town, and the few who’d gotten access to the Google pipe said they really loved it. But I couldn’t find a single person who’d found a way to use Google Fiber to anywhere near its potential—or even a half or quarter of what it can do. It was even difficult to find people who could fully utilize Google Fiber in their imaginations. As hard as people tried, few could even think up ways to do something truly amazing with the world’s fastest Internet.