September 2013

Pakistan started banning access to YouTube a year ago as a response to violent protests against clips of the anti-Islamic film The Innocence of Muslims, and the company has kept up the ban ever since. Now, democracy activists are arguing that the Pakistani government uses those clips as a pretext to suppress freedom of speech.

“The Pakistani government has been blocking Internet content under the pretext of national interest, religion, and morality,” Hassan Belal Zaidi at the independent Internet rights advocacy group Bytes For All, based in Islamabad, told the Christian Science Monitor. “But it is actually trying to block any parallel discourse on the Internet and curtail freedom of expression of minorities... both political and religious, which speak against their persecution that happens quite often in Pakistan, and are not covered by mainstream media."

In a report filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Duke University Professor, Bates White Partner, and former FCC Chief Economist Leslie Marx states that proposals to restrict Verizon's and AT&T's participation in the upcoming Incentive Auction would "put at risk its twin priorities of raising significant revenue and reallocating a substantial amount of spectrum from broadcast to mobile wireless services."

Dr. Marx's analysis provides evidence that the FCC could not impose significant bidding restrictions without materially reducing auction revenues and risking outright auction failure. The filing, written on behalf of Verizon, addresses proposed rules for the FCC's upcoming Incentive Auction for wireless spectrum. Under these proposals, rules would limit Verizon's and AT&T's ability to bid for spectrum. In her analysis, Dr. Marx concludes that despite the claim that auction restrictions might increase revenue by ensuring that smaller firms are not discouraged from participating, proponents of that theory do not offer empirical support for these claims.

[Commentary] US consumer broadband speeds rank 33rd in the world, right behind the Ukraine.

Personally, I pay more than $1,500 per month for 30/30MB fiber for our office. This is ridiculously expensive and slower than the average household Internet in many other countries. It's a serious impediment to the United States maintaining its economic competitiveness -- and to enabling all of us to take full advantage of the cloud, which is clearly the next phase of computing. As a patriotic American, I find the current political atmosphere where telecom lobbyists set the agenda to be a nightmare. All over the world, high-end fiber is being deployed while powerful monopolies in the United States work to prevent it from coming here. Poor laws and regulations have protected a duopoly in most areas of the country. You can buy Internet from the local cable monopoly or the local phone monopoly, period. Neither have much motivation to make it much faster nor any cheaper. Today, the argument is that municipal fiber -- as well as other efforts to both increase the speed and availability of broadband and make the United States competitive with the rest of the world -- will cost telecommunication jobs. In reality, most evidence points to the opposite net effect. Yes, it would cut into Time Warner's short-term profitability. But it would increase my company's short and long-term profitability -- and create other higher-paying jobs associated with technology and communication throughout the economy.

After the initial cloud rush, where everyone will be talking but only a few will be doing, I expect that cloud adoption will closely match broadband speed, cost, and availability curves. Those companies living in countries where the broadband monopoly is protected will adopt the cloud at a slower rate than those with competitive markets and municipal fiber. There's a good chance US firms will fall into that group.

[Commentary] Robert C. Maynard—journalist, editor, newspaper publisher, and former owner of The Oakland Tribune—spent much of his career trying to improve diversity in journalism. His namesake organization, the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, is devoted to that effort. Twenty years after his death, the organization is headed by his daughter, Dori Maynard, who is troubled by what she sees as a decrease in attention paid to diversity in newsrooms.

“As one industry leader said a few years ago, ‘When it comes to diversity, it’s not only on the backburner—it’s not even in the kitchen,” she noted. About 90 percent of newsroom supervisors are white; only 12.37 percent of those in the newsroom are minorities, even though they make up 37 percent of the US population. The problem, Maynard said, is that when the journalism business model changed abruptly with the advent of the Internet, people went into “freefall panic” and diversity, she said, became an afterthought. But diversity is important. Robert Maynard, in his last public address before he died, said that “The country cannot be the country we want it to be if its story is told only by one group of citizens. Our goal is to give all Americans front door access to the truth.” So what’s to be done? Maynard´s daughter said that the Institute is commemorating the anniversary of her father’s death by refocusing on increasing the number of minorities in the journalism industry pipeline and retaining them once they’re there. The Institute is planning a possible series of online conversations that looks not only at what has gone wrong, but also at what has gone right—at coverage that works and why. She said they want to gather examples of how having a diverse staff adds “nuance to story and subject.”