benton's blog

Last week, Federal Communications Commissioner Mignon Clyburn outlined five principles to bring the Lifeline program, which subsidizes phone service for low-income Americans, into the broadband age. The principles focus on two things we all care about.

Kevin Taglang is travelling again, so this week we share an editorial from our chairman, Charles Benton, on the big news surrounding the E-rate program.

Normally on Fridays, Kevin Taglang wraps up the top news of the week. But Kevin’s away so we thought we’d give you the you the big news straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. On Monday, President Barack Obama laid out his plan to ensure a free and open Internet through the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality. As Sen Ed Markey tweeted, “When the leader of the free world says the #Internet should remain free, that’s a game changer.”

On October 30, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Federal Communications Commission is seriously considering reclassifying broadband into two distinct services: a retail one, in which consumers would pay broadband providers for Internet access; and a back-end one, in which broadband providers serve as the conduit for websites to distribute content.

We’re less than two weeks from Election Day 2014 and deciding which party will control Congress for the next two years. Nate Silver gives Republicans a 66% chance of winning a majority of seats in the Senate which would give the party control of both Houses. What would that mean for telecommunications and technology policy?

The opponents of a truly Open Internet are spending millions of dollars to transform the debate over what should be a no-brainer regulatory finding into something analogous to dropping a hydrogen bomb. The big Internet Service Providers (ISPs) would have us believe that Title II net neutrality is regulatory strangulation, government-by-dictatorship, wholesale infringement of their First Amendment rights, and on and on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

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Reflections on the Pew Study on Killer Apps in the Gigabit Age