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[Commentary] The National Broadband Plan won’t do jack until more folks in Wunderland acknowledge and aggressively address one stark truth – broadband competition is mostly a myth, expensively maintained through lobbyists, think tanks and easily-influenced politicians.

Until we get meaningful competition, a significant part – though mercifully not all – of Wunderland’s policies will result in dabbling around the edges rather than a meaningful advancement of broadband in the US. More people in Wunderland have to grab this bull by the horns, or some other vital area, and kick it in the butt. People need to take a two-by-four and beat back these attempts to undermine and circumvent programs that fund broadband efforts that introduce much needed competition. Let’s see some profiles in courage and toss this AT&T/T-Mobile merger out the back door. Encourage (incentivize) companies like Google and Corning to partner with communities to put fiber infrastructure in place. If you’re going to do more than just pretend to reform USF, take that $4 billion that comes directly out of taxpayers’ pockets and put it into communities to solicit and fund the best solutions they can find someone willing to provide. Either we get serious about competition or we stop pretending we’re serious about broadband.

[Commentary] We’re never going to truly connect this country if the focus of our collective broadband deployment work is to repeat erroneous claims about the number of options Americans have for broadband providers. The policies that support the current duopoly and monopoly business structure in broadband are crippling our rural communities but we won’t see forward movement on broadband competition (and therefore access, price and service) if we can’t even get the baseline data right.

While consumers are trained to look for tell-tale signs of a phishing attack on the desktop, spotting a scam from a mobile e-mail program or browser can be a lot more difficult. It’s often hard to tell where a link will take you before clicking and there is no “green bar” to tell you that a site is indeed who it purports to be. Lookout Mobile Security, a software company that specializes on smartphone security, is announcing its effort to make browsing on mobile devices a little safer. The new “safe browsing” feature works by checking all links against its cloud-based database, including those within text messages, Facebook and e-mail messages and offering a warning when users click on a link suspected of being a scam. The company began developing the feature as a proof of concept back in February and now it is being added as part of Lookout’s premium paid service.

With all the focus on broadband at the Federal Communications Commission, it's easy to forget that the regulator's quadrennial review of its media ownership rules, originally scheduled for 2010, is overdue.

Some progress was made, though, as the FCC released five of the nine studies it ordered as part of the review of the current rules. The commission is still waiting for an additional four studies and will also conduct two studies internally. Once comments are in for all the studies, it will open up the process and decide whether to change the rules or keep them as is. The big question, though, is when that will happen, and whether the FCC will finally be able to break through the morass that its media ownership rules have become over the past decade. Some of the rules, such as one that puts limits on the ability of companies to own both a newspaper and a broadcast outlet in the same market, are still tied up in the courts. It won't surprise anyone in Washington if it takes until fall, or even longer, before the FCC is able to review all the studies, make a decision, and open up the rule-making process.