Research

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has announced more than $3.5 million in funding to support new, independent research into issues at the forefront of national tech policy debates.

Internet freedom is increasingly imperiled by the tools and tactics of digital authoritarianism, which have spread rapidly around the globe. Repressive regimes, elected incumbents with authoritarian ambitions, and unscrupulous partisan operatives have exploited the unregulated spaces of social media platforms, converting them into instruments for political distortion and societal control.

At a time when millions of Americans still do not have access to broadband of any kind, Next Century Cities is a resource for local leaders who are searching for connectivity solutions. Lifting up the voices of local broadband advocates, our work helps to ensure that lawmakers and policymakers understand what is at stake for our member communities, especially those that are still struggling to provide reliable, affordable broadband access for their residents.

When President Donald Trump entered office, Twitter was a political tool that had helped get him elected and a digital howitzer that he relished firing. In the years since, he has fully integrated Twitter into the very fabric of his administration, reshaping the nature of the presidency and presidential power. Early on, top aides wanted to restrain the president’s Twitter habit, even considering asking the company to impose a 15-minute delay on Trump’s messages.

The keen interest by politicians, regulators, and competition authorities in international price rankings has sparked a series of management consultancies to produce regularly studies that purport to compare and rank prices for mobile wireless services across the world. These rankings, so they claim, are the Swiss Army knife of competition analysis. A country that ranks lower on a list is declared a laggard or noncompetitive and thus supposedly is in need of regulatory intervention. Such claims require scrutiny and further analysis.

Benton Senior Fellow Jonathan Sallet called for a new national broadband agenda. Over the past year, Jon has been talking to broadband leaders around the country, asking about who’s currently connected and who’s not. You can read Jon’s findings in Broadband for America’s Future: A Vision for the 2020s. Jon delivered the keynote address at the Broadband Communities conference in Virginia on Wednesday.

IPTV is an important tool to change business structures and move beyond subscription-based business models for telecom operators. However, the level of IPTV penetration differs among operators, which might be closely related to individual operator's strategy for the broadband market and the regulatory environment. Controlling country-specific business environments, this study identifies the key factors influencing IPTV penetration rates.

Some governments avidly try to control online data, whether this is on social media, blogs, or both. And surprisingly, China only features in the top 10 for one category. India and Russia are well ahead, accounting for 19.86 and 19.75 percent of the overall number of removal requests (390,764), respectively. However, these two countries don’t always dominate the top spots across all channels. Turkey and the United States also put in a high number of requests, making up 9 percent and 6.91 percent of the overall requests received, respectively.

The purpose of Broadband for America’s Future: A Vision for the 2020s is to collect, combine, and contribute to a national broadband agenda for the next decade, enlisting the voices of broadband leaders in an ongoing discussion on how public policy can close the digital divide and extend digital opportunity everywhere. Leaders at all levels of government should ensure that everyone is able to use High-Performance Broadband in the next decade by embracing the following building blocks of policy:

The Northeast Michigan Council of Governments (NEMCOG), in conjunction with Connected Nation Michigan, has created a vertical asset inventory for the region, which is largely rural. The project identifies and catalogs publicly and privately held assets upon which wireless equipment can be mounted. These structures include silos, water towers and the like. The interactive tool can be accessed at Discover Northeast Michigan. Identifying these assets is vital in rural areas that long have lagged in broadband penetration.