Other spring breaks
Two enjoyable things: First, Nina Camic's posts from her spring break. I've never met Nina, but she's a law professor and she gets a lot out of life — the food! the pictures! the adventures!
Second: the other night I went to a friend's house and met his ten-year-old son. The son is absolutely obsessed with Tom Lehrer songs and has memorized a bunch of the lyrics. And when I was ten I was obsessed with Tom Lehrer songs and memorized a bunch of the lyrics. Maybe this is just something that happens to people in fifth grade. But I hadn't listened to them since then. So the son put on a CD and we sang along. It was revelatory. I now know how much I didn't understand about those songs when I was ten. I also remembered huge chunks of text - and I don't think I could memorize something with such intensity now.
A third thing: Jeff Jarvis is on a great roll, getting presidential candidates to interact online:
Here is my invitation to ask any candidate any question. Just record your question and upload it to YouTube (or use QuickCapture) and then tag it PrezConference
(just as Biden’s campaign tagged his reply). That way, we’ll see which
questions get answered and which don’t along with the answers. The tag
makes it a conversation.
State video franchising laws
Are you following the debate over state
franchising? FreePress
is. And there's a lot going on in many states. According to
today's U.S. Communications Law Bulletin, there are video franchise bills
pending or passing all over the place that would take authority away from
municipalities and give it to the states — Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin,
Tennessee… Similar measures failed in Utah and
Idaho. Lots of other states involved.
These are shaping up to be titanic battles between
the telcos (who want quick and easy access to video subscribers) and cablecos
(who got there first). Here's a good overview of arguments against this kind of measure in Illinois.
Back in the spring of 2003, there was a big push at the state level to get theft-of-service laws passed that made it illegal for customers to attach otherwise-legal devices to cable and telephone networks. The logic behind this effort was to avoid federal discomfort with broadcast flag rules by getting the same relief from the state.
Same thing here. If net neutrality is going to tangle up the phone companies' attempts to get relief from state franchising laws at the federal level, they'll get what they need from the states. The technique seems to work quite well.