http://scrawford.net/blog Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:17:21 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In Edmund Morris's biography of Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, "Theodore Rex," Morris writes that Roosevelt's great friend Owen Wister placed Roosevelt's effort to break up a key railroad trust "at the top of all Roosevelt's great and courageous strokes in the domain of domestic statesmanship." [I]t had excited public optimism at the ... http://scrawford.net/blog/trust-busting/1322/ It was great to watch yesterday's FCC meeting presenting the National Broadband Plan.  It has been an embarrassment for years that we haven't had a serious strategy for bringing high-speed (and higher-speed) Internet access to more people and more businesses more quickly. The Internet is our nation's common medium, as Reed ... http://scrawford.net/blog/pride-and-relief/1321/ Yes, it's the health care week, the financial reform week, the Rielle-in-GQ week, the embassy-employee-slayings-in-Mexico week, the U.S.-Israel crisis week, the education reform week, and the slow-judicial-appointments week - but it's also the high-speed Internet access week.  Let's hope the issue gets the attention it deserves. The executive summary of the ... http://scrawford.net/blog/bright-light-on-high-speed-internet-access/1319/ The overwhelming vote in the European Parliament this week - 663-13! - to oppose the secretly-negotiated Anti-Counterfeiting and Trade Agreement was striking.  They're calling for the text to be revealed, and they're not happy about making ISPs introduce "US-style draconian ways" to punish misbehaving subscribers. According to Wired, the Parliament isn't ... http://scrawford.net/blog/european-parliament-has-principles/1318/ Several canaries in several coal mines: 1.  In a filing in the FCC's net neutrality proceeding, Netflix notes the "growing concern that [cable companies] will use their control over programming networks to stifle competition, including the growing competition from online video providers like Neflix" and urges the Commission to take a ... http://scrawford.net/blog/canaries-in-coal-mines/1317/ I was at the airport this morning on the way back to Ann Arbor after spring break.  CNN was on above our heads, broadcasting the President's speech at Arcadia University.  Here's the amazing thing:  most of the people around me were watching attentively.  They paused over their pizza.  They put ... http://scrawford.net/blog/we-were-sent-there-to-do-what-was-hard/1316/ I've been talking to lots of people for the last three days, and that's gotten in the way of completing the blog post I started on Monday.  But on the internet, who knows what time it is? Here's the rest of the story. Back during the Bush(2)-era FCC, the Commission agreed with ... http://scrawford.net/blog/rest-of-the-story/1315/ Last week's letter to the FCC from the network provider industry has a lot of people talking. For lots of reasons, the US government for a hundred years required basic general-purpose interactive networks - you can lable them "telephone" and "telegraph" - not to discriminate.  There's also been a requirement to ... http://scrawford.net/blog/plain-language-explanation-part-i/1314/ Two surveys of broadband adoption were released last week, and they both tell us we have a long way to go in closing the digital divide. The FCC's excellent survey, Broadband Adoption and Use in America, conducted at the end of 2009, shows that 35% of Americans do not use broadband ... http://scrawford.net/blog/patterns-of-broadband-adoption/1313/ 1.  FCC says a major reason for low adoption of broadband in the US is price. 2.  FCC also reminds us that there's a looming spectrum crisis. Let's assume mobile phones providing high-speed Internet access require additional spectrum.  But they're also going to need much more deeply-available fiber - mobile communications need ... http://scrawford.net/blog/big-week/1312/