September 2009

The Federal Trade Commission will host a public forum on December 15, 2009, titled "Sizing Up Food Marketing and Childhood Obesity." The forum will assemble industry representatives, federal regulators, consumer groups, scientific researchers, and legal scholars to discuss issues related to food marketing to children. The forum will address the food and entertainment industries' progress toward self-regulation and implementation of the recommendations in the FTC's 2008 report, "Marketing Foods to Children and Adolescents: A Review of Industry Expenditures, Activities, and Self-Regulation." Panelists also will discuss current research on the impact of food advertising on children, and the statutory and constitutional issues surrounding governmental regulation of food marketing. In addition, the Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children - comprised of representatives from the FTC, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and U.S. Department of Agriculture - will report on the status of recommended nutritional standards for foods marketed to children.

In China, the state-controlled mobile service company has changed its customers' cellphone ring-back tones to a patriotic song -- "Guojia," or "Country" -- sung by the actor Jackie Chan and a female vocalist. The company's representative said any customer who did not like the tune could switch to other options at no cost by following instructions on its Web site. She said she did not know how long the song would continue to play otherwise. The cellular provider, China's biggest, is far from alone in trying to add its own flourish to the commemoration of 60 years of Communist rule. Numerous companies have changed the background colors of their Web sites to red and yellow, the colors in the Chinese flag. But Hu Xingdou, a reform-minded economics professor at Beijing Institute of Technology, said China Mobile went overboard in tinkering with its customers' phones. "The current efforts to instill ideology makes me feel that the authorities consider ordinary Chinese people to be unpatriotic or even mentally challenged," he said. "So they enforce this patriotic education on people."

With 141 days remaining before the Federal Communications Commission must deliver a National Broadband Plan to Congress, the task force developing the plan provided a status report to the Commission during its monthly meeting Tuesday. Congress required the Commission to craft a strategy for delivery of universal, affordable, widely adopted broadband to serve vital national purposes. Capturing all the external benefits of broadband to society and the economy is key to the analysis of the costs and benefits of universality. Benefits include consumer savings, health care improvements, educational and employment opportunities, and more. Subsidy mechanisms must also be considered as a means to universal adoption, but current mechanisms, such as Universal Service and stimulus grants, are insufficient to achieve national purposes. On the other side of the ledger, reducing the cost of key inputs, such as spectrum, rights of way, backhaul, and fiber, can extend the reach and performance of broadband. Preliminary analysis indicates that approximately three to six million people are unserved by basic broadband (speeds of 768 Kbps or less). The number of unserved increases as the definition of minimum broadband speed increases. The incremental cost to universal availability varies significantly depending on the speed of service, with preliminary estimates showing that the total investment required ranging from $20 billion for 768 Mbps-3 Mbps service to $350 billion for 100 Mbps or faster. The cost of providing consumers with a choice of infrastructure providers, and/or ensuring that all consumers have access to both fixed and mobile broadband would be significantly higher than these initial estimates. Nearly 2/3 of Americans have adopted broadband at home, while 33% have access but have not adopted it, and another 4% say they have no access where they live. But large segments of the population have much lower penetration rates, and adoption levels vary across demographic groups. The cost of digital exclusion is large and growing for non-adopters, as resources for employment, education, news, healthcare and shopping for goods and services
increasingly move on line. The task force has commissioned its own survey to learn how three key factors affect adoption: attitudes toward broadband and technology, affordability and personal context (home environment, access to libraries, disabilities, etc.). Results are expected in November.

A longtime agreement in which the Department of Commerce has oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is due to expire Wednesday, but that may not be the end of the relationship. While ICANN isn't talking, some observers expect a new type of agreement to be announced as soon as Wednesday, with the US government sharing oversight of the nonprofit organization that controls the Internet's domain name system with other countries. This new type of agreement would allow ICANN to become more independent, while addressing concerns from several other countries that the United States has too much control over ICANN, said Michael Palage, a former ICANN board member. The new agreement would create several oversight boards, with international representation, Palage said. The Economist reported last week that a new agreement, called an affirmation of commitments, will replace the existing pact between the U.S. government and ICANN. The Department of Commerce and ICANN have operated under a series of agreements laying out expectations for the nonprofit since November 1998. The new agreement "will tell them what it should do, but it can't legally bind them," much like past agreements, said Palage, now a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank. "It gives the appearance in the global community that the U.S. government has recognized that ICANN has done what is was supposed to do. What it's also doing is ... it's putting in some accountability mechanisms."