January 2010

The iPad could offer nice benefits for the college student: keep all your textbooks in one slender, elegant package; highlight and make notes; watch embedded video and multimedia; browse the web for supplementary material; chat and collaborate with classmates and teachers as you read. But will the gadget cut costs or open an even bigger money pit for cash-strapped students?

Already textbooks cost the average college student more than $1,000 a year; electronic content can be much less, especially when it's open-source. The open-license textbook company Flat World Knowledge estimated it saved students a collective $3 million just this past fall. The iPad uses the open ePub format for electronic books, which should be a boon to the burgeoning open education movement. However, Joshua Kim, a technology blogger at Inside Higher Ed, asks whether the iPad is a "sustaining" rather than a "disruptive" innovation. The danger, in other words, is that colleges will spend even more money and faculty time on purchasing and developing content for these new gadgets, as they have on the generations of tech that came before (laptops, Ethernet, fancy AV in classrooms) without making cuts elsewhere.

The Federal Communication Commission's Media Bureau adopted an Order that permits FM radio stations to voluntarily increase digital power levels up to ten percent of analog power levels and establishes interference mitigation and remediation procedures to promptly resolve complaints of interference to analog stations. These rule changes will substantially boost digital signal coverage while safeguarding analog reception against interference from higher power digital transmissions.

The Bureau Order will:

• Permit most FM stations to immediately increase digital power by 6 dB, a four-fold power increase;
• Limit power increases for stations currently licensed in excess of class maximums, i.e., "super-powered" stations, to protect analog radio service from interference;
• Establish application procedures for power increases up to 10 dB;
• Establish interference remediation procedures that require the Media Bureau to resolve each bona fide dispute or impose tiered power reductions within 90 days; and
• Reserve the right to revisit the issue of digital power levels if significant interference results to analog reception.

The political world has been arguing about campaign finance policy for decades. A once rich conversation has become a stale two-sided battleground. One side sees contribution or spending limits as essential to restraining corruption, the appearance of corruption, or the "undue influence" of wealthy donors. The other resists any such limits in the name of free speech. The time has come to leap over this gulf and, as much as possible, move the disputes from the courts. Preventing corruption and protecting free speech should each be among the key goals of any policy regime, but they should not be the only objectives. This report seeks to change the ongoing conversation. Put simply, instead of focusing on attempts to further restrict the wealthy few, it seeks to focus on activating the many. This is not a brief for deregulation. The members of this working group support limits on contributions to candidates and political parties. But we also recognize the limits of limits. More importantly, we believe that some of the key objectives can be pursued more effectively by expanding the playing field. Interactive communications technology potentially can transform the political calculus. But technology alone cannot do the trick. Sound governmental policies will be essential: first, to protect the conditions under which a politically beneficial technology may flourish and, second, to encourage more candidates — particularly those below the top of the national ticket — to reach out to small donors and volunteers.

The Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance is urging the FCC to adopt its price-cap plan so that its members, which are largely mid-size local exchange firms, can get better support from the Universal Service Fund.

The alliance says that many of the regions served by its members do not receive sufficient USF support and a chunk of its members are "challenged by flaws in mechanisms that have been ruled invalid by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit." The court has remanded the FCC's rules for providing high-cost universal service support to non-rural carriers. The group expressed concern that if the FCC does not take some interim action to fix basic problems with the USF, the problems will linger as the agency waits to make repairs to the fund as part of its larger, longer and broader efforts to tackle communications reform through the National Broadband Plan.