June 2010

On May 25, 2010, the Federal Communications Commission released a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) in the 2010 Quadrennial Regulatory Review - Review of the Broadcast Ownership Rules and Other Rules Adopted Pursuant to Section 202 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The FCC is seeking comment on whether its media ownership rules continue to serve the public interest. Comments will be due on or before July 12, 2010 and reply comments will be due on or before July 26, 2010.

Community broadband providers face unique challenges, said a group of experts June 10 at an event hosted by the New America Foundation. Broadband is a local issue and members of the communications community shouldn't lose sight of that, said author Craig Settles, who is also president of Successful.com and co-director of Communities United for Broadband, in a speech just prior to the panel discussion.

While discussing the national implications of telecom policy, and advocating for a robust national approach, Settles also expressed skepticism that the issue could be easily resolved through federal action. "It has become a national discussion at this point, followed by action policy and money," Settles said. "Broadband is a local issue, and we can't lose sight of the fact that it is all local, and regardless of what happens here in D.C., there are people in various communities, large, small and everything in between, and they have to live with these policies. What are some key things we need to do on the D.C. side, and on the local side?" Settles also rejected the notion of focusing exclusively on access to particular varieties of technology as a panacea. He suggested that a more holistic approach was needed.

[Commentary] The proponents of Network Neutrality have long claimed that the Federal Communications Commission needs to lay down some rules insuring freedom of speech on the Internet. As a songwriter I have a problem wrapping my mind around the concept that the FCC is going out of the censorship business and into the protection of free speech.

Wasn't it the FCC that banned Billy Holiday's wonderful recording of "Love for Sale" and Cole Porter's "I Get a Kick Out of You?" The Songwriter's Guild of America is not the only organization that is concerned about the idea of the FCC's protection of free speech on the Internet.The EFF, a strong proponent of Net Neutrality, has also expressed concern: "While we're big fans of net neutrality, we worry that the FCC may want to build its net neutrality regulations on a rotten legal foundation,"Title I 'ancillary authority' which is both discredited and unbounded. As we've said before, if ancillary jurisdiction is enough for net neutrality regulations (something we might like) today, the FCC could just as easily invoke it tomorrow for any other Internet regulation that the commission dreams up (including things we won't like, like decency rules and copyright filtering)."

If other strong Net Neutrality supporters like the Electronic Frontier Foundation realize that FCC regulation might very well have a negative effect on freedom of expression on the Internet, one would hope that a group calling itself 'Free Press' would share those same concerns.

The State Department has made Internet censorship a key pillar of its foreign policy and now factors the issue into its diplomatic relations with every other nation, a senior official from the department said on June 11.

In every meeting with foreign dignitaries, "this issue is on the table," Alec Ross, senior advisor for innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said here at an event hosted by the Media Access Project, a nonprofit law firm and advocacy group. "Internet freedom has gone from being something that's a piece of what could at best be called a piece of foreign policy arcanum -- a little thing that a handful of people work on -- to something becoming increasingly central in our foreign policy," Ross said. Ross said that while much of the media attention devoted to online censorship focuses on prominent countries like China and Iran, the issue is much broader and the State Department sees the situation getting worse. "2009 was the worst year in history in terms of Internet freedom," he said. "There are now literally dozens of countries with less-than-stellar Internet freedom records. And it's increasingly the case that governments view the Internet as less something built on a single end-user-to-end-user principle than something that can be sort of built to spec, that looks and feels and works more like an intranet than an Internet."