June 2010

The US has accelerated its effort to provide dissidents in Iran with computer hardware and software to evade government censors. But it's a shift that many activists say is insufficient to bring political change in Tehran.

The Obama Administration says it is seeking to aid the Green Movement by facilitating its ability to communicate inside Iran and by punishing government entities responsible for the political crackdown. One primary goal of the U.S. tech-support program is to counter Tehran's jamming of Iranian websites and Western broadcasting, including reporting from the Voice of America, which Tehran routinely blocks, and U.S.-funded Radio Farda, which provides real-time political news. As part of the effort, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which enforces U.S. trade sanctions, provided San Francisco-based Censorship Research Center a license to export Haystack anti-filtering software to Iran.

A global telecom talk coming up in 2012 could threaten the openness of the Internet and even lead to content policing, according to a speech June 11 by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Philip Verveer.

Calling the upcoming conference the most significant event to affect broadband policy in years, Verveer warned that the "dynamism" of the Web is at threat when the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) meets for its next round of negotiations. Heightened global broadband rules could open the door to other regulations, including "content controls," Verveer said. The conference, organized by the ITU, a United Nations agency, is of particular concern because agreements are binding on negotiating members, which include the United States, Verveer said.

A long-running feud between a municipal utility in Lafayette (LA) and Cox Communications appears to have revived itself Wednesday when LUS Fiber filed a lawsuit against the National Cable Television Cooperative.

LUS Fiber charges that the cable group is unfairly denying it membership, thus depriving the Lafayette utility from millions of dollars in savings when buying television programming. The dispute's worth tracking because LUS Fiber is one of a growing number of municipalities around the country that has built a publicly-financed fiber-to-the-home network, the economics of which are still unproven. The project is being watched closely by others in the telecom industry across the country: An executive from Google's gigabit-per-second fiber-to-the-home project in April made her only conference trip of the year to visit and inspect LUS Fiber's 100 megabit-per-second fiber-to-the-home roll-out.

India is rounding up opposition to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and wants to stop the deal from being made outside of existing international institutions.

This week, it made good on its promise to object. The new standards envisioned by ACTA "could short-change legal process, impede legitimate competition and shift the escalated costs of enforcing private commercial rights to governments, consumers and taxpayers," said an Indian representative at the World Trade Organization. "They also represent a systemic threat to the rights of legitimate traders and producers of goods, and fundamental rights of due process of individuals." One key area of concern is ACTA's permission for customs agents to seize goods "in transit" between countries, even if those goods are legal in both the sending and receiving countries. "Let me give an example," said the Indian rep. "India's right to exercise flexibilities, such as granting compulsory licenses, would be interfered with by the mandatory application of border measures to goods in transit. Indian exporters could be constrained from shipping goods produced under its own exception to countries where there is no applicable IPRs protection because transit may be blocked by an intervening transit country's application of domestic IPRs." Generic pharmaceuticals are the big concern here. Countries like India sometimes create "compulsory licenses" in which drug firms can pay a set amount to the government and can legally use another organization's patented material, whether that organization wants them to or not. The US has similar compulsory licenses for things like music. India also expressed irritation over the fact that "plurilateral processes like ACTA completely bypass the existing multilateral processes" at the WTO and elsewhere.