October 2010

Despite a campaign pledge, the Obama administration so far has failed to set up a central online hub for all of the government's ethics information.

A review of more than 560 pages of e-mails obtained by The Hill through a Freedom of Information Act request showed that senior White House aides looked to secure funding for such a website, tentatively to be called Ethics.gov. They also hosted meetings with watchdog groups to discuss the initiative. But despite those efforts, the administration has not produced a website to increase government transparency. "There is definitely a big distance from President Obama's Ethics.gov campaign promise and what they have done so far," said John Wonderlich, policy director for the Sunlight Foundation. "They are failing to live up to their promise, but their promise was aimed very high."

[Commentary] Is Charter Communications, the big St. Louis-based cable company, gouging its customers? It sure seems like it.

Cable's sixth largest operator has begun itemizing the fees that it pays to local broadcasters for the privilege of retransmitting their signals to its subscribers. The monthly bills now going out show that Charter is paying around $1 a month for the broadcast signals. But it is charging customers $25 per month for the basic tier containing the signals.

And Charter is listing the broadcast fees in the "Taxes and Fees" section of its bills and calling it a "surcharge," suggesting that they are some kind of government-mandated fees rather than just another cost of doing business. That's more than a little misleading. Charter tries to explain the new fees on its website, but rather than clarifying matters it sinks deeper into the muck of its own misinformation. The broadcast signals "were historically made available to Charter at no cost, or low cost," the site says. True enough. But then it goes on to say that "the prices now demanded by broadcast stations have necessitated that we pass these costs on to customers." That's kind of a lie, too, isn't it? Who necessitated that they pass the costs along in the form of a special fee? It was not the "prices" or broadcasters. It was nobody other than Charter itself. Charter doesn't have to pass along the costs of retrans. It could absorb the costs and settle for a slightly lower margin. Or, it could make room in the budget for retrans by whacking other costs, perhaps some of those networks that nobody watches.

Broadcasters in markets where Charter operates -- St. Louis; Madison, Wis.; parts of North and South Carolina, much of Michigan and Montgomery, Ala., -- ought to make sure could demand that Charter reveal what it is paying for each of the other programming services, from ESPN on down. Broadcasters then will come out looking good. The 25 cents or so that Charter is paying each network affiliate will look like a bargain compared to what it's paying cable networks with far fewer viewers.

David Honig, president and executive director of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, urged the Federal Communications Commission not to proceed with his regulatory proposals for broadband, but to instead give Congress another shot at passing network neutrality legislation during the upcoming lame duck session.

Honig's view is at odds with other watchdogs and several prominent Democratic lawmakers who have urged Chairman Genachowski to act following the collapse of last-minute legislative efforts. The minority media advocate backs enhanced network neutrality safeguards but opposes reclassifying broadband as a telecom service subject to stricter regulation. He contends that such a step would undermine opportunities for minority enterprises. "The tide is in favor of getting the legislation that almost crossed the finished line," he insisted.

The Alliance for Digital Equality (ADE), whose eclectic membership includes AT&T, Cisco, BET and the Communications Workers of America, seconded that emotion. In a statement, alliance chairman Julius Hollis said: "By calling for reclassification, fringe groups are simply out of touch with what our communities really need, and that's jobs and investment. We cannot allow them to hijack this debate, nor can we allow overregulation by the FCC to impede this goal."

The Office of the National Coordinator has begun a study on how to overcome the privacy and security risks of using health information that otherwise has been stripped of its personal identifiers such as a patient's name and address.

One danger is that the data might be able to be re-identified through the use of additional records publicly available on the Internet, according to Dr. David Blumenthal, the national health IT coordinator. But health care experts say that the use of de-identified data is critical for tracking population health over time and for research purposes. ONC wants to come to a "consensus on what risk we can tolerate for identification and then what level of removal, what kinds of removal of information, are required to get to that level of risk," Blumenthal told a congressional hearing Sept. 30. But he did not provide further details. Dr Blumenthal and other health IT speakers spoke about the challenges of privacy and security of health information at a hearing of the House Committee on Science and Technology Committee subcommittee on technology and innovation.