July 2012

The moral obligations and competing values of corporations have been debated since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution: How do corporate leaders drive for profit maximization while ethically meeting the needs of communities and citizens?

In the age of globalization and worldwide communications revolutions, these issues have taken a new turn. Activists in democratic countries have tried to get governments and companies to halt or limit the sale to authoritarian regimes of technologies that can be used to track, target, jail, or kill dissidents. Advocacy efforts are also being targeted at trying to convince technology companies not to allow their products to be used to spy upon, censor, block access to content, or thwart the public’s use of Internet-based tools that allow people living in authoritarian states to bring their issues to fellow citizens and allies abroad. Still, other advocates are trying to convince technology companies to crack down on labor abuses being committed by their foreign suppliers.

Frontier Communications' ongoing commitment to deploying broadband services to rural America will accelerate with the acceptance of $71.9 million from the Federal Communications Commission's Connect America Fund (CAF). The funds present Frontier with an opportunity to expand its commitment to deploying and enhancing broadband connectivity in underserved or unserved areas. The FCC established CAF to accelerate broadband build-out to the 18 million Americans living in rural areas who currently have no access to robust broadband infrastructure. By accepting this funding, Frontier has pledged to provide broadband service to an additional 92,876 households covering more than half of the 27 states it serves, ensuring rural customers in states such as Michigan, Oregon, Washington and West Virginia have access to broadband connectivity.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said, “Last year, the Commission’s unanimous vote to create the Connect America Fund put the nation on the path to connect all Americans to high-speed Internet, without increasing overall funding. This is the most significant effort ever undertaken to connect rural America to broadband. For the first time, universal service funding will be targeted to unserved homes, businesses, and anchor institutions in rural areas, and companies will be held accountable for building out infrastructure. Today’s announcement by Frontier Communications represents the beginning of that new deployment: approximately 200,000 unserved rural Americans will get broadband for the first time. In today’s economy, access to broadband means access to jobs and economic opportunity, in addition to better education and healthcare. I applaud Frontier Communications for stepping up to the plate with its commitment to accelerate broadband build-out by increasing private investment in rural communities, in partnership with the Connect America Fund.”

It’s one thing to undercut your competition by price — but Washington is starting to worry that Apple, Google, Microsoft and other firms are going too far when they actually try to block rivals from selling their products at all.

It’s a fight for supremacy in the marketplace — waged using patents as weapons. Firms go to the International Trade Commission to block imports of foreign-made goods and they ask judges to stop rival products from being sold in the United States. And their argument is simple: The patents are so valuable and so unique that they should be able to bar competitors from selling items that are just a little too similar to iPhones, Galaxy tablets and other products.

Samsung Electronics won a legal ruling after a U.K. judge said its Galaxy tablets aren’t “cool” enough to be confused with Apple’s iPad.

The design for three Galaxy tablets doesn’t infringe Apple’s registered design, Judge Colin Birss said in London in a court fight between the world’s two biggest makers of smartphones. Consumers aren’t likely to get the tablet computers mixed up, he said. The Galaxy tablets “do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design,” Birss said. “They are not as cool.”