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RURAL BROADBAND V STATE-WIDE FRANCHISING LOBBYISTS
[SOURCE: Facing South, AUTHOR: R Neal]
[Commentary] Remember FDR's rural electrification? It transformed the South, or at least the Appalachian Tennessee Valley for every future generation. While broadband Internet access isn't quite on par with electricity as a basic human need in modern society, it's almost as important, especially in terms of U.S. global competitiveness. Local governments who control the infrastructure rights of way have a duty to make sure those resources benefit all their citizens and taxpayers. They also know best which areas are underserved (which are all too frequently rural, low-income, or predominately minority communities), and they are more likely to negotiate build-out requirements to ensure that every resident has access. It's unlikely that a bureaucrat in Nashville will know or even care about the needs of Bell Buckle or Ducktown TN, and even less likely that anyone at a communications giant's corporate headquarters has even heard of such places.
http://southernstudies.org/facingsouth/2007/02/rural-broadband-v-state-w...

INTERNET 3.0: IDENTIFYING PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS TO THE NETWORK NEUTRALITY DEBATE
[SOURCE: Rob Frieden, Penn State Univ]
What Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”) can and cannot do to diversify services lies at the core of the debate over network neutrality. In prior generations ISPs had little incentive or technological capability to deviate from plain vanilla best efforts routing for content providers and from standard “all you can eat” subscription terms for consumer access to the World Wide Web. The next generation Internet has the technological capability and ISPs have the commercial motivation to offer “better than best efforts” routing and premium services for both content providers and consumers seeking higher quality of service and more reliable traffic delivery. However the potential exists for carriers operating the major networks used to switch and route bitstreams to go beyond satisfying diverse requirements of content provider and endusers. Network neutrality advocates worry that major ISPs have both the wherewithal and incentive to bifurcate the Internet into one medium increasingly prone to congestion and declining reliability and one offering superior performance and potential competitive advantages to users able and willing to pay, or affiliated with an ISP operating a major bitstream transmission network such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. Opponents refuse to see a current or prospective problem and worry that network neutrality requirements legitimizes common carrier regulation of the Internet, a regulatory regime heretofore limited to telecommunications services operating in a less than fully competitive environment. This paper examines the network neutrality debate with an eye toward refuting and dismissing the many false and misleading claims and concentrating on the real problems occasioned by the Internet's third evolution. The paper accepts as necessary and proper many types of price and quality of service discrimination. However the paper identifies other types of hidden and harmful discrimination. The paper concludes with an identification of best practices in “good” discrimination that should satisfy most network neutrality goals without creating disincentives that might dissuade ISPs from building the infrastructure needed for Internet 3.0 services.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=962181

OWNERSHIP OF MEDIA DEVALUES DEMOCRACY
[SOURCE: Ventura County Star, AUTHOR: Ernest A. Canning]
[Commentary] Actor Tim Robbins wrote, “The very structure of our conglomerated media system conspires against real journalism, and hence, the truth. And without access to the truth, democracy withers.” Nowhere is the problem more acute than the manner in which we operate elections. The corporate media, especially electronic media, have a vested interest not only in whom we elect but how we elect. By failing to provide in-depth, meaningful coverage of links between candidates and issues that truly matter to the vast majority of Americans, i.e., the middle and working classes; by focusing solely on those candidates whose electoral success will not threaten the media conglomerate bottom line; even then limiting coverage to poll numbers and abstract observations about “viability,” the media conglomerates have enhanced the existence of a corrupt electoral system in which candidate access to the public can only be secured by the expenditure of millions of dollars spent on expensive, 30-second spot ads, and where only those candidates who are backed by wealthy corporations need apply.
http://www.venturacountystar.com/vcs/opinion/article/0,1375,VCS_125_5352...

NEWSROOM SPENDING RAISES US NEWSPAPER PROFITS -- STUDY
[SOURCE: Reuters, AUTHOR: Robert MacMillan]
U.S. newspapers that spend more money on their newsrooms will make more money, according to a study released on Wednesday, which questioned the wisdom of the media industry's trend of cutting jobs to save costs. The authors of the University of Missouri-Columbia study, which was based on 10 years of financial data, said news quality affects profit more than spending on circulation, advertising and other parts of the business. "If you invest in the newsroom, do you make more money? The answer is yes," Esther Thorson, an advertising professor and associate dean for graduate studies at the University of Missouri's School of Journalism, said in a statement. "If you lower the amount of money spent in the newsroom, then pretty soon the news product becomes so bad that you begin to lose money," she said. The researchers developed a mathematical model that showed how newspapers could rearrange their spending on distribution and circulation, advertising and newsrooms to achieve a higher profit, Thorson said. U.S. publishers have been eliminating jobs at many newspapers as part of larger efforts to trim expenses amid falling profit margins and, in the case of publicly traded chains, declining stock prices.
http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=entertainmentNews...