Category Archives: Internet Freedom

Digital inclusion and who controls the Internet

Internet Freedom, Surveillance

Big Data and Privacy

 

Media Alliance joined sixteen other grassroots media group in a letter to the White House embracing a rights-model for the handling of big data.

The letter states “we believe that big data creates significant new risks of racial injustice. In order to ensure a fair and inclusive future for our nation’s communities of color, and to enable the potential benefits of these new technologies to be fully realized and broadly shared, it is vitally important that the emerging policy framework for big data explicitly acknowledges and address issues of racial discrimination”. Continue reading Big Data and Privacy →

Internet Freedom

SXSW Misfire – The Human Hotspot

Video

 

by Emily Price, Mashable.com

In what has become a highly controversial move, advertising agency BBH transformed some of Austin’s homeless people into mobile hotspots during SXSW Interactive. Thirteen homeless from Austin’s Front Steps shelter donning an “I’m a 4G hotspot” T-shirt and armed with a MiFi were strategically placed throughout SXSW and offered internet access around their personal location to attendees. Continue reading SXSW Misfire – The Human Hotspot →

Internet Freedom

AT&T and Verizon: What Digital Divide?

 

by Gerry Smith, Huffington Post

To help close the digital divide, the Federal Communications Commission is offering phone companies millions of dollars to expand high-speed Internet service to rural Americans.

But the nation’s two largest phone companies — AT&T and Verizon — have told the FCC to keep the money. Continue reading AT&T and Verizon: What Digital Divide? →

Internet Freedom

Be Careful What You Wish For

 

Posted by Tracy Rosenberg on
Huffington Post  December 24, 2010

Sometimes you might get it.

For most of the past year, public interest groups worried about the future of the Internet have pushed for action on net neutrality by the Federal Communications Commission. In response to that call, Chairman Julius Genachowski moved in the spring to reclassify broadband services, proposing a light regulatory protocol as a “third way”.

After that didn’t exactly take off, the chair convened meetings with industry including AT&T, Skype, Verizon and Google, meetings that broke down after Google and Verizon announced a deal that would introduce paid content prioritization. In the ensuing uproar, the issue once again rose to the level of a burning public debate with right-wing accusations of “Obamacare for the Internet” competing with public interest laments about slow lanes on the Internet to come for alternative news, independent artists and musicians, and community groups. Continue reading Be Careful What You Wish For →