Digital inclusion and who controls the Internet
Don’t get how extending Lifeline service to broadband makes a better world?
Here is Mag-net’s analysis of why Universal Service Fund Reform is a critical issue for a more just country. Continue reading Connecting the Issues: USF Reform and Social Justice
Watch the video of the 2011 DC Launch of Black Voices for Internet Freedom.
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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?
On this edition, excerpts from “Race, Immigration and the Fight for an Open Internet,” a panel discussion presented by the G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism and New America Media. The topic? Net neutrality. What is it? Who will it impact most? And why should we care?
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
The Bay Area’s vital response when the FCC came to town in April 2008 to hold a hearing on Comcast throttling is the subject of a new documentary “Barbershop Punk” aired at Austin’s SXSW.
Posted by Tracy Rosenberg on
Huffington Post May 22 2010
As we arrive at the end of the long health care reform battle with something less than nirvana, media activists have been waiting with bated breath for the release of the long-awaited National Broadband Plan from the Federal Communications Commission.
Well over a year in the making, the plan sets a course for the future of the online communications system — a system that materially affects every American’s ability to access information and express themselves.
It’s not exactly the public option.
The Center for Digital Democracy, joined by a coalition of public health, child advocacy, and media justice groups, today filed an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief in a case concerning teen privacy online. In Fraley v. Facebook, the social networking company was sued for violating the privacy of users of all ages, and the company settled with class-action attorneys before going to litigation. Facebook’s proposed settlement, which was eventually approved by the U.S. District Court, does not protect teen users from appearing in sponsored advertisements on Facebook, even though seven states forbid this kind of appropriation without parental consent Continue reading Coalition Demands Privacy Protections For Teens on Facebook
