Posted by Tracy Rosenberg June 2012 at Oakland Local
I was out-gunned 30-1.
On May 26th, I went to the California Public Utilities Commission to encourage them to perform a thorough investigation of the impact of the AT&T / T-Mobile merger on California consumers.
As a public interest advocate, I’m used to being the underdog. Despite sending lots of last-minute emails asking people to come, I didn’t expect a huge amount of folks would be able to dispense with work and family and rush over to the commission meeting.
This 2011 video from keepusconnected.org explains and clearly demonstrates AT&T’s failure to deliver basic functionality for public, educational and government (PEG) access channels on its U-Verse system.
A petition challenging the discriminatory treatment is pending at the FCC. (2016 update: still pending).
This short video talks about community/municipal/coop options for high speed internet and wireless communication services from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
At the June 21, 2012 Guggenheim Securities Symposium, the CEO of Verizon laid out aggressive plans to move customers off of copper phone lines and into Fios service and not necessarily voluntarily.
Regulatory schemes like SB 1161 are perfectly designed to allow Verizon to increasingly escape from any regulation at all as they morph from a telecommunications company to an Internet services provider. Continue reading Kill The Copper→
Enjoy this fun article on a pioneer in low-power formerly “pirate” radio from the Illinois Times.
*****
Mbanna Kantako is on a roll.
From his rental house just off North Grand Avenue in Enos Park, the 54-year-old blind man talks about the advent of spring and the need to till the soil. He speaks of pollution, the Great Spirit, expectations that people gain responsibility with age and the Boston Marathon bombing, not knowing how many people might be listening via a radio signal that covers just a tiny portion of the city.
“You know the government set this shit up,” he intones. “It’s the government. They the ones that did 9/11. They the ones that did the Oklahoma City bombing. You have every reason not to believe what the government says.” Continue reading Keeping It Real: An LPFM Pioneer→
Posted by Tracy Rosenberg on February 9th, 2014 Truthout
The future of democratic media may come down to a bunch of lawyers.
Twenty-five years after pirate radio aficionados and media activists pushed for and eventually won the Low Power Community Radio Act, the fate of hundreds of radio licenses is up in the air. Continue reading A Thousand New Radio Stations: Whose Will They Be?→
