Small market-oriented cable operator Mediacom filed suit today in Federal court against the USDA over how that government agency has administered the Broadband Loan and Loan Guarantee Program, a program authorized by Congress to grant low-cost loans to companies willing to bring broadband services to rural America. The Iowa Cable and Telecommunications Association was also a party to the suit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa.
In addition to reiterating problems with the USDA’s Rural Utility Service (RUS) program overseeing the loans already documented by the agency’s Inspector General, the complaint raises specific allegations about an entity called Local Internet Service Company (LISCO), which obtained approval for a $9.475 million RUS loan to build a fiber-to-the-premises system in Fairfield, Iowa.
The cable guys claim, with what appears to be convincing back-up, that LISCO misrepresented to USDA the nature of the broadband service already available in Fairfield, which, they claim already has a lot of broadband competition, a situation that runs counter to the spirit of the loan program.
By approving LISCO’s application, RUS diverted loan program money to build duplicative facilities in an area which already has at least three incumbent providers, at least one of which provides high-quality broadband service at reasonable cost. Frustrating the intent of the Farm Bill and its own implementing regulations, RUS acted to improve LISCO’s competitive position rather to increase rural broadband access.
This is all well and good — if only the complaint weren’t coming from cable operators. I must admit that the RUS program sounds sloppy, inefficient and, most dangerously, really not open to public comment. Mediacom and its representatives had a devil of a time getting information on the loan application and plans of LISCO and ultimately resorted to a Freedom of Information Act request.
Moreover, Mediacom even attended a meeting with USDA Under Secretary Thomas Dorr and RUS Adminstrator James Andrew hosted by Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) and still can’t get a grip on what, exactly, LISCO said to get the loan or what LISCO is promising.
So, while it’s easy to dismiss the complaint because it’s coming from a rival that obviously wants to limit competition, I think it’s hard to justify what seems to be an opaque, closed process of handing out loans.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:13 PM | Print | Comments (2)
Courtesy of Michael Shtender-Auerbach at the Century Foundation comes news of a campaign against web censorship kicked off by Amnesty International. Called Irrepressible.Info, the campaign asks bloggers and online publications to publish material that has been censored somewhere in the world. (We’ve done it — check the right hand column for Farsi content banned in Iran).
Amnesty International has teamed with The Observer and the Opennet Initiative to launch Irrepressible.Info. As an interesting side-note Amnesty International got off the ground 45 years ago through The Observer when British Lawyer Peter Beneson wrote an article for the paper titled “The Forgotten Prisoners.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:26 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The Pew Internet and American Life Project released its latest home broadband adoption report late last week, showing not only the expected continued steep rise in broadband use, but also a high proportion of Internet users creating content.
As of March 2006, 42% of all American adults had a high-speed Internet connection at home, up from 30% as of March 2005. Growth was particularly strong in African-American households with broadband adoption in this segment growing by 121% year-over-year.
For the first time ever, DSL eclipsed cable modems as the top broadband technology — 50% of the homes had a DSL connection, while only 41% had cable high-speed connections. (I find it hard to believe that the remaining 9% of homes had a satellite or Wi-Fi connection, but the directionality of DSL v. cable is what counts.)
The really interesting data point is that 35% of all Internet users (including those who have used the Internet at work), or 48 million people, have posted content to the web, either through blogs or web pages or sharing venues where artwork or video can be posted. But an even bigger proportion of home broadband users, 42% or 31 million, have created content and put it online.
The survey also queried respondents about VoIP and came up with some surprising findings. First, 61 million people had heard about VoIP as of December 2005, an 86% jump in familiarity when compared to the previous year. Secondly, half of all VoIP customers still hang onto their landline phones. (Hat tip to ClickZ.)
Update: John Murrell at Good Morning Silicon Valley has this great observation on the study’s findings, one worth underscoring given just how out-to-lunch so many traditional content suppliers are.
This is the rude awakening awaiting any media company that’s still snoozing. Consumers are no longer restricted to consuming. “It’s the mass talking to the mass,” said Jesse Drew, associate director of technocultural studies at the University of California-Davis, specifically talking about video-sharing site YouTube but laying out the general principle. “Now there’s no central spigot that everything comes out of.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:46 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Is there pent-up demand for anonymous, disposable phone numbers? That may be the case or it may just be serendipity that over the past week or so two companies have stepped up with plans to give consumers free or low-cost disposable, anonymous phone numbers.
The first is NetZero, which has a new service called PrivatePhone. PrivatePhone is a free phone number and voice mail option that allows consumers to give out numbers without having to give out their home or cell number.
That’s all it is — a number and voice mail box to check for messages. The calls can be forwarded to regular phones for a fee.
Now another company called Jangl has come out with a service that allows people to “anonymize” themselves with disposable phone numbers. At first blush my thought is: why? Are there so many people that we meet in the course of a day that we don’t trust but to whom we still want to give our phone numbers?
On second thought, the answer is: yes. So many of our online activities involve working with people we don’t know and never meet and oftentimes we’re required to give out phone numbers during our web-based activities.
Where would you use something like this? When you’re buying and selling online. We see people publicize their cell phone numbers all the time on craigslist. With Jangl they could add a layer of anonymity.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:50 AM | Print | Comments (0)
The New York Times Glenn Collins has this piece today about documentary producer Steven Rosenbaum’s 7,000-gigabyte video archive of the events of 9/11 and their aftermath. Rosenbaum assembled from a host of sources 500 hours of video related to the attacks, the largest collection of “raw visual data” on the catastrophe.
But Rosenbaum is in financial straits and might have to sell off the collection piecemeal unless he finds a permanent donor, partner or buyer that would keep it intact. Any partner would have to help him pay off $500,000 in debt that he incurred through his now-defunct company CameraPlanet, although Rosenbaum isn’t looking to make money.
“This collection is about five years of my life,” Mr. Rosenbaum said. “It’s not about money. We don’t have the resources to make it available to researchers and other documentarians, and we are very selective in giving approval to use our video.”
The scholarly value of the archives is immense, researchers say. The University of Illinois has already offered to help organize the content for future historians.
We’d like to work with the collection to develop the kind of software that can be useful to search historical data,” said Orville Vernon Burton, a professor of history and sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is director of the Center for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science there.
In the past, historians often had to sift through meager records. “Scholars of the future will have an overwhelming task coping with e-mails, videos, newscasts, radio broadcasts and written accounts generated by historically important events like 9/11,” Dr. Burton said.
If financing can be found, Dr. Burton and scientists at Urbana-Champaign, a leading supercomputing center, would like to work with Mr. Rosenbaum’s collection “to store it, preserve it and develop the kind of software that can be useful to search this data,” he said, “to develop tools that can take e-mails, newscasts and videos, index them and search them by topic and time, so they can be evaluated.”
For now, however, only samples of Rosenbaum’s collection are viewable at Google Video.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:01 AM | Print | Comments (1)
Blogs We Read
