Talk about the Internet democratizing democracy…Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-IL) is conducting an innovative online experiment. He’s engaging in series of four nightly broadband policy discussions in an effort to craft legislation on national broadband policy.
He says he’s doing it in order to open up the legislative process (and he couldn’t have picked a more relevant topic to let net users comment on) and thinks this might set the standard for how legislators go about crafting bills.
There are two reasons I’m asking for your help and participation. The first is because I think we need more public participation and transparency in the way Congress crafts significant legislation. This is an approach to legislation that has never been tried before. If it’s successful — as I believe it will be — it may become the way lawmakers approach drafting bills on other issues like education, health care, and foreign policy.
Durbin also couldn’t have picked a better site to serve as the locus of this experiment. Durbin’s chats will take place on a blog called Open Left, founded by Matt Stoller, Chris Bowers and Mike Lux. Stoller and Bowers were editors at hot progressive blog MyDD until last month and Lux runs a political consulting firm called Progressive Strategies.
But Durbin’s experiment — namely calling on the wisdom of the web crowd to craft legislation — may, in the end, prove to be a passing thing. He’s fighting the well-entrenched industries who run the country’s broadband networks and he’s fighting, well, the nature of political power itself. Legislation rarely reflects the ideal policy approach to any topic and almost always reflect rank, raw political power by special interests. It’s hard to see how a sweet experiment could stand up to hundreds, if not thousands, of years of lawmaking.
Public Knowledge’s Art Brodsky casts some skepticism on this idealistic development and notes, correctly, that:
Passing meaningful telecommunications legislation is very difficult because just about any progressive ideas or bills geared to introducing competition or innovation will incur the wrath of the telephone and/or cable companies, and possibly the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as well.
Still, Durbin’s heart is (perhaps) in the right place and it’s nice to see someone try to open up the legislative process to the most democratic of all communications media.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:52 PM | Print | Comments (0)Two items today attest to what I hope is not a trend in today’s tech-based service world. The first is Matt Richtel’s article in the New York Times about the human cost of SunRocket’s sudden shut-down. When I initially read that SunRocket had quietly folded its tents and decamped under the cover of darkness, my first reaction was genuine sympathy for the customers left in the lurch.
Sure enough, Richtel tells the tale of Marshel Emery, an unemployed father of three who was suddenly left with no means of telephonic contact with prospective employers. That hurts to hear and SunRocket’s backers should be ashamed at giving folks like Emery no warning.
Although not as high on the moral outrage scale, mobile video service provider Amp’d is, according to Om, probably on the cusp of a similar plug-pulling. Om nails it when he says this kind of stealth shut-down is “unfair and amoral.”
But it’s only a matter of time before this kind of reprehensible tent-folding will attract the attention of regulators, particularly when it comes to telephony. John Nakahata, former chief of staff for the Federal Communications Commission and Blair Levin, former FCC chief of staff and now an analyst, both hint at this outcome in Richtel’s piece. Let’s hope so.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:40 AM | Print | Comments (1)
The Internet has democratized everything and tonight it will democratize democracy in a dramatic way. The first of the six official Democratic debates will take place (although as the Washington Post points out, it hardly feels like the first), sponsored by CNN and YouTube. The candidates will line up in South Carolina for traditional televised debate on CNN but the questions will come from us, via YouTube.
Over 1,500 video questions have been submitted and four dozen of those will air during the debate. Community Counts has all the videos here, organized by how many votes each video received from Community Counts’ visitors. The top rated video (see below) is a great question.
Contender John Edwards will be hosting a live webcast following the debate and has promised to answer the top two questions on Community Counts.
This is truly a watershed moment in both the Internet and politics, and it changes the election process forever. Don’t miss it.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:17 AM | Print | Comments (0)
(Back after another blogging break…)
Congress plans to give Google’s $3.1 billion acquisition of Ask.com the once-over, citing not only competition concerns but also privacy fears given the access the search giant will have to massive user activity databases once the deal goes through. The FTC, which is also responsible for consumer privacy matters, is in charge of the usual merger review for this deal, a sign to some DC observers that policymakers plan to factor in privacy-related issues into the normally dry antitrust analysis applied to these kinds of deals.
While all this scrutiny may seem like a great thing for Google’s foes, things have a way of boomeranging in Washington — if the feds crack down on Google, they may very well expand the scope of their inquiries in a way that bites everybody on the bum. Therefore, it’s not surprising that Google’s rivals, Microsoft and Ask.com, are taking proactive steps to ensure that they’re not caught in this net.
The two companies announced yesterday a joint commitment “to call on the industry to develop global privacy principles for data collection, use and protection related to searching and online advertising.” The move comes on the heels of Google’s own efforts to ward off privacy-related punishment. The search giant earlier this year announced that it will anonymize search results after 18 months (meaning you can’t peg them back to specific individuals) and, more recently, said that it will allow cookies of inactive users to expire after two years.
In keeping with this new plan to promote greater privacy protections (and in the process perhaps also protect its $6 billion deal to buy online ad giant AQuantive Inc. from the kind of harsh scrutiny that Google is enduring), Microsoft is also anonymizing search results after 18 months, but is doing Google one better — the search records on Microsoft’s Live Search service will go anonymous after 18 months unless Microsoft hears otherwise from users and the identity wiping is retroactive.
Ask.com is likewise stepping up its pro-privacy measures. The company announced last week a new tool called AskEraser, which will allow users to stop Ask from storing any personal information about their searches.
All of this is good news for consumer privacy. But, Google, Microsoft and Ask are clearly hoping to gain some kind of upper hand in the policy arena and as opposed to gaining an advantage in marketplace through these moves. Although governmental bodies (including the EU) will no doubt be pleased by the proactive measures, do consumers even know or care about which search service stores what kind of information about them? Probably not.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:52 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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