By Glenn Fleishman
January 25, 2006
The plan to build a 1,500-square-mile Wi-Fi network is underway: Yesterday, I wrote about a couple of stories (neither online) filed in Palo Alto newspapers about what seemed to be an Intel-led effort to put together a request for proposal (RFP) for a Bay Area-spanning Wi-Fi outdoor network. I spoke with Intel external affairs manager Mark Pettinger about the details, which will be fully available soon.
The Joint Venture Silicon Valley group via a local joint government organization has asked dozens of cities and counties in the Bay Area to contribute modest funds (a few thousand each) towards the cost of preparing a draft RFP which would then, in turn, be finalized and issued for bids. Joint Venture is run by an array of local businesspeople, elected politicians, executives from non-profits, and academic leaders.
The vision expressed in planning documents that I’ve seen show a scope that’s incredibly broad: the network would provide outdoor service to sensors for municipal projects, like water levels in creeks, to ordinary consumer purposes. The network would cover Silicon Valley’s broadest definition, reaching from San Mateo in the north to Gilroy in the south; Fremont in the east and over the mountains to Santa Cruz in the west. Silicon Valley’s population in this definition was estimated at 2.44 million in 2003 by Joint Venture
No business model or technology is preordained, although Wi-Fi is mentioned repeatedly. Whether it’s free, fee, or baroque combinations will be determined while drafting the RFP and considering bids. It might be that ZigBee, EVDO, WiMax, Wi-Fi, and other flavors would be the ideal combination.
Intel’s Pettinger said the estimated cost of preparing the draft RFP is about $60,000, and Intel has agreed to provide about 1/3 of that as in-kind services. The Intel Solution Services (ISS) division, which is a systems architecture planning group, will lead on the drafting. Intel has agreed to not put in a bid to answer the RFP. The draft will be finalized into a bidding document by Joint Venture. Intel has helped a number of communities plan their municipal network RFPs, including most recently Portland, Ore., and Tempe, Ariz., through their Digital Communities effort.
This RFP will ultimately issued by a consortium that includes 16 cities and San Mateo County at the core (a joint powers authority called SAMCAT), and could encompass as many as 26 cities and counties that would join with them. Santa Clara County, Los Altos Hills, Santa Clara (city), Morgan Hill, Palo Alto, Los Gatos, and Santa Cruz have put their money where their mouth is for the RFP already. The draft RFP should be ready in April of this year, if all goes as planned.
The story leaked out ahead of supporting documentation over the weekend because local cities and towns in the Bay Area have received the solicitation for funds to prepare the RFP, and a reporter made a call (it’s how the best stories develop). Pettinger said that there’s no interest in keeping this private, but the groups involved hadn’t yet had a chance to draft a press release and assemble all the pieces to explain the effort.
By Michael Stoll, SPJ - Northern California Chapter
January 26, 2006
Society of Professional Journalists calls for national debate on sale of Knight Ridder newspapers
[Note: Media Alliance is exploring opportunities for public fora in the coming months to address this issue. Please stay tuned to our webiste for info. ]
INDIANAPOLIS – The Society of Professional Journalists and its Northern California Chapter call for an urgent national conversation about how to preserve public-service journalism in light of the likely sale of the Knight Ridder newspaper company.
Knight Ridder, the nation’s second-largest newspaper chain, put itself out to bid last November. To satisfy the demands of a few major shareholders seeking larger short-term profits, the company may be swallowed whole by another conglomerate or broken up by speculators in early 2006. To finance the multibillion-dollar deal, new owners would be under heavy pressure to slash investment in newsgathering and reporting.
News media play a vital role in ensuring a robust and transparent democracy, a role that is too important to be compromised by the quest for profits. SPJ believes that both journalists and the public need to discuss openly the societal implications of these kinds of business decisions, as several groups have done in recent weeks.
We acknowledge that newspapers cannot serve their democratic role unless they stay in business. But the increasing corporate pressure to squeeze additional returns out of already profitable newspapers, at rates exceeding the margins in most other industries, has skewed the balance between journalism and commerce. SPJ and the NorCal Chapter believe that those directing the production of news have an ethical obligation to readers every bit as significant as their fiduciary accountability to shareholders.
Much of the newspaper industry has fared poorly under financial pressures similar to those dogging Knight Ridder. Layoffs, buyouts and hiring freezes shrank the newspaper industry by at least 2,100 jobs in 2005. These same pressures are affecting alternative weekly newspapers and the ethnic press.
Though there is disagreement about what should happen to Knight Ridder -- whose 32 daily newspapers, various Web sites and weekly publications provide news to millions of readers -- there is broad consensus within the journalism community that it should not be allowed to fall into the hands of those unwilling to guarantee the continuity of public-service journalism.
Journalists in particular have an obligation to invite discussion on this topic. The SPJ Code of Ethics urges journalists to “clarify and explain news coverage and invite dialogue with the public over journalistic conduct.” We call on reporters, editors, columnists and editorial writers to write about the planned sale and solicit ideas from community leaders and readers, who have a significant stake in the civic-minded management at their local newspapers.
A national conversation about how Knight Ridder newspapers can maintain their journalistic integrity under escalating profit pressures should send a message to investors not to ignore the social value of their investments -- either now or in future battles over media ownership. Such a dialogue would also help journalists fulfill their ethical responsibility to be accountable to their readership. And it would help that readership participate, as we believe the Constitution envisioned, in preserving a free, vibrant and competitive press.
For further information about the proposed Knight Ridder sale, visit www.spj.org/norcal.
By Don Hazen, AlterNet
Posted on January 23, 2006
Today AlterNet launches a new blog, Echo Chamber, that will cover how progressive ideas and issues are communicated and gain traction in the overall media universe. We'll be looking closely at language and framing, and media initiatives and ads like Moveon.org's much-needed campaign against corruption in Washington, D.C. We will also spotlight progressive media figures, events, new books and films, and happenings in the blogosphere.
Several AlterNet editors will be blogging, as well as Jeffrey Feldman of Frameshop and Paul Waldman, a Media Matters for America fellow and original editor of the Gadflyer.
You may wonder: What is an "echo chamber"? It's a term that gets bandied about, usually along the lines of, "We progressives need a better echo chamber like the radical right has, what with Fox, Limbaugh, Drudge, etc."
With an effective echo chamber, a political idea or message, preferably one with clear values and goals, is repeated frequently in various media by multiple message carriers until it reaches a tipping point or helps achieve a political goal, or becomes part of the overall national political conversation.
Take the ongoing campaign against Wal-Mart that has raised public consciousness about the company's many transgressions. It is hard to ignore the fact the Wal-Mart's public image has taken a beating in the press; as a result, the company has had to change some of its policies and respond with some positive steps.
There has been solid reporting and grassroots organizing against Wal-Mart for some time. However, it was the making of Robert Greenwald's film, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, that served as a catalyst for the most recent stage of the campaign that has put Wal-Mart on the defensive. [Full disclosure: Robert Greenwald is a member of the board of the Independent Media Institute, AlterNet's parent organization.] Grassroots activism, an aggressive web presence, good visibility in the blogosphere, coverage on AlterNet, the Nation, CAP's Progress Report and other progressive media all helped create an environment in which the corporate press began to cover Wal-Mart more critically.
Greenwald also understood the importance of good corporate media coverage. He hired PR guru Ken Sunshine, who works with both unions and Hollywood celebrities. Sunshine and his team helped place key early articles in the New York Times, Business Week and other media to build the momentum. Greenwald did countless interviews, pounding away at the theme that Wal-Mart is destroying communities and shirking its responsibilities to pay a fair wage, provide health care, etc. With the development of Wal-Mart-Watch.com and WakeUpWal-Mart.com and the leaking of internal company memos, the media echo chamber became a key element of a strategic campaign.
But an echo chamber cannot succeed without the necessary ingredients: vision, ideas, values, language, organizing in the field, clear goals, effective spokespeople and the commitment of the full range of progressive media to pound away to help push the mainstream coverage.
And we aren't just trying to emulate the top-down infrastructure that the radical right has developed over the years. Our echo chamber here at AlterNet will give voice not only to policy wonks and strategists, but also to the grassroots progressive activists who too often lack a forum in which to air their ideas and innovations.
Nevertheless, the conversation about language and framing will need to take place on more than one level. On the day-to-day level we can discuss the messages of the current political moment -- right now that's political corruption, abuse of presidential power, and the ongoing travesty in Iraq. But much of the spinning and parsing of language sidesteps the painful reality that progressives are still losing badly; that Alito will be confirmed; and that Democrats and progressives have not found or used "frames" that could transform the public discourse.
Peter Teague, a program officer at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, has thought long and hard about the challenge of framing. "My sense is that the left is now thoroughly confused about framing, and that the term is used interchangeably with spin and messaging," he says. But getting it right, says Teague, really matters. "What 'framing' really points us to is a deep rethink that forces us to challenge our assumptions and identities and that may require a re-organization of our efforts."
Teague continues: "I think we can agree that no single issue 'movement' has what it takes to build a more progressive America. Therefore, the central assumption behind most of our efforts -- that we can build an effective counterweight to conservatives and corporate hegemony from the conglomeration of several different issues or identity-based movements -- must be challenged. We now have decades of experience with this theory, and we are no closer to the rebirth of a genuine movement than we were 25 years ago."
Basically what Teague is challenging us to do is understand that "reframing" requires challenging some of our most basic assumptions -- that continuing to do the same thing is not going to do the trick. Framing begins at a deep conceptual level, and despite the unfortunate backlash to dismiss framing as superficial, it actually is radical and deep. It is about how we understand the world, how we define the problems and the solutions, how we organize ourselves to achieve our goals, and how we talk about all of it. It is back to the basics.
We at AlterNet have always felt ourselves part of the progressive echo chamber, especially because we amplify the content of other media sources (half of our content is original; the rest is taken from the best of the progressive media). We spend time thinking about the language of change -- what do our headlines and summaries convey? Are we framing a positive vision for the future, as well as providing the critique that gets our juices flowing?
Echo Chamber, the blog, is a work in progress and all of our readers are invited to participate. Many of you already do; each time you email a story to a friend, you are participating in the progressive echo chamber -- and our readers email tens of thousands of AlterNet articles to friends and colleagues every week. So jump into the echo chamber, offer your comments and critiques, and frame your own democratic vision for the future.
Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.
from Media Alliance, some text from MoveOn
In our increasingly consolidated media environment, the news channel CNN has championed itself as a unique source for fact-based reporting. MA has been critical of their coverage on numerous issues, especially the role of big business and the U.S. government in shaping the news, and have urged them to avoid partisanship and the conservative bent of most outlets.
This week CNN Headline News announced plans to give an hour of airtime every day to right-wing talk radio "personality" Glenn Beck. This is a far cry from the needed work to strengthen CNN's news offerings with quality, non-partisan journalism.
Variety magazine reports CNN "will look to build Beck into the type of TV personality that could siphon viewers from Bill O'Reilly, Joe Scarborough and other conservative hosts."
ACTION: Please contact CNN right away. Say no to CNN hiring right-wing "personality" Glenn Beck as part of the Headline News and no to CNN trying to become a Fox News clone. We need more balance and independence in our news - more journalism and less partisanship and cults of personality.
Jack Womack, CNN Vice President - jack.womack@turner.com
Ken Jautz, CNN Vice President - ken.jautz@turner.com
Glenn Beck is about as controversial as it gets. The media watchdog group Media Matters for America have collected just a few of his outlandish comments:
On families of the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks: "[T]his is horrible to say, and I wonder if I'm alone in this—you know, it took me about a year to start hating the 9-11 victims' families? Took me about a year."
On Hurricane Katrina survivors who remained in New Orleans: "And that's all we're hearing about, are the people in New Orleans. Those are the only ones that we're seeing on television are the scumbags...It's just a small percentage of those who were left in New Orleans, or who decided to stay in New Orleans, and they're getting all the attention."
Talking to a caller who claimed to have tortured prisoners in U.S. custody: "I've got to tell you, I appreciate your service ... Good for you. Good for—I mean, good for you...I have to tell you, when all is said and done, I'm glad people like you are on our side."
On the father of Nick Berg, American civilian executed in Iraq: "The want to be a better person today than I was yesterday says he's a dad, he's grieving, but I don't buy that. I'm sorry, I don't buy it. I think he is grieving, but I think he's a scumbag as well. I don't like this guy at all.
CNN needs to hear from you—please write now:
Jack Womack, CNN Vice President - jack.womack@turner.com
Ken Jautz, CNN Vice President - ken.jautz@turner.com
By Howard Mintz, Mercury News
January 19, 2006
The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases.
The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.
In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.
The Mountain View-based search and advertising giant opposes releasing the information on a variety of grounds, saying it would violate the privacy rights of its users and reveal company trade secrets, according to court documents.
Nicole Wong, an associate general counsel for Google, said the company will fight the government's effort ``vigorously.''
``Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and the demand for the information is overreaching,'' Wong said.
The case worries privacy advocates, given the vast amount of information Google and other search engines know about their users.
``This is exactly the kind of case that privacy advocates have long feared,'' said Ray Everett-Church, a South Bay privacy consultant. ``The idea that these massive databases are being thrown open to anyone with a court document is the worst-case scenario. If they lose this fight, consumers will think twice about letting Google deep into their lives.''
Everett-Church, who has consulted with Internet companies facing subpoenas, said Google could argue that releasing the information causes undue harm to its users' privacy.
``The government can't even claim that it's for national security,'' Everett-Church said. ``They're just using it to get the search engines to do their research for them in a way that compromises the civil liberties of other people.''
The government argues that it needs the information as it prepares to once again defend the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act in a federal court in Pennsylvania. The law was struck down in 2004 because it was too broad and could prevent adults from accessing legal porn sites.
However, the Supreme Court invited the government to either come up with a less drastic version of the law or go to trial to prove that the statute does not violate the First Amendment and is the only viable way to combat child porn.
As a result, government lawyers said in court papers they are developing a defense of the 1998 law based on the argument that it is far more effective than software filters in protecting children from porn. To back that claim, the government has subpoenaed search engines to develop a factual record of how often Web users encounter online porn and how Web searches turn up material they say is ``harmful to minors.''
The government indicated that other, unspecified search engines have agreed to release the information, but not Google.
``The production of those materials would be of significant assistance to the government's preparation of its defense of the constitutionality of this important statute,'' government lawyers wrote, noting that Google is the largest search engine.
Google has the largest share of U.S. Web searches with 46 percent, according to November 2005 figures from Nielsen//NetRatings. Yahoo is second with 23 percent, and MSN third with 11 percent.
Mercury News Staff Writer Michael Bazeley contributed to this report. Contact Howard Mintz at hmintz@mercurynews.com or (408) 286-0236.
By Glenn Fleishman, The New York Times
Thursday, 19 January 2006
"All of us were very idealistic, and all quite strongly opinionated," said Adam Shand, founder of The Personal Telco Project, which had visions of such a network in Portland, Ore.
There as elsewhere, it was seen as a three-step process.
First, build home brew Wi-Fi antennas and develop software to make outdoor wireless networks affordable and practical.
Second, persuade thousands of people in each city to stick Wi-Fi antennas out their windows, on their roofs or in their places of business to serve collectively as the nodes of a network. (Some groups sought to share existing commercial broadband Internet access--often regardless of whether an Internet service provider allowed that kind of sharing--while others wanted to build a separate community network.)
Third, link those thousands of nodes into neighborhood networks that would themselves connect into a cloud of free citywide Wi-Fi coverage. That's free as in free beer as well as in freedom: Most advocates envisioned no restrictions on content or participation, and no access charges. In contrast, almost all early Wi-Fi hot spots were pinpoints of service, had fees attached and restricted use.
Step 2 was never completed, which is why victory speeches seem, at first glance, out of place. Nonetheless, "community wireless accomplished spectacularly well what it set out to do," said Dana Spiegel, president of NYCwireless, a volunteer wireless advocacy group in Manhattan.
While attendance at some community networking groups has plummeted, and some smaller groups have disappeared, their technical and political impact has never been higher. Wireless advocates no longer dangle dangerously from rooftops mounting antennas built inside potato chip cans, though some still provide technical help to business owners and nonprofit groups in creating free Wi-Fi hot spots.
"The problems that were hard in 2001 were technical ones," Spiegel said. "Now they're personal and relationship and political ones. The technology--we almost don't even think about it anymore."
Greg Richardson, president of consulting firm Civitium, says that movement was the impetus for government-run citywide wireless-Internet plans. Richardson has been a consultant on municipal wireless policy and technical issues for Philadelphia, San Francisco and other cities.
Community wireless gave municipal planners "the validation that a lot of those ideas could work," Richardson said. Early and continuing municipal efforts to provide small areas of free access in parks and downtown districts were and still are often created in conjunction with these community groups.
The move from building physical networks to building political influence, many advocates say, stems in part from an August 2004 forum organized by the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network in Illinois.
At the event, many community wireless leaders met for the first time. Sessions were conducted with politicians and members of nonprofit groups interested in diversifying media ownership. Sascha Meinrath, the network's project coordinator, said he saw a political awakening hit the technically focused participants.
"We could develop all of these technologies, we could come up with the holy grail of wireless technologies, and then it would be illegal to deploy it," he said. After they returned from the conference, several wireless advocates became involved in the political debates over municipal broadband. These debates intensified after Philadelphia announced in late 2004 that it would build a citywide Wi-Fi network.
In quick succession, other cities announced their own plans, including Minneapolis; San Francisco; Anaheim, Calif.; and Tempe, Ariz.
Much of the advocates' involvement has centered on stressing network neutrality, in which a network operator has little say over what devices are used on a network and for what purpose.
The issue became more prominent after recent statements by the chief executive of AT&T (the former SBC Communications) suggesting that content providers like Google might be required to pay fees to reach AT&T's Internet access customers. Scattered reports also indicate that some access providers may be blocking or interrupting Internet phone services.
Michael Oh of NewburyOpen.net, a commercially sponsored free Wi-Fi zone on Newbury Street in Boston, said, "I don't think anyone in the SBC world or the policy-making world would have anticipated that there would have been anyone at the table like us when it came to municipal wireless."
Many wireless advocates said they already have relationships with local politicians and now are stepping up to the state level; some were contacted by officials trying to make sense of broadband policy. Richard MacKinnon, founder of the Austin Wireless City Project, testified at state hearings in Texas and joined in a successful fight against a bill to restrict municipal-broadband service.
Wireless advocates "have done more to bring forward the concerns of network neutrality as well as open access" than anyone else in the political process, Richardson said. "They have a very loud voice in an advocacy role."
A policy statement by NYCwireless lists several principles that define network neutrality: A city or network builder must resell service to other Internet service providers, avoid restrictions on content or types of service (like Internet phone service) and allow all legal devices to be connected to the network, meaning that Internet telephone adapters and wireless cameras would be as legitimate as laptop Wi-Fi cards.
Because of concerns over neutrality, many community groups have focused on how to create independent networks that require neither government support nor an Internet connection to be useful.
The Champaign-Urbana network is developing software that allows computers and Wi-Fi gateways to organize into a larger network as they find other nodes. The approach is called mesh networking; the software would be open-sourced and distributed at no cost. (Mesh networks are to be the basis of all the municipal Wi-Fi networks currently planned but are to use commercial equipment and proprietary software.)
SeattleWireless is taking a different approach to creating fixed networks using wireless equipment. Since 2000, its founder, Matt Westervelt, and other members have planned to create a central point that would act as a relay medium for local groups seeking to connect their offices, create temporary networks for events or offer Internet connections to others.
His organization raised $2,500 for a climber to place network equipment on a cellular tower on Capitol Hill, one of the highest spots in Seattle. The cost of upkeep is to be donated by a private company.
Community advocates want to use both these independent networks and municipal broadband to carry new kinds of locally focused services and data.
Oh and The Boston Globe (a division of The New York Times Company) are experimenting in locations around Boston with what they call Pulse Points: freestanding Wi-Fi nodes with no Internet connections. These nodes carry only local discussion boards and information.
At a Pulse Point in the South Station train terminal, every other board posting in the early days "was a flame about why there was no free Internet access," Oh said. Now the spot is routinely used to exchange information and personal stories.
Spiegel said the transition from hardware and networks to the higher level of programs and politics is inevitable as networks spread.
"In the end, what all of us were trying to do was to change the way people thought about communications," he said. "The Internet wasn't something that you sat down at the computer to use, but that it was something that permeated our lives--it just didn't have the distribution to permeate our lives."
Entire contents, Copyright © 2006 The New York Times. All rights reserved.
"Broadband is the electricity of the 21st century—and much of America is being left in the dark."
Let there be Wi-fi
From The Washington Monthly - January/February 2006
By Robert McChesney and John Podesta
Two decades ago, the chattering classes fretted about economic upheaval rising from Japan and the Asian Tigers. They feared an invasion of cars, microchips, and Karaoke that would take away American jobs, take over U.S.-dominated industries, and shift cultural norms. In the 1990s, America responded with a boom in high technology and Hollywood exports. But a revolution is again brewing in places like Japan and South Korea. This time it's about “broadband”—a technology that, in terms of powering economies, could be the 21st century equivalent of electricity. But rather than relive the jingoism of the 1980s, American policy makers would be wise to take a cue from the Asian innovators and implement new policies to close the digital divide at home and with the rest of the world.
Most people know broadband as an alternative to their old, slow dial-up Internet connection. These high-capacity data networks made of fiber-optic cables provide a constant, unbroken connection to the Internet. But broadband is about much more than checking your email or browsing on EBay. In the near future, telephone, television, radio and the web all will be delivered to your home via a single broadband connection. In the not-so-distant-future, broadband will be an indispensable part of economic, personal, and public life. Those countries that achieve universal broadband are going to hold significant advantages over those who don't. And so far, the United States is poised to be a follower—not a leader—in the broadband economy.
American residents and businesses now pay two to three times as much for slower and poorer quality service than countries like South Korea or Japan. Since 2001, according to the International Telecommunications Union, the United States has fallen from fourth to 16th in the world in broadband penetration. Thomas Bleha recently argued in Foreign Affairs that what passes for broadband in the United States is “the slowest, most expensive and least reliable in the developed world.” While about 60 percent of U.S. households do not subscribe to broadband because it is either unavailable where they live or they cannot afford it, most Japanese citizens can access a high-speed connection that's more than 10 times faster than what's available here for just $22 a month. (Japan is now rolling out ultra-high speed access at more than 500 times what the Federal Communications Commission considers to be “broadband” in this country.)
The economic ramifications are profound. “Asians will have the first crack at developing the new commercial applications, products, services, and content of the high-speed-broadband era,” writes Bleha. Already, South Korea, which leads the world in the percentage of its businesses and homes with broadband, is the number one developer of online video games—perhaps the fastest-growing industry today. What's more, societies in which broadband use is near-universal will adapt to its uses much more quickly than those where access is available only to the well-to-do few.
The countries surpassing the United States in broadband deployment did so by using a combination of public entities and private firms. The Japanese built their world-class system by ensuring “open access” to residential telephone lines, meaning competitors paid the same wholesale price to use the wires. The country is also establishing a super-fast, nationwide fiber system via a combination of tax breaks, debt guarantees and subsidies. But of particular note, the Japanese government also encouraged municipalities to build their own networks, especially in rural areas. Towns and villages willing to set up their own ultra-high-speed fiber networks received government subsidies covering approximately one-third of their costs.
Unfortunately, the United States has pursued the opposite policy. President Bush has called for “universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007,” and FCC Chairman Kevin Martin claims broadband deployment is his “highest priority.” But they have made no progress toward these goals; in fact, they have rewarded their corporate cronies for maintaining high prices, low speeds and lackluster innovation. Federal policies have not merely failed to correct our broadband problems, they have made them worse. Instead of encouraging competition, the FCC has allowed DSL providers and cable companies to shut out competitors by denying access to their lines. And whereas the Japanese government encourages individual towns to set up their own “Community Internet,” Washington has done nothing. Fourteen states in the United States now have laws on the books restricting cities and towns from building their own high-speed Internet networks. No wonder America is falling behind its Asian competitors.
Despite all the opposition from telecom companies and their political allies, some municipalities are finding ways to provide broadband to their residents. Community Internet projects are already up and running in dozens of small towns and coming soon to bigger cities like Philadelphia, Portland, and Minneapolis. These cities recognize broadband as perhaps the single most important factor in transforming their local economies and the lives of average citizens. Community Internet could revolutionize and democratize communications in this country. But the major obstacle to universal, affordable broadband access for all Americans is not economic or technical. It's political.
“A birch rod in the cupboard”
The dispute over municipal broadband bears a striking similarity to the development of the electric power industry a century ago. As James Baller—an attorney who represents local governments and public utilities—first warned in a 1994 paper written for the American Public Power Association: “The history of the electric power industry casts substantial doubt on the notion that our nation can depend on competition among cable and telephone companies alone... to ensure not only prompt and affordable, but also universal, access to the benefits of the information superhighway.”
Borrowing from Richard Rudolph and Scott Ridley's 1986 book, Power Struggle: The Hundred-Year War Over Electricity, Baller showed that when electricity first became available in the 1880s, privately owned utilities marketed “the new technology as synonymous with wealth, power and privilege,” lighting large cities, businesses, and the homes of the rich. Electricity also allowed factories to stay open 24 hours a day, and led to the institution of swing shifts. But communities that didn't have electricity couldn't produce as much, and couldn't keep up with urban competitors. Rural communities were left with the choice of forming a government-owned utility or being left in the dark. Even big cities like Detroit built municipal power systems to cut prices and extend service. In response, private utility companies responded with a massive propaganda and misinformation campaign that attacked advocates of municipal power as “un-American,” “Bolshevik,” and “an unholy alliance of radicals.”
But the expansion of electricity, Baller argued, showed that the presence—or even threat—of competition from the public sector is one of the surest ways to secure quality service and reasonable prices from private enterprises delivering critical public services. FDR, he notes, called municipal power systems “a birch rod in the cupboard, to be taken out and used only when the child gets beyond the point where more scolding does any good.”
And Roosevelt picked up the birch rod himself. In 1935, he created the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), which gave loans and other help to small towns and farmer cooperatives interested in setting up their own power systems. The REA turned out to be one of the New Deal's most successful programs. Within two years, hundreds of new municipal power utilities were up and running across the country, and within 20 years, virtually all of rural America had electricity, provided either by rural co-ops or big utilities spurred to action by municipal competition. Baller concluded: “The plain, hard truth is that universal electric service would never have developed on a timely basis in the absence of municipally owned electric utilities and rural electric cooperatives”—which still account for more than a quarter of the power in the country today.
Like the advent of electricity, broadband is transforming the daily lives of Americans. The future of U.S. communities depends upon access to advanced high-speed telecommunications services, a fact many urban policymakers already recognize. “Just as with the roads of old,” Dianah Neff, Philadelphia's chief information technology officer, recently told BusinessWeek, “if broadband bypasses you, you become a ghost town.”
The Philadelphia story
Last year, sensing their citizens were being stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide, Philadelphia's leaders launched an ambitious plan to blanket the entire city with wireless Internet service. To provide universal, affordable Internet access, Philadelphia plans to construct a gigantic “wireless mesh network”—a system of interconnected antennas placed on streetlights, traffic signals, and public buildings. Each of these “nodes” broadcasts a broadband signal, which connects up with other nodes to create a cloud of Internet access for PCs, laptops and wireless devices. The technology is similar to the “Wi-Fi hotspots” that have popped up at cafes and libraries across the country. Philadelphia's hotspot, however, will cover 135 square miles. No tax dollars will be used to build the system, which will be financed instead with $10 to $15 million in bonds and private investment. The city is finalizing a contract with a consortium led by Earthlink to build and run the system—and several Internet service providers (ISPs) will compete to market the service to local residents. The service will cost about $20 a month —with subsidized access for lower-income households for about $10. The city plans to deploy the first of 3,000 nodes soon and complete the system by 2007.
For all its potential benefits to the city's residents, Wireless Philadelphia was nearly crushed before it started. Last fall, behind closed doors in the state capitol, industry lobbyists slipped a measure into a massive telecommunications bill to stop municipalities from entering the broadband business. “The Verizon bill”—as it was known around the state legislature—sailed through both chambers before city officials and media advocates got wind of its contents. A last-minute compromise carved an exception for Philadelphia, allowing that effort to go ahead as planned, but the rest of the state was shut out.
Towns in states where industry lobbyists have not succeeded (yet) in shutting down municipal broadband are doing remarkable things. When three major employers in Scottsburg, Ind. (pop. 6,040), threatened to leave town because they didn't have the communications infrastructure needed to deal with their customers and suppliers, the town's mayor, Bill Graham, went to the major cable and telephone companies for help. They told him that extending high-speed broadband services to Scottsburg wasn't profitable enough. So the city decided to build a municipal wireless “cloud” using transmitters placed on water and electric towers that reach more than 90 percent of the surrounding county's 23,000 residents. “Scottsburg didn't wake up one morning and say, we want to be in the broadband business,” Graham told PBS. “Scottsburg had business and industry that was going to leave our community because what we had was not fast enough.” Scottsburg's investment worked—the employers stayed.
In Hermiston, Ore., fire fighters and police officers carry wireless computers that can download blueprints of a building on the way to a fire or track an accident at the nearby Army depot that houses chemical weapons, thanks to that town's Community Internet system. And Community Internet even played a role in helping the evacuees from Hurricane Katrina. With much of the communications network obliterated in the Gulf Coast Region, a cadre of volunteers converged in Louisiana, and used donated equipment to set up wireless networks, computers and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones at more than a dozen shelters, allowing evacuees to contact other shelters to search for family members or fill out FEMA forms to get disaster aid.
The industry backlash
Community Internet has the potential to revolutionize and democratize communications in this country. And that may be the reason why big cable and telephone companies and their political allies have launched a sophisticated misinformation campaign. These companies and their coin-operated think tanks generally make three paradoxical arguments against municipal broadband. First, they contend that municipalities have no place in the “free market.” Of course, the cable and telephone giants don't mention that their own monopolies—which control 98 percent of the broadband market—have been cemented with extensive public subsidies, tax breaks and incentives (as well as free rein to tear up city streets). Verizon, for instance, didn't complain last fall when Pennsylvania handed them subsidies for broadband deployment worth nearly 10 times what Wireless Philadelphia will cost. Neither did Comcast object when Philadelphia approved a $30 million grant to build a skyscraper that will house its headquarters. To the incumbent providers, “unfair competition” means any competition at all.
Opponents also warn that municipalities will “crowd out” more efficient private players. In reality, most municipal networks are a last resort by desperate local governments. Often their choice isn't between a municipal system and a private one, but between municipal and nothing. (Of course, that doesn't stop the phone and cable companies from trying to outlaw Community Internet even in areas where they don't currently offer service.) A recent study by the Florida Municipal Electric Association found “no evidence” to support the argument that municipal systems limit private investment. On the contrary, these systems appear to spur investment by bringing entrepreneurs and new competition into the market. Even threatening to build a system has a funny way of encouraging the incumbents to improve service and lower their prices.
The same critics of Community Internet claim that cities are too “lazy” or inefficient to manage complex systems and will be unable to adapt to changing technologies. But municipalities have a long track record of successfully and efficiently operating power plants, sewage systems and subways. It's hard to imagine that the broadband networks—most of which will actually be operated by private contractors—are any more complex. Perhaps the more obvious question is: If these systems are destined to fail, why are the telephone and cable companies expending so much energy trying to stop them?
The high-priced industry lobbyists and their political allies are moving quickly to write their monopolies into law. In 2005, they were able to push through restrictions in five states—though only Nebraska passed an outright ban. But eight other bills were defeated or derailed thanks to a vocal coalition of media reformers, consumer groups, municipal officials, and the high-tech industry. So now opponents are pushing legislation at the federal level to outlaw municipal broadband nationwide. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), a former executive at phone giant SBC, has introduced a bill in the House that would give incumbent providers the right of first refusal before a city or town could offer broadband service. A similar measure is buried in Sen. John Ensign's (R-Nev.) rewrite of the Telecom Act.
21st-century meal ticket
This is exactly the opposite of what the country needs. Instead, we need political leadership to build popular support for a new national broadband policy. To start, the FCC should swiftly reverse course and restore competition for broadband whether it comes from DSL, cable, power lines, or wireless Community Internet systems.
Congress could boost the speed and reliability of community wireless networks by making available more “unlicensed spectrum”—those portions of the public airwaves not exclusively reserved for government or commercial use. Exisiting “Wi-Fi” networks operate in “junk bands” cluttered with signals from cordless phones, microwave ovens, baby monitors and other consumer devices. At lower frequencies–like in the television band—signals travel farther and can go through walls, trees and mountains. Opening up some of this spectrum would make Community Internet systems much faster and cheaper to deploy, allowing a new generation of broadband entrepreneurs to enter the market. The broadcasters are about to return a sizable chunk of spectrum as part of the digital television transition, a portion of which could be reserved for Community Internet if Congress doesn't auction it all off to the cell phone companies. Another option would be to reallocate vast, unused “white spaces” between TV channels for wireless broadband. Either way, more “unlicensed spectrum” is the key to making universal, super-fast broadband for $10 a month a reality.
Most importantly, the federal government must ensure that the cable and telephone monopolies can't crush innovative projects like Wireless Philadelphia and the emerging national movement for Community Internet. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) have introduced a bill that would free municipalities to decide for themselves which technologies best serve their citizens. U.S. policy should create incentives for communities to build advanced telecommunications networks in hundreds of cities and towns across the country, creating robust competition for communications services, assisting small entrepreneurs through public-private partnerships, and bringing opportunity to low-income urban neighborhoods and rural communities too often neglected by large entrenched monopolies.
Without real competition or innovation, broadband deployment in the United States has stagnated. And the stakes of this misguided policy couldn't be higher. According to the Department of Commerce, 95 percent of new jobs created will demand computer skills. And a 2001 Brookings Institution study estimated the widespread adoption of basic broadband could add $500 billion to the U.S. economy and create 1.2 million new jobs per year. Simply empowering local governments and community groups, in coordination with private entrepreneurs, to provide universal affordable, broadband may be the single best thing we can do to make America the pre-eminent economy—and democracy—of the 21st century.