Articles by Drew Clark 
Drew Clark is Editor/Executive Director of BroadbandCensus.com, a FREE web service with news and information about competition, speeds and prices offered by high-speed internet providers. He also hosts DrewClark.com -- The Politics of Telecom, Media and Technology.
Previously, he was Senior Writer with National Journal Group, reporting on free speech, intellectual property, privacy, telecommunications and media for Technology Daily, a leading publication on information technology and public policy. He also ran the Center for Public Integrity's telecom and media project, and was Assistant Director of the Information Economy Project at George Mason University School of Law from January 2008 to January 2009. More detailed bio. He has been blogging on TLF since December 2006.
Art Brodsky’s 4,789-word article about Connect Kentucky and its offspring Connected Nation has been the talk of telecom circles over the past week.
Connected Nation is a non-profit entity that has become one of biggest players in the currently topical field of broadband data. Using their work in Kentucky as a model for mapping out broadband availability nation-wide, the group has become a driving force behind legislation that would provide grants for other states to duplicate these efforts.
Examples of legislation following the Connect Kentucky model are the Senate version of the current farm bill, H.R. 4212, which includes Illinois Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin’s “Connect the Nation Act,” S. 1190. Durbin’s bill would authorize $40 million a year, for five years, to state efforts to map out broadband inventory on the census block level.
The “Broadband Data Improvement Act,” S. 1492, by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, takes a similar approach. The goal is, in the identical language of both bills, to “identify and track the availability and adoption of broadband services within each State.”
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The Federal Communications commission on Tuesday eased restrictions on the ability of newspaper companies to own television and radio stations in the same market, by a 3-2 vote.
After the vote becomes effective, newspapers would be allowed to own stations within the 20 largest broadcast markets. Mergers of newspapers and broadcast stations would still be allowed in smaller markets, although subject to some regulatory constraints.
Since the so called “cross-broadcast” ownership rule was put in place in 1975, newspapers have been barred from owning a radio or television stations unless such combinations existed prior to the rule’s application, or subsequently received a waiver of the rules.
The vote to ease the newspaper ownership restrictions split the commission on party lines, with the Republicans voting for the measure, and the two Democrats offering stinging dissents. The action, and the comments by the commissioners, was a sign of the politically controversial nature of media ownership in recent years.
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By Drew Clark
I got the news today from an insider: National Journal’s Technology Daily, which covered the tech and information policy on the inside for nearly nine years, is closing down in January.
I’m no longer a part of Technology Daily, having left in August 2006 to pursue another journalistic opportunity. But I was there from November 1998 until last year, serving as a senior writer for the publication and writing more than 2,400 stories for Tech Daily. When something that you’ve been a part of for eight of its nine-year-life dies, that affects you. It’s time for a moment of appreciation.
Blogs of condolences have already been posted by the 463, by Tech Liberation, and by Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth (which has the e-mail that went out to Tech Daily subscribers last night).
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Comcast’s decision to limit Internet traffic from the peer-to-peer software BitTorrent would be against the law if Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama had his way, an aide to the Democratic Senator said Thursday.
In a conference call organized by the campaign for Sen. Obama, D-Ill., high-profile technology experts Lawrence Lessig, Beth Noveck and Julius Genachowski endorsed the technology and innovation agenda that Obama released on Wednesday. Also on the lines were three Obama aides, who declined to speak for attribution.
“What I find compelling about the Senator’s [stance] is a strong commitment to Net neutrality,” said Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University, referring to the notion that broadband providers be barred from favoring business partners with speedier Internet delivery.
Obama “addresses the problem of Net neutrality in a way that could actually be enforced,” said Lessig. By contrast, Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton “can’t stand up for Net neutrality.”
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Comcast’s terms of service and other consumer broadband service documents make no mention of any restrictions on the use of “peer-to-peer” applications like BitTorrent, or of any Internet network management.
AT&T and Time Warner Cable, two of the other big broadband providers, do mention restrictions on “peer-to-peer” services in their consumer broadband documents. Verizon Communications does not mention the phrase, according to an analysis of the four broadband providers conducted by DrewClark.com.
Unlike Time Warner Cable, Comcast fails to mention any “management,” “network management” or “reasonable network management” of its consumer broadband service in its documents.
Of the four providers, however, Comcast makes the most extensive warning to consumers against the “excess” use of bandwidth. For example, Comcast declares that the consumer “shall ensure that your use of the Service does not restrict, inhibit, interfere with, or degrade any other user’s use of the Service, nor represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an overly large burden on the network.”
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Last week was a whirlwind of activity for the telecommunications, media and technology project with which I had been engaged since August 2006.
The folks at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard were kind enough to invite me to speak in their luncheon series on Tuesday, October 9. I discussed “Media Tracker, FCC Watch, and the Politics of Telecom, Media and Technology.” I’m happy to report that the event is now archived on Media Berkman as a webcast.
I spoke about the work of the “Well Connected” Project at the Center for Public Integrity for which I was responsible. I devoted most of my time in the lecture to the Media Tracker, the interactive database at the heart of the project. The Media Tracker combines data from publicly available sources in a new and unique way, mapping out media and telecom ownership at the ZIP code level. Ownership is linked to lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions by company. The level of contribution by a telecom, media or technology company to any federal candidate can be viewed – documenting who has received what from whom.
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ASPEN, Colo. – Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin on Tuesday offered two proposals that he said would address concerns about objectionable content and add “access to new voices in the media.”
Martin repeated his proposal to require cable operators to sell television programming a la carte, or on a per-channel basis. “The ability to pick and choose among the content being offered them by the cable operators,” he said at the Aspen Forum on Communications and Society here.
Parents would have “much have meaningful choices” in the programming they could watch, he said. Currently, “there is little or no incentive for the market or programmers to respond” to parents’ demands for less racy content.
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With the death of the last year’s video franchising-Net neutrality bill, Democrats have now firmly taken the reins on telecommunications policy in Congress. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii., has legislation designed to map out the availability of broadband, or high-speed Internet connections, in the United States, and it passed out of committee on July 19. Now, this week, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., announced an online effort to write national broadband strategy legislation. He will joined by several telecommunications and Internet experts in open-comment blogging sessions for four nights from July 24 – 27 at OpenLeft.com. Durbin says he will be crafting legislation based on the input he gets during those sessions. He will then post drafts of that legislation online for more feedback before filing it as a bill.
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By Drew Clark
The National Association of Broadcasters likes to think of itself as the king of Capitol Hill. It carefully cultivates an invincible image. And some in the mainstream media buy it. The New York Times describes NAB as “the powerful trade lobby.” But in truth, right now television and radio broadcasters have never been weaker than in 1982, when Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., uttered these famous words: “The NAB can’t lobby its way out of a paper bag.”
Over the last 10 years, the NAB spent $55 million in lobbying expenditures – more than any other association – to disprove Packwood’s hypothesis. But still, the association is now getting hit on all sides. On radio, this year NAB is battling the proposed merger of XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio. Besting such a merger would normally be easy – if NAB hadn’t been arguing for the opposite of what it now seeks. And last month an alliance of performers and recording companies called MusicFirst decided to strike for a performance royalty from over-the-air radio stations. American copyright law exempts terrestrial broadcasters from paying for performances.
But the biggest deal is now heading into the spotlight: vacant television channels known as “white spaces.” Everyone covets them: technology companies like Dell, Google, Intel and Microsoft, wireless carriers like Sprint-Nextel, advocates for rural broadband, and non-profit spectrum utopians who look at white spaces and see decentralized community networks.
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Today, the Well Connected Project of the Center for Public Integrity is excited to launch an issue portal jointly with Congresspedia. This issue portal is a wiki, like Wikipedia, creating a collection of articles on telecom, media and technology policy, in a single location. Anyone can read, write and edit these articles.
This issue portal builds on the great telecom and technology reporting done by the members of the Well Connected Project staff. This venture into collaborative journalism is a first for our project. It adds a new element to our investigative journalism endeavor. First of all, we have the Media Tracker, a free database of more than five million records that tells you who owns the media where you live by typing in you ZIP code. If we win our lawsuit against the FCC, we’ll also include company-specific broadband information in the Media Tracker.
Second, our blog features dozens of quick-turnaround stories on the hottest topics in telecom and media policy. Recent stories have broken news on the battle over 700 Megahertz, on the lobbying over the proposed XM-Sirius satellite radio merger, and also over copyright controls on electronic devices. We also do investigative reports – like this one about Sam Zell, the new owner of Tribune Co. – that build on the data that is freely available in Media Tracker.
Now, with the addition of this Congresspedia wiki, our project aims to incorporate citizen-journalism on key public policy issues near and dear to the blogosphere. These are issues like Broadband availability, Digital copyright, Digital television, Regulating media content, and Spectrum are at the core of what techies care about in Washington. We hope you will add others articles, too. In fact, I’ve already started my own wish list: articles about Patent overhaul legislation, Media ownership, the Universal Service Fund, and Video franchising. Our reporters can summarize these issues and debates, but so can you.
Take a crack at them!
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.