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.
WASHINGTON, March 7, 2007 – The country’s two satellite television companies have joined forces with four major technology companies and a wireless company to promote the auction of frequencies currently used by television broadcasters.
In a March 5 meeting at the Federal Communications Commission with FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, the tech companies – Google, Intel, Skype and Yahoo! – joined with Access Spectrum to promote their “Coalition for 4G in America.”
The engagement of Internet giants like Google and Yahoo!, which traditionally have not lobbied the FCC, suggests considerable interest by the technology industry in the upcoming auction, which is set to begin no later than January 28, 2008. In 2006, Congress fixed February 19, 2009, as the end-date for analog television, freeing a wide swath of radio-frequencies for use by new technologies.
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SAN JOSE, February 26, 2007–AT&T Senior Vice President Jim Ciconni said Tuesday that the telecommunications world is fundamentally different from 1968, when the FCC required AT&T to allow competing telephones onto its network.
Speaking at the Technology Policy Summit here, Ciconni addressed the recent push for new wireless ‘Net Neutrality rules. “Unlike 1968, we have a pretty vibrant market out there,” he said.
The date refers to the year in which the agency allowed the Carterphone, which connected handheld radio conversations to telephone lines, onto AT&T’s network.
As a result, AT&T would reject any FCC requirement that put such rules in place on wireless carriers.
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SAN JOSE, February 26, 2007–Legislation to overhaul aspects of the patent system could take shape in as few as two or three weeks, said Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property and the Internet.
“This is an issue that doesn’t break down on partisan grounds,” said Berman, adding that the technology sector’s desire to seek changes in patent laws has “created a groundswell, a strong momentum for reform, to make it the highest priority of our subcommittee.”
Berman, who was speaking at the Tech Policy Summit here, said that last Congress patent legislation died in a crossfire between the technology industry, which broadly supported changes, and the pharmaceutical industry, which opposed them. Berman said he had been pushing for changes since 2000.
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WASHINGTON, January 23, 2007–Those who would “Save the Internet” came to Memphis last week and declared victory in their struggle. They also hosted a party to celebrate and launch the next phase of the battle: going on the offensive.
The SavetheInternet.com Coalition is, of course, David to the Bell companies’ Goliath. Over the last two years AT&T, Verizon Communications and their trade group the United States Telecom Association spent more than $50 million lobbying Congress to change the nation’s telecommunications laws, according to disclosure documents. But it was spent in vain. The Bell-favored bill, which had overwhelmingly passed the House, died last year in the Senate.
In contrast, SavetheInternet.com spent $250,000 on educating the public about its side of the story, said coalition spokesman Craig Aaron. “Save the Internet” opposed the Bell bill, and made “Net Neutrality” its rallying cry. The coalition gathered more than 1.5 million petition signatures supporting the notion that telecom companies must be stopped from controlling the content that flows over their broadband networks
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MEMPHIS, Tenn., January 13, 2007–A new House subcommittee chaired by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, will turn its oversight to a range of government agencies, particularly the Federal Communications Commission, Kucinich announced here on Friday night.
Kucinich, a 2004 candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination who stated his intention to run again in 2008, said that his committee will hold holdings criticizing the FCC on the issue of media ownership.
In a speech before the National Conference for Media Reform here, unexpected visitor Kucinich announced his chairmanship of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the House Government Reform Committee.
The new subcommittee, Kucinich said in the speech, would be a platform to hold “hearings to push media reform right at the center of Washington.”
“You are the message,” he said to the cheering crowd.
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WASHINGTON, January 8, 2007–Both the high-tech and the mainstream press go ga-ga over the Consumer Electronics Show. Forty years old, it’s the country’s largest annual trade show, and it officially opens this morning in Las Vegas.
What’s not to like in more than 1.2 million square feet of electronic glitz and glimmer? On Sunday night, Microsoft’s Bill Gates previewed how your car will communicate with your electronic address book and your digital music player. Verizon Wireless demonstrated how you will soon get television from Comedy Central, Fox, and NBC directly on your cell phone. And NetGear announced a “media receiver” for watching TV, movies and Internet videos from the comfort of your leather couch. Think of it as video iPod with an HDTV connection.
The impresario of all these digital goodies is Gary Shapiro, the chief lobbyist for the Consumer Electronics Association. CEA is the tech trade association that sponsors the annual event, raking in more than $80 million. But for Shapiro, who looks and acts like the proverbial kid in the candy shop for four days every January, the show is about more than just money. It’s about scoring points for his group’s public policy agenda in Washington.
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HONG KONG, December 5, 2006–The convergence of telecommunications and media is posing problem for communications regulators all over the world, and many of them swapped stories here about the best way to cope with rapid technological change.
Most government panelists participating in two morning sessions at the International Telecommunications Union’s Telecom World conference here agreed on the need for a unified communications authority.
But they differed after whether competition policy could prove adequate to dealing with issues of telecommunications and media. In other words, would the need for communications regulation fade over time?
Officials from France and Hong Kong are both in the midst of re-evaluating their existing regulatory structures, which include two separate agencies. In each case, one agency is charged with overseeing broadcasting, and the other agency oversees telephone communications.
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HONG KONG, December 4, 2006–Global regulators had a mixed message for the telecommunications industry here on Monday: Governments should ease restrictions on companies in the presence of competition–but otherwise tighten them.
At the opening forum at Telecom World 2006, government officials from China, Hong Kong, the European Commission and International Telecommunications Union delivered a similar message, but with varying degrees of specificity.
Vivian Reding, the European commissioner responsible for information society and media, was the most direct: “Competition and open markets drive investment and innovation. Monopolies don’t.”
Reding and the other regulators spoke here at the triennial conference of the ITU, a hybrid international body based in Geneva, Switzerland, that is part of the United Nations. The union represents telecommunications companies as well as U.N. member states.
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