Michael Anderson from Niemanlab.org reports:
In the two months since Ann Arbor became the nation’s newest no-newspaper town, there’s been lots of talk about its status as ground zero for the new ecosystem of Web-native niche outlets. But I wanted to know: In a business that’s always been oiled by routine — midnight press runs, 6 a.m. broadcasts, 11 a.m. news meetings, 6:30 deadlines — how will tomorrow’s hyperlocal news professionals structure their day? So, a few weeks after the Ann Arbor News folded, I spent a morning with its most established successor, the one-year-old, online-only Ann Arbor Chronicle, to get a sense for the future of the newsroom routine.
Anderson’s story paints a vivid picture of entrepreneurship in news delivery, at least on the editorial side of the operation. I’d love to hear more about the business side of the venture. How much revenue are these sites generating per view or per user? How can they increase revenue? Are they experimenting with selling their ad inventory through ad networks that offer personalized (“behaviorally targeted”) ads to increase revenue? What do they think of Google’s new micropayments venture?
ArsTechnica has a great write-up of WashingtonWatch.com’s earmarks project and a top earmark hunter, Andi Osiek.
Back from vacation and digging out, I will be furiously working over the weekend to check the data we collected, flag earmarks that made it into bills, and award the prizes to the top earmark hunters in the contest.
Did you know you can escape the early termination fee in your wireless contract simply by getting someone else to take over the contract? I discovered this little gem recently while reading the Federal Communications Commission’s 2008 report on competition in the wireless industry , released earlier this year (mentioned in paragraph 186, if you’re curious).
Cell phone companies charge early termination fees of up to $200. They charge these fees because they usually sell phones at subsidized prices and then get reimbursed over the life of the contract via the monthly fee. If someone else takes over my contract, the company still gets its money, so they’re OK with the practice of transferring the contract to someone else.
Consumer writers such as David Wood and Patrick at cashmoneylife.com explain how to transfer your contract to someone else. Web sites match up people who want to get out of their contracts with people who want to take over these contracts. Some web sites offer to put parties in touch with each other for free. Others charge $20 — far below the typical early termination fee.
Score another victory for wily entrepreneurs who invented a win-win solution that benefits consumers and wireless phone companies as well. The Federal Communications Commission report cites 2006 and 2007 Wall Street Journal articles on this, so it’s not exactly a secret. (I was unaware of it until now only because my wife and I use 5 year old cell phones, so we’ve been on a month-to-month wireless contract for years and have never had to look for a way around the early termination fee.)
But for the past several years, federal legislators have been pushing wireless companies to prorate their early termination fees, supposedly because consumers have no choice but to pay the fee if they want to get out of a contract before it concludes. In October 2007, I testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportion on a piece of legislation called the “Cell Phone Consumer Empowerment Act.” The bill included a requirement that wireless companies prorate their early termination fees. Apparently to head off the legislation or FCC regulation, the day before the hearing, AT&T announced it would follow Verizon’s lead and prorate its early termination fees; other major carriers followed suit. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), sponsor of the legislation, took credit for the change, thanking AT&T for beginning the fee prorationing on her birthday.
When wireless companies prorate fees, they usually reduce them by $5 per month. Trading my contract, on the other hand, lets me escape the fee altogether. So who got me a better deal — the federal government, or a pack of entrepreneurs I’ve never met?
There is no better security for data than not collecting it in the first place. And when data is no longer needed, the best security for it is to destroy it.
That’s why I was surprised to see a request from the chairman and ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee asking the Transportation Security Administration to preserve data that is scheduled for destruction.
Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) attended and spoke at the first meeting of the DHS Privacy Committee four years ago. I have regarded him as a champion of privacy since then. But he and Rep. Peter King (R-NY) want biometric data collected for the defunct Registered Traveler program preserved on the chance that Registered Traveler is revived. This is an inappropriate request.
Anyone who submits data to the government should recognize the risk that it will be preserved longer than promised and put to new uses. There were merits to the Clear system within Registered Traveler. I wrote about them in my book and testified about them in 2005. One of the serious demerits is that Registered Traveler created stores of biometric data that politicians are now trying to control.
Read Part II here
In February, Congress passed the Obama Administration’s “(Five Year) National Broadband Plan,” part of the so-called “Stimulus.” (As economist Russ Roberts put it, government “stimulus” is “like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end.”) The Plan transfers $7.2 billion from taxpayers to broadband providers in subsides to promote broadband build-out. More than 10,000 comments have been filed on the plan. Once you get past the constitutional nicety of whether Congress has the power to subsidize “internal improvements” like broadband (it doesn’t), you might wonder just how well your money will be spent by all these techno-supplicants for the latest craze in corporate welfare.
The good news is that these comments are available online. Hurray for transparency! The bad news is that…
they’re available online—specifically on the FCC’s Electronic Comments Filing System (ECFS). Anyone who’s used the web more recently than 1998 will cringe the first time they try to use ECFS to find anything, as Jerry has noted. Apart from the cumbersome, highly unintuitive interface, the problem is that there’s no way to search the text of comments
! You can only search pre-defined fields like like “law firm,” and if you don’t enter a value in precisely the right way, you get nada.
Bill Cline, the Chief of the Reference Information Center for the FCC’s Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau tries hard to put the best face on this farce of e-government, explaining:
Continue reading →
It’s bad enough that America educates the world’s best and brightest, only to send them home for lack of visas. But to drive away immigrants who come to the U.S. and start businesses is just unconscionable. I hope Paul Graham’s idea for a “Founder Visa” takes off: 10,000 / year for founders of companies that are started in the U.S. Brad Feld has a great column on this today, answering questions about how the visa would work.
As the Economist said on the related issue of H1-B visas for skilled foreign workers:
SILICON VALLEY, as the old joke goes, was built on ICs—Indians and Chinese that is, not integrated circuits. As of the last decennial census, in 2000, more than half of all the engineers in the valley were foreign-born, and about half of those were either Indian or Chinese—and since 2000 the ratio of Indians and Chinese is reckoned to have gone up steeply. Understandably, therefore Silicon Valley has strong views on America’s visa regime.
I suspect the demographics for entrepreneurs are similar, especially in Sillicon Valley, which has long been driven largely by “enginpreneurs” rather than MBAs.
What an absurd country we live in: We accept, for better or worse, massive illegal immigration across our porous southern border as a fact of life, but can’t muster the political will to give legal status to the most creative and innovative from around the world drawn to the Land of Opportunity made possible by capitalism. So, being dutiful and law-abiding, these “Talented Tenth” go home to suffer under the dead weight of bureaucracies even more oppressive, incompetent and corrupt than our own. How sad.
[This is part of an ongoing series about “Problems in Public Utility Paradise.”]
According to this recent article by Donald Meyers of the Salt Lake City Tribune, five candidates for mayor of Provo, Utah are falling all over themselves to declare their support for continuing the public utility fiasco that is iProvo, the city’s fiber-to-the-home network. According to Wikipedia, it is the largest municipally-owned Fiber to the Home network in the United States.” Steve Titch of the Reason Foundation, who has been following iProvo for many years, has documented its millions of dollars of losses and risk to taxpayers, saying “iProvo is a dismal financial failure by any standard.” But that isn’t stopping city officials and mayoral candidates from proposing to throw more money at this massive “if-you-build-it-they-will-come” fantasy. “One thing most of the candidates running for mayor agree on: iProvo is too important to fail, even if it means bailing out the company that bought it,” Meyers reports. Here’s the relevant passages from his article, with the key bits of bad info highlighted:
The city sold the troubled fiber-optic network to Broadweave Networks in 2008 in a deal in which Broadweave would take over the payments on the city’s $39.6 million bond. Since November, Broadweave has had the city draw on its $6 million surety deposit to make its bond payments in a bid to build up cash to pay for growth.
In August, Veracity Communications merged with Broadweave, becoming Veracity Networks. The company’s leaders, Drew Peterson and David Moon, have asked the city to restructure the payment schedule to allow the company to cut back on its payments for 18 months while it strengthens its coffers. It later would pay extra money over a seven-year period and reimburse the city with interest.
Provo would draw on its Energy Department’s reserves to make up the shortfall in bond payments — $1.4 million.
Continue reading →
For some time now here at the TLF, we have been documenting the track record of various government-owned or subsidized utility projects — municipal wi-fi projects, locally-owned telecom ventures, city or state fiber projects, and so on. We’ve attempted to see if the rhetoric matches the reality when it comes to the grandiose promises made about government investment or ownership of communications or broadband networks being our ticket to high-tech paradise.
The results? Well, the record speaks for itself. It’s been one miserable failure after another. And yet the high-tech pork barrel rolls on and taxpayers are all too often stuck picking up the tab.
I just wanted to make everyone aware of the fact that I finally got around to collecting most of our essays on the subject here into an “Ongoing Series” page that will be permanently housed here. (As far as I can tell, we’re up to about 18 or 19 installments). I encourage my TLF contributors to help me contribute entries to the series and I also invite our readers to continue to submit examples of these experiments so we can continue to document their failure. Of course, if there are success stories, we’d like to hear about those too. But that will likely be a much shorter series!
Over at Ars Technica, Matt Lasar does a nice job pointing out how the FCC’s quarterly indecency complaint totals have again been inflated by one group: the Parents Television Council. This is something Lasar has written about before and he’s one of the few journalists who continues to ask sharp questions about the ongoing manipulation of these statistics by PTC. As Lasar notes in his latest piece:
for the first quarter of this year, show the viewers relatively calm at 578 complaints in January, then 505 in February, followed by 179,997 in March? 179,997? Um, did we miss something? Did television really get that much more indecent in March? No worries. In these situations, we know what to do. We go over and check out the Parents Television Council‘s website. And sure enough, there’s a plausible instigator—a PTC viewer action alert crusade against a March 8 episode of the animated comedy show the PTC just loves to hate, Fox TV’s Family Guy.
This “complaint box stuffing” is something I wrote quite a bit about in the past, especially in my 2005 paper, “Examining the FCC’s Complaint-Driven Broadcast Indecency Enforcement Process.” As I pointed out there, “The PTC’s increasingly effective use of computer-generated campaigns against specific TV programs is a leading factor in explaining the large jump in indecency complaints in recent years.” Specifically, as I noted in that paper (as well as a Supreme Court filing with my friends at CDT), the FCC quietly and without major notice made two methodological changes to its tallying of broadcast indecency complaints in 2003 & 2004 that PTC requested: Continue reading →
Today I was invited to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to testify at one of the agency’s Broadband Working Group workshops. This particular workshop was on “Broadband Consumer Context,” which focused on “a range of challenges and opportunities as the internet becomes a focal point for commercial transactions, social networking, and a host of activities pertaining to information gathering and exchange.”
I was asked to address the issue of whether there is a relationship between online safety concerns and broadband uptake. In my testimony, I noted that, in my 15 years of research in this area, I have never unearthed any substantive empirical evidence suggesting a correlation between parental concerns about online activity and overall household broadband uptake. I have seen occasional anecdotal news stories discussing the concerns some parents have had about their kids online that led them to reject online connectivity, but these stories have been exceedingly rare (and I haven’t seen any in recent memory).
I also argued that I did not think it at all surprising that such anecdotes are harder to find, or that empirical evidence on this front seems non-existent. I argued that there were four logical explanations for why parental concerns about online safety haven’t “moved the broadband needle” much in the negative direction:
- Not every home has children present
- Parents use a variety of household media rules to control media & Internet usage
- A vibrant marketplace of parental control technologies exists
- Likely that most parents believe that the benefits of broadband outweigh the potential downsides
For all the details on each of those, read my entire testimony or check out the presentation embedded below that I made to the FCC today. Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.