public policy

Funding and eligibility for California broadband subsidies back on track in Sacramento

27 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Open for business again.

The authors of legislation to top up the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) and make more broadband construction projects eligible for grants and loans have put money back in and removed unworkable restrictions pushed by industry lobbyists.

The primary proposal, senate bill 740, was originally written by senator Alex Padilla (D – Los Angeles) to add money to CASF, because current grant requests would, if approved, zero out the fund.… More

Supreme Court considering whether it's a good idea to open up a new feeding ground for patent trolls

26 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Looks like one of those divided infringements. Let’s eat it.

The U.S. Supreme Court finished its current session this week with a flurry of action, momentous and otherwise. Lost in the fireworks generated by rulings on gay rights, racial preferences and voting rules though, was its decision to take a look at an intellectual property case that, depending on where it eventually goes, could create a vast new opportunity for patent trolls and trial lawyers to line their pockets.… More

Santa Cruz's innovative Open Counter platform going national with Knight grant


Cowell’s Beach is a great place to start.

Santa Cruz is proving itself to be a leading center for twenty-first century e-government. The latest endorsement came from the Knight Foundation today, which announced it was giving a $450,000 award to the Open Counter project. It was one of only eight winners, out of 860 applicants, of the Knight News Challenge on Open Gov.

Led by Peter Koht, an economic development staffer with the City of Santa Cruz, the Open Counter initiative was originally backed by Code for America, a private foundation that bills itself as a Peace Corps for geeks.… More

If you've fudged on Facebook, you've committed a federal crime

23 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Aaron’s Law wouldn’t have kept Aaron out of prison.

A Silicon Valley congresswoman and an Oregon senator, both democrats, are introducing parallel bills that would tighten up the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Zoe Lofgren and Ron Wyden are titling it Aaron’s Law, in honor of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide after being charged with a tall stack of felonies for downloading a library’s worth of pay-walled academic journal articles at MIT.… More

Eligibility for broadband subsidies harder to prove under Senate farm bill requirements

20 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Trail of tiers.

The version of the federal farm bill passed by the senate has problematic requirements for documenting eligibility for the broadband infrastructure grants and loans it authorises. It sets 4 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds as a minimum. If an area does not have at least one service provider offering that level of service or better, then it’s eligible for construction subsidies, assuming all the other requirements are met.

To prove an area is eligible, though, the lack of service has to be…

(I) certified by the affected community, city, county, or designee; or (II) demonstrated on (aa) the broadband map of the affected State if the map contains address-level data; or ‘‘(bb) the National Broadband Map if address-level data is unavailable.

… More

It sounds a little different when a city talks about acceptable Internet use

19 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Unacceptable use.

Opelika, Alabama wants to be the first in the state to add fiber to the home service to its municipal electric utility. It’s set $41 million aside to build an FTTH system and hopes to get to profitability within five years. But it’s also wrestling with a question that often comes up when building municipal broadband projects: to what degree can or should a city control what happens on its network?

The discussion in Opelika centers on an acceptable use policy.… More

Changing partners in the California broadband subsidy dance

18 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Whose happy ending will it be?

With the California state budget passed by the legislature and sent on to Governor Brown for his expected signature, broadband subsidy bills are starting to move forward again. Senate bill 740 and assembly bill 1299 were approved last month in their original chambers, and have now swapped places.

SB 740 is the bill that will determine the future of the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF). Originally, it would have added $100 million to CASF and made it possible for a wide range of independent Internet service providers and local agencies to apply for broadband infrastructure grants and loans.… More

Federal broadband grants would help level the playing field for California projects

16 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Big state, big farms.

The version of the federal omnibus farm bill that was approved by the U.S. Senate last week improves the chances of actually building broadband infrastructure in areas of California where no service currently exists. That’s assuming the lack of service can be documented and withstand challenges from competing providers who might claim otherwise, which is a separate can of worms.

The legislation, which still has to be approved by the House, allows the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) to give outright grants to pay for broadband projects, in addition to its existing loan program.… More

Building on a broadband lead

15 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Blocking strategy.

Akamai, a leading content delivery network provider, publishes periodic performance reports that ranks global Internet service by country. Its latest figures put Korea, Japan and Hong Kong at the top of the chart.

That doesn’t tell the whole story, though. The Akamai numbers show how fast traffic is moving on its network, not how much of it there is. So having, say, super fast connections in gaming centers and clusters of homes with gigabit class connections can skew the rankings.… More

Broadband competition beats stagnation and regulation

12 June 2013 by Steve Blum
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Don’t fence me in.

There’s nothing new about local governments getting into the utilities business. Nearly all waste water utilities and many (most?) water utilities are publicly owned and managed, either by a primary agency (i.e. city or county) or a special district or equivalent. Plenty of publicly owned electric and solid waste utilities are around too.

So long as the go/no-go decision is made by the taxpayers involved – indirectly by representative government or directly by vote, as they prefer – it’s little different from a corporation and its shareholders deciding to commit capital.… More