Faithful Data Drip readers (you know who you are, Mom): recent blog silence reflects, in part, the wrapping up of two big SSRC projects on broadband adoption in low-income communities and media piracy in emerging economies. More to come on both, but in the meantime, here is anexcerpt from the India chapter of our Piracy study:
As in most of the countries documented in this report, enforcement campaigns against organized retail piracy became significantly more intense in the mid-2000s. In states like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, local governments extended The Goondas Act—traditionally used to curtail activities like bootlegging and criminal intimidation—to cover video piracy. This amendment was passed at the behest of local film industry representatives, and produced a typically parochial arrangement between pirate vendors and police that ensured that the measures applied only to local film. In the Burma Bazaar in Chennai—arguably the largest pirate market in India—most DVD retail kiosks post notices that they do not stock or sell Tamil films and respect the copyrights of the Tamil film industry. Pirated copies of the latest films from Hollywood and Hollywood in contrast, are available in large quantities, in plain sight. Pirates in Karnataka—a southern state—for their part, do not stock Kanadda-language films. These norm-based arrangements reflect the intense localism of many aspects of cultural identity, trade, and governance in India.
A great example of what can be done with health and income datasets married to rich visualization tools. Grandfathered in because he touches on global growth in internet use at the end.
A little over a month ago, the NTIA held what it called a Broadband Data Transparency Workshop, that brought together government officials from agencies including the NTIA, FCC, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Labor; telecommunications industry representatives from groups such as the CTIA, NCTA, and USTA; NGO representatives from organizations such as the Ford Foundation, the New America Foundation, and the Rainbow Coalition; as well as academic researchers. This event is just the most recent in a growing number of governmental activities that revolve to some extent around data access and transparency issues in the communications policy arena.
I returned last week from a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Enforcement at the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. The basic question before the committee was whether WIPO has anything substantive to say or do in regard to enforcement of IP rights, as distinct from the creation of new standards. This is an important question because (1) IP activism by industry and partner governments has shifted from the creation of more and higher IP formal protection to pushing for stronger enforcement; (2) WIPO has been marginalized from these debates–first by the WTO, later by US and European bilateral agreements, and most recently by negotiations over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
Newspaper CEO efforts to shake down Google seemed doomed to continue, it seems, with Rupert Murdoch making the latest round of fruitless criticism of Google’s ‘theft’ of copyright through the simple act of indexing stories. This seems misguided for both narrow technical reasons and broader business model ones: on the one hand, it is easy to opt out of Google if newspapers chose to do so; more generally, the newspaper’s primacy in bundling different kinds of reporting and advertising is, for the most part, finished. That the linking controversy appears to be an unsettled area in copyright jurisprudence is mostly testament to the maladaptation of copyright law to the Internet.
But I am intrigued by the implicit question of Google’s—and other dominant Internet intermediaries’—public-interest responsibilities. Read the rest of this entry »
Have four years passed already? It’s that time again, when the FCC, as mandated by Congress, conducts its quadrennial re-evaluation of its various media ownership regulations. These regulations are generally focused on broadcast television and radio, and, tangentially, newspapers. Read the rest of this entry »
I was recently at a 3-day meeting on broadband adoption at the New American Foundation. This is a hot subject as the FCC prepares its national broadband strategy for Congress, due in February.
Part of the meeting focused on the national broadband strategies of other countries–India, China, and Tanzania among others. As in the US, the basic playbook involves both building infrastructure and ensuring that it’s priced at levels that some signficant portion of the population can afford. The expansion of cellular data services has a large place in these strategies, due to generally cheaper buildout costs and cheaper devices. As always, the resulting information and communication services are described as catalysts of economic activity.
But what drives adoption? Even when built out, broadband prices almost always remain high relative to local incomes, and local information services are a chicken/egg proposition–waiting on a large enough public to warrant the investment. E-commerce, e-government, and other services follow, rather than precede, widespread adoption.
The government has created a $7.2 billion spending program aimed at providing access to broadband for Americans who have missed out on the benefits of the Internet revolution. The government has also mandated the creation of a national broadband plan, which will provide recommendations on how to make sure that all Americans have access to high-speed Internet service.
In the real world, planning usually dictates spending. But in Washington, that’s not always the case.
The FCC is examining how to improve the accessibility and quality of information it makes available in its broadcast ownership database through its proceeding on Promoting Diversification of Ownership in the Broadcasting Services. These improvements are critical to make more information available about the status of minority broadcast station owners. The Government Accounting Office (GAO) found in its 2008 analysis of factors influencing media ownership, including minority media ownership, that the FCC’s form 323s (forms indicating radio or television ownership) “suffer from three weaknesses: (1) exemptions from filing for certain types of broadcast stations such as noncommercial stations; (2) inadequate data quality procedures; and (3) problems with data storage and retrieval.”
In mid-2009 the FCC recognized that it needed to improve its data collection and reporting to address these weaknesses.
I recently provided testimony for two separate ongoing U.S. Government Accountability Office investigations, and it was very interesting to see how the GAO has recognized the importance of the data quality and access issues that we’re harping on here. This is clearly an issue that is moving from the periphery toward the center of U.S. communications policymaking. Read the rest of this entry »
In connection with an SSRC project on media piracy, I’ve been looking at claims about the prevalence of peer-to-peer (p2p) filesharing traffic on the Internet. ISPs and internet hardware vendors tend to argue that it’s a lot.Cisco puts the figure at 55% of global consumer Internet traffic in 2008. Ipoque—a maker of deep packet inspection (DPI) tools for ISPs—cites 45% to 70% of Internet traffic in their 2009 study, depending on the region. Both studies anticipate continued absolute growth of p2p, but as a diminishing share of overall internet traffic. Streaming video—Hulu, YouTube, and similar services—is the new bandwidth hog, and has surpassed p2p in the US according to some accounts. Read the rest of this entry »
Flagging Harold Feld’s great post on how the proprietary status of broadband customer data tilts power in the broadband stimulus application process toward cable and telco incumbents…
A representative from RUS [Rural Utilities Service] was explaining how applicants must fully document “unserved” and “underserved” at the census block level — but without access to any carrier data because carriers regard this as proprietary. Then, assuming the application survives to the NTIA/RUS “due diligence” round, the agency will invite broadband access providers in the area to submit confidential information to demonstrate that the area designated by the Applicant is not underserved or unserved. The applicant will have no opportunity to rebut any evidence submitted against the Application.
In addition to the costly and pointless task of requiring applicants to develop their own estimates of broadband coverage in their proposed areas of service–something the cable companies and telcos already have in greater detail–the risk here is that unreviewable cable and telco data will allow incumbents to veto projects perceived as competing with their own services.
An emerging coherent data agenda for media and communications policymaking is coalescing from a range of disparate, and in some cases unlikely, sources. Consider, for instance, the fact that the Federal Communications Commission recently has become embroiled in a dispute between radio audience measurement firm Arbitron and a consortium of radio station owners and advocacy organizations that go by the collective name of the Portable People Meter Coalition. The consortium’s name reflects the focal point of the dispute – Arbitron’s ongoing effort to introduce a new electronic audience measurement technology (the Portable People Meter) to replace its somewhat long-in-the-tooth paper diary system, which has been used to measure radio audiences in the U.S. for decades. In this relatively obscure dispute we see many of the rationales for the larger-scale data agenda that needs to move to the forefront of the media and communications policy dialogue. Read the rest of this entry »
I returned last week from a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Enforcement at the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. The basic question before the committee was whether WIPO has anything substantive to say or do in regard to enforcement of IP rights, as distinct from the creation of new standards. This is an important question because (1) IP activism by industry and partner governments has shifted from the creation of more and higher IP formal protection to pushing for stronger enforcement; (2) WIPO has been marginalized from these debates–first by the WTO, later by US and European bilateral agreements, and most recently by negotiations over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
I was recently at a 3-day meeting on broadband adoption at the New American Foundation. This is a hot subject as the FCC prepares its national broadband strategy for Congress, due in February.