April 2012

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee wants to do more to promote the local technology industry than any mayor before him. But some who advocate for low-income residents in this rapidly changing city are saying that's not necessarily a good thing.

Since he was appointed mayor a year ago and elected to a full term in November, Mayor Lee has made it a priority to boost the city's economy through the tech industry. Last year, he backed tax breaks to help San Francisco Internet companies Zynga and Twitter. He visits tech companies weekly and is close to start-up financier Ron Conway. But this approach increasingly has some advocates of affordable housing and renters' representatives questioning whether the mayor's focus on tech-sector growth is helping San Franciscans who are struggling most to recover from the recession. Advocacy groups met with Mr. Lee earlier this month to raise concerns about issues ranging from the dearth of work at the tech firms for entry-level workers to the city's rising cost of living with the arrival of wealthy tech workers.

After the Federal Communications Commission adopted new political ad disclosure rules, a number of groups weighed in.

• "Those missing markets include some key presidential battleground states, as well as states and districts with close congressional campaigns," said Lisa Rosenberg, a government affairs consultant with the Sunlight Foundation. "Moreover, by limiting the coverage to ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, the ruling omits coverage for political advertising on Spanish-language television that could be especially important this year." Nonetheless, Rosenberg said, the FCC’s vote was a step in the right direction.
• The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), which had fiercely opposed the rule before the vote, said the FCC unfairly singled out the television industry for disclosure. "By forcing broadcasters to be the only medium to disclose on the Internet our political advertising rates, the FCC jeopardizes the competitive standing of stations that provide local news, entertainment, sports and life-saving weather information free of charge to tens of millions of Americans daily," said Dennis Wharton, NAB’s vice president of communications.
• Free Press, one of many groups that had pushed for years to have the disclosure rule approved, said the vote was a “win for transparency, open access to information and the public." "We're pleased that the FCC has ignored the overheated rhetoric and unsubstantiated claims of the broadcast lobby in this proceeding," said Corie Wright, a senior policy counsel at Free Press. "These modest measures will place minimal, if any, burden on broadcasters but will offer great public benefits."

Since the first dot-com boom, unmetered Internet access has been the industry standard. But recently, usage-based billing has been staging a comeback.

Comcast instituted a bandwidth cap in 2008, and some other wired ISPs, including AT&T, have followed suit. In 2010, three of the four national wireless carriers—Sprint is the only holdout—switched from unlimited data plans to plans featuring bandwidth caps. To many people, the argument for metered bandwidth seems intuitive and obvious. Bandwidth is a scarce resource, and advocates argue that usage-based pricing encourages efficient network use and ensures that heavy users pay their "fair share." Yet the economics of metering aren't as simple as they might appear. Companies are often surprised by how well flat-rate billing schemes work. Customers love them, and flat-rate billing encourages more intensive use of networks that sit idle most of the time. Network providers insist that they are simply trying to cope with rapidly rising demand for bandwidth. But critics charge that the trend toward bandwidth caps is driven by more sinister motives, especially in the residential broadband market.

In this story we'll examine the economics of metering and try to explain why it has suddenly come back into vogue.

The US is falling in the quality of broadband its ISPs are offering on a quarterly basis, although in the fourth quarter of 2011 that fall in speeds was seen by several other counties, with overall broadband speeds falling to a global average 2.3 Mbps from the third quarter to the fourth. The data comes from Akamai’s State of the Internet report, which uses the content delivery network’s data to construct a detailed report on web speeds, security and mobile connections. Om has covered the big picture, but here’s what the report says about the US. For the year, the global average connection speed was up a 19 percent, with double-digit percentage growth seen in eight of the top 10 countries and also in the US, which is ranked 13th. The U.S.’s average connection speed is 5.8 Mbps — a 14 percent increase from the previous year. Overall our average peak connection speeds ranged from 36 Mbps in Delaware down to 13.3 Mbps in Arkansas.