benton's blog
Weekly Digest
Weekly Digest
Upgrading America
:
Achieving a Strategic Bandwidth Advantage
And a Psychology of Bandwidth Abundance
To
Drive High-Performance Knowledge Exchange
Fujitsu Conference on
Paving the Road to Unlimited Bandwidth:
Technologies and Applications for a Connected Age
Weekly Digest
Tale of Two Oversight Hearings
It was the best of oversight hearings, it was the worst of oversight hearings. Oh, who are we kidding – we’ll never pull off a Dickensian metaphor throughout this week’s roundup. But we did note the coincidence that the three agencies most responsible for extending the reach and affordability of broadband in the US were called before Congress for oversight hearings this week.
Weekly Digest
Weekly Digest
Will News Corp’s UK Problem Become Its US Problem?
Our big story of the week comes from across the pond, in London Town where, for many months, regulators have been examining the business practices of one of the world’s largest media empires.
American Hate Radio: How A Powerful Outlet For Democratic Discourse Has Deteriorated Into Hate, Racism and Extremism
For over a century we have used the radio waves to communicate with our neighbors. Even today radio remains the primary way that Americans consume media, reaching 93% of the American population on a weekly basis. Radio can be an excellent outlet for news, democratic discourse, community engagement and even life-saving emergency information, and, in many instances, it is just that.
FCC Must Reach Out On Upcoming Changes to Lifeline Telecom Program
By the end of this month, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is expected to issue new rules aimed at reforming and modernizing the low-income Lifeline telephone program. The rules are expected to include many changes to the application process. It will also update the annual check-in which determines continued eligibility for the program.
Whether the FCC succeeds in this effort will depend on whether the reform order includes an extensive education and outreach component to explain the changes. Planning must start now.
FCC’s Low-Income Phone Reform Needs to Connect and Tie Eligibility to People, Not Housing
The Federal Communications Commission is poised to reform and modernize the Lifeline phone program that was created to help low-income household afford phone service. The reform and modernization is expected to move the program beyond traditional landline service to better accommodate wireless phone service and to set a foundation to move to broadband access for poor people. Yet, the reform could also discriminate against the very people the program was designed to help.