Policy Blog

On June 25, Senators John Cornyn and Joe Lieberman re-introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA, S.1373) in the Senate.

This is an important development. FRPAA would essentially extend the NIH open-access policy across the federal government. Most federally-funded researchers would be required to deposit their peer reviewed manuscripts in a suitable open access repository at the time of acceptance for publication, and the repositories would be required to release the open access copies no later than six months after publication.

Currently, the NIH and the Institute of Education Sciences (within the Dept of Ed) are the only federal agencies with similar policies, and both of them allow 12 month delays, not just the FRPAA six month delay. FRPAA would apply to all unclassified research funded in whole or part by agencies whose budgets for extramural research are $100 million/year or greater.

At the beginning of June, the FCC’s Media Bureau handed down a decision allowing Evolution, Inc. to produce a low-end* digital-to-analog set-top box to aid in the digital TV changeover.

Why is this a bad thing? Because the integrated decryption component in Evolution’s box sounds a death knell for the competitive market.

Yesterday, the Rural Utilities Service (RUS) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) jointly announced the terms and conditions of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP). As you’ll recall, BTOP is a $7.2 billion program, authorized by Congress under the Stimulus Act, which aims to increase the speed, affordability and adoption of broadband Internet services in America. In the latest episode of “5 Minutes With Harold Feld,” Harold celebrates RUS and NTIA’s announcement, while noting that the terms and conditions of the program bring both good and bad news for proponents of progressive broadband policy.

The rules of the road for the $7.2 billion broadband stimulus package announced today (July 1) hit a lot of high notes, putting public policy in favor of an open and non-discriminatory Internet front and center for projects that would bring the Internet to unserved and underserved areas.

“Without a non-discrimination condition, network operators could give preferential treatment to affiliated services, or charge some application and content providers for “fast lanes” that would put others at a competitive disadvantage,” the document said.

Monday, June 22nd

Addressing the French Parliament at Versailles, President Sarkozy announced his plan to “go all the way” in defense of the proposed 3-strikes HADOPI legislation that was deemed unconstitutional by the France’s Constitutional Council earlier this month. The legislation proposes kicking copyright infringers off the Internet for a year after receiving three warnings for infringing behavior.

Tuesday, June 23rd

We just got word that the Supreme Court has declined to review the Cablevision remote DVR case. This is the case where Hollywood and some cable networks sued Cablevision for providing a TiVo-like service where the copy of the recorded program resides on the cable operator’s servers rather than on a hard drive in the home. The studios claimed that both the buffer copies and the copies residing on Cablevision’s servers were a violation of its right to reproduce the program, and that the recordings sent to the customer were a violation of its public performance right. A lower court in New York City sided with Hollywood, but the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, ruling that the remote DVR service did not violate Hollywood’s copyrights.

The Court’s decision not to take the case is a huge victory for consumers and all video service providers, not just cable.

With up to $350 million in federal stimulus funds allocated for broadband mapping, an organization called Connected Nation is racking up the frequent flying miles in an effort to capture the lion’s share of the money.

Connected Nation, headquartered in Washington, D.C., is a non-profit organization that represents the interests of the telephone and cable industries in broadband mapping by obtaining contracts from states to do the work while also protecting the “confidentiality” of deployment information that may be deemed “proprietary” by the companies supplying the information In return, Connected Nation charges up to millions of dollars for mapping and, in some occasions, to organize local teams to assess demand.

From Austin to Boise, Honolulu, Oklahoma City and even up to Wasilla, Alaska, and many points in between, Connected Nation has pitched its services to state governments, with impressive results in either setting up t

After months of waiting, the Senate confirmed two key members of the Obama communications and technology team: new FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) director Larry Strickling (his official title is Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information). And not a moment too soon.

Here is what is facing the new leaders right now: NTIA (along with the Rural Utilities Service) is expected to issue its “Notice of Funds Availability” imminently for the $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus money, and that “NOFA” will include the rules for applying for the grants, as well as the conditions (like non-discrimination) with which a grantee much comply.

All this talk of Internet surveillance is enough to cause intense bafflement. For the last couple of days, stories about the revolution Iran indicated that the government is able to keep track of the Internet doings of protesters by means of deep-packet inspection (DPI), a technology developed in the West that, like most dual-use technologies, has a good side and a bad side.

The good side is that it can be used to manage networks and deal with computer viruses and other nasties. The bad side is that it can be used to track computer messages, target insurgents, invade privacy, violate Net Neutrality and, as AT&T wants to do, target the use of copyrighted material online and have users thrown off of the Internet. Using DPI as the mother of all Internet filters would seem to be a non-starter, and yet the industry keeps pushing it, perhaps thinking that the U.S.

Time Warner and Comcast have announced a new pilot program for their TV Anywhere initiative. The 5,000 customers in the pilot will get access to cable programming content not otherwise available online — as long as they prove they subscribe to a subscription video service — or “MVPD” — like cable or FIOS. (MVPD stands for “multichannel video programming distributor” and means anything that sells you a whole bunch of cable channels.