The Promise and Limitations of New Technologies in Spreading Democracy
RSVP here.
Do the Internet and social media empower Big Brother or individuals in autocratic regimes, or do they offer a rare level playing field?
This year’s Arab Spring resurrected exuberant claims for the role of new technologies in spreading democracy. At the same time self-proclaimed “cyber-realists” were quick to point out that President Mubarak’s problems seemed to grow after he unplugged the Internet. Now, summer’s deadly stalemate in Syria has given pause to anyone peddling absolute theories about the interplay between new information technologies and revolution.
If not a panacea, how can social media and the Internet be deployed to maximize civic engagement in autocratic societies? Does the U.S. policy of supporting Internet freedom amount to a policy of regime change in some countries? When Big Brother does unplug the Internet, what can, or should, the rest of us do about it?
Please join us at a Future Tense event on July 13 to grapple with these issues.
A reception will immediately follow the event.
Agenda
2:00 pm - Reflecting on the Tunisian Hair Trigger
Sami Ben Gharbia (from Tunisia)
Co-founder, nawaat.org
Advocacy Director, Global Voices
President
New America Foundation
2:20 pm - Internet Freedom and Human Rights: The Obama Administration's Perspective
Michael H. Posner
Assistant Secretary of State for Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor
U.S. Department of State
Moderator
Jacob Weisberg
Chairman and Editor-in-Chief
Slate Group
2:50 pm - Friending Revolutions: Social Media and Political Change in Egypt and Beyond
Merlyna Lim
Professor, Consortium of Science, Policy and Outcomes and the School of Social Transformation - Justice and Social Inquiry Program
Arizona State University
3:10 pm - How the Arab Spring Begat a Deadly Summer
Ahmed Al Omran
Blogger, Saudijeans.org
Ammar Abdulhamid
Executive Director, Tharwa Foundation
Blogger and Human Rights Activist
Oula Alrifai
Syrian Youth Activist
Moderator
Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation
Contributor, New York Times
4:00 pm - Myths, Realities, and Inconvenient Truths of the Internet
Senior Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation
Co-founder, Global Voices Online
4:30 pm - The View from Havana
Yoani Sanchez (via video)
Blogger, desdecuba.com
Human Rights Activist
4:45 pm - Internet Freedom's Next Frontiers?
Mary Jo Porter
English Translator for Yoani Sanchez and other Cuban bloggers
Co-founder, hemosoido.com and translatingcuba.com
Marcus Noland
Deputy Director, Peterson Institute for International Economics
Author,
Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea
Moderator
Co-Director, Future Tense Initiative
Director, Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program, New America Foundation
5:20 pm - Bypassing the Master Switch
Director, Open Technology Initiative
New America Foundation
Ian Schuler
Senior Program Manager, Internet Freedoms Program
U.S. Department of State
Moderator
Future Tense Fellow, New America Foundation
Author, Nonzero, The Moral Animal, and The Evolution of God
The Promise and Limitations of New Technologies in Spreading Democracy
RSVP here.
Do the Internet and social media empower Big Brother or individuals in autocratic regimes, or do they offer a rare level playing field?
This year’s Arab Spring resurrected exuberant claims for the role of new technologies in spreading democracy. At the same time self-proclaimed “cyber-realists” were quick to point out that President Mubarak’s problems seemed to grow after he unplugged the Internet. Now, summer’s deadly stalemate in Syria has given pause to anyone peddling absolute theories about the interplay between new information technologies and revolution.
If not a panacea, how can social media and the Internet be deployed to maximize civic engagement in autocratic societies? Does the U.S. policy of supporting Internet freedom amount to a policy of regime change in some countries? When Big Brother does unplug the Internet, what can, or should, the rest of us do about it?
Please join us at a Future Tense event on July 13 to grapple with these issues.
A reception will immediately follow the event.
Agenda
2:00 pm - Reflecting on the Tunisian Hair Trigger
Sami Ben Gharbia (from Tunisia)
Co-founder, nawaat.org
Advocacy Director, Global Voices
President
New America Foundation
2:20 pm - Internet Freedom and Human Rights: The Obama Administration's Perspective
Michael H. Posner
Assistant Secretary of State for Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor
U.S. Department of State
Moderator
Jacob Weisberg
Chairman and Editor-in-Chief
Slate Group
2:50 pm - Friending Revolutions: Social Media and Political Change in Egypt and Beyond
Merlyna Lim
Professor, Consortium of Science, Policy and Outcomes and the School of Social Transformation - Justice and Social Inquiry Program
Arizona State University
3:10 pm - How the Arab Spring Begat a Deadly Summer
Ahmed Al Omran
Blogger, Saudijeans.org
Ammar Abdulhamid
Executive Director, Tharwa Foundation
Blogger and Human Rights Activist
Oula Alrifai
Syrian Youth Activist
Moderator
Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation
Contributor, New York Times
4:00 pm - Myths, Realities, and Inconvenient Truths of the Internet
Senior Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation
Co-founder, Global Voices Online
4:30 pm - The View from Havana
Yoani Sanchez (via video)
Blogger, desdecuba.com
Human Rights Activist
4:45 pm - Internet Freedom's Next Frontiers?
Mary Jo Porter
English Translator for Yoani Sanchez and other Cuban bloggers
Co-founder, hemosoido.com and translatingcuba.com
Marcus Noland
Deputy Director, Peterson Institute for International Economics
Author,
Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea
Moderator
Co-Director, Future Tense Initiative
Director, Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program, New America Foundation
5:20 pm - Bypassing the Master Switch
Director, Open Technology Initiative
New America Foundation
Ian Schuler
Senior Program Manager, Internet Freedoms Program
U.S. Department of State
Moderator
Future Tense Fellow, New America Foundation
Author, Nonzero, The Moral Animal, and The Evolution of God
U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors
The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.
The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”
Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.
The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.
Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.
The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.
In one of the most ambitious efforts, United States officials say, the State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $50 million to create an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will.
The effort has picked up momentum since the government of President Hosni Mubarak shut down the Egyptian Internet in the last days of his rule. In recent days, the Syrian government also temporarily disabled much of that country’s Internet, which had helped protesters mobilize.
The Obama administration’s initiative is in one sense a new front in a longstanding diplomatic push to defend free speech and nurture democracy. For decades, the United States has sent radio broadcasts into autocratic countries through Voice of America and other means. More recently, Washington has supported the development of software that preserves the anonymity of users in places like China, and training for citizens who want to pass information along the government-owned Internet without getting caught.
But the latest initiative depends on creating entirely separate pathways for communication. It has brought together an improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler.
Sometimes the State Department is simply taking advantage of enterprising dissidents who have found ways to get around government censorship. American diplomats are meeting with operatives who have been burying Chinese cellphones in the hills near the border with North Korea, where they can be dug up and used to make furtive calls, according to interviews and the diplomatic cables.
The new initiatives have found a champion in Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose department is spearheading the American effort. “We see more and more people around the globe using the Internet, mobile phones and other technologies to make their voices heard as they protest against injustice and seek to realize their aspirations,” Mrs. Clinton said in an e-mail response to a query on the topic. “There is a historic opportunity to effect positive change, change America supports,” she said. “So we’re focused on helping them do that, on helping them talk to each other, to their communities, to their governments and to the world.”
Developers caution that independent networks come with downsides: repressive governments could use surveillance to pinpoint and arrest activists who use the technology or simply catch them bringing hardware across the border. But others believe that the risks are outweighed by the potential impact. “We’re going to build a separate infrastructure where the technology is nearly impossible to shut down, to control, to surveil,” said Sascha Meinrath, who is leading the “Internet in a suitcase” project as director of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group.
“The implication is that this disempowers central authorities from infringing on people’s fundamental human right to communicate,” Mr. Meinrath added.
The Invisible Web
In an anonymous office building on L Street in Washington, four unlikely State Department contractors sat around a table. Josh King, sporting multiple ear piercings and a studded leather wristband, taught himself programming while working as a barista. Thomas Gideon was an accomplished hacker. Dan Meredith, a bicycle polo enthusiast, helped companies protect their digital secrets.
Then there was Mr. Meinrath, wearing a tie as the dean of the group at age 37. He has a master’s degree in psychology and helped set up wireless networks in underserved communities in Detroit and Philadelphia.
The group’s suitcase project will rely on a version of “mesh network” technology, which can transform devices like cellphones or personal computers to create an invisible wireless web without a centralized hub. In other words, a voice, picture or e-mail message could hop directly between the modified wireless devices — each one acting as a mini cell “tower” and phone — and bypass the official network.
Mr. Meinrath said that the suitcase would include small wireless antennas, which could increase the area of coverage; a laptop to administer the system; thumb drives and CDs to spread the software to more devices and encrypt the communications; and other components like Ethernet cables.
The project will also rely on the innovations of independent Internet and telecommunications developers.
“The cool thing in this political context is that you cannot easily control it,” said Aaron Kaplan, an Austrian cybersecurity expert whose work will be used in the suitcase project. Mr. Kaplan has set up a functioning mesh network in Vienna and says related systems have operated in Venezuela, Indonesia and elsewhere.
Mr. Meinrath said his team was focused on fitting the system into the bland-looking suitcase and making it simple to implement — by, say, using “pictograms” in the how-to manual.
In addition to the Obama administration’s initiatives, there are almost a dozen independent ventures that also aim to make it possible for unskilled users to employ existing devices like laptops or smartphones to build a wireless network. One mesh network was created around Jalalabad, Afghanistan, as early as five years ago, using technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Creating simple lines of communication outside official ones is crucial, said Collin Anderson, a 26-year-old liberation-technology researcher from North Dakota who specializes in Iran, where the government all but shut down the Internet during protests in 2009. The slowdown made most “circumvention” technologies — the software legerdemain that helps dissidents sneak data along the state-controlled networks — nearly useless, he said.
“No matter how much circumvention the protesters use, if the government slows the network down to a crawl, you can’t upload YouTube videos or Facebook postings,” Mr. Anderson said. “They need alternative ways of sharing information or alternative ways of getting it out of the country.”
That need is so urgent, citizens are finding their own ways to set up rudimentary networks. Mehdi Yahyanejad, an Iranian expatriate and technology developer who co-founded a popular Persian-language Web site, estimates that nearly half the people who visit the site from inside Iran share files using Bluetooth — which is best known in the West for running wireless headsets and the like. In more closed societies, however, Bluetooth is used to discreetly beam information — a video, an electronic business card — directly from one cellphone to another.
Mr. Yahyanejad said he and his research colleagues were also slated to receive State Department financing for a project that would modify Bluetooth so that a file containing, say, a video of a protester being beaten, could automatically jump from phone to phone within a “trusted network” of citizens. The system would be more limited than the suitcase but would only require the software modification on ordinary phones.
By the end of 2011, the State Department will have spent some $70 million on circumvention efforts and related technologies, according to department figures.
Mrs. Clinton has made Internet freedom into a signature cause. But the State Department has carefully framed its support as promoting free speech and human rights for their own sake, not as a policy aimed at destabilizing autocratic governments.
That distinction is difficult to maintain, said Clay Shirky, an assistant professor at New York University who studies the Internet and social media. “You can’t say, ‘All we want is for people to speak their minds, not bring down autocratic regimes’ — they’re the same thing,” Mr. Shirky said.
He added that the United States could expose itself to charges of hypocrisy if the State Department maintained its support, tacit or otherwise, for autocratic governments running countries like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain while deploying technology that was likely to undermine them.
Shadow Cellphone System
In February 2009, Richard C. Holbrooke and Lt. Gen. John R. Allen were taking a helicopter tour over southern Afghanistan and getting a panoramic view of the cellphone towers dotting the remote countryside, according to two officials on the flight. By then, millions of Afghans were using cellphones, compared with a few thousand after the 2001 invasion. Towers built by private companies had sprung up across the country. The United States had promoted the network as a way to cultivate good will and encourage local businesses in a country that in other ways looked as if it had not changed much in centuries.
There was just one problem, General Allen told Mr. Holbrooke, who only weeks before had been appointed special envoy to the region. With a combination of threats to phone company officials and attacks on the towers, the Taliban was able to shut down the main network in the countryside virtually at will. Local residents report that the networks are often out from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m., presumably to enable the Taliban to carry out operations without being reported to security forces.
The Pentagon and State Department were soon collaborating on the project to build a “shadow” cellphone system in a country where repressive forces exert control over the official network.
Details of the network, which the military named the Palisades project, are scarce, but current and former military and civilian officials said it relied in part on cell towers placed on protected American bases. A large tower on the Kandahar air base serves as a base station or data collection point for the network, officials said.
A senior United States official said the towers were close to being up and running in the south and described the effort as a kind of 911 system that would be available to anyone with a cellphone.
By shutting down cellphone service, the Taliban had found a potent strategic tool in its asymmetric battle with American and Afghan security forces.
The United States is widely understood to use cellphone networks in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries for intelligence gathering. And the ability to silence the network was also a powerful reminder to the local populace that the Taliban retained control over some of the most vital organs of the nation.
When asked about the system, Lt. Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for the American-led International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, would only confirm the existence of a project to create what he called an “expeditionary cellular communication service” in Afghanistan. He said the project was being carried out in collaboration with the Afghan government in order to “restore 24/7 cellular access.”
“As of yet the program is not fully operational, so it would be premature to go into details,” Colonel Dorrian said.
Colonel Dorrian declined to release cost figures. Estimates by United States military and civilian officials ranged widely, from $50 million to $250 million. A senior official said that Afghan officials, who anticipate taking over American bases when troops pull out, have insisted on an elaborate system. “The Afghans wanted the Cadillac plan, which is pretty expensive,” the official said.
Broad Subversive Effort
In May 2009, a North Korean defector named Kim met with officials at the American Consulate in Shenyang, a Chinese city about 120 miles from North Korea, according to a diplomatic cable. Officials wanted to know how Mr. Kim, who was active in smuggling others out of the country, communicated across the border. “Kim would not go into much detail,” the cable says, but did mention the burying of Chinese cellphones “on hillsides for people to dig up at night.” Mr. Kim said Dandong, China, and the surrounding Jilin Province “were natural gathering points for cross-border cellphone communication and for meeting sources.” The cellphones are able to pick up signals from towers in China, said Libby Liu, head of Radio Free Asia, the United States-financed broadcaster, who confirmed their existence and said her organization uses the calls to collect information for broadcasts as well.
The effort, in what is perhaps the world’s most closed nation, suggests just how many independent actors are involved in the subversive efforts. From the activist geeks on L Street in Washington to the military engineers in Afghanistan, the global appeal of the technology hints at the craving for open communication.
In a chat with a Times reporter via Facebook, Malik Ibrahim Sahad, the son of Libyan dissidents who largely grew up in suburban Virginia, said he was tapping into the Internet using a commercial satellite connection in Benghazi. “Internet is in dire need here. The people are cut off in that respect,” wrote Mr. Sahad, who had never been to Libya before the uprising and is now working in support of rebel authorities. Even so, he said, “I don’t think this revolution could have taken place without the existence of the World Wide Web.”
Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Andrew W. Lehren from New York, and Alissa J. Rubin and Sangar Rahimi from Kabul, Afghanistan.
U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors
The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.
The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”
Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.
The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.
Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.
The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.
In one of the most ambitious efforts, United States officials say, the State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $50 million to create an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will.
The effort has picked up momentum since the government of President Hosni Mubarak shut down the Egyptian Internet in the last days of his rule. In recent days, the Syrian government also temporarily disabled much of that country’s Internet, which had helped protesters mobilize.
The Obama administration’s initiative is in one sense a new front in a longstanding diplomatic push to defend free speech and nurture democracy. For decades, the United States has sent radio broadcasts into autocratic countries through Voice of America and other means. More recently, Washington has supported the development of software that preserves the anonymity of users in places like China, and training for citizens who want to pass information along the government-owned Internet without getting caught.
But the latest initiative depends on creating entirely separate pathways for communication. It has brought together an improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler.
Sometimes the State Department is simply taking advantage of enterprising dissidents who have found ways to get around government censorship. American diplomats are meeting with operatives who have been burying Chinese cellphones in the hills near the border with North Korea, where they can be dug up and used to make furtive calls, according to interviews and the diplomatic cables.
The new initiatives have found a champion in Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose department is spearheading the American effort. “We see more and more people around the globe using the Internet, mobile phones and other technologies to make their voices heard as they protest against injustice and seek to realize their aspirations,” Mrs. Clinton said in an e-mail response to a query on the topic. “There is a historic opportunity to effect positive change, change America supports,” she said. “So we’re focused on helping them do that, on helping them talk to each other, to their communities, to their governments and to the world.”
Developers caution that independent networks come with downsides: repressive governments could use surveillance to pinpoint and arrest activists who use the technology or simply catch them bringing hardware across the border. But others believe that the risks are outweighed by the potential impact. “We’re going to build a separate infrastructure where the technology is nearly impossible to shut down, to control, to surveil,” said Sascha Meinrath, who is leading the “Internet in a suitcase” project as director of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group.
“The implication is that this disempowers central authorities from infringing on people’s fundamental human right to communicate,” Mr. Meinrath added.
The Invisible Web
In an anonymous office building on L Street in Washington, four unlikely State Department contractors sat around a table. Josh King, sporting multiple ear piercings and a studded leather wristband, taught himself programming while working as a barista. Thomas Gideon was an accomplished hacker. Dan Meredith, a bicycle polo enthusiast, helped companies protect their digital secrets.
Then there was Mr. Meinrath, wearing a tie as the dean of the group at age 37. He has a master’s degree in psychology and helped set up wireless networks in underserved communities in Detroit and Philadelphia.
The group’s suitcase project will rely on a version of “mesh network” technology, which can transform devices like cellphones or personal computers to create an invisible wireless web without a centralized hub. In other words, a voice, picture or e-mail message could hop directly between the modified wireless devices — each one acting as a mini cell “tower” and phone — and bypass the official network.
Mr. Meinrath said that the suitcase would include small wireless antennas, which could increase the area of coverage; a laptop to administer the system; thumb drives and CDs to spread the software to more devices and encrypt the communications; and other components like Ethernet cables.
The project will also rely on the innovations of independent Internet and telecommunications developers.
“The cool thing in this political context is that you cannot easily control it,” said Aaron Kaplan, an Austrian cybersecurity expert whose work will be used in the suitcase project. Mr. Kaplan has set up a functioning mesh network in Vienna and says related systems have operated in Venezuela, Indonesia and elsewhere.
Mr. Meinrath said his team was focused on fitting the system into the bland-looking suitcase and making it simple to implement — by, say, using “pictograms” in the how-to manual.
In addition to the Obama administration’s initiatives, there are almost a dozen independent ventures that also aim to make it possible for unskilled users to employ existing devices like laptops or smartphones to build a wireless network. One mesh network was created around Jalalabad, Afghanistan, as early as five years ago, using technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Creating simple lines of communication outside official ones is crucial, said Collin Anderson, a 26-year-old liberation-technology researcher from North Dakota who specializes in Iran, where the government all but shut down the Internet during protests in 2009. The slowdown made most “circumvention” technologies — the software legerdemain that helps dissidents sneak data along the state-controlled networks — nearly useless, he said.
“No matter how much circumvention the protesters use, if the government slows the network down to a crawl, you can’t upload YouTube videos or Facebook postings,” Mr. Anderson said. “They need alternative ways of sharing information or alternative ways of getting it out of the country.”
That need is so urgent, citizens are finding their own ways to set up rudimentary networks. Mehdi Yahyanejad, an Iranian expatriate and technology developer who co-founded a popular Persian-language Web site, estimates that nearly half the people who visit the site from inside Iran share files using Bluetooth — which is best known in the West for running wireless headsets and the like. In more closed societies, however, Bluetooth is used to discreetly beam information — a video, an electronic business card — directly from one cellphone to another.
Mr. Yahyanejad said he and his research colleagues were also slated to receive State Department financing for a project that would modify Bluetooth so that a file containing, say, a video of a protester being beaten, could automatically jump from phone to phone within a “trusted network” of citizens. The system would be more limited than the suitcase but would only require the software modification on ordinary phones.
By the end of 2011, the State Department will have spent some $70 million on circumvention efforts and related technologies, according to department figures.
Mrs. Clinton has made Internet freedom into a signature cause. But the State Department has carefully framed its support as promoting free speech and human rights for their own sake, not as a policy aimed at destabilizing autocratic governments.
That distinction is difficult to maintain, said Clay Shirky, an assistant professor at New York University who studies the Internet and social media. “You can’t say, ‘All we want is for people to speak their minds, not bring down autocratic regimes’ — they’re the same thing,” Mr. Shirky said.
He added that the United States could expose itself to charges of hypocrisy if the State Department maintained its support, tacit or otherwise, for autocratic governments running countries like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain while deploying technology that was likely to undermine them.
Shadow Cellphone System
In February 2009, Richard C. Holbrooke and Lt. Gen. John R. Allen were taking a helicopter tour over southern Afghanistan and getting a panoramic view of the cellphone towers dotting the remote countryside, according to two officials on the flight. By then, millions of Afghans were using cellphones, compared with a few thousand after the 2001 invasion. Towers built by private companies had sprung up across the country. The United States had promoted the network as a way to cultivate good will and encourage local businesses in a country that in other ways looked as if it had not changed much in centuries.
There was just one problem, General Allen told Mr. Holbrooke, who only weeks before had been appointed special envoy to the region. With a combination of threats to phone company officials and attacks on the towers, the Taliban was able to shut down the main network in the countryside virtually at will. Local residents report that the networks are often out from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m., presumably to enable the Taliban to carry out operations without being reported to security forces.
The Pentagon and State Department were soon collaborating on the project to build a “shadow” cellphone system in a country where repressive forces exert control over the official network.
Details of the network, which the military named the Palisades project, are scarce, but current and former military and civilian officials said it relied in part on cell towers placed on protected American bases. A large tower on the Kandahar air base serves as a base station or data collection point for the network, officials said.
A senior United States official said the towers were close to being up and running in the south and described the effort as a kind of 911 system that would be available to anyone with a cellphone.
By shutting down cellphone service, the Taliban had found a potent strategic tool in its asymmetric battle with American and Afghan security forces.
The United States is widely understood to use cellphone networks in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries for intelligence gathering. And the ability to silence the network was also a powerful reminder to the local populace that the Taliban retained control over some of the most vital organs of the nation.
When asked about the system, Lt. Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for the American-led International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, would only confirm the existence of a project to create what he called an “expeditionary cellular communication service” in Afghanistan. He said the project was being carried out in collaboration with the Afghan government in order to “restore 24/7 cellular access.”
“As of yet the program is not fully operational, so it would be premature to go into details,” Colonel Dorrian said.
Colonel Dorrian declined to release cost figures. Estimates by United States military and civilian officials ranged widely, from $50 million to $250 million. A senior official said that Afghan officials, who anticipate taking over American bases when troops pull out, have insisted on an elaborate system. “The Afghans wanted the Cadillac plan, which is pretty expensive,” the official said.
Broad Subversive Effort
In May 2009, a North Korean defector named Kim met with officials at the American Consulate in Shenyang, a Chinese city about 120 miles from North Korea, according to a diplomatic cable. Officials wanted to know how Mr. Kim, who was active in smuggling others out of the country, communicated across the border. “Kim would not go into much detail,” the cable says, but did mention the burying of Chinese cellphones “on hillsides for people to dig up at night.” Mr. Kim said Dandong, China, and the surrounding Jilin Province “were natural gathering points for cross-border cellphone communication and for meeting sources.” The cellphones are able to pick up signals from towers in China, said Libby Liu, head of Radio Free Asia, the United States-financed broadcaster, who confirmed their existence and said her organization uses the calls to collect information for broadcasts as well.
The effort, in what is perhaps the world’s most closed nation, suggests just how many independent actors are involved in the subversive efforts. From the activist geeks on L Street in Washington to the military engineers in Afghanistan, the global appeal of the technology hints at the craving for open communication.
In a chat with a Times reporter via Facebook, Malik Ibrahim Sahad, the son of Libyan dissidents who largely grew up in suburban Virginia, said he was tapping into the Internet using a commercial satellite connection in Benghazi. “Internet is in dire need here. The people are cut off in that respect,” wrote Mr. Sahad, who had never been to Libya before the uprising and is now working in support of rebel authorities. Even so, he said, “I don’t think this revolution could have taken place without the existence of the World Wide Web.”
Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Andrew W. Lehren from New York, and Alissa J. Rubin and Sangar Rahimi from Kabul, Afghanistan.
New ICTs + New Media = New Democracy? Communications policy and public life in the age of broadband
A by-invitation experts’ workshop
New America Foundation, September 20-22, 2011
Are “new media” fundamentally changing the practice of democracy? Recent years have seen a significant transition in the role computer mediated communications play in the political sphere. A technological revolution driven by economic and market forces is undermining settled practices, established institutions, and traditional communications norms. As a result, public policies governing the telecommunications and media infrastructure need to be re-examined, and their theoretical foundations and paradigmatic assumptions reformulated.
Technological developments and broadband communications have forced the rules of political discourse to change: contemporary new media are circumventing and displacing old media; political candidates and public officials are finding new ways of communicating with the public; fundraising and advertising in political campaigns are being reshaped; and voiceless organizations and communities around the world are making themselves heard -- both within their national boundaries and around the world.
The Institute for Information Policy at Penn State University and the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative are pleased to announce this call for paper proposals, which focuses on the role broadband policies play in the promotion and preservation of democracy and human rights. Authors of the selected papers will be invited to present and discuss them during a three day by-invitation-only experts workshop designed to bring together American and international experts and to be held at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, between September 20-22, 2011. This workshop is part of a series of events focused on “Making Policy Research Accessible,” organized by the IIP, with the support of the Ford Foundation. Presenters at the workshop will be invited to submit their completed papers for review by the Journal of Information Policy (www.jip-online.org).
Paper topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Freedom, democracy and justice: Changing concepts of democracy in the 21st century
- Campaign financing policies in the age of broadband communications
- Viability of existing telecommunications/media policies in light of technological change
- Preservation of freedom of expression and the public sphere in the new media environment
- Human rights and policy implications of recent popular uprisings around the world
- Allocation of resources allowing broadband communication to fulfill their role in democracy
- Private and public ownership of communication networks and their implications for democracy
Abstracts of up to 500 words and a short bio of the author(s) should be submitted to pennstateiip@psu.edu by June 30, 2011. Please write IIPOTIWS: YOUR NAME in the subject line. Abstracts not sent according to the above instructions will not be reviewed. Accepted presenters
will be notified by July 15, 2011.
]]>New ICTs + New Media = New Democracy? Communications policy and public life in the age of broadband
A by-invitation experts’ workshop
New America Foundation, September 20-22, 2011
Are “new media” fundamentally changing the practice of democracy? Recent years have seen a significant transition in the role computer mediated communications play in the political sphere. A technological revolution driven by economic and market forces is undermining settled practices, established institutions, and traditional communications norms. As a result, public policies governing the telecommunications and media infrastructure need to be re-examined, and their theoretical foundations and paradigmatic assumptions reformulated.
Technological developments and broadband communications have forced the rules of political discourse to change: contemporary new media are circumventing and displacing old media; political candidates and public officials are finding new ways of communicating with the public; fundraising and advertising in political campaigns are being reshaped; and voiceless organizations and communities around the world are making themselves heard -- both within their national boundaries and around the world.
The Institute for Information Policy at Penn State University and the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative are pleased to announce this call for paper proposals, which focuses on the role broadband policies play in the promotion and preservation of democracy and human rights. Authors of the selected papers will be invited to present and discuss them during a three day by-invitation-only experts workshop designed to bring together American and international experts and to be held at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, between September 20-22, 2011. This workshop is part of a series of events focused on “Making Policy Research Accessible,” organized by the IIP, with the support of the Ford Foundation. Presenters at the workshop will be invited to submit their completed papers for review by the Journal of Information Policy (www.jip-online.org).
Paper topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Freedom, democracy and justice: Changing concepts of democracy in the 21st century
- Campaign financing policies in the age of broadband communications
- Viability of existing telecommunications/media policies in light of technological change
- Preservation of freedom of expression and the public sphere in the new media environment
- Human rights and policy implications of recent popular uprisings around the world
- Allocation of resources allowing broadband communication to fulfill their role in democracy
- Private and public ownership of communication networks and their implications for democracy
Abstracts of up to 500 words and a short bio of the author(s) should be submitted to pennstateiip@psu.edu by June 30, 2011. Please write IIPOTIWS: YOUR NAME in the subject line. Abstracts not sent according to the above instructions will not be reviewed. Accepted presenters
will be notified by July 15, 2011.
]]>http://www.youtube.com/kikodw (tagged as IS4CWN)
or take a look at the individual videos below.
*The Serval project*
1/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yk1FdFsQUA
2/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3SUWE5F7SM
3/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGXoe424t5M
4/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_YIJXq-BzY
5/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrgvkSzdZ2E
*BGWireless Serbia Freemium Model*
1/2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJZ-Cl8ggj8
2/2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hTw677X5-Y
*Next Steps for Community Wireless Networks*
1/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bDoARBaIuA
2/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkm8i7XQSUs
3/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsNGEOhBrls
4/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGhloXSOW78
5/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pm4TYGQ8dc
*Wireless Toronto*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtGSuAopOII
*Village Telco*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EsctLSG5dI
*FunkFeuer*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUMUnMkVm_w
*WLAN Ljubljana, Slovenia*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKFgWZO6Inw
*Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN)*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5krFJ8nNpY
*Austin Wireless Freemium model*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC-U_IfV_hQ
*Freemium model - Brough Turner talk *
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbEnl6fdBBo
*Tribal Digital Village*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYXCCN-yxds
*Chambana Wireless*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKBdRt2xxWg
*BGWireless, Serbia*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI3MufT9ZAE
http://www.youtube.com/kikodw (tagged as IS4CWN)
or take a look at the individual videos below.
*The Serval project*
1/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yk1FdFsQUA
2/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3SUWE5F7SM
3/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGXoe424t5M
4/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_YIJXq-BzY
5/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrgvkSzdZ2E
*BGWireless Serbia Freemium Model*
1/2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJZ-Cl8ggj8
2/2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hTw677X5-Y
*Next Steps for Community Wireless Networks*
1/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bDoARBaIuA
2/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkm8i7XQSUs
3/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsNGEOhBrls
4/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGhloXSOW78
5/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pm4TYGQ8dc
*Wireless Toronto*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtGSuAopOII
*Village Telco*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EsctLSG5dI
*FunkFeuer*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUMUnMkVm_w
*WLAN Ljubljana, Slovenia*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKFgWZO6Inw
*Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN)*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5krFJ8nNpY
*Austin Wireless Freemium model*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC-U_IfV_hQ
*Freemium model - Brough Turner talk *
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbEnl6fdBBo
*Tribal Digital Village*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYXCCN-yxds
*Chambana Wireless*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKBdRt2xxWg
*BGWireless, Serbia*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI3MufT9ZAE
Hillary Clinton called for the U.S. to promote Internet freedoms earlier this week and introduced a $25 million fund for technology companies that might help with the task. The New America Foundation has already applied for a grant under that program that includes a $3.5 million proposal, of which $500,000 will be funded by the New America Foundation itself. The mission? To build the technology stack for a distributed, open source telecommunications system.
The project would combine well known projects, such as the open source voice projects Asterisk and OpenBTS, with new projects for mesh networking known as The Serval Project, which Kevin covered earlier this month and Commotion, open source firmware to enable routers to create an open mesh network. Dan Meredith, a technologist at New America broke it down for me, and said the hope is to deliver communications in areas where Internet access is scarce, but also among populations that are unable to use communications because of government interference. While this technology stack would have been of limited use in Egypt, it actually could have helped protesters in the country stay connected to each other if not to the wider Internet. Here’s how the pieces fit together:
The Serval Project: The goal here is to create software used to connect phones with or without Internet access. The project uses an existing phone number and handsets with the application installed can communicate with each other by calling the phone number of other phones in the Serval network. Serval does need some kind of wireless network on which to run, be it a wireless LAN that’s not connected back to the web or a GSM cellular network.
Commotion: This is a fairly new project that seeks to make distributed communications easier by turning any device from a phone to a router into a node on a mesh network. This can be used to create a wireless LAN for Serval-enabled handsets to run on top of, or it can be used to create an access network in general. The point here is that it’s distributed, as opposed to every connection going back to a central wireless or wireline provider. Commotion networks have been set up in Detroit and Washington D.C. and the same technology has been used to set up networks worldwide. The Commotion site says:
Our first hope is first create an intranet as requested from our growing contacts on the ground to facilitate the creation of local based organizing and outreach intranet applications. Concurrently, we are working to provide strategic uplinks via satellite and dial-up to get folks reconnected to the global internet. Finally, we hope to integrate the good work folks at Tor are doing (https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TheOnionRouter/Torouter) into a bundle and the firmware as well. More ideas are of course welcome!
Tor: If Commotion is the road for packets to drive around on and Serval is like the car enabling the drivers to get on the road, then Tor tints the car’s windows, according to Meredith. The software uses multiple encrypted nodes to route your traffic requests around the web to disguise where it is coming from, this shielding the identity of user or person making a web search. Bloggers, activists, journalists and the military use Tor to keep their location, IP address and web site visits secret. For dissidents, running Tor on top of Commotion can disguise the location of network nodes and users.
Open BTS or Asterisk : Using OpenBTS linked to an open source voice server running software such as Asterisk, a distributed network now has the ability to make voice calls without going back to the centralized core network of a wireless or wireline carrier. If one hooks a server running OpenBTS to an Asterisk server on a Commotion network then voice calls via VoIP are now available via the existing GSM radios on the phones, even without using something like Serval.
Open GSM: This one is a bit like Pump up the Volume, meaning it may be all rebel cool, but it may not be legal. Essentially its a project to build cheap base stations in various cellular frequency bands to deliver a cell signal to GSM phones. Since these towers are using airwaves purchased by private or state-owned telecommunications companies and could cause interference it’s pretty much going to be reserved for folks who aren’t okay with government regulations, or who can get approval for their networks. If your government doesn’t want you access the web, though, this base station connected back to a web gateway is one way to fight the power and provide web access.
Is this the final technology stack for providing safer and more reliable Internet access for activists and dissidents? I can’t say but as protests sweep across the Middle East and governments such as Egypt, China or Burma are willing to crack down on Internet access, the need for innovation around decentralized networks grows.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Muhammed Ghafari
Hillary Clinton called for the U.S. to promote Internet freedoms earlier this week and introduced a $25 million fund for technology companies that might help with the task. The New America Foundation has already applied for a grant under that program that includes a $3.5 million proposal, of which $500,000 will be funded by the New America Foundation itself. The mission? To build the technology stack for a distributed, open source telecommunications system.
The project would combine well known projects, such as the open source voice projects Asterisk and OpenBTS, with new projects for mesh networking known as The Serval Project, which Kevin covered earlier this month and Commotion, open source firmware to enable routers to create an open mesh network. Dan Meredith, a technologist at New America broke it down for me, and said the hope is to deliver communications in areas where Internet access is scarce, but also among populations that are unable to use communications because of government interference. While this technology stack would have been of limited use in Egypt, it actually could have helped protesters in the country stay connected to each other if not to the wider Internet. Here’s how the pieces fit together:
The Serval Project: The goal here is to create software used to connect phones with or without Internet access. The project uses an existing phone number and handsets with the application installed can communicate with each other by calling the phone number of other phones in the Serval network. Serval does need some kind of wireless network on which to run, be it a wireless LAN that’s not connected back to the web or a GSM cellular network.
Commotion: This is a fairly new project that seeks to make distributed communications easier by turning any device from a phone to a router into a node on a mesh network. This can be used to create a wireless LAN for Serval-enabled handsets to run on top of, or it can be used to create an access network in general. The point here is that it’s distributed, as opposed to every connection going back to a central wireless or wireline provider. Commotion networks have been set up in Detroit and Washington D.C. and the same technology has been used to set up networks worldwide. The Commotion site says:
Our first hope is first create an intranet as requested from our growing contacts on the ground to facilitate the creation of local based organizing and outreach intranet applications. Concurrently, we are working to provide strategic uplinks via satellite and dial-up to get folks reconnected to the global internet. Finally, we hope to integrate the good work folks at Tor are doing (https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TheOnionRouter/Torouter) into a bundle and the firmware as well. More ideas are of course welcome!
Tor: If Commotion is the road for packets to drive around on and Serval is like the car enabling the drivers to get on the road, then Tor tints the car’s windows, according to Meredith. The software uses multiple encrypted nodes to route your traffic requests around the web to disguise where it is coming from, this shielding the identity of user or person making a web search. Bloggers, activists, journalists and the military use Tor to keep their location, IP address and web site visits secret. For dissidents, running Tor on top of Commotion can disguise the location of network nodes and users.
Open BTS or Asterisk : Using OpenBTS linked to an open source voice server running software such as Asterisk, a distributed network now has the ability to make voice calls without going back to the centralized core network of a wireless or wireline carrier. If one hooks a server running OpenBTS to an Asterisk server on a Commotion network then voice calls via VoIP are now available via the existing GSM radios on the phones, even without using something like Serval.
Open GSM: This one is a bit like Pump up the Volume, meaning it may be all rebel cool, but it may not be legal. Essentially its a project to build cheap base stations in various cellular frequency bands to deliver a cell signal to GSM phones. Since these towers are using airwaves purchased by private or state-owned telecommunications companies and could cause interference it’s pretty much going to be reserved for folks who aren’t okay with government regulations, or who can get approval for their networks. If your government doesn’t want you access the web, though, this base station connected back to a web gateway is one way to fight the power and provide web access.
Is this the final technology stack for providing safer and more reliable Internet access for activists and dissidents? I can’t say but as protests sweep across the Middle East and governments such as Egypt, China or Burma are willing to crack down on Internet access, the need for innovation around decentralized networks grows.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Muhammed Ghafari
-
Election Day is tomorrow. By all indications we're going to be getting a very different, much more Republican Congress this time around. But before they come in, let's remember one of the last things the old, more Democratic Congress did. Or attempted to do, unsuccessfully.
By that, I mean net neutrality, the idea that Internet providers should be prevented from giving some Internet traffic priority over other Internet traffic. So if your provider decided you would get videos from YouTube really fast but websites from somewhere else really slow, they would be legally prohibited from doing so.
We talk to Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative, and Susan Crawford, professor at Cardozo Law School in New York. They say not to expect much to come out of Congress this time either but that the ball has been placed clearly in the court of the Federal Communications Commission.
Late this year or possibly early next year, FCC Chairman will likely assert his agency's authority over internet communications. From there it's a question of whether whatever they do holds up in court.
Also in this show, a new software program lets employees of a company know where all their co-workers are physically located at all times. Which comes as a relief to people who hate privacy and never want to be left alone.
]]>-
Election Day is tomorrow. By all indications we're going to be getting a very different, much more Republican Congress this time around. But before they come in, let's remember one of the last things the old, more Democratic Congress did. Or attempted to do, unsuccessfully.
By that, I mean net neutrality, the idea that Internet providers should be prevented from giving some Internet traffic priority over other Internet traffic. So if your provider decided you would get videos from YouTube really fast but websites from somewhere else really slow, they would be legally prohibited from doing so.
We talk to Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative, and Susan Crawford, professor at Cardozo Law School in New York. They say not to expect much to come out of Congress this time either but that the ball has been placed clearly in the court of the Federal Communications Commission.
Late this year or possibly early next year, FCC Chairman will likely assert his agency's authority over internet communications. From there it's a question of whether whatever they do holds up in court.
Also in this show, a new software program lets employees of a company know where all their co-workers are physically located at all times. Which comes as a relief to people who hate privacy and never want to be left alone.
]]>Second “Freedom Rings” Broadband Stimulus Award will Support Internet Access, Computers and Training
Today, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration awarded an $11.8 million grant to an 11 member coalition of community organizations lead by the Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition, the second “Freedom Rings” proposal to be awarded in the City from the federal Broadband Technology Opportunities Program. Compounding the $6.4 million awarded in June to the City of Philadelphia for 77 computer centers, this grant supports sustainable broadband adoption programs that will:
- Generate 5,000 new broadband household subscribers;
- Distribute over 5,500 computers to public housing residents and formerly homeless youth;
- Support 50 businesses to adopt broadband;
- Provide over 100,000 hours of hands-on training to 15,000 people; and,
- Create over 75,000 new broadband users through a viral social marketing campaign.
"The New America Foundation has been engaged in the assessment and evaluation of Philadelphia broadband initiatives since 2007," stated Sascha Meinrath, Director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative. "OTI utilized the knowledge we've gleaned over the years to help develop the Philadelphia Freedom Rings Initiative – supporting an innovative collaboration to bring digital excellence to the city's residents."
Sharmain Matlock-Turner, President and CEO of the Urban Affairs Coalition, said, “we thank our friends at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative for helping us connect Philadelphia’s communities to broadband technologies. Most people know that broadband is essential for their daily lives. We know that long-term adoption strategies must be thoughtfully tailored to community needs and delivered through trusted, neighborhood-level organizations, like the Urban Affairs Coalition and Philadelphia’s Freedom Rings Partnership, in order to be effective and sustainable. New America is going to help us do just that.”
In Philadelphia, the Open Technology Initiative continued its on-the-ground support beyond the 2007 analysis of Philadelphia's Municipal wireless project The Philadelphia Story with strategy, grant writing, technical consulting, and guidance for the grants offered through the U.S. Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Building on expertise in Philadelphia, OTI has committed to evaluate the impact of the project through both quantitative and qualitative metrics.
"We are excited because this project prioritizes placing resources and skills training in the hands of those most in need, and will put Philadelphia at the forefront of cities building towards a digital future for all residents," explained Todd Wolfson, a co-founder of Media Mobilizing Project, a partner in the proposal.
“Today's announcement is another example of Philadelphia's deep history to lead and spur innovation through community engagement,” added Dan Meredith, Technologist and OTI's lead in Philadelphia. “This project's priorities move past typical dump and run technology efforts with an attempt to stymie the digital divide by bringing broadband adoption programs directly to Philadelphia residents.”
The Open Technology Initiative has supported efforts to direct broadband stimulus funding to community-focused projects across the country, through both on-the-ground efforts and providing expansive application resources.
A fact sheet on the Freedom Rings: Sustainable Broadband Adoption is available here: http://www2.ntia.doc.gov/files/grantees/factsheetpaurbanaffairscoalition.pdf
Please contact Kate Brown with media requests at 202-596-3365 or brown@newamerica.net.
]]>Second “Freedom Rings” Broadband Stimulus Award will Support Internet Access, Computers and Training
Today, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration awarded an $11.8 million grant to an 11 member coalition of community organizations lead by the Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition, the second “Freedom Rings” proposal to be awarded in the City from the federal Broadband Technology Opportunities Program. Compounding the $6.4 million awarded in June to the City of Philadelphia for 77 computer centers, this grant supports sustainable broadband adoption programs that will:
- Generate 5,000 new broadband household subscribers;
- Distribute over 5,500 computers to public housing residents and formerly homeless youth;
- Support 50 businesses to adopt broadband;
- Provide over 100,000 hours of hands-on training to 15,000 people; and,
- Create over 75,000 new broadband users through a viral social marketing campaign.
"The New America Foundation has been engaged in the assessment and evaluation of Philadelphia broadband initiatives since 2007," stated Sascha Meinrath, Director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative. "OTI utilized the knowledge we've gleaned over the years to help develop the Philadelphia Freedom Rings Initiative – supporting an innovative collaboration to bring digital excellence to the city's residents."
Sharmain Matlock-Turner, President and CEO of the Urban Affairs Coalition, said, “we thank our friends at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative for helping us connect Philadelphia’s communities to broadband technologies. Most people know that broadband is essential for their daily lives. We know that long-term adoption strategies must be thoughtfully tailored to community needs and delivered through trusted, neighborhood-level organizations, like the Urban Affairs Coalition and Philadelphia’s Freedom Rings Partnership, in order to be effective and sustainable. New America is going to help us do just that.”
In Philadelphia, the Open Technology Initiative continued its on-the-ground support beyond the 2007 analysis of Philadelphia's Municipal wireless project The Philadelphia Story with strategy, grant writing, technical consulting, and guidance for the grants offered through the U.S. Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Building on expertise in Philadelphia, OTI has committed to evaluate the impact of the project through both quantitative and qualitative metrics.
"We are excited because this project prioritizes placing resources and skills training in the hands of those most in need, and will put Philadelphia at the forefront of cities building towards a digital future for all residents," explained Todd Wolfson, a co-founder of Media Mobilizing Project, a partner in the proposal.
“Today's announcement is another example of Philadelphia's deep history to lead and spur innovation through community engagement,” added Dan Meredith, Technologist and OTI's lead in Philadelphia. “This project's priorities move past typical dump and run technology efforts with an attempt to stymie the digital divide by bringing broadband adoption programs directly to Philadelphia residents.”
The Open Technology Initiative has supported efforts to direct broadband stimulus funding to community-focused projects across the country, through both on-the-ground efforts and providing expansive application resources.
A fact sheet on the Freedom Rings: Sustainable Broadband Adoption is available here: http://www2.ntia.doc.gov/files/grantees/factsheetpaurbanaffairscoalition.pdf
Please contact Kate Brown with media requests at 202-596-3365 or brown@newamerica.net.
]]>Originally from (and copyrighted by) AOL Daily Finance:
-
It was a high-stakes gamble gone terribly wrong.
At approximately 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 5, Federal Communications Commission Chief of Staff Edward Lazarus walked into a conference room where his boss, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, was meeting with public interest groups discussing federal broadband policy.
The chairman turned to his chief of staff and asked him to update the room on the ongoing broadband regulation talks between Verizon (VZ), AT&T (T), Google (GOOG), Skype and the Open Internet Coalition, a Web industry group.
"Eddie looked like he had just lost his best friend," according to a person who was present and recalled the expression on Lazarus's face. Addressing the gathering, Lazarus announced that the talks had been terminated -- he would later say "suspended" -- explaining that the negotiators had found a number of points of agreement but had failed to reach a consensus.
What was at stake in the Lazarus talks? No less than the future of the Internet, with wide-ranging ramifications for the delivery of broadband content and services to the home -- not to mention hospitals, banks and mobile devices.
Outside of Public View
As Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Netflix (NFLX) and Google forge ahead with highly publicized new plans to stream high-speed content like movies and TV shows to your living room, smartphone, telecom and cable giants like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast (CMSCA) have been intensely lobbying to maintain control over the broadband pipes they spent billions to build. Comcast is going so far as to buy a rich content factory, NBC Universal, a deal that would create a $35 billion media and delivery juggernaut. That merger is currently pending before the FCC, and though public interest groups have been roundly critical, it's expected to be approved.
An epic and escalating war is now taking place over the next era of broadband content delivery. Some skirmishes are playing out in the public eye, but others -- perhaps the most critical -- are far removed from it. In fact, very few people know that the highly controversial efforts by Google and Verizon to hammer out their own proposal for a broadband policy framework -- news of which broke only last month -- started nearly two years ago. The outcome of this ever-hotter war will have a profound impact on the way consumers access information well into the future.
Just hours earlier on that August Thursday, Lazarus had assured the participants that his talks were moving ahead and making progress, according to sources familiar with the meetings. But when news emerged (in the form of a New York Times article that appeared online late Wednesday and in the Thursday newspaper) that two of the key participants, Verizon and Google, were on the verge of announcing their own proposal, the talks collapsed. It was a plan that Lazarus -- not to mention Skype or the Open Internet Coalition -- was not prepared to accept.
Google and Verizon disputed the Times article, insisting that they were pitching a policy proposal not a business deal, as the article described it. But it was clear that Lazarus's approach had hit a wall.
"We hadn't gotten consensus on any of the issues, and everything was contingent on everything else."
"We had exhausted the Lazarus process," a participant in the talks told DailyFinance. "We had reached an impasse, and the decision to suspend the meetings was the right decision. We hadn't gotten consensus on any of the issues, and everything was contingent on everything else. The toughest issues were managed services and wireless broadband, and how you treat them."
Prior to working at the FCC, Lazarus, a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, had spent most of the decade as a partner at legal powerhouse Akin Gump in Los Angeles. He has written extensively on various legal issues, and when Lazarus promoted his book Closed Chambers on The Daily Show in 2006, host Jon Stewart asked him about the need for complex legal jargon. Lazarus replied: "Do you know how much I charge on an hourly basis, Jon? If I didn't make up my own language, why would people pay me?"
At Stake: Equal Access to the Internet
For Lazarus (pictured at right), the closed-door meetings were a bold, high-stakes gamble to bring together the polarized sides of the frequently acrimonious debate over net neutrality -- the basic idea that Internet broadband providers shouldn't pick winners on the Web or discriminate against rival content. During a speech in Aspen just three weeks ago, Verizon policy chief Tom Tauke said: "The elephant that is still in the room is the issue that has dominated debate in this industry for at least five years, and that is net neutrality."
The Internet today largely operates under the principle of net neutrality, which most people don't even notice, so it's easy to take for granted. But all Web users and companies have equal access to the Internet, in the same way that all Americans have the right to take a road trip anywhere in the 50 states without a passport. Companies and institutions have closed networks, but the main public internet is accessible by all.
Without this open access, net neutrality advocates argue, startups like Google, Twitter and untold thousands of others could never have taken hold. Indeed, innovation online would be grievously stifled. For the last five years, Internet-dependent companies like Google and Skype have been fighting a series of running battles with the giant broadband providers over how net neutrality should be enshrined -- if at all -- in regulation and law moving forward.
Lazarus is a relative newcomer to the net neutrality debate. It appears he wanted to broker a deal he could hand to Congress on a silver platter heading into a contentious midterm election. Instead, he got a busted process, two rogue participants, furious interest groups and an agency in near-disarray, at least on broadband policy. "The chairman remains fully committed to preserving the free and open Internet as a platform for investment, innovation, free speech and consumer choice," a senior FCC official tells DailyFinance. The FCC declined to make Lazarus available for an interview.
Behind-the-Scenes Maneuvering by Two Giants
Lazarus was scrambling to find a solution to the grave jurisdictional crisis the FCC faced after a federal judge ruled in April that the agency lacked the authority to enforce net neutrality -- a verdict that rocked tech policy circles from D.C. to Hollywood. The court said the FCC had no power to enforce four principles laid down in 2004 by then-FCC Chairman Michael Powell that are the basis for net neutrality. Powell's successor, Kevin Martin, tried to use those principles in 2008 to sanction cable giant Comcast for slowing down peer-to-peer traffic -- an ultimately botched pseudo-regulatory action with far-reaching and unintended consequences.
But behind the scenes, two of the biggest and most important companies in technology and telecommunications, Google and Verizon, grew tired of waiting for the feds to act amid the regulatory and legal morass surrounding net neutrality and broadband policy. So, they got together and put a tangible broadband policy compromise on the table. In the process, the companies inadvertently pulled back the curtain on what could be the most ineffectual regulatory agency in Washington -- the FCC.
Although news of the Google-Verizon proposal emerged last month, the two companies have actually been working together on policy efforts to a greater degree and for longer than they've admitted publicly. In the fall of 2008, nearly two years before the Lazarus talks blew up, two top Verizon policy officials, Tauke and Link Hoewing, Verizon's VP of Internet and tech policy, happened to be in the Bay Area attending a tech conference, when they decided to pay a call at Google.
Traditional adversaries -- at least when it came to net neutrality -- Verizon and Google seemed like unlikely future allies.
Initially, the two companies' courtship was nurtured by the friendship between Alan Davidson (pictured at right), Google's with-it public-policy chief, and Hoewing, who has worked with Tauke to craft Verizon's policy strategy. This friendship predated Davidson's arrival at Google, going back to his stint at the Center for Democracy and Technology, where he was known as something of a savvy libertarian. Had Davidson and Hoewing, two of the brightest tech policy minds in D.C., not already been friends, the controversial deal that rocked Internet circles and made headlines everywhere might never have happened.
By 2008, Verizon had been slowly coming around to the ideas of openness that Google espoused -- at least relative to some of its fellow telecom giants, like AT&T. "Verizon has had a history of being forward-looking on a lot of Internet policy issues," says a top Internet industry source. "They've taken a strong stance on free-speech issues and were among the first to really start thinking about themselves as a broadband company."
Google's Spectrum Bid Was Built to Lose
Earlier in 2008, Verizon had agreed to pay $4.7 billion for the highly coveted 700 Mhz C Block in a closely watched FCC wireless spectrum auction and in doing so also agreed to abide by open-access provisions set by the FCC for that chunk of spectrum. (Those provisions mean subscribers can use any compatible phone and software and aren't locked into a single device, like Apple's iPhone.)
Google had craftily triggered the open-access provisions by meeting the FCC's $4.6 billion reserve bid. In a savvy strategic move, Google was bidding to lose -- or rather, bidding to trigger the provisions -- although Google execs later said the company would have ponied up the $4.6 billion for the spectrum had it actually won. But Verizon Wireless, the nation's largest mobile carrier, would never have allowed Google to buy nearly $5 billion worth of wireless spectrum outright. So, it outbid Google and accepted the FCC's open-access provisions.
It's taken nearly three years, but that chunk of 700 Mhz C Block spectrum is now Verizon 4G -- the company's next generation of superfast wireless broadband -- and it's about to be rolled out, with the open-access provisions intact, company officials say.
On their 2008 visit to the Bay Area, Verizon's Tauke and Hoewing ended up having a day-long series of meetings at Google's Mountain View, Calif., campus. It was the initial foray in what would become a nearly-two-year odyssey to see if the two companies could find common ground on net neutrality. About a year later, Google and Verizon quietly filed paperwork with the FCC, outlining some areas of agreement after the talks had gained momentum in the summer of 2009. Another filing followed in early 2010.
In March, Google CEO Eric Schmidt (pictured at left, above) and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg (at left, below) wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which they pledged to work together and said that although "our two companies don't agree on every issue, we do agree generally as a matter of policy that the framework of minimal government involvement should continue." And of course, their talks gained greater urgency after the FCC lost the Comcast decision in April 2010.
"Google and Amazon and others have moved closer to the middle on the net neutrality debate," says a source familiar with the Google-Verizon partnership. "Verizon needs to have some predictability to continue investing. Google knows that it needs the telecom sector to make massive investment. And both companies need to keep consumers happy."
The conventional wisdom was that Google and Verizon would do little more than talk.
But three weeks ago, Google and Verizon finally dropped the bombshell they had been crafting, on and off, since October 2008. Essentially, the framework would ensure net neutrality on wired networks, meaning no traffic-blocking or discrimination against any content or rival. However, the proposal would not require net neutrality on wireless networks, which is apostasy to the principle's backers. Their deal would also create an ambiguous category of "managed services," a nonpublic, superfast network that companies could use to deliver prioritized content -- for a price -- something also fundamentally antithetical to hardcore net neutrality advocates.
"Was the Google-Verizon proposal the only reason the talks failed? No. Was it the straw that broke the camel's back? Yes."
When Lazarus finally called off the talks in August, he was about to leave for vacation anyway, according to multiple sources. But he and the other meeting participants had known for months about the separate discussion between Google and Verizon. Although those two had struck their own deal, the other parties, including AT&T and Skype, still remained far apart on the key issues. There was really no reason for them to continue negotiating when two of their peers had struck their own pact. Besides that, the telecom and cable companies weren't budging from their stance of no net neutrality on wireless networks nor from their insistence on "managed services," and those were positions the Open Internet Coalition and the FCC itself simply couldn't accept.
"Until the network operators start feeling that policymakers and elected officials won't support their position that there will be no rules on wireless services or specialized services, I don't see their position changing unilaterally," says Markham Erickson, the respected tech policy lawyer who led the Open Internet Coalition at the Lazarus talks.
"Was the Google-Verizon proposal the only reason the talks failed? No," says Gigi Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge, a D.C.-based pro-net neutrality advocacy group. "Was it the straw that broke the camel's back? Yes."
The Roots of Net Neutrality
Former FCC Chairman Michael Powell (pictured at right) knows very well how important the concept of net neutrality is. He was a George W. Bush-appointee who served as FCC chairman from 2001 to 2005, and it was his initial four principles that form the policy basis for the current net neutrality debate. Looking at the situation that the FCC is dealing with, Powell now says: "Genachowski has an enormous challenge, and he has to assert himself forcefully. The chairman has a problem in that his jurisdictional basis is unclear and confused. But that's why we have a Congress, and they should absolutely fix this problem and stop the confusion."
Powell disapproves of the FCC moving ahead to reclassify without Congress: "I don't think it's an appropriate position to say we [the FCC] may not have the authority, but we think Congress may take too long, so we're going to create it for ourselves."
As chairman, Powell pushed for what became known as the "four freedoms" throughout 2004 and 2005:
• Freedom to access content. Consumers should have access to their choice of legal content.
• Freedom to use applications. Consumers should be able to run applications of their choice.
• Freedom to attach personal devices. Consumers should be permitted to attach any devices they choose to the connection in their homes.
• Freedom to obtain service plan information. Consumers should receive meaningful information regarding their service plans.
The lost Comcast decision meant the FCC lacked jurisdiction over broadband and thus could not enforce the four freedoms or any other type of openness or net neutrality regulation. The decision threw the agency's ambitious National Broadband Plan into chaos because Genachowski has proposed adding two additional two principles -- one formalizing nondiscrimination, the essence of strong net neutrality, the other extending the principle to wireless networks -- to Powell's original four. The ruling put the chairman in a serious bind.
Genchowski did have one immediate option, what some referred to as "the nuclear option." That was to simply reclassify broadband Internet from a Title I "information" service to a Title II "communications" service, which would give the commission the needed regulatory authority to enforce net neutrality. Of the five FCC commissioners, Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn, were ready to vote for immediate Title II reclassification, according to sources with knowledge of the matter. Genachowski would have been the third and deciding vote, but the chairman chose to hold off.
Such wholesale reclassification is unacceptable to the telecom and cable companies because they claim it would introduce the possibility of increased litigation and price controls, among other things. Instead, Genachowski tried to thread the needle, proposing something he called "the third way" -- or "Title II lite" -- as an alternative to standing around toothless after being knocked out in the Comcast case or taking the major step of full Title II reclassification. The chairman has garnered support for this position, if not wholehearted plaudits for the pace of his action.
"We're in favor of the third way," says Sohn of Public Knowledge (pictured at left). "And we're willing to accept the chairman's political calculation that [the FCC waits] until after the election. As long as he moves after the election, then we're fine."
"We are also hopeful for legislation, and we will exercise some patience there as well," Sohn adds. "But if there's no legislation after the election, the chairman has to move forward with reclassification because consumers can't wait any longer for protection and be left without a cop on the beat."
"All options remain on the table," a senior FCC official tells DailyFinance. "The FCC staff is busy reviewing and analyzing an extensive record of more than 50,000 comments in the broadband framework proceeding, which only closed a few weeks ago. Securing a solid legal foundation for broadband policy is too important an issue to rush."
"I Will Take a Backseat to No One"
As a presidential candidate, then-Senator Barack Obama sensed the importance of an open Internet, and he pledged to make broadband deployment, innovation and investment a centerpiece of his economic agenda. In November 2007, during a speech at Google's Mountain View headquarters, Obama declared his strong support for net neutrality in unambiguous terms before a packed house, with many Googlers standing.
"I will take a backseat to no one in my commitment to network neutrality," Obama declared, "because once providers start to privilege some applications or websites over others, then the smaller voices get squeezed out, and we all lose. The Internet is perhaps the most open network in history, and we have to keep it that way.
"We could see the Internet get divided up by the highest bidders," Obama warned. "We have to ensure free and full exchange of information, and that starts with an open Internet." After the speech, Google CEO Eric Schmidt thanked Obama for "such a strong message about innovation."
During the presidential campaign, Sascha Meinrath, now 36, was part of Obama's idealistic technology, media and telecom working group -- led by Genachowski -- that included young tech policy stars such as Alec Ross and Ben Scott, both now at the State Dept., as well as former FCC-staffer Blair Levin, among others. Meinrath is currently director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative and a top telecom policy expert and pro-net neutrality advocate -- another wunderkind of progressive tech policy activism. The New America Foundation is a relatively new, nonprofit center-progressive D.C. think tank run by Steve Coll, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former star at the Washington Post. Google CEO Schmidt is the foundation's chairman.
Nearly three years after the heady idealism of then-candidate Obama's tech, media and telecom working group, Meinrath (pictured at right) has become one of Genechowski's toughest critics. He says the FCC has failed to carry out Obama's vision by dragging its feet, cowering to both industry and Congress and generally delaying real action, despite some lofty rhetoric.
Meinrath isn't the only such critic. An emerging consensus among both public interest groups and progressive think thanks asserts that Genachowski has so far been a bust. "The FCC continues to kick the can down the road and prolong this process, but the longer the FCC ponders the politics of net neutrality, the longer consumers are left unprotected," Free Press Research Director S. Derek Turner said in a recent statement. "It is time for the FCC to stop writing notices and start making clear rules of the road. The phone and cable companies have shown us what the Internet will look like if they are allowed to write their own rules and build a two-tiered Internet with fast and slow lanes and zero protections on mobile broadband. We don't need more questions from the FCC, we need more answers."
Not surprisingly, some young GOP-allied telecom lobbyists have been overheard celebrating the public interest groups' distress in D.C. bars in recent weeks.
"When Genachowski became chairman of the FCC, many of us thought that this was a fantastic opportunity to implement the telecom agenda he had already signed off on," Meinrath says. "Which begs the question: What happened? Was there some sort of political math done where people realized that fixing telecom requires angering powerful constituencies? Why, now that he's chairman of the FCC, has Genachowski failed to implement so much of the agenda that he supported? Why has the Obama administration refused to hold Genachowski publicly accountable for his failure to act?"
Genachowski (pictured at left) is clearly ambitious. A former Internet executive for media mogul Barry Diller's IAC conglomerate, Genachowski is an old Harvard Law School chum of President Obama's -- and someone who genuinely cares about broadband issues and development. But he's also learned a few things about politics.
After leading Obama's tech media and telecom policy working group, Genachowski initially aimed high, hoping to be named the nation's first chief technology officer, when that was a Cabinet-level position, according to multiple sources. When the CTO job was downgraded, he became the front-runner to head the FCC.
"Over the years, I've worked with multiple chairmen, including Michael Powell and Kevin Martin, and Genachowski is by far the worst to work with," says Meinrath of his former boss on the working group. "Powell's and Martin's doors were open to us on a regular basis, even when we disagreed. That has all but ceased under the Genachowski administration."
The FCC today is "in endless process," Meinrath says, adding that "the opportunity costs of this failure to act are staggering -- in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. So, drawing out the telecom reform decision-making process is causing substantial harm to our economy: lost jobs, lost revenue and lost productivity."
Privately, some FCC officials have grumbled about an election-year, hyperpolitical Congress and lack of support from the Obama team. Others have even suggested that White House has pressured the FCC -- an independent agency -- to ratchet back on net neutrality for political reasons. Meinrath is among those making such claims. "Multiple senior FCC officials pressure have said in meetings where I was present that they've received pressure from the White House and from Capitol Hill to slow down on the National Broadband Plan and net neutrality," he says plainly. The FCC declined to comment on this allegation.
"If you're going to start a fire, you better be ready to deal with it."
But others say the current and recent White Houses rarely meddle too heavily in FCC matters, especially this administration, which is dealing with a crippled economy, war and now the Middle East peace process. "The White House has real limitations on what they can do to influence the agency," says a former FCC official. "They don't pick up the phone and tell an independent agency what to do. To a White House, the FCC is a place they don't want to be bothered with. They expect a chairman to take care of business over there."
"But they've badly mismanaged this issue," this former official adds. "If you're going to start a fire, you better be ready to deal with it."
Or as another former FCC official puts it more bluntly: "When you're a regulator in D.C., you can do two things: Go along to get along, or try to do something, which could lead to a shit-storm. Genachowski has managed to do basically nothing -- and create a shit-storm."
Close Ties Even Before Verizon's Android Smartphone
The inaction that has left Genachowski with such a mess is partly what drove Google and Verizon to seek out their separate peace on net neutrality.
While Google and Verizon insist that their initiative isn't a business project, they do have close ties, especially through their partnership on the Android mobile operating system, which Verizon has embraced successfully with hit products like the Droid smartphone, which it has used to combat Apple's wildly popular iPhone. And the Google-Verizon proposal certainly isn't a cut-and-dry Android business partnership. As Tauke's and Hoewing's fall 2008 meetings at Google demonstrate, the two sides were looking for common ground well before Verizon's Droid rollout.
The first two components of the Google-Verizon plan -- net neutrality for wired networks and no net neutrality for wireless networks -- are fairly straightforward. The first point represents an apparent victory for net neutrality advocates -- openness, choice and nondiscrimination on the Internet, period. "It would be hard to imagine a major telecom company agreeing to this even six months ago," says a person familiar with the deal, adding that this point has gotten overwashed by the more controversial elements.
Net neutrality advocates have been hoping to extend the nondiscrimination principle to wireless services, and in fact, Genachowski proposed it last fall. But the wireless carriers have been fiercely opposed. It's a matter of physics, they say.
"Spectrum is very limited because so many people can be using it in a given cell site."
"When you get into wireless, you're talking about changing the power levels as people move through a cell site and scheduling packets when the connections are most capable," Verizon's Hoewing told DailyFinance in a recent interview. "So we're constantly managing network traffic in order to reasonably assure good services over the network. Spectrum is very limited because so many people can be using it in a given cell site."
Hoewing says Verizon's proposal calls for more transparency from the carriers with respect to speeds and how networks are managed. "We're going to be ensuring that the consumer knows the real speeds they can expect to get. We've got do a better job with that."
Given the urgent need to free more wireless spectrum, this is a legitimate issue for wireless providers. AT&T can't even keep up with the voracious data demands of its iPhone and iPad users. Most everyone agrees that the U.S. needs to deploy more wireless spectrum, but that takes time, money and infrastructure.
Just What Are These "Managed Services"?
However, it's the third component of the Google-Verizon proposal, the mysterious "managed services" provision, that has proved most confusing and has the most controversial and potentially long-lasting implications.
In essence, Google and Verizon are proposing a separate "managed services" network apart from the "public Internet," where nondiscrimination wouldn't apply and where wealthy companies would be able to buy huge chunks of bandwidth and superfast connections. Some of the benign-sounding uses Google and Verizon have mentioned as managed services are things like high-speed, secure networks for medical or banking data. Managed services would be a faster, paid alternative to the public Internet, kind of like ultra-premium cable for the rich.
"We studiously avoided defining managed services to encourage innovation and because we don't know what these services are right now," Hoewing told me. "We define what they are not. They are not broadband Internet access that complies with the consumer protection principles where you can go anywhere, use any application, connect any device, and that would include the nondiscrimination principle. They are different but can use Internet content and [Internet protocol] technologies. They are an additional service, and we can't try to pass them off as being the public internet. The FCC would have the authority to look at managed services and send an emergency report to Congress if necessary."
Google's participation in such a proposal shocked many net neutrality supporters, who had long seen the search giant as one of their most powerful allies. Meinrath has an explanation for that turnabout: "Google wants to bolster its standing with Verizon because Google wants Verizon to be the platform for it's iPad-killer tablet and Google video."
"I think Google is schizophrenic. Its success is due to the open nature of the Internet."
Does that mean Google is evil? "I think Google is schizophrenic," Meinrath says. "Google's success is due to the open nature of the Internet. It's unlikely that it ever would have gotten off the ground had the dominant players locked in prioritization for their own services in the late 1990s."
Meinrath adds: "Eric Schmidt is a very smart man. Now that Google is the dominant market player, he's looking at the dollars that could come from a fourth, Google-centric, addition of a triple play [phone, TV, Internet] home package. This fourth 'Google service package' would generate huge amounts of money, but it would also undermine the best-effort Internet and would create a discriminatory regime prejudiced toward supporting the largest corporate players and undermining new competitors and innovators."
For the record, Google officials from Schmidt on down have publicly and privately insisted that the company remains committed to what Schmidt has lately taken to calling the "public Internet." At least for now, Google officials are are dismissing the suggestion that Google could, say, roll out a high-speed movie-rental service based on YouTube for Verizon FiOS customers as a "managed service." The public internet is just fine for us, thank you very much.
But the concerns don't stop there, Meinrath says. "All of this is before you even get into applications that have mixed-media uses -- the next generations of World of Warcraft and collaborative office suites that combine instant messaging with video, voice or gaming all integrated in the same application," he says. "So the so-called 'policy framework' that Google and Verizon propose requires that we either eliminate privacy and have a deep packet inspection regime across the board, or that we build a new broadband infrastructure for rich corporations who will then extract the cost of this redundant buildout from their customers."
Another Nice Trick by Google
Google knew that a backlash would come -- and boy, did it -- but the company's compromise on wireless and managed services was made at least a bit more palatable by the fact that Google's $4.6 billion bid for that 700 Mhz C Block that Verizon wound up buying triggered the open-access provisions for using that spectrum. So, we now have the curious situation that while the Google-Verizon proposal doesn't require net neutrality for wireless networks, Verizon Wireless is preparing to roll out 4G wireless service under open-access provisions -- a service that will likely power millions of Google Android-equipped devices.
Nice trick. Clearly, it was a significant coup for Google to be able to achieve a deal with Verizon while still being able to enjoy the benefits of the telecom's open 4G network. In short, Google gets to have it both ways, so it shouldn't be surprised that Meinrath accuses it and Verizon of adopting a "for thee, but not for me" position.
"But while a Google-Verizon partnership may start out as a joint agreement, it won't end up that way."
"Google wants to be able to use Verizon's new C Block band, which contains an open-device mandate, to sell its services," Meinrath charges. "But while a Google-Verizon partnership may start out as a joint agreement, it won't end up that way. Either Google will get a leg up on Verizon and take them over and crush them, or Verizon will do the same thing. Without regulations preventing these sorts of mergers and acquisitions, there's no equilibrium point in telecom. Either Verizon or Google will take control, with the possibility being that Google would become either a telecom subsidiary or a telecom network owner."
That's a bold claim, but pro net-neutrality advocates feel betrayed by Google, and by the FCC and President Obama -- all perceived as friendly forces only one short year ago. And they're angry. "Our erstwhile allies are causing serious damage," says Meinrath. "It appears that the White House is perfectly happy with the status quo since they have not put any public pressure on the FCC to actually fulfill Obama's campaign promises to reform telecommunications and foster both an open Internet and a competitive media environment. As a growing consensus now believes, since the White House has refused to weigh in, they must be happy with Genachowski's inaction."
Time for an Ultimatum?
Since the "suspension" of the Lazarus talks, many parties have moved the Washington discussions across town to the K Street offices of the Information Technology Industry Council, an industry organization that lobbies the government on behalf of a wide variety of tech giants, including Microsoft (MSFT), Oracle (ORCL), Cisco (CSCO), Apple, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Dell (DELL). ITIC Chairman Dean Garfield has been in touch with Lazarus, according to several sources, and the FCC issued a muted statement of quasi-support for the talks, which do not include Google -- still smarting over the wicked PR hit it took over the Verizon proposal -- or the Open Internet Coalition.
"These are no longer net neutrality talks," says Meinrath. "These are mega-corporations talking to other mega-corporations about how they should carve up the Internet."
Giving critics who see the FCC taking a go-slow approach to this firestorm even more ammunition, just last week, the FCC issued a notice seeking further public comment clarifying several issues before it makes any decision, ensuring that nothing will happen until after the November elections. "If the goal is to keep talking about change with ever acting, then Genachowski has been a major success for the Obama administration," says Meinrath. "But if President Obama is serious about upholding his campaign pledge, he should tell Chairman Genachowski to either act or resign."
That may not be such an extreme position, considering what's at stake in this war: the future of the Internet.
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Originally from (and copyrighted by) AOL Daily Finance:
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It was a high-stakes gamble gone terribly wrong.
At approximately 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 5, Federal Communications Commission Chief of Staff Edward Lazarus walked into a conference room where his boss, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, was meeting with public interest groups discussing federal broadband policy.
The chairman turned to his chief of staff and asked him to update the room on the ongoing broadband regulation talks between Verizon (VZ), AT&T (T), Google (GOOG), Skype and the Open Internet Coalition, a Web industry group.
"Eddie looked like he had just lost his best friend," according to a person who was present and recalled the expression on Lazarus's face. Addressing the gathering, Lazarus announced that the talks had been terminated -- he would later say "suspended" -- explaining that the negotiators had found a number of points of agreement but had failed to reach a consensus.
What was at stake in the Lazarus talks? No less than the future of the Internet, with wide-ranging ramifications for the delivery of broadband content and services to the home -- not to mention hospitals, banks and mobile devices.
Outside of Public View
As Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Netflix (NFLX) and Google forge ahead with highly publicized new plans to stream high-speed content like movies and TV shows to your living room, smartphone, telecom and cable giants like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast (CMSCA) have been intensely lobbying to maintain control over the broadband pipes they spent billions to build. Comcast is going so far as to buy a rich content factory, NBC Universal, a deal that would create a $35 billion media and delivery juggernaut. That merger is currently pending before the FCC, and though public interest groups have been roundly critical, it's expected to be approved.
An epic and escalating war is now taking place over the next era of broadband content delivery. Some skirmishes are playing out in the public eye, but others -- perhaps the most critical -- are far removed from it. In fact, very few people know that the highly controversial efforts by Google and Verizon to hammer out their own proposal for a broadband policy framework -- news of which broke only last month -- started nearly two years ago. The outcome of this ever-hotter war will have a profound impact on the way consumers access information well into the future.
Just hours earlier on that August Thursday, Lazarus had assured the participants that his talks were moving ahead and making progress, according to sources familiar with the meetings. But when news emerged (in the form of a New York Times article that appeared online late Wednesday and in the Thursday newspaper) that two of the key participants, Verizon and Google, were on the verge of announcing their own proposal, the talks collapsed. It was a plan that Lazarus -- not to mention Skype or the Open Internet Coalition -- was not prepared to accept.
Google and Verizon disputed the Times article, insisting that they were pitching a policy proposal not a business deal, as the article described it. But it was clear that Lazarus's approach had hit a wall.
"We hadn't gotten consensus on any of the issues, and everything was contingent on everything else."
"We had exhausted the Lazarus process," a participant in the talks told DailyFinance. "We had reached an impasse, and the decision to suspend the meetings was the right decision. We hadn't gotten consensus on any of the issues, and everything was contingent on everything else. The toughest issues were managed services and wireless broadband, and how you treat them."
Prior to working at the FCC, Lazarus, a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, had spent most of the decade as a partner at legal powerhouse Akin Gump in Los Angeles. He has written extensively on various legal issues, and when Lazarus promoted his book Closed Chambers on The Daily Show in 2006, host Jon Stewart asked him about the need for complex legal jargon. Lazarus replied: "Do you know how much I charge on an hourly basis, Jon? If I didn't make up my own language, why would people pay me?"
At Stake: Equal Access to the Internet
For Lazarus (pictured at right), the closed-door meetings were a bold, high-stakes gamble to bring together the polarized sides of the frequently acrimonious debate over net neutrality -- the basic idea that Internet broadband providers shouldn't pick winners on the Web or discriminate against rival content. During a speech in Aspen just three weeks ago, Verizon policy chief Tom Tauke said: "The elephant that is still in the room is the issue that has dominated debate in this industry for at least five years, and that is net neutrality."
The Internet today largely operates under the principle of net neutrality, which most people don't even notice, so it's easy to take for granted. But all Web users and companies have equal access to the Internet, in the same way that all Americans have the right to take a road trip anywhere in the 50 states without a passport. Companies and institutions have closed networks, but the main public internet is accessible by all.
Without this open access, net neutrality advocates argue, startups like Google, Twitter and untold thousands of others could never have taken hold. Indeed, innovation online would be grievously stifled. For the last five years, Internet-dependent companies like Google and Skype have been fighting a series of running battles with the giant broadband providers over how net neutrality should be enshrined -- if at all -- in regulation and law moving forward.
Lazarus is a relative newcomer to the net neutrality debate. It appears he wanted to broker a deal he could hand to Congress on a silver platter heading into a contentious midterm election. Instead, he got a busted process, two rogue participants, furious interest groups and an agency in near-disarray, at least on broadband policy. "The chairman remains fully committed to preserving the free and open Internet as a platform for investment, innovation, free speech and consumer choice," a senior FCC official tells DailyFinance. The FCC declined to make Lazarus available for an interview.
Behind-the-Scenes Maneuvering by Two Giants
Lazarus was scrambling to find a solution to the grave jurisdictional crisis the FCC faced after a federal judge ruled in April that the agency lacked the authority to enforce net neutrality -- a verdict that rocked tech policy circles from D.C. to Hollywood. The court said the FCC had no power to enforce four principles laid down in 2004 by then-FCC Chairman Michael Powell that are the basis for net neutrality. Powell's successor, Kevin Martin, tried to use those principles in 2008 to sanction cable giant Comcast for slowing down peer-to-peer traffic -- an ultimately botched pseudo-regulatory action with far-reaching and unintended consequences.
But behind the scenes, two of the biggest and most important companies in technology and telecommunications, Google and Verizon, grew tired of waiting for the feds to act amid the regulatory and legal morass surrounding net neutrality and broadband policy. So, they got together and put a tangible broadband policy compromise on the table. In the process, the companies inadvertently pulled back the curtain on what could be the most ineffectual regulatory agency in Washington -- the FCC.
Although news of the Google-Verizon proposal emerged last month, the two companies have actually been working together on policy efforts to a greater degree and for longer than they've admitted publicly. In the fall of 2008, nearly two years before the Lazarus talks blew up, two top Verizon policy officials, Tauke and Link Hoewing, Verizon's VP of Internet and tech policy, happened to be in the Bay Area attending a tech conference, when they decided to pay a call at Google.
Traditional adversaries -- at least when it came to net neutrality -- Verizon and Google seemed like unlikely future allies.
Initially, the two companies' courtship was nurtured by the friendship between Alan Davidson (pictured at right), Google's with-it public-policy chief, and Hoewing, who has worked with Tauke to craft Verizon's policy strategy. This friendship predated Davidson's arrival at Google, going back to his stint at the Center for Democracy and Technology, where he was known as something of a savvy libertarian. Had Davidson and Hoewing, two of the brightest tech policy minds in D.C., not already been friends, the controversial deal that rocked Internet circles and made headlines everywhere might never have happened.
By 2008, Verizon had been slowly coming around to the ideas of openness that Google espoused -- at least relative to some of its fellow telecom giants, like AT&T. "Verizon has had a history of being forward-looking on a lot of Internet policy issues," says a top Internet industry source. "They've taken a strong stance on free-speech issues and were among the first to really start thinking about themselves as a broadband company."
Google's Spectrum Bid Was Built to Lose
Earlier in 2008, Verizon had agreed to pay $4.7 billion for the highly coveted 700 Mhz C Block in a closely watched FCC wireless spectrum auction and in doing so also agreed to abide by open-access provisions set by the FCC for that chunk of spectrum. (Those provisions mean subscribers can use any compatible phone and software and aren't locked into a single device, like Apple's iPhone.)
Google had craftily triggered the open-access provisions by meeting the FCC's $4.6 billion reserve bid. In a savvy strategic move, Google was bidding to lose -- or rather, bidding to trigger the provisions -- although Google execs later said the company would have ponied up the $4.6 billion for the spectrum had it actually won. But Verizon Wireless, the nation's largest mobile carrier, would never have allowed Google to buy nearly $5 billion worth of wireless spectrum outright. So, it outbid Google and accepted the FCC's open-access provisions.
It's taken nearly three years, but that chunk of 700 Mhz C Block spectrum is now Verizon 4G -- the company's next generation of superfast wireless broadband -- and it's about to be rolled out, with the open-access provisions intact, company officials say.
On their 2008 visit to the Bay Area, Verizon's Tauke and Hoewing ended up having a day-long series of meetings at Google's Mountain View, Calif., campus. It was the initial foray in what would become a nearly-two-year odyssey to see if the two companies could find common ground on net neutrality. About a year later, Google and Verizon quietly filed paperwork with the FCC, outlining some areas of agreement after the talks had gained momentum in the summer of 2009. Another filing followed in early 2010.
In March, Google CEO Eric Schmidt (pictured at left, above) and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg (at left, below) wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in which they pledged to work together and said that although "our two companies don't agree on every issue, we do agree generally as a matter of policy that the framework of minimal government involvement should continue." And of course, their talks gained greater urgency after the FCC lost the Comcast decision in April 2010.
"Google and Amazon and others have moved closer to the middle on the net neutrality debate," says a source familiar with the Google-Verizon partnership. "Verizon needs to have some predictability to continue investing. Google knows that it needs the telecom sector to make massive investment. And both companies need to keep consumers happy."
The conventional wisdom was that Google and Verizon would do little more than talk.
But three weeks ago, Google and Verizon finally dropped the bombshell they had been crafting, on and off, since October 2008. Essentially, the framework would ensure net neutrality on wired networks, meaning no traffic-blocking or discrimination against any content or rival. However, the proposal would not require net neutrality on wireless networks, which is apostasy to the principle's backers. Their deal would also create an ambiguous category of "managed services," a nonpublic, superfast network that companies could use to deliver prioritized content -- for a price -- something also fundamentally antithetical to hardcore net neutrality advocates.
"Was the Google-Verizon proposal the only reason the talks failed? No. Was it the straw that broke the camel's back? Yes."
When Lazarus finally called off the talks in August, he was about to leave for vacation anyway, according to multiple sources. But he and the other meeting participants had known for months about the separate discussion between Google and Verizon. Although those two had struck their own deal, the other parties, including AT&T and Skype, still remained far apart on the key issues. There was really no reason for them to continue negotiating when two of their peers had struck their own pact. Besides that, the telecom and cable companies weren't budging from their stance of no net neutrality on wireless networks nor from their insistence on "managed services," and those were positions the Open Internet Coalition and the FCC itself simply couldn't accept.
"Until the network operators start feeling that policymakers and elected officials won't support their position that there will be no rules on wireless services or specialized services, I don't see their position changing unilaterally," says Markham Erickson, the respected tech policy lawyer who led the Open Internet Coalition at the Lazarus talks.
"Was the Google-Verizon proposal the only reason the talks failed? No," says Gigi Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge, a D.C.-based pro-net neutrality advocacy group. "Was it the straw that broke the camel's back? Yes."
The Roots of Net Neutrality
Former FCC Chairman Michael Powell (pictured at right) knows very well how important the concept of net neutrality is. He was a George W. Bush-appointee who served as FCC chairman from 2001 to 2005, and it was his initial four principles that form the policy basis for the current net neutrality debate. Looking at the situation that the FCC is dealing with, Powell now says: "Genachowski has an enormous challenge, and he has to assert himself forcefully. The chairman has a problem in that his jurisdictional basis is unclear and confused. But that's why we have a Congress, and they should absolutely fix this problem and stop the confusion."
Powell disapproves of the FCC moving ahead to reclassify without Congress: "I don't think it's an appropriate position to say we [the FCC] may not have the authority, but we think Congress may take too long, so we're going to create it for ourselves."
As chairman, Powell pushed for what became known as the "four freedoms" throughout 2004 and 2005:
• Freedom to access content. Consumers should have access to their choice of legal content.
• Freedom to use applications. Consumers should be able to run applications of their choice.
• Freedom to attach personal devices. Consumers should be permitted to attach any devices they choose to the connection in their homes.
• Freedom to obtain service plan information. Consumers should receive meaningful information regarding their service plans.
The lost Comcast decision meant the FCC lacked jurisdiction over broadband and thus could not enforce the four freedoms or any other type of openness or net neutrality regulation. The decision threw the agency's ambitious National Broadband Plan into chaos because Genachowski has proposed adding two additional two principles -- one formalizing nondiscrimination, the essence of strong net neutrality, the other extending the principle to wireless networks -- to Powell's original four. The ruling put the chairman in a serious bind.
Genchowski did have one immediate option, what some referred to as "the nuclear option." That was to simply reclassify broadband Internet from a Title I "information" service to a Title II "communications" service, which would give the commission the needed regulatory authority to enforce net neutrality. Of the five FCC commissioners, Michael Copps and Mignon Clyburn, were ready to vote for immediate Title II reclassification, according to sources with knowledge of the matter. Genachowski would have been the third and deciding vote, but the chairman chose to hold off.
Such wholesale reclassification is unacceptable to the telecom and cable companies because they claim it would introduce the possibility of increased litigation and price controls, among other things. Instead, Genachowski tried to thread the needle, proposing something he called "the third way" -- or "Title II lite" -- as an alternative to standing around toothless after being knocked out in the Comcast case or taking the major step of full Title II reclassification. The chairman has garnered support for this position, if not wholehearted plaudits for the pace of his action.
"We're in favor of the third way," says Sohn of Public Knowledge (pictured at left). "And we're willing to accept the chairman's political calculation that [the FCC waits] until after the election. As long as he moves after the election, then we're fine."
"We are also hopeful for legislation, and we will exercise some patience there as well," Sohn adds. "But if there's no legislation after the election, the chairman has to move forward with reclassification because consumers can't wait any longer for protection and be left without a cop on the beat."
"All options remain on the table," a senior FCC official tells DailyFinance. "The FCC staff is busy reviewing and analyzing an extensive record of more than 50,000 comments in the broadband framework proceeding, which only closed a few weeks ago. Securing a solid legal foundation for broadband policy is too important an issue to rush."
"I Will Take a Backseat to No One"
As a presidential candidate, then-Senator Barack Obama sensed the importance of an open Internet, and he pledged to make broadband deployment, innovation and investment a centerpiece of his economic agenda. In November 2007, during a speech at Google's Mountain View headquarters, Obama declared his strong support for net neutrality in unambiguous terms before a packed house, with many Googlers standing.
"I will take a backseat to no one in my commitment to network neutrality," Obama declared, "because once providers start to privilege some applications or websites over others, then the smaller voices get squeezed out, and we all lose. The Internet is perhaps the most open network in history, and we have to keep it that way.
"We could see the Internet get divided up by the highest bidders," Obama warned. "We have to ensure free and full exchange of information, and that starts with an open Internet." After the speech, Google CEO Eric Schmidt thanked Obama for "such a strong message about innovation."
During the presidential campaign, Sascha Meinrath, now 36, was part of Obama's idealistic technology, media and telecom working group -- led by Genachowski -- that included young tech policy stars such as Alec Ross and Ben Scott, both now at the State Dept., as well as former FCC-staffer Blair Levin, among others. Meinrath is currently director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative and a top telecom policy expert and pro-net neutrality advocate -- another wunderkind of progressive tech policy activism. The New America Foundation is a relatively new, nonprofit center-progressive D.C. think tank run by Steve Coll, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former star at the Washington Post. Google CEO Schmidt is the foundation's chairman.
Nearly three years after the heady idealism of then-candidate Obama's tech, media and telecom working group, Meinrath (pictured at right) has become one of Genechowski's toughest critics. He says the FCC has failed to carry out Obama's vision by dragging its feet, cowering to both industry and Congress and generally delaying real action, despite some lofty rhetoric.
Meinrath isn't the only such critic. An emerging consensus among both public interest groups and progressive think thanks asserts that Genachowski has so far been a bust. "The FCC continues to kick the can down the road and prolong this process, but the longer the FCC ponders the politics of net neutrality, the longer consumers are left unprotected," Free Press Research Director S. Derek Turner said in a recent statement. "It is time for the FCC to stop writing notices and start making clear rules of the road. The phone and cable companies have shown us what the Internet will look like if they are allowed to write their own rules and build a two-tiered Internet with fast and slow lanes and zero protections on mobile broadband. We don't need more questions from the FCC, we need more answers."
Not surprisingly, some young GOP-allied telecom lobbyists have been overheard celebrating the public interest groups' distress in D.C. bars in recent weeks.
"When Genachowski became chairman of the FCC, many of us thought that this was a fantastic opportunity to implement the telecom agenda he had already signed off on," Meinrath says. "Which begs the question: What happened? Was there some sort of political math done where people realized that fixing telecom requires angering powerful constituencies? Why, now that he's chairman of the FCC, has Genachowski failed to implement so much of the agenda that he supported? Why has the Obama administration refused to hold Genachowski publicly accountable for his failure to act?"
Genachowski (pictured at left) is clearly ambitious. A former Internet executive for media mogul Barry Diller's IAC conglomerate, Genachowski is an old Harvard Law School chum of President Obama's -- and someone who genuinely cares about broadband issues and development. But he's also learned a few things about politics.
After leading Obama's tech media and telecom policy working group, Genachowski initially aimed high, hoping to be named the nation's first chief technology officer, when that was a Cabinet-level position, according to multiple sources. When the CTO job was downgraded, he became the front-runner to head the FCC.
"Over the years, I've worked with multiple chairmen, including Michael Powell and Kevin Martin, and Genachowski is by far the worst to work with," says Meinrath of his former boss on the working group. "Powell's and Martin's doors were open to us on a regular basis, even when we disagreed. That has all but ceased under the Genachowski administration."
The FCC today is "in endless process," Meinrath says, adding that "the opportunity costs of this failure to act are staggering -- in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. So, drawing out the telecom reform decision-making process is causing substantial harm to our economy: lost jobs, lost revenue and lost productivity."
Privately, some FCC officials have grumbled about an election-year, hyperpolitical Congress and lack of support from the Obama team. Others have even suggested that White House has pressured the FCC -- an independent agency -- to ratchet back on net neutrality for political reasons. Meinrath is among those making such claims. "Multiple senior FCC officials pressure have said in meetings where I was present that they've received pressure from the White House and from Capitol Hill to slow down on the National Broadband Plan and net neutrality," he says plainly. The FCC declined to comment on this allegation.
"If you're going to start a fire, you better be ready to deal with it."
But others say the current and recent White Houses rarely meddle too heavily in FCC matters, especially this administration, which is dealing with a crippled economy, war and now the Middle East peace process. "The White House has real limitations on what they can do to influence the agency," says a former FCC official. "They don't pick up the phone and tell an independent agency what to do. To a White House, the FCC is a place they don't want to be bothered with. They expect a chairman to take care of business over there."
"But they've badly mismanaged this issue," this former official adds. "If you're going to start a fire, you better be ready to deal with it."
Or as another former FCC official puts it more bluntly: "When you're a regulator in D.C., you can do two things: Go along to get along, or try to do something, which could lead to a shit-storm. Genachowski has managed to do basically nothing -- and create a shit-storm."
Close Ties Even Before Verizon's Android Smartphone
The inaction that has left Genachowski with such a mess is partly what drove Google and Verizon to seek out their separate peace on net neutrality.
While Google and Verizon insist that their initiative isn't a business project, they do have close ties, especially through their partnership on the Android mobile operating system, which Verizon has embraced successfully with hit products like the Droid smartphone, which it has used to combat Apple's wildly popular iPhone. And the Google-Verizon proposal certainly isn't a cut-and-dry Android business partnership. As Tauke's and Hoewing's fall 2008 meetings at Google demonstrate, the two sides were looking for common ground well before Verizon's Droid rollout.
The first two components of the Google-Verizon plan -- net neutrality for wired networks and no net neutrality for wireless networks -- are fairly straightforward. The first point represents an apparent victory for net neutrality advocates -- openness, choice and nondiscrimination on the Internet, period. "It would be hard to imagine a major telecom company agreeing to this even six months ago," says a person familiar with the deal, adding that this point has gotten overwashed by the more controversial elements.
Net neutrality advocates have been hoping to extend the nondiscrimination principle to wireless services, and in fact, Genachowski proposed it last fall. But the wireless carriers have been fiercely opposed. It's a matter of physics, they say.
"Spectrum is very limited because so many people can be using it in a given cell site."
"When you get into wireless, you're talking about changing the power levels as people move through a cell site and scheduling packets when the connections are most capable," Verizon's Hoewing told DailyFinance in a recent interview. "So we're constantly managing network traffic in order to reasonably assure good services over the network. Spectrum is very limited because so many people can be using it in a given cell site."
Hoewing says Verizon's proposal calls for more transparency from the carriers with respect to speeds and how networks are managed. "We're going to be ensuring that the consumer knows the real speeds they can expect to get. We've got do a better job with that."
Given the urgent need to free more wireless spectrum, this is a legitimate issue for wireless providers. AT&T can't even keep up with the voracious data demands of its iPhone and iPad users. Most everyone agrees that the U.S. needs to deploy more wireless spectrum, but that takes time, money and infrastructure.
Just What Are These "Managed Services"?
However, it's the third component of the Google-Verizon proposal, the mysterious "managed services" provision, that has proved most confusing and has the most controversial and potentially long-lasting implications.
In essence, Google and Verizon are proposing a separate "managed services" network apart from the "public Internet," where nondiscrimination wouldn't apply and where wealthy companies would be able to buy huge chunks of bandwidth and superfast connections. Some of the benign-sounding uses Google and Verizon have mentioned as managed services are things like high-speed, secure networks for medical or banking data. Managed services would be a faster, paid alternative to the public Internet, kind of like ultra-premium cable for the rich.
"We studiously avoided defining managed services to encourage innovation and because we don't know what these services are right now," Hoewing told me. "We define what they are not. They are not broadband Internet access that complies with the consumer protection principles where you can go anywhere, use any application, connect any device, and that would include the nondiscrimination principle. They are different but can use Internet content and [Internet protocol] technologies. They are an additional service, and we can't try to pass them off as being the public internet. The FCC would have the authority to look at managed services and send an emergency report to Congress if necessary."
Google's participation in such a proposal shocked many net neutrality supporters, who had long seen the search giant as one of their most powerful allies. Meinrath has an explanation for that turnabout: "Google wants to bolster its standing with Verizon because Google wants Verizon to be the platform for it's iPad-killer tablet and Google video."
"I think Google is schizophrenic. Its success is due to the open nature of the Internet."
Does that mean Google is evil? "I think Google is schizophrenic," Meinrath says. "Google's success is due to the open nature of the Internet. It's unlikely that it ever would have gotten off the ground had the dominant players locked in prioritization for their own services in the late 1990s."
Meinrath adds: "Eric Schmidt is a very smart man. Now that Google is the dominant market player, he's looking at the dollars that could come from a fourth, Google-centric, addition of a triple play [phone, TV, Internet] home package. This fourth 'Google service package' would generate huge amounts of money, but it would also undermine the best-effort Internet and would create a discriminatory regime prejudiced toward supporting the largest corporate players and undermining new competitors and innovators."
For the record, Google officials from Schmidt on down have publicly and privately insisted that the company remains committed to what Schmidt has lately taken to calling the "public Internet." At least for now, Google officials are are dismissing the suggestion that Google could, say, roll out a high-speed movie-rental service based on YouTube for Verizon FiOS customers as a "managed service." The public internet is just fine for us, thank you very much.
But the concerns don't stop there, Meinrath says. "All of this is before you even get into applications that have mixed-media uses -- the next generations of World of Warcraft and collaborative office suites that combine instant messaging with video, voice or gaming all integrated in the same application," he says. "So the so-called 'policy framework' that Google and Verizon propose requires that we either eliminate privacy and have a deep packet inspection regime across the board, or that we build a new broadband infrastructure for rich corporations who will then extract the cost of this redundant buildout from their customers."
Another Nice Trick by Google
Google knew that a backlash would come -- and boy, did it -- but the company's compromise on wireless and managed services was made at least a bit more palatable by the fact that Google's $4.6 billion bid for that 700 Mhz C Block that Verizon wound up buying triggered the open-access provisions for using that spectrum. So, we now have the curious situation that while the Google-Verizon proposal doesn't require net neutrality for wireless networks, Verizon Wireless is preparing to roll out 4G wireless service under open-access provisions -- a service that will likely power millions of Google Android-equipped devices.
Nice trick. Clearly, it was a significant coup for Google to be able to achieve a deal with Verizon while still being able to enjoy the benefits of the telecom's open 4G network. In short, Google gets to have it both ways, so it shouldn't be surprised that Meinrath accuses it and Verizon of adopting a "for thee, but not for me" position.
"But while a Google-Verizon partnership may start out as a joint agreement, it won't end up that way."
"Google wants to be able to use Verizon's new C Block band, which contains an open-device mandate, to sell its services," Meinrath charges. "But while a Google-Verizon partnership may start out as a joint agreement, it won't end up that way. Either Google will get a leg up on Verizon and take them over and crush them, or Verizon will do the same thing. Without regulations preventing these sorts of mergers and acquisitions, there's no equilibrium point in telecom. Either Verizon or Google will take control, with the possibility being that Google would become either a telecom subsidiary or a telecom network owner."
That's a bold claim, but pro net-neutrality advocates feel betrayed by Google, and by the FCC and President Obama -- all perceived as friendly forces only one short year ago. And they're angry. "Our erstwhile allies are causing serious damage," says Meinrath. "It appears that the White House is perfectly happy with the status quo since they have not put any public pressure on the FCC to actually fulfill Obama's campaign promises to reform telecommunications and foster both an open Internet and a competitive media environment. As a growing consensus now believes, since the White House has refused to weigh in, they must be happy with Genachowski's inaction."
Time for an Ultimatum?
Since the "suspension" of the Lazarus talks, many parties have moved the Washington discussions across town to the K Street offices of the Information Technology Industry Council, an industry organization that lobbies the government on behalf of a wide variety of tech giants, including Microsoft (MSFT), Oracle (ORCL), Cisco (CSCO), Apple, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Dell (DELL). ITIC Chairman Dean Garfield has been in touch with Lazarus, according to several sources, and the FCC issued a muted statement of quasi-support for the talks, which do not include Google -- still smarting over the wicked PR hit it took over the Verizon proposal -- or the Open Internet Coalition.
"These are no longer net neutrality talks," says Meinrath. "These are mega-corporations talking to other mega-corporations about how they should carve up the Internet."
Giving critics who see the FCC taking a go-slow approach to this firestorm even more ammunition, just last week, the FCC issued a notice seeking further public comment clarifying several issues before it makes any decision, ensuring that nothing will happen until after the November elections. "If the goal is to keep talking about change with ever acting, then Genachowski has been a major success for the Obama administration," says Meinrath. "But if President Obama is serious about upholding his campaign pledge, he should tell Chairman Genachowski to either act or resign."
That may not be such an extreme position, considering what's at stake in this war: the future of the Internet. ]]>
