Susan Crawford, author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age was interviewed on the Moyers & Company that aired on PBS on Sunday Feb 10 2013. The show was called ‘Who’s Widening America’s Digital Divide‘. The video is below. It has closed captions.
On Wednesday February 6 2013, Allied Fiber CEO Hunter Newby – a good friend of ISOC-NY, appeared on Craig Settles’ Gigabit Nation Internet radio show. Ostensibly the topic How Would a Susan Crawford FCC Chairmanship Impact Broadband‘ was recent proposals that Obama appoint Susan Crawford as the next FCC Chair, and Newby strongly supports the idea, feeling that she uniquely has the savvy and perception to carry through the necessary changes to overcome the current inertia. The conversation soon went into further detail of ways and means. Needless to say, Hunter advocates open access to rights of way, and that municipalities lay dark fiber systems in their neighborhoods, for utilization by both incumbents and newcomers. It’s a good listen.
On January 16 2013 Susan Crawford, author of “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age” presented the theme of the book at Cardozo School of Law in NYC. The presentation was followed by a Q&A. Many ISOC-NY members attended and contributed to the discussion. Video is below. No captions as yet, but see the AMARA links below and, if you can, please contribute a few minutes of your time to the transcription process.
Presentation:
Download: audio
Transcribe: AMARA
Q&A:
Download: audio
Transcribe: AMARA
ISOC-NY Meetup http://www.meetup.com/isoc-ny/events/97652892/
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/499584710073837/
Twitter: #CaptiveAudience | @scrawford
1/9 Art Brodsky U.S. Internet Suffers When the Refs Blow the Calls (HuffPo)
1/9 Sam Gustin Is Broadband Internet Access a Public Utility? (Time)
1/10 Susan Crawford on Diane Rehm show (npr)
1/10 Hance Haney Crawford’s Misplaced Nostalgia for Utility Regulation (TechLiberation)
1/11 Scott Cleland Professor Crawford’s Obsolete Public Utility Thinking for Broadband (Daily Caller)
1/14 Eric Null Susan Crawford: Make Internet Free For the Public, and Out of the Hands of Private Monopolies (PolicyMic)
2/1 Dan Gillmor Who should be the next head of the Federal Communications Commission? (The Guardian)
2/4 Michael Grotticelli <http://broadcastengineering.com/ip-network/google-s-high-speed-fiber-installation-provides-economic-growth-kc>Google’s high-speed fiber installation provides economic growth in KC (Broadcast Engineering)
On Wednesday, October 10, 2012, the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings presented Fostering Internet Competition in Washington DC. The event explored policies to maintain Internet competition. A panel of experts discussed policy recommendations that encourage innovation without stifling competition. The panel comprised Susan Crawford, Douglas Rushkoff, and antitrust expert Spencer Waller. The event was webcast live, and the video can be seen below.
On October 25 2012 Engine Advocacy and the New York Tech Meetup will present The Open Internet and the 2012 Election at NYU Stern School of Business. The event will be in the form of a conversation with Fred Wilson, Clay Shirky, and Susan Crawford. Space is limited, tickets are $10 and you need an Amazon account to buy one. No webcast has been announced as yet.
What: The Open Internet and the 2012 Election
Where: NYU Stern School of Business
When: Thursday, October 25 2012 – 6pm-7:30pm
Webcast: None announced as yet.
Register: Tickets $10 via NY Tech Meetup
Twitter: @nytm | @EngineAdvocacy
A live webcast of this event is archived at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/26429270
On April 27 2012 Susan Crawford gave a keynote at the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam. In her talk she gave a preview of the theme of her forthcoming book “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age”
Last OneWebDay – Sep 22 2011 – ISOC-NY hosted the Bob Frankston talk: Infrastructure commons – the future of connectivity in which he laid out the “Frankston Doctrine” – the heretical view that communities should build and operate their own communications infrastructure, entirely dispensing with telcos and usage-based billing. Long a lone voice in the wilderness, Frankston’s ideas are now beginning to get some love. On Valentine’s Day – Feb 14 2012 – OneWebDay founder Susan Crawford used her Bloomberg column The Case for Publicly Owned Internet Service to rail against State laws that prohibit municipal broadband initiatives.
Now, on Feb 25 2012, comes a searing GigaOM opinion piece from UK analyst Martin Geddes titled It’s the end of the line for telco .
Geddes opens:
The telecom industry has reached its peak. This is it. Look around you. Whatever you are doing in telecom, however you are making money in the field, it isn’t going to get better than this. This industry has acquired its maximum share of the economy. We are the digital railroad business at the height of the railroad barons. The only way now is down. We’ll see maybe one or two more mini-booms, a few more troughs, but the long-term trend has just gone into reverse.
and concludes:
Home networks don’t need service providers. You just buy a box and plug it in. Street-level networks don’t either — you can build a simple resilient mesh. Nor do town networks that join the kids with their school. We fundamentally don’t need communications service providers to manage data transmission. As long as we have a means to fund infrastructure, just as we manage with roads, we can do it for ourselves.
This is the beginning of the end of the Information Superrailroad, where all the bits are scarce and billable. Broadband ISP service is a branch line to nowhere.
Unlicensed wireless is the automobile, and local open fibers are the roads. It doesn’t carry very much very far right now, but it will. And with it, the fate of the telecom industry as constituted today is sealed. Like with the railroads, telcos will carry ever more traffic, and will protect themselves with political power. But their heyday is over, and a new disruptive model has emerged.
Bob Frankston will speak at the ISOC-DC event Connecting Everyone! Mesh Networks, Public Internet and the Drive Towards Universal Access on March 1 2012. There will be a webcast.
Susan Crawford in a Jul. 24 Bloomberg column Cyberwar Hysteria Hurts U.S., Helps Consultants notes how security hype, fueled by consultants spreading FUD couched in military language, is driving wholesale compromises of privacy and freedom.
Crawford notes:
The administration’s draft cybersecurity bill released in May would result in regulation of private Internet access providers by the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS approach maps to the framework under which chemical plants handling hazardous substances are regulated, signaling that some sector of the administration views the Internet as akin to an informational toxic-waste dump.
Unrestrained Sharing
Most importantly, the bill would allow unrestrained “voluntary” sharing of any information by private operators with DHS, no matter how it was acquired and no matter how existing law would otherwise restrict disclosure of the information. Such sharing would be justified for cybersecurity purposes, if the operator made efforts to remove irrelevant identifying information and complied with not-yet-written privacy protections. This government- centered structure bypasses the Fourth Amendment’s right to privacy. The stated limitations are no real limitation at all.
The White House proposal would also broaden the scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, make the CFAA part of a racketeering prosecution (triggering harsh penalties), and generally enhance the sentences available under that statute. The CFAA already is interpreted breathtakingly broadly. All computers connected to the Internet are protected by the CFAA against undefined “unauthorized access,” which has made it possible for disgruntled employers to go after employees who use any information for purposes the employer doesn’t like. Expanding an already unconstrained scheme is the D.C. equivalent of jumping the shark; it calls the entire cyberwar enterprise into question.
Here is video of Susan Crawford at the Students for Free Culture Conference on Feb 18 2011. Susan gives a brief preview of her coming book ‘The Big Squeeze” and then engages in discussion.
On Jan 19, as part of the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee State of the Net Conference 2011, a panel of experts discussed the changing landscape of video distribution, and its implications for lawmakers. The panel was preceded by a short presentation by MIT Research Associate Dr. William Lehr outlining the state of play.
Moderator
*Gary Arlen, President, Arlen Communications
Panel
joly 9:33 pm on February 8, 2013 Permalink |