I watched bits and pieces of the VP debate on Thursday night, but had a bit cute overload watching Palin, and donchaknowit – I had to turn it off.

So friday I looked around the interwebs for a good thorough recap of the debate and found the New York Times interactive video of the debate. I watched the whole thing over the course of Friday, and that night showed my brother the highlights. It was so easy to pick out the best parts: Palin’s shout outs and winks, and Biden on McCain the maverick and his family.

New York Times debate interactive screenie

It would be great to see more video presented this way – especially talking-head video. Better yet nytimes should linkify the transcripts of the debate, allowing people to go in depth and find out what the candidates are talking about.

Cool.

The meeting hosted input from BitTorrent and other large network operators. Members of the coalition came down against any kind of regulation of their networks.

According to an article on FreePress.net, members are saying that BitTorrent and video downloads are beginning to consume a lot of bandwidth, and that the network operators need not be burdened by regulation when they manage their networks.

From the press release on the FTTH Council’s website:

“There is a continuing need to monitor and manage the networks to ensure available bandwidth for all subscribers,” said John Andrews, President of US Sonet [a major network operator]. “Network management is crucial and necessary for the success of new broadband applications and services. And, changing network threats require constantly changing network management practices.”

Network operators know better how to manage their network than politicians do. However customers get mad when they buy an Internet connection and can’t use it the way they expect.

Customer protection through simplicity. This is what network neutrality has to be about. Right now I pay for a 5 megabit Internet connection, and I can use that connection as much as I want whenever I want. Special exceptions to these rules will cause confusion and frustration. The Internet is complicated enough as it is.

via freepress.net

Don’t get too excited yet, the FCC’s commissioners have to vote on it at their next meeting on June 13.

It appears companies are willing to try the ad-supported Internet model again. From Wired’s Epicenter blog:

“We’ve been pushing for [free internet access] as a matter of policy for two years,” says John Muleta, founder and CEO of M2Z Networks, a company that aims to provide free ad-supported broadband access.

…

So is Muleta talking to Google, Yahoo or Microsoft about a partnership for the free access?

“We’re a Silicon Valley company and we’re always talking to potential partners,” Muleta says.

I do wonder if Google is going to get involved in another spectrum auction. I hope the last one didn’t take to much out of them. The open-access provisions that Google proposed for the last auction would be great to have applied here, but it’s not clear that the FCC will do that without pressure. Requiring the winner to allow any device and service over their airwaves in addition to free access is going to make this spectrum even less attractive.

Some quotes from the report about local governments with websites:

Among the counties analyzed, Internet use for transactional purposes varied considerably. It appears, for example, that being close to an urban county makes a difference in the quality of Internet interaction possible in counties.

And if if you didn’t see that coming, here is another quote:

In analyzing the quality of e-government services among municipal governments (including boroughs, townships and cities), the most striking finding was how little local governments in rural Pennsylvania use the Internet at all, as measured by the availability of a website. The exception, a county with a strong tourism economy, had a high-level Internet presence.

The report says that the Internet was most noted for it’s “transactional use” and far less for it’s “transformative use.” The document breaks these two uses down. Transactional use of the Internet replaces the need to travel for face-to-face interaction and makes finding information easier. Transformative use means applications: creating products and services that are only possible with the Internet and information technology.

As far as getting more people connected, the report makes this comment:

Proactive governments are critical to the successful uptake of broadband technologies. Government is often a key enabling factor in the availability and use of broadband, primarily through legislative action that creates opportunities and, in some cases, constructs constraints through mandates, which dictate that technology and services be provided.

I’m interested to see the recognition of the “transformative use” of the Internet. How can the Internet transform rural America?

So the FCC recently voted on a temporary measure to cap the payments until the rules can be fixed. According to Ars Technica, analysts are calling for the revision on the rules to focus the payouts on building out broadband throughout the country rather that continuing to pay telecoms for the old fashion phone lines.

Great idea. It should be obvious though right? Paying the telecoms to build out the modern Internet infrastructure instead of copper phone lines?

The report mentions South Korea, where a high population density makes broadband roll out more practical, compared to the U.S. where people live in single-family homes spread out in suburbs.

The report makes 11 policy recommendations based on their findings. Aside from the typical tax incentives to companies and consumers making it cheaper to deploy and adopt broadband, the report recommends extending government programs to help pay for wider deployment.

Some of the more interesting recommendations echo ideas that were discussed in my Digital New Deal post. Directly from the report:

• Promote the widespread use of a national, user-generated, Internet-based broadband mapping system that would track location, speed, and price of broadband.
• Fund a revitalized Technology Opportunities Program, with a particular focus on the development of nationally scalable Web-based projects that address particular social needs, including law enforcement, health care, education, and access for persons with disabilities.
• Support new applications, including putting more public content online, improving e-government, and supporting telework, telemedicine, and online learning programs.

It’s an interesting way to try to drive broadband adoption: force important government and social services online and use it as a reason to push the issue.

The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting op-ed up on their website about a Digital New Deal. With a recession and a lot of young people coming of age having used the Internet for most of their lives, the author, Helen De Michiel, argues that the government should start an online public works program. The program would put savvy young ‘millennials’ to work building a public commons, kind of a super-social networking site, commercial-free and open to all.

This sounds like an interesting idea, especially with an impending recession that some have said will much worse than what we’ve seen in a while.

There is a response to the article at PBS’s Mediashift Idea Lab that brings up the most important issues of a kind of Digital New Deal, stuff that was not addressed in first article: broadband penetration and willingness of people to participate.

I think the priority of a Digital New Deal should lie in doing something about these issues. Like the effort to provide electricity and telephone service to rural areas in the ’30s and ’40s, we need a serious push to wire rural areas and neglected parts of urban areas for Internet access. Connected Nation, Inc.,, and not-for-profit that promotes broadband adoption and computer literacy, released a report that said that increasing broadband availability would add an extra $134 billion to the economy every year. That’s economic stimulus.

I think once this is done, we can discuss the possibility starting an online digital public works project. There is much that could be done with the Internet to improve our society and government, but we can’t leave people behind because they can’t get or afford access to it.

The law, if passed, would require the FCC to keep closer tabs on Internet service providers to insure that they are fair in the way they manage and charge for their services.

Predictably the telecom and wireless companies have lobbied against the bill, saying it’s unnecessary and would hurt them.

An article at IP Buisness magazine has a great look at where the bill is at and why its probably not going to happen this year despite broad support.

The researchers give a few possible explanations for the findings. That for people in lower income groups the use of the Internet was more valuable than other activities, the Internet has more value for these groups, these groups had more time to spend on the Internet, or these groups see more value in using the Internet.

This compelling data should support the argument for those pushing governments to provide more funding to connect low income people, and in fact the authors of the paper suggest this:

The results show that predicted usage among low-income individuals would be high, even higher than their [higher income] counterparts … In particular, these findings suggest that a subsidy for internet use would not be wasted. Individuals who have not yet adopted (and who are primarily low-income) would use the internet intensely if given access.

The data collected by the study is a few years old, from 2001, but the researchers affirm that their inferences from the data are still valid, saying the same pricing structures exist, keeping the same lower income groups out.

found via PhysOrg

U.S. President George Bush made a similar statement in 2004. Bush set the bar a little higher, promising universal broadband (high-speed) Internet access by 2007. But that hasn’t happened yet either.