broadband network – Wetmachine

Matt Stoller joins the Ranks of Progressive Elders of Policy

Harold January 7, 2009 February 26, 2013General, Tales of the Sausage Factory

*ahem*

Dear fellow members of super secret progressive cabal, fellow travellers in the Angry Left, community organizers, and other Fringies out to destroy honest small town American values and/or discredit the Democrats with our wild, out of touch ideas like not giving industry free checks and actually solving problems with our health care system, decaying infrastructure, and crappy broadband network.

I am pleased to announce that ace rabble rouser Matt Stoller will be joining the Inner Circle here in the DC Bubble by taking a position on the Hill. As you all know, Matt has been one of the amazing mainstays of progressive policy blogging — particularly on the media and telecom issues so near and dear to my heart. I hope you will all join me in welcoming Matt and familiarizing him with the Protocols of the Progressive Elders of Policy so that we may better destroy the true fabric of America by replacing the current amazingly successful free market model with our evil centralized socialist soviet-style top-down centrally controlled broadband infrastructure.

I know I personally, am looking forward to Matt’s help in imposing highly restrictive network neutrality regulations that will ensure that network administrators have no say in how they manage their networks, and — ultimately — lead to the nationalizing Veizon, AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner and all other broadband providers in Socialist Workers paradise.

We will celebrate by pulling out the still beating heart of a Libertarian (assuming we can find one) (still beating heart, that is) at the Secret HQ of our Google Overlords who are, of course, bankrolling our entire effort.

P.S. Please do not forget to vote for us for Best Technology Blog of 2008.

Stay tuned . . . .

Stevens Bill Analysis Part I — The Good Parts (Unlicensed Spectrum and Program Access)

Harold May 2, 2006 February 24, 2013Tales of the Sausage Factory

Senator Stevens (R-AK), Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, has introduced a massive telecom bill. The ten sections of the Communications, Consumer Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006 (helpfully broken down into separately named acts) covers a variety of material from subsidies for troops calling home to Return of the Broadcast Flag. As a consequence, I’ve broken up my analysis into a bunch of different postings.

Below, I talk about the two good things in the Stevens Bill, “The Wireless Innovation (WIN) Act of 2006,” (Title VI of the stevens Bill) and the “Sports Freedom Act of 2006” (Title IV Subtitle A).

In Part II, I will hit the really awful stuff on municipal broadband, network neutrality and broadcast flag.

This skips a bunch on local franchising, PEG, universal service, interoperability of emergency equipment, telephone rates for military personnel deployed abroad. I may come back to these if I can, but other folks, such as Saveaccess.org are doing a good job covering these issues and I also need to do my day job.

Lafayette we are here!

Harold July 18, 2005 February 24, 2013General, Tales of the Sausage Factory

The city of Lafayette, LA approved a $125 million municipal bond referendum to build out a municipal network by a hefty 62% to 38% margin. Contrast this with the ease with which state franchising is moving through the TX legislature now that SBC has dropped the anti-muni provision. There’s a lesson here, folks . . .

Tales of the Sausage Factory: Fight to keep the muni option open!

Harold February 23, 2005 February 24, 2013Tales of the Sausage Factory

I’m not saying that every municipality should have its own broadband network. I’m just saying every muni should have the _right_ to deploy the option. So Media Access Project and Free Press have put together a way for you to tell your state legislator and federal representative that they work for you, not their ILEC contributors, and that you, as a voter, don’t think you should have to kiss ILEC patootie to get broadband.