PeerFlow

R.E.A. for Fast Internet Everywhere

In the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt discovered stayed at Warm Springs in south Georgia to treat his polio. He discovered that most of rural America did not have electricity, and thus little light at night, few refrigerators, no eletric irons, and where you could get electricity, it cost much more than he was used to.

It was Roosevelt himself who linked the country's rural electrification program to his adopted hometown of Warm Springs, Ga. In an August 11, 1938, speech at Gordon Military College in Barnesville, Roosevelt spoke at the dedication of Lamar Electric Membership Corporation (now Southern Rivers Energy). His comments there immortalized the impact the president's connection with rural Georgia had in illuminating the nation's farms and country back roads. "Fourteen years ago, a Democratic Yankee came to a neighboring county in your state in search of a pool of warm water wherein he might swim his way back to health," Roosevelt said before a crowd of 20,000 that summer day. "The place, Warm Springs, was a rather dilapidated, small summer resort. His new neighbors extended to him the hand of genuine hospitality, welcomed him to their firesides and made him feel so much at home that he built himself a house, bought himself a farm, and has been coming back ever since."

Truly, Roosevelt endeared himself to Georgians. He continued his speech with the following words, which have been quoted countless times in promoting Warm Springs, the Little White House and Georgia's EMCs: "There was only one discordant note in that first stay of mine at Warm Springs: when the first-of-the-month bill came in for electric light for my little cottage, I found that the charge was 18 cents a kilowatt-hour about four times as much as I paid in Hyde Park, New York. That started my long study of proper public utility charges for electric current and the whole subject of getting electricity into farm homes. So, it can be said that a little cottage at Warm Springs, Georgia, was the birthplace of the Rural Electrification Administration."

The R.E.A. produced more than electricity. "Truly, Roosevelt endeared himself to Georgians", and to the rest of rural America, making the rest of FDR's New Deal much easier to sell. Read the rest of FDR's speech: that's exactly what he's doing; using the R.E.A. t o sell the New Deal.

We have a similar situation today with high speed Internet and rural America. Republicans controled Congress and the White House for 8 years and the U.S. fell behind. Democrats want to pass the equivalent of another New Deal. High speed Internet access everywhere would have the effect the R.E.A. had in the 1930s.

Plus more: the Internet is the printing press, the telephone, the telegraph, the radio, and the TV of the 21st century. Without it, people can't even download the PDF of the CWA report that shows how far behind they are, much less YouTube, facebook, blogs, and access to diverse news sources throughout the world, not to mention the text of every bill in Congress and the voting records of every Congress member, as well as who their campaign contributors are. Those of us with Internet access take those things for granted.

Those without still mostly depend on one local newspaper and TV news for their information. Well, that plus chain emails for those who have dialup. With newspapers failing and TV news controled by a handful of companies, without the Internet there is no free press. Without a free press there is no democracy.

As FDR said in 1938:

Yes, electricity is a modern necessity of life (and) not a luxury. That necessity ought to be found in every village, in every home and on every farm in every part of the wide United States.

The same is true of high speed Internet access in 2009.

We need high speed Internet access everywhere for economic progress, national competitiveness, and for democracy. And yes, since the Internet is a huge source of recipes, for mom and apple pie! In south Georgia, even for okra fritters! All the Internet you can eat: how's that for a slogan?

U.S.A.: Dead Last in Internet Speeds, and Not Trying Very Hard to Catch Up

Leslie Cauley writes in USA Today:

The average Internet download speed in the USA is 5.1 megabits per second

A programmer on a project I'm working on just moved back to Finland. He's got 30 megabits per second, and he could get 100 Mbps if he wanted to pay a little more. Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A., we're lucky to get 3Mbps through DSL or 8Mbps through cable. Anywhere in Japan you can buy 100Mbps for about the same price per month as we pay in the U.S. for 3Mbps. I don't think you can even buy anything as slow as 8Mbps in Japan anymore.

USA Today got its data from a report by Communication Workers of America, which says:

New research indicates that between 2007 and 2009, the average download Internet speed in the United States has increased by only 1.6 megabits per second (mbps), from 3.5 mbps in 2007 to 5.1 mbps in 2009. At this rate, it will take the United States 15 years to catch up with current Internet speeds in South Korea, the country with the fastest average Internet connections.

U.S.A.! We're dead last and not trying very hard to catch up!

It's not just the U.S. as a whole that's a backwater, some parts are worse. Let look at Georgia. Don't stop with the interactive display, which appears to show the fastest tested, click on through to the PDF report that shows a more realistic picture of speeds people actually get; it has the map shown above.

Atlanta is as usual well served, at least by U.S. standards, which is 1/10 the speeds you can get in a couple dozen other countries.

But look at the other half of Georgia. See all the grey in the southeast of the state, between Valdosta and Savannah, and between Macon and Valdosta (GA-01)? Less than 768 kilobits per second. That's dialup. Which means nobody there will be picking up this PDF, or posting pictures on facebook, or watching clips of the Daily Show on YouTube, or following what their representative is up to.

And that's just the people who actually use the Internet. Most people don't. See all the white areas? There are few speed tests there because there are so few people there using the Internet to test.

Last week Rep. Sanford Bishop (D GA-02) said all information about the new health care reform would be online. That's a good 21st century step. But much of his own district (southwest Georgia) won't be able to get it that way; they're still mired in the 20th century.

In the 1930s there was a similar situation with electric power, as FDR discovered when he stayed at Warm Springs in south Georgia to treat his polio. Result: the Rural Electrification Authority (R.E.A.), which brought electricity to rural America and made the rest of FDR's New Deal welcome to rural Americans. More on that in the next post.

-jsq

Japan Still Far Ahead of US in Internet Connection Speeds

While the U.S. still hopes to get up to 10Mbps Internet connection speeds by 2012, Japan already has such speeds for cable Internet service almost everywhere. And yes, I mean Internet connections, not just broadband.

But in Japan cable Internet service is of declining popularity, because 30 or 40 Mbps for $50 or $60 per month is not really fast there.

DSL in Japan goes up to 50 Mbps for also around $50-$60/month.

But for actual fast, cheap, Internet connections, people in Japan buy Fiber to the Home (FTTH), which actually costs less and delivers from 100Mbps to 1Gbps.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A., EDUCAUSE has proposed 100Mbps national broadband using a funding method that already failed in Texas.

Japan didn't get to 100Mbps by a single government-funded network. It did it by actually enforcing competition among broadband providers. Why did it do this? Because a private entrepreneur, Masayoshi Son, and his company Softbank, pestered the Japanese government until it did so.

Thus it's refreshing that these graphs laying out how far ahead of the U.S. Japan is come from the New America Foundation. Chair? Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

Internet, Not Broadband, for National Policy

A national broadband policy is what you get when you put bellheads in charge. Fortunately, Scott Bradner has been on the Internet since the beginning, and explains the difference.

Broadband is not the Internet. Broadband is shorthand for a diverse class of wired and wireless digital transmission technologies. The Internet, in contrast, is a set of public protocols for inter-networking systems that specifies how data packets are structured and processed. Broadband technologies, at their essence, are high-capacity and always-on. The essence of the Internet is (a) that it carries all packets that follow its protocols regardless of what kinds of data the packets carry, (b) that it can interconnect all networks that follow those protocols, and (c) its protocols are defined via well-established public processes.

There’s risk in confusing broadband and Internet. If the National Broadband Plan starts from the premise that the U.S. needs the innovation, increased productivity, new ideas and freedoms of expression that the Internet affords, then the Plan will be shaped around the Internet. If, instead, the Plan is premised on a need for broadband, it fails to address the ARRA’s mandated objectives directly. More importantly, the premise that broadband is the primary goal entertains the remaking of the Internet in ways that could put its benefits at risk. The primary goal of the Plan should be broadband connections to the Internet.

It's a petition. Please sign it.

-jsq

PS:

Therefore, we urge that the FCC’s National Broadband Plan emphasize that broadband connection to the Internet is the primary goal. In addition, we strongly suggest that the Plan incorporate the FCC Internet Policy Statement of 2005 and extend it to (a) include consumer information that meaningfully specifies connection performance and identifies any throttling, filtering, packet inspection, data collection, et cetera, that the provider imposes upon the connection, (b) prohibit discriminatory or preferential treatment of packets based on sender, recipient or packet contents. Finally, we suggest that the Internet is such a critical infrastructure that enforcement of mandated behavior should be accompanied by penalties severe enough to deter those behaviors.

While you're at it, urge the FCC to stop talking about "consumers" and start talking about participants.

Iran and U.S. Media Irrevelance

Blogger Interrupted spells out the pretty much complete failure of the U.S. news media, especially cable news, to cover what's going on in Iran, which is at least of a scale with the Tienanmen Square protests that made CNN's name 20 years ago.

No obstacle was enough to stop the coverage. Even when China cut off CNN from Beijing, CNN reported repeatedly that they were cut off. BECAUSE IT IS NEWS WHEN A NEWS ORGANIZATION IS SHUT DOWN. When tanks hit the streets in Moscow in 1991, cameras were there, regardless of safety concerns, in one of the most closed societies on earth at the time, as the outcome was in grave doubt. Reporters risked their lives.

At least one news organization has been shut down, El Arabiya. Plus cell phone service is out and facebook, youtube, Voice of America, and BBC World Service are being blocked or jammed in Iran.

There are news organizations covering all this, most notably the BBC. But if you really want to know what's going on you have to turn to twitter or bloggers like Andrew Sullivan.

The biggest problem with the decline of the traditional news media is the accompanying decline in real reporting. Yet how hard could it be to report that the official election statistics are preposterous, the Iranian state's own election monitors say the election had problems, and the opposition (which apparently actually won) is very organized and is planning demonstrations today and a general strike Tuesday?

If the traditional media can't cover something as obvious as this, what good is it?

-jsq

Where the Money Leaving Music Sales is Really Going

Charles Arthur did a little research:

But the reality is that nowadays, one can choose between a game costing £40 that will last weeks, or a £10 CD with two great tracks and eight dud ones. I think a lot of people are choosing the game - and downloading the two tracks. That's real discretion in spending. It's hurting the music industry, sure. But let's not cloud the argument with false claims about downloads.

Or keep making such claims and keep electing Pirate Party members the the EU Parliament. Either way such claims have a limited life span.

USPS Bubble Pop

Big corporations' distortion of US Postal Service rates gets noticed by The American Interest:

Just as General Motors has in effect subsidized Big Oil by continuing to build gas-guzzlers in recent years, so has the USPS continued to subsidize Big Mail by shaping its operations to encourage what it now calls, revealingly, “standard mail”—that is, advertising junk mail. Most American citizens are blissfully unaware of the degree to which USPS subsidizes U.S. businesses by means of the fees it collects from ordinary postal customers. For example, if you wish to mail someone a large envelope weighing three ounces, you’ll pay $1.17 in postage. A business can bulk-mail a three-ounce catalog of the same size for as little as $0.14.

USPS management claims that “standard” mail makes lots of money, that the USPS makes a better margin delivering a “standard” mail package for $0.14 than it does a first-class one for $1.17. Why? Supposedly because of efficiencies produced by bulk-mail, machinable, zip-plus-four and zip-plus-nine standardization schemes. If you look at the revenue stream from advertising mail, it does look impressive, and it has been growing (for perverse reasons we’ll come to in a minute). But when you juxtapose next to that revenue stream the enormous transactional costs of maintaining a riotously complex rate structure to service it, you quickly reach a different conclusion: Standard mail, the costs of which are also generally tax-deductible for businesses, does not make money. It amounts to a corporate subsidy, which helps to explain why Congress, insofar as its members understand this, typically doesn’t object to the status quo. After all, these corporations have been known to contribute to electoral campaigns.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Not only are pennies shaved off the postage affixed to grandma’s letters routed directly into the pockets of direct-mail marketers, some 20 percent of direct-mail advertising volume is comprised of credit card, mortgage and other financial offers. So yes, the USPS has contributed in a subtle yet very real way to our burst economic bubble.

And the USPS's own "standard mail" is about to pop. It's worse than you probably think. An article well worth reading.

Chess End-Game for the Duopoly?

This is rich:

"Now is not the time, nor is this the appropriate proceeding, to engage in a debate about the need for net neutrality obligations," two TWC lawyers warned the FCC on Monday. The discussion should stay strictly focused on broadband deployment, the company insists. "Debates in this proceeding about new net neutrality regulations would only divert attention from these important goals, delaying the distribution of funds while generating considerable contention when the Commission should instead be fostering a spirit of collaboration."

Matthew Lasar, writing in ars technica, makes a familiar point:

And one of them, Comcast, definitely thinks that the agency was way out of line to invoke this statement when sanctioning the company for P2P throttling last year, and has filed legal papers against the FCC in federal court. Expect arguments that the Commission never really properly established the declaration as a set of rules when the trial starts.

Well, yeah, I'd expect to hear arguments like that, because the duopoly's paid shills have been making them ever since the FCC made that toothless declaration of principles.

Yet it seems the Obama administration has taken the initiative to do what the FCC never did:

But the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has hard-wired the FCC's pronouncement into law, at least when it comes to stimulus grantees. The legislation requires of grant recipients "at a minimum, adherence to the principles contained in the Commission’s broadband policy statement." Plus the government must publish, in consultation with the Commission, "the non-discrimination and network interconnection obligations that shall be contractual conditions of grants awarded."

Still, why is Time Warner picking now to be so intransigent? And why is NCTA claiming FCC can't interpret those principles, because

"Imposing new and untested nondiscrimination or interconnection requirements as a condition of stimulus funding risks injecting contentiousness, uncertainty, and delay into a process that should focus on creating new jobs and new broadband connections as quickly as possible,"

While NCTA and TW are of course themselves injecting contentiousness, uncertainty, and delay into the process.

Hm, so if the current duopoly won't accept these principles, the stimulus money may have to go to other companies. Which could mean the end of the duopoly.

The duopoly is playing chess with death.

Sterling: Samizdat Quality Quality Oligarch Press

Bruce Sterling,, who has studied and practiced paper and online media his en tire career, and who also traveled to the USSR and then to Russia, says Prof. Clemons hasn't imagined the worst:

(((Well, no -- the "worst" would be that the publishers keep grinding out product, only it's evil propaganda entirely subsidized by ultrawealthy moguls who have made themselves the only public source of news and culture. In other words, the commercial press collapses and it's replaced by a classically fascist press. (Likely run on bailout money.) THAT's the worst -- with the possible exception of a furious proletarian upheaval that forces everyone to read grimy, poorly-printed copies of PRAVDA.)))

It would be easy to see a path from where we are now (half of U.S. media is owned by only five companies that actively suppress stories they don't want to hear and promote stupid ones they do want) to Bruce's scenario.

Clemons: Advertising Doomed Online, Too

U. Penn. professor Eric K. Clemons, who researches strategic and competitive information technology, writes:

The expected drop in internet advertising revenues this year was neither unpredictable nor unpredicted, nor was it caused solely by the general recession and the decline in retail sales. Internet advertising will rapidly lose its value and its impact, for reasons that can easily be understood. Traditional advertising simply cannot be carried over to the internet, replacing full-page ads on the back of The New York Times or 30-second spots on the Super Bowl broadcast with pop-ups, banners, click-throughs on side bars. This might be a subject where considerable disagreement is possible, if indeed, pushed ads were still working in traditional media. Mostly they have failed. One newspaper after another is going out of business across the United States, and the ad revenues of traditional print media, even of highly respected magazines, is declining. The ultimate failure of broadcast media advertising is likewise becoming clear.

So a newspaper that wants to survive needs to find a way to do it without depending on traditional broadcast advertising.