Just found out about the "Freedom to Connect" or F2C conference happening from April 3-4 in DC. Sounds like it will be an important gathering of policy-makers, experts and activists on internet public policy. The goal of F2C:Freedom to Connect is to bring a wide range of thought leaders to Washington, DC to share experience,…
Category: Media Reform
It’s a secret!
My friend Ralf sent me a link to an entertaining flash animation on government secrecy called “In the Dark”. Created under the direction of Matt Wuerker and sponsored by a new coalition called OpentheGovernment.org, the web movie lampoons the US government’s efforts to keep necessary and vital information away from the American people. “In the…
The Internet as Supermarket or Freeway?
The March 20th issue of the New Yorker has a nice "Talk of the Town" piece on the net neutrality debate called "Net Losses." In it they contrast competing visions of what the Internet is to become: Ultimately, Internet providers hope to manage the Internet the way a supermarket owner manages his store, charging companies…
Fair Use explained in comic book form
Here’s an awesome use of a visual medium to convey a complex subject. Bound by Law is a comic book created by the Duke Law School Center for the Study of the Public Domain to teach folks in an entertaining fashion about the principles and pitfalls of the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. The…
Learning about grassroots media activism
I’m at a media reform activist event at the New America Foundation in Washington DC. This series of panels is sponsored by the Media and Democracy coalition, which is being facilitated by Consumer’s Union. The first panel this afternoon is on “Telecommunications and Media Around the World.” The star-studded array of panelists included Jonathan Lawson…
Network-centric views on policy change
I attended an interesting briefing at the Ford Foundation yesterday that featured a couple of researchers who take a network / systems perspective to advocacy and policy change. The first was Richard Rogers, who teaches New Media at the University of Amsterdam. Richard spoke about "issue networks," which he defined as a set of actors…
Off to media reform event on Thursday in DC
I’m attending a media reform activist event this Thursday March 16 at the New America Foundation in DC. They are hosting a series of discussions in the afternoon on domestic and international media policy issues, with several of the key leaders in media reform including Jonathan Lawson of Reclaim the Media, Jamie Love from the…
My new gig: Media Reform
As I’ve been hinting over the past weeks, I am now working on media reform issues on a full-time basis. The Social Science Research Council, a distinguished non-profit that supports social science research in the public interest, has hired me as the program coordinator of their "Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Public Sphere" program. The…
NY Times Editorial on AT&T / Bell South Merger
The New York Times has an editorial in today’s edition entitled "The Call of the Wild Web" on the proposed $67 billion merger between AT&T and BellSouth. They argue that this deal has enormous potential impact on the Internet in general as an open communications platform: The health and future of the economy depend on…
Trouble in River City: Ma Bell is Back
Reuters reports that AT&T plans on acquiring BellSouth of Atlanta, one of its only rivals in the long-distance telephone and DSL business. At a price of $67 billion, AT&T will have “residential customers stretching from Florida to California and business customers comprising more than half of the Fortune 1000.” This is an alarming trend for…