Archive: Year: 2015

Competition Referring to state laws pushed by big telcos preventing cities from creating their own public broadband options, President Obama had this to say yesterday: “In too many places across America, some big companies are doing everything they can to keep out competitors. Today I am saying we are going to change that. Enough is enough.” Republicans in Washington "were swift to denounce" Obama's comments, Julian Hattem reports for The Hill, arguing that he was advocating more "big government" programs. The new upgraded version of VAN, the voter engagement platform used by many Democratic and progressive campaigns, looks pretty nifty. CityMart, the open procurement platform, is coming to the US, its founder and CEO Sascha Haselmayer, writes on the Knight Foundation blog. Ford (the car...

Command Lines The White House is unveiling a new report aimed at supporting more community-based broadband. As Amy Schatz reports for Re/code, "in reality, the White House isn't offering much new" beyond reiterating what the FCC has been saying about the topic. Still, with President Obama going to Cedar Rapids today to highlight the issue and the White House planning a June summit on local broadband access, the issue has never gotten more attention in Washington. Sophisticated software aimed at reading the emotion behind human facial expression was good enough to predict someone's voting preference with 73% accuracy, based on watching their reactions to clips of the Obama-Romney debates, Raffa Khatchadourian reports for The New Yorker in the course of a...

Believe it or not, it isn't too soon to start planning to attend Personal Democracy Forum 2015, taking place June 4-­5 at New York University's Skirball and Kimmel Halls. This is our twelfth annual conference! We've already confirmed these amazing speakers, who are all global leaders and innovators at the cutting edge of technology, politics and social change: Sunil Abraham - Executive director, Center for Internet & Society, Bangalore Cory Doctorow - Author and blogger, BoingBoing Harold Feld - Senior vice president, Public Knowledge Tristan Harris - Design ethics and product philosopher, Google Sandy Heierbacher - Executive director, National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation Nanjira Sambuli - Research manager, iHub Nairobi Astra Taylor - Author, "The People's Platform" Zephyr Teachout - Professor, Fordham Law School If past years are...

Turbulence In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in France, British prime minister David Cameron is calling for making encrypted communications services illegal, reports Andrew Griffin for The Independent. And interior ministers of twelve major European countries are calling for increased censorship of offensive material online, David Meyer reports for GigaOm. In case you need a refresher course in why Cameron's call is stupid and unworkable, just read this from BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow. Apposite: Iceland's visionary MP Birgitta Jonsdottir guest-edited the latest issue of The New Internationalist, and here is her opening essay on "Democracy in the digital era." (The full issue, which is only available to subscribers, includes essays by Jillian York, Dunja Mijatovic, Nick Davies, Sunil Abraham, Eric King,...

Recaps Previewing next week's State of the Union speech, President Obama is visiting Cedar Falls, Iowa this Wednesday to offer "new steps to increase access to affordable, high-speed broadband," the Des Moines Register's Jennifer Jacobs reports. The city is Iowa's only gigabit city, she notes. Obama is also going to "call for better safeguards against identity theft, improved privacy protection, [and] enhanced cybersecurity for the government and private companies," Michael Shear reports for The New York Times. "Both Democrats and Republicans are desperate for any edge at the polls, and they say they’ll be employing 21st-century data mining techniques in search of supporters from this ripe demographic that has little or no track record in politics," reports Darren Samuelsohn for Politico. He writes,...

Clues Doc Searls and David Weinberger, two of the web's best thinkers, have updated The Cluetrain Manifesto, a seminal book they co-authored in 2000 along with Chris Locke and Rick Levine. Their 121 "New Clues" are well worth studying. A few of my favorites: 2. The devices we use to connect to the Internet are not the Internet. 9. The Internet is no-thing at all. At its base the Internet is a set of agreements, which the geeky among us (long may their names be hallowed) call "protocols," but which we might, in the temper of the day, call "commandments." 12. There has not been a tool with such a general purpose since language. For those of us with longish memories, one thing that is...

Overdue Speaking at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler strongly implied that the agency will be voting to reclassify Internet service providers under Title II of the Communications Act, invoking the common carrier frame to protect net neutrality, Megan Geuss reports for Ars Technica. Susan Crawford explains why "zero-rating" services that give users free data to access a limited portfolio of web services like Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia are pernicious. She writes, "… the cost of such services is the future of the Internet. Those users may never move to “real” Internet access, satisfied with their “free” access to a walled garden of chosen services. And carriers will have no particular incentive to provide them with...

Je Suis Charlie JeSuisCharlie. Reported.ly's coverage of the massacre. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush launched his 2016 presidential exploratory leadership PAC yesterday, posting videos speaking in English and Spanish while walking down a New York street, and raising more than $100,000 online in just the first few hours, Darren Samuelsohn and Tarini Parti report for Politico. Don't miss your chance to go "behind the scenes" with the House Republicans on Capitol Hill via their new Instagram page. No word on whether this will include making their actual legislative work more transparent. (h/t @NewtGingrich) Women make up only one-quarter of commenters on New York Times web pages, researcher Emma Pierson reports in a guest post on Nicholas Kristof's blog page, though their comments tend to get...

Pushbacks After you get past Ev Williams' throat-clearing clarification about why he "doesn't give a shit" if Instagram has more users than Twitter, the company he cofounded, his Medium essay about measuring attention rather than clicks is well worth your (ahem) time. Prediction lists proliferate at the beginning of the year and they're generally not worth much, but from this batch of "consultant predictions" over at Campaigns & Elections, John Rowley's stood out. "Groups of voters are going to push back against politicians having so much data on them," he predicts, and "2015 will be the last cycle major campaigns will worry much about news media relations with print." Sounds about right. (By the way, C&E editors: What's with not linking to...

Catch-ups Politico's Darren Samuelsohn rounds up the latest thinking on voter targeting techniques, with privacy advocates warning that at some point campaigns will go too far. The "invisible primary" for the 2016 presidential campaign starts now, and one requirement to be competitive, according to Nicco Mele of Harvard's Kennedy School, is an email list of at least one million supporters by this March, reports John McCormick for Bloomberg News. Democratic data wonks think they won (despite losing) in 2014 because they figured out how to "scale down" data sciences to state and local races, CNN Peter Hanby reports. Net neutrality update: Some imposition of Title II of the Communications Act seems more likely, reports Brian Fung for the Washington Post, taking the pulse of...