Last night gave Barack Obama a rare uncontested moment in the spotlight, and his task was largely, as Monica said below, to use it to remind American voters just why they voted for him in the first place. For the many Americans who didn’t vote for him, he had an opportunity to remind many of […]
Nancy Scola
Nancy Scola is a writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in Science Progress, Politics Magazine, AlterNet, and the Columbia Journalism Review.
Posted inArticle
China Not a Fan of “One Internet” Policy.
The Chinese government’s reaction to The Chinese government’s reaction to Hillary Clinton‘s big “Internet freedom” speech has been strongly negative and fairly pitched. No real surprise there. She did directly call out Beijing for limiting their citizens’ access to information. But the particular way in which they’re going about their criticism is worth paying attention […]
Posted inArticle
The Internet, Mom, and Apple Pie.
Hillary Clinton Hillary Clinton just wrapped up an hour-long speech at the Newseum that had been billed by the State Department as a “major address” on “Internet freedom.” If people were hoping for Clinton to start putting meat on the bones of her 21st-century statecraft approach that I wrote about for the Prospect here, this […]
Posted inArticle
A China Without Google.
Google’s Google’s possible pullout from China is, I think, both surprising and not. Filtering out references to Tiananmen Square doesn’t really meet anyone’s definition of a free and open Internet, and it really didn’t seem sustainable for the company to ramp up selling itself at home as the protector of Internet openness (see, for example, […]
Posted inArticle
The Internet is Falling! The Internet is Falling!
There’s just really very little in the way of actual evidence in Larry Downes’ CNET op-ed today that claims that the Obama administration is “clearly backtracking” on a commitment to turning the principle of net neutrality into enforceable policy. Downes’ column is of a piece with a new talking point that has popped up in […]
Posted inArticle
More Forgiving Anti-Terrorism Tools.
Laura Rozen quickly picked up yesterday on one striking nugget in the Obama administration’s new review of the Christmas Day bomb incident. The report’s summary reveals that the State Department didn’t know that Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab held a U.S. visa because of a misspelling. Seems perhaps like a pedestrian finding. But it actually […]
Posted inArticle
Lowering Commercial Volume.
My holiday gift to you is a topic of dinner table conversation that, if my experience is any guide, can bring about a rare moment of unanimity regardless of the politics of your assorted relatives. I happened to casually mention during a holiday get together this past weekend that Congress is My holiday gift to […]
Posted inArticle
Snowballs and a Distribution Divide.
On Black Friday, I picked up a sweet 32″ Samsung HD TV for about $500. That’s not nothing, but it occurred to me after I left Best Buy that the full suite of cutting edge technology I own can today be had for a few thousand dollars (even less if you go MacBook instead of […]
Posted inArticle
Entertaining the Idea of Open Access.
Ars Technica’s Matthew Lasar has a good rundown of what’s in the FCC’s first national broadband plan status report — and the total lack of language on open access that has broadband advocates nervous about how ambitious the final plan, due on Obama’s desk in mid-February, will be. One reason why open access’s absence from […]
Posted inArticle
Loca-aurism.
One bright spot in the decade it’s taken for the House to finally pass a very good bill on community radio licensing might be that all this haggling is defining a place for LPFM (short for “low-power FM”) in the regulated media landscape. To make sense of LPFM, it’s helpful, I think, to think of […]