Nancy Scola

Rebecca McKinnon, a China expert, seems hopeful that the great Google Web site switch that points people from Google.cn to a new Hong Kong-based version of the site will give Beijing enough cover to ignore that site’s refusal to censor. It’s technically a Hong Kong site, they might say, and look the other way. Google […]

This afternoon, Google made its expected announcement on the future of operations in China. The background, of course, is that Google had said recently that it would no longer censor search results in China, which China said put the company in violation of Chinese laws. Which brings us to today. In its announcement, Google said […]

Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but there are signs that we’re starting to see a questioning of the consensus that the national broadband plan released by the Federal Communications Commission last week was all that it could have been. I’ve argued that the plan does little to encourage competition. And without competition in broadband, it’s pretty […]

The long-awaited National Broadband Plan was, as you might be aware, finally released Tuesday by a small planning unit within the Federal Communications Commission. What’s been somewhat surprising is how the reaction to the plan among broadband-access advocates seems to be that it’s a good document, as far as it goes. Fair enough. But a […]

Tribal lands in the United States have terrestrial broadband penetration rates of about 10 percent, according to the best available data, as cited in the new National Broadband Plan released yesterday. As a point of comparison, the broadband adoption rate among rural Americans more broadly is 50 percent. It’s important to keep in mind the […]

In its 360-page National Broadband Plan [PDF], set to be handed over to Congress today, the FCC was kind enough to provide a Cliff Notes version of the document in the form of one literary footnote at the text’s beginning: In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Welsh rebel Glendower tells his co-conspirator Hotspur: “I can call spirits […]

As Monica mentioned below, tomorrow was slated to be the day that the Federal Communications Commission would, finally, put out some version of a National Broadband Plan, the first of its kind for the United States. I happened to get a copy at a pen-and-pad briefing at the FCC this morning, and we were told […]

In the latest issue of Democracy, Time‘s Joe Klein suggests that the way to reinvigorate liberalism as an appealing political doctrine is to celebrate its comforting efficiencies, its unwavering competence, its you-can-leave-your-house-keys-with-me-ness: Liberals are congenitally disposed to thinking grand thoughts, and that’s a good thing — in the long run. In the short term, however, […]

Matt Bai has a piece in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine riffing off of Larry Lessig‘s important work in correcting both the perception and practice of Congress being horrifyingly warped by the money that flows into campaign coffers. Lessig’s work to reform Congress deserves more attention and debate, for sure. So that’s good. But […]

The New York Times‘ Mark Landler reports that the Treasury Department will today announce an affirmative policy freeing U.S. tech companies like Yahoo, Microsoft, Twitter, and Google to distribute their products in places like Sudan, Cuba, and in particular Iran. Here’s Landler: The decision, which had been expected, underscores the complexity of dealing with politically […]