Government Technology

Media Mergers a Threat To Community News?

Ron Tang — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 01:54:00 -0400

The policies set by the U.S. federal government on media ownership have tremendous impact on community media that traditionally has played an important role in fostering community awareness and involvement. For local municipalities and constituencies, the on-the-ground media ownership rules ultimately boils down to the question of how diverse the opinions expressed in local media will be and how representative of topical issues the local news will be.

The past twenty years have seen an unprecedented number of media mergers spanning TV, radio, film, publishing and online holdings. An oligopoly has emerged whereby a half-dozen massive corporations control enormous numbers of media outlets. In 2006, combined revenues from these companies were larger than many countries -- even individually, their economic might is daunting:

- Viacom ($11.5 billion in revenue) and owner of Atom Entertainment, BET, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, VH1, Paramount Pictures, Paramount Home Entertainment, publishing company Famous Music and music game developer Harmonix, in addition to the Viacom 18 joint venture with the Indian media company Global Broadcast news.

- CBS Corporation ($14.3 billion in revenue) owns the CBS Television Distribution Group, CBS Television Network, the CW joint venture with Time Warner, Showtime, Simon & Schuster book publishers, as well as 27 television stations and CBS Radio, Inc, (composed of 140 stations across the country).

- News Corporation ($25.3 billion in revenue) controls the Fox Broadcasting Company (including television and cable networks such as Fox, Fox Business Channel, National Geographic and FX), 35 television stations, print publications including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, TVGuide, and the magazines Barron's and SmartMoney, HarperCollins book publishing, film production companies Blue Sky Studios, Fox Searchlight Pictures, and 20th Century Fox, MarketWatch.com and other web holdings, and non-media holdings including the National Rugby League.

- Walt Disney Company ($34.3 billion in revenues) and owner of the ABC Television Network, A&E, ESPN, the Disney Channel, Lifetime, SOAPnet, 227 radio stations, multiple music and book publishing companies, media production companies Miramax, Touchstone, Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar Animation Studios, the cellular service Disney Mobile, and numerous theme parks.

- Time Warner ($44.2 billion in revenues) owns the America Online (AOL), Cartoon Network, Cinemax, CNN, the CW (a joint venture with CBS), HBO, MapQuest, Moviefone, Netscape, TBS, TNT, Warner Bros. Pictures, Castle Rock, and New Line Cinema, as well as over 150 magazines, including Time, Cooking Light, Marie Claire and People. Time Warner Cable also controls roughly 20% of all cable broadband subscribers and increased its subscriber base by 3.5 million (to roughly 15 million total) with its acquisition of Adelphia with Comcast.

- General Electric ($164.3 billion in revenues) has media-related holdings including Bravo and the Sci-Fi Channels, Focus Features, MSNBC, television networks NBC and Telemundo, Universal Pictures, and 26 additional television stations in the United States.

In opposition to these massive media conglomerates is a growing coalition of civil rights, public interest, consumer, and local media organizations. According to Ben Scott, Policy Director for Free Press, media conglomerization "is not a left-right issue -- it unites a wide variety of organizations concerned about the impact of concentrated media on the diversity of opinion a democracy requires." As it turns out, in addition to "the usual suspects" that one might expect to join the fight against big media (for example, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Free Press, Independent Press Association, National Federation of Community Broadcasters), everyone from the American Federation of Musicians to the National Council of Churches, and from Rainbow Push to the National Hispanic Media Coalition has joined the "Stop Big Media" Campaign (www.stopbigmedia.com).

The only requirement to joining Stop Big Media is agreement with the principles of the coalition. The core element of the campaign is a belief that "a free and vibrant media full of diverse, local and competing voices is the lifeblood of America's democracy." And the straightforward goal of Stop Big Media is to "ensure that our media system is, in the words of the Supreme Court, 'an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will prevail.'" To that end, Stop Big Media focuses on advocacy efforts aimed at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Congress.

At its heart, Stop Big Media focuses attention on the stark outcomes of media conglomerization. As a case in point -- and, perhaps, a reason why many civil rights organizations have joined the Stop Big Media Coalition -- as mergers and acquisitions have run rampant throughout the industry, minority ownership of media has shrunk. Inez González, Director of Media Policy for the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), puts the current situation bluntly, "There has been no progress on the diversity issue in media ownership... [diversity] doesn't seem to have been a priority for this administration or the current FCC chair... It was only until Free Press released their studies that we confirmed what we all knew that the numbers are just unacceptable." Currently, while racial and ethnic minorities constitute 34% of the U.S. Population, they own only 7.7% of full-power radio stations; 3.15% of television stations. "Women are similarly underrepresented in the media ownership landscape," states Beth McConnell, executive director of the Media and Democracy Coalition. "When diverse communities are shut out of media ownership, their voices and points of view -- as well as issues that matter to their communities -- is poorly reflected, or not reflected at all."

As González points out, "For Latinos there is a great urgency to deal with media consolidation because the issue has now become very personal. Hate Speech in media has always existed but it has increased to a scary degree and its being propagated by owners that are not interested in serving the public interest -- Clear Channel, for example, syndicates Michael Savage, a hate speaker, all over the country. This is the type of business strategy that is harming communities of color."

"Media consolidation limits the number of voices heard in the media, affecting both the political left and right," writes McConnell. "The more diversity of ownership, the more diversity of view points. That's why organizations and policy makers from both ends of the political spectrum have spoken out against weakening media ownership rules."

As González makes clear, civil rights groups are fighting against interests with deep pockets and strong lobbying arms. "The most prominent opponents of the Campaign are the broadcasters and newspaper companies that desire the combine in local markets," says Scott. "These companies and their trade associations spend millions lobbying in Washington to scrap public interest limits on media ownership." And these millions have had an effect.

On November 13, 2007, FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times claiming that a "relatively minor loosening of the ban on cross-ownership of newspapers and TV stations in markets where there are many voices" was vital "to improve the health of the newspaper industry." According to Martin, this allowance for further conglomerization "would help strike a balance between ensuring the quality of local news while guarding against too much concentration." McConnell has a very different take on this, pointing out that Martin and others "argue media mergers, particularly among newspapers and broadcast television stations, are needed to boost their bottom line; but no credible evidence exists that media mergers create healthier news outlets that produce better reporting or programming."

As Scott explicates, "The Stop Big Media Coalition was a response to the FCC's decision to loosen media ownership limits to permit further consolidation of ownership in local markets." In response to Martin's op-ed, Free Press, the organization coordinating the Stop Big Media campaign, released an 18-page report discussing at length 10 facts that contradict Martin's public statements. As the report concludes:

- FACT #1: Martin's ‘modest' proposal is corporate welfare for Big Media. Martin's plan would unleash a buying spree in the top 20 markets, making it easier for companies like Belo, News Corp. and Tribune Co. to push out independent, local owners.

- FACT #2: Loopholes open the door to cross-ownership in any market. Under Martin's loose standards, cross-ownership waivers could be approved in hundreds of smaller cities and towns.

- FACT #3: Loopholes allow newspapers to own TV stations of any size. The same technicalities could permit top-rated stations in any market to combine with major newspapers.

- FACT #4: FCC history shows weak standards won't protect the public. The current rules forbid cross-ownership, but the FCC hasn't denied any temporary waiver request in years.

- FACT #5: Cross-ownership doesn't create more local news. The latest studies -- using the FCC's own data -- show that markets with cross-ownership produce less total local news, as one dominant company crowds out the competition.

- FACT #6: Cross-ownership won't solve newspapers' financial woes. Claims that the newspaper industry is about to "wither and die" are greatly exaggerated, and no evidence shows that cross-ownership would make things better.

- FACT #7: The Internet is an opportunity, not a death sentence. Mergers and consolidation are not the answer to the financial problems of the traditional media.

- FACT #8: Martin's plan would harm minority media owners. Nearly half of the nation's minority-owned TV stations are lower-rated outlets in the top 20 markets, making them a target for Big Media takeovers.

- FACT #9: A broken and corrupt process creates bad policies. The FCC's lack of transparency, flawed research and secret timetable have tossed aside basic fairness and accountability in the rush to change media ownership rules.

- FACT #10: The public doesn't want more media consolidation. Martin's actions ignore the millions of Americans -- and 99 percent of the comments in the FCC docket -- who oppose letting a few media giants swallow up more local media.

On December 18, 2007, however, disregarding most of the hundreds of thousands of comments filed by the public in opposition to allowing further media mergers, the FCC passed rules to allow further media conglomerization. This decision meant that the Stop Big Media Coalition had to go directly to Congress to fix the problem. In anticipation of the FCC ruling, Senators Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Trent Lott (R-Miss.) introduced the bi-partisan "Media Ownership Act of 2007" (S. 2332), which would mandate public comment on (and an unbiased analysis of) any new FCC rules and would create an independent task force to investigate the stunning lack of minority media ownership.

The Senate passed S.J.RES.28, a joint resolution with much the same impact as S. 2332, by a near-unanimous voice vote on May 15, 2008. For the Senate Joint Resolution to go into effect, the House of Representatives needs to pass a similar resolution. The Stop Big Media Campaign is now focusing its efforts there -- working to get 100 cosponsors on the House resolution over the summer -- and expects a vote this fall.

This is not just an issue for major metropolitan areas. For local municipalities and constituencies, the on-the-ground media ownership rules ultimately boils down to the question of how diverse the opinions expressed in local media will be and how representative of topical issues the local news will be. As Scott emphasizes, "Concentrated media freed of ownership limits create unprecedented control over the local news media by one company. That kind of power over public information without accountability or competitive forces is a danger to any local government official concerned with robust public information."

"Local artists cannot be found on most radio dials, as corporate station owners like Clear Channel prefer national playlists that eliminate the need for local dee jays" McConnell points out. "Similarly, as large out of state corporations look to increase profits in news rooms, they slash staff and force reporters to do more with less. That means less investigative journalism, less watchdogging of local government, and more easy to produce stories about fires, crimes and weather." For local communities, a lack of local ownership "affects the quality and availability of local news, art and culture."

As Scott sums up, "The Coalition aims to stop consolidation and pursue policies that provide opportunities for minorities and women to gain access to media markets." And this is only one facet of a large and growing movement. Across the country, dozens of allied campaigns and initiatives are leading the charge to empower local communities and increase participatory media. "In Philadelphia, local groups like the Media Mobilizing Project are fighting to ensure poor residents have the tools and resources to access the Internet," writes McConnell. "In North Carolina, the Mountain Area Information Network is deploying a wi-fi network to compete with the big, expensive cable and phone companies. Rural communities across the nation are coming together to demand policy changes to meet their broadband needs." As it turns out, the FCC's recent decisions around media ownership run counter to what the general public appears to want.

Overseas Wireless Deployments Offer Lessons For U.S.

Ron Tang — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 06:45:00 -0400

How we measure success is as important as what we are measuring. On March 19, 2008, the FCC dramatically revised its broadband data collection, in essence, finally giving in to mounting evidence that current assessments have been woefully inadequate. Previous data collection may have allowed politicians to declare "mission accomplished" -- that universal affordable broadband is available throughout the United States -- yet the fact remains that large swaths of the United States have fallen behind a growing list of other countries in broadband provision.

Within the U.S. context, wireless networks have often followed a familiar trajectory: utilizing hyperbolic and misleading rhetoric in making promises to local communities; obfuscating the state of actual deployment and the real-world service levels provided; and ignoring success stories that point to innovative business models overseas that are unheard-of in the United States. Sylvia Cadena, coordinator of WiLAC in Ecuador, points out one of the most overlooked areas of innovation in this realm, "[Rather] than municipal networks, we look more for community networks, which although [they] are affected by the same context, do not depend on the political will, but the organization and hard work of its members."

In fact, these community networking organizations have been the groups that pioneered large-scale wireless networking technologies -- eight years ago, when there were few companies deploying wireless networks, dedicated groups of technology experts, programmers and community organizers were developing and deploying wireless technologies in London, San Francisco and Urbana, Ill. Today, the networking technologies of these groups have matured to the point where relatively astounding community networks have been deployed using the wireless systems developed by this global network of open source programmers.

Growing Up

Dana Spiegel, president and executive director of NYCwireless, has followed the maturation of these technologies and their real-world deployments throughout North America. "The interesting and inspirational networks are the ones that grew out of community wireless initiative," she said. "In particular, Austin, Texas, and Montreal are great examples." Both cities formed public-private partnerships, but the foundation has been locally based nongovernmental organizations, not private, for-profit companies, Spiegel said, "These cities were smart enough to recognize that their best chance of success was not only to build upon the work of local volunteers, but to involve them intimately in the creation of the local nets. This creates an incentive for other local activists and volunteers, and ensures there's a direct connection to the people who are going to be the early adopters of these nets."

Anthony Townsend, a community wireless movement veteran and research director at the Institute for the Future, also looks "mostly outside the U.S." for innovative projects. "The work of Ile Sans Fil in Montreal is probably the most interesting because it's a great example of a community network that has effectively graduated to become the municipal network. Something similar is going on in Austin, Texas, as well," said Townsend. In both cases, innovative business models have been developed to use local expertise and empower community organizations to deploy and manage the networks.

Richard MacKinnon, president of Austin Wireless, also investigates overseas community wireless deployments and said he's "inspired by the work of Ramon Roca and Guifi.net in Catalan." Guifi.net is a grass-roots initiative formed to overcome the shortcomings of telecom incumbents who failed to adequately serve local communities. "This community wireless network was created to provide connectivity for scores of rural villages that were underserved by Telefonica," he said. "‘Underserved' is code for when an incumbent service provider declines to provide service or provides it at monopoly prices," MacKinnon continued. "Guifi.net developed a business and technological model and taught people how to take control of their economic destiny away from Telefonica." Often, community wireless networks and the technologies and business models they utilize are ignored by decision-makers because of the false sense that these are small-scale endeavors. But the reality, as MacKinnon explained, is quite different, "Much like a gigantic [local area network] that spans [throughout Catalonia] incorporating hundreds of independently financed and deployed nodes, Guifi.net provides the critical infrastructure necessary for businesses and individuals."

Guifi.net, which recently won Spain's National Telecommunications Award, has focused on creating an extendable, "organic" network rather than one that provides ubiquitous connectivity; yet its service area is far larger than Philadelphia, San Francisco and New York City combined. Currently Guifi.net is composed of more than 4,000 wireless nodes spanning scores of different towns and villages throughout northeastern Spain.

Ramon Roca, coordinator of the Guifi.net project, is the first to point to both the personal impetus and the grass-roots support this network has. He explained, "My interest [was] primarily because of the need of broadband access for my professional activities, without having to move to a city," Roca said. "When my brother became the mayor of our small rural and dispersed village [2,000 inhabitants, 54 square kilometers], we decided to go ahead and give a chance to our neighborhood -- despite [what we were] observing around us, and because we had no funds, and we decided to look for allies in other municipalities and communities." Guifi.net may not be the largest community wireless network around. In the Djursland area of Denmark, community groups have been building a regional wireless network for more than half a decade -- today, this network spans roughly 1,000 square miles -- utterly dwarfing the major municipal wireless networks deployed in the United States.

Taking the Leap

For large-scale metro and regional-scale networks, Townsend indicated the remarkable successes being realized overseas, "Parts of Western Europe, like Spain and Germany, have vigorous grass-roots groups building large-scale public infrastructure with very little money, and in Central and Eastern Europe you see all kinds of places where community networks are emerging as the dominant Internet service providers in places where there was no broadband before. There are great stories from places like Belgrade where wireless activists are rappelling down the side of apartment buildings installing community Nets and doing hilltop shots across the border to Croatia and Bosnia," said Townsend.

Glenn Strachan has extensive experience creating large-scale wireless networks. As project director for Macedonia Connects, Strachan coordinated a project to wirelessly connect the entire country. While we may not think of this area as leading technological innovation, countries like Macedonia and Estonia are leaving the United States in their broadband deployment wake. Strachan said, "I look internationally for exciting projects, and I also look for rural municipal wireless projects in the United States. Anyone can build an urban network using wireless devices, but it is a wholly different activity to connect people in a rural environment or in a country which has a ‘difficult' telecom reality -- often led by a monopolistic provider unwilling to open the marketplace to competition and supported by the government." Further south, in Athens, Greece, the community wireless network spans most of the metropolitan area and consists of more than 2,000 wireless nodes.

So what's gone wrong in the United States?

Perhaps the worst part of the U.S. broadband problem is how little information we actually collect and the grossly inaccurate manner in which we collect it. In a remarkable example of political double-speak, the very same March 19, 2008, press release, the FCC declares: "An order adopted by the Federal Communications Commission today will increase the precision and quality of broadband subscribership data collected every six months from broadband services providers... improvements include collecting detailed subscribership information on a local level and more detailed information about the speed of broadband service [and to] capture more precise information about upload and download broadband speeds in the marketplace." But the release also states several sentences later, "the FCC today adopted a report showing that broadband services are currently being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion."

The notion that all Americans are having broadband services deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion doesn't even stand up to a cursory examination of the facts. While the most important telecommunications decision-makers in the country may have finally concluded that their data collection has been woefully inadequate to date (and this only after a massive multiyear campaign by public interest organizations representing underserved communities), the FCC still declares that "everything is fine according to our data."

"To our detriment, the current mix of providers and regulatory policies has squashed innovation in the United States," MacKinnon said. "We have a culture that protects the investments of incumbent telecoms to the point of obviating innovation -- they're incented to devote more of their budgets to litigation and lobbying than to R&D [research and development]. As a result, we've developed a culture of defending proprietary technology -- no matter how outdated -- and collecting rents, not matter how exorbitant." Meanwhile, outside this distinctly U.S. context, MacKinnon sees that "the most interesting wireless projects are found in places such as Catalan, Bosnia, Africa and rural Texas. They all have in common a renegade subculture leveraging open source software, open hardware and open network philosophy. They've developed a culture of building, creating and connecting -- no matter how far-fetched -- on a shoestring budget."

"I don't think that there's that much in terms of muni-nets worldwide, but an interesting standout is Estonia," said Spiegel. "This country has almost complete availability of Wi-Fi for its citizens, and the network has become a critical part of the nation's infrastructure." The problem then, has to do with the lack of telecommunications political leadership here Stateside. "In the U.S. I think the biggest problem is that local governments are too afraid of spending money, and are too afraid of standing up to telco incumbents," Spiegel said. "Local governments should stand up for their citizens, and spend money when appropriate, and otherwise hold telcos and cablecos to their end of any contracts. Only with forceful and decisive action and dedication will any muni-net have the possibility of success."

Community Service

Esme Vos, founder of MuniWireless.com, said the "U.S. is ahead in terms of number of deployments of large-scale Wi-Fi networks. The U.S. is also home to a number of hardware companies like Tropos and Meraki; in terms of services, the U.S. is ahead (e.g., Skyhook Wireless, which provides location-based service)." Craig Settles, president of Successful.com and a longtime municipal wireless consultant wrote, "From the cities I've talked to in Europe, it seems that cities such as Paris that have deployed fiber networks are providing services heads and shoulders above the U.S. in terms of high speed, low price and diversity of offerings."

Settles sees municipal wireless endeavors as less ahead of the curve. "The wireless side of things appear to be less advanced, depending on the country. Besides roadblocks from incumbents, you have European Union rulings that can trump initiatives within individual countries (such as with Dublin, Ireland, recently), government limits on the power wireless transmitters can use," he said. "You also have lots of small towns and much older cities, so the access to suitable vertical assets for building infrastructure hinders getting coverage in as many places as people would like."

While municipal endeavors may be floundering on both sides of the Pond, the EU has a more vibrant community wireless scene than the United States -- the question this begs is why?

One possibility may be that more resources for creating the building blocks for community wireless networks are available in the EU. As Michael Maranda, president of the Association for Community Networking, pointed out, compared to a host of other countries, "We're lagging in all respects: cost/speed, cost/bit and speeds available, choice in technology, freedom to switch platforms, freedom to utilize network services of our choice [and] interoperability."

"Europe is home to several metro-scale grass-roots wireless networks based on open source technology. These include city-spanning networks of thousands of nodes in Berlin, Vienna [Austria], Graz [Austria] and many other cities, and throughout the Czech Republic," wrote Joshua King, senior system administrator for the chambana.net community Web hosting project. The result of these activities is, as King said, "Those networks enjoy widely varying levels of official support from their respective municipalities, but nevertheless provide peerless service on commodity hardware platforms costing less than $50. There is no community effort in the U.S. on a comparable scale, and as far as I am aware no commercial one either."

Wolfgang Nagele, network engineer at RIPE and longtime community wireless developer, summed up the issue, "In Europe the whole municipal networking movement never ended up a big political movement -- yet. Most initiatives I know of are working without political backgrounds. In Vienna, for example, it's part of our belief to keep out of political daily business to avoid interest conflicts." The Viennese community network is both a cutting-edge test bed for new technologies and provides access to most of the metropolitan area.

Get the Message

According to Strachan, "The main difference beyond all others is that people overseas get it. They understand that connectivity is an integral element associated with their own development. In the USA, this concept appears to be absent." Strachan's assessment is based on first-hand experiences.

"In every country I have worked in that there is a monopolistic provider who has no desire for competition within the marketplace, there is always a struggle," he said. "As for innovation, the people within each country have already determined the best and most innovative ways to provide connectivity, but they lack the capital resources and some of the ultimate expertise required to complete the picture."

Within this context, a vibrant cornucopia of different technologies and business models are being implemented. As Roca summarizes, there are "particular cases with very good coverage, good infrastructures, etc., and others without. This contrast becomes much more evident at the developing countries." In turn, this diversity of needs and resources drives an array of large-scale implementations.

Townsend contrasted this with the current U.S. situation. "Our culture, geography and markets have come together to stifle innovation," he said. "First, we already have a lot of broadband choices -- not real competition, and not the fastest broadband, but for a lot of people ‘good enough'. So the wireless underground is not attracting as many talented people as it did in 2000-2003 (especially when a lot of them were dot-com-ers out of work). Also, Americans just aren't as interested in ‘local' as [much as] other cultures. So we don't see the intense focus on using hotspots as local content portals, or creating private non-Internet networks for file sharing, video chat, etc."

Dharma Dailey, principal at the Ethos Group, a wireless consultancy, summed it up, "Addressing network innovation, I see more and more people who I consider to be the brightest innovators in networking get increasingly more excited about their projects overseas than those they work on in the U.S. I wonder if we are going to see a brain drain of network innovators from the U.S. When they can leapfrog far beyond the legacy networks we're shackled to here in the States, who can blame them?"

At issue is the migration of technologies to locales where they are being actively implemented. While the United States may have led the charge a half-decade ago, much like our lagging broadband penetration ranking, we're losing our competitive edge when it comes to wireless R&D, "Many key innovations in networking not only started here, but were incubated at U.S. taxpayers' expense -- computers, the Internet, satellite, cellular telephony," wrote Dailey. "Now we're being punished for being first because we're stuck with incumbents who benefited from those early innovations but are firmly committed to stifling game-changing innovation now."

The real challenge for the United States may be whether we can switch tactics quickly enough to regain our technological lead in an increasingly sophisticated global economy, adapt our business models to take advantage of disruptive technologies, and expand our decision-making to include options that have been systematically ignored regardless of their continuing successes. In the end, even a top-down bureaucracy like the FCC is realizing that fundamental changes to how we've handled broadband implementation are vitally important in the immediate future.

Municipal Wireless Success Demands Public Involvement, Experts Say

Ron Tang — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:00:00 -0400

Most media have it wrong. Municipal wireless networks across the United States didn't stumble in 2007 -- high-profile cities where deals fell apart, such as Chicago, San Francisco and Houston, were not going to finance, own or operate their respective networks. These weren't municipal networks at all. The business model that faltered in 2007 was the "private corporate franchise" model based on the deal that Philadelphia and EarthLink agreed to in 2006. It was, in fact, the free market that failed last year -- not governments in their traditional role as the builders and maintainers of critical infrastructure.

How we define a municipal network has repercussions for every aspect of next-generation network-building, and it will reverberate through 2008. Jon Peha, associate director of the Center for Wireless and Broadband Networking at Carnegie Mellon University, addresses these problems in his work. "Unfortunately some define municipal networks as a network that serves a city, and some define it as the city government's network, and people argue about exactly what the latter means," Peha said. "I often write about models for a 'wireless metropolitan-area network' (WiMAN), because it is a broader term that carries no ambiguous baggage."

Craig Settles, a wireless consultant and the president of Successful.com, defines municipal networks, at a minimum, as ones with "local government involvement, whether it's a government manager driving the project as is the case in Greene County, N.C., or the economic development office is working with community organizers and local businesses to drive the project -- similar to what's happening in Seattle."

Networks can't continue to be characterized as municipal when the municipality neither owns nor has principal or ultimate responsibility and authority over that network, said Michael Maranda, president of the Association for Community Networking. "Just because a network may cover the bulk of a muni territory, and just because a city initiates public processes around the idea of such a venture to make some assets available in furtherance of such an effort -- we can't call it muni."

Esme Vos, founder of MuniWireless.com, lays out a spectrum of ways municipalities can be involved as an anchor tenant; as a subscriber, leasing out or donating city-owned property on which wireless nodes can be mounted, or leasing out or donating backhaul (e.g., fiber access); as an investor or guarantor of a loan; [and] as the owner of the network (e.g., Corpus Christi, Texas, and Burbank, Calif.). At its heart, there's a battle brewing between "free-marketeers" who favor the government taking a hands-off approach to broadband networking, and those in favor of government involvement to help direct efforts at the national, state and local levels.

When the NSFNET was privatized beginning in 1995, a huge boom ensued whereby numerous corporations built broadband infrastructure. Unfortunately when the free-market technological bubble burst in 2000, governments at all levels refused to get involved in broadband networking. Today, after more than a half-decade of market failure, as a growing number of other countries continue to pull ahead of the United States -- deploying far better and more accessible broadband infrastructure -- municipalities have an opportunity to turn things around. Joshua King, senior network administrator for the Chambana.net community Web hosting project, puts it this way: "A 'municipal' network is a network whose ownership and operation is under the control of a city and is run for the common good of the citizens of that city rather than for profit."

Like many, King is not against public-private partnerships, but he supports the notion that the core intent of these networks must be the public good and not corporate profits. "This does not mean that the network cannot be utilized by local businesses to turn a profit, nor does it mean that third-party companies can't be contracted to deploy or maintain a network," King said. "But that the network itself provides services in a neutral fashion to all citizens within the network's coverage area (and the city has some obligation to expand that coverage area to all citizens)."

Locally Grown Networks

If we take King's assertion to the next logical leap, we could envision broadband networks owned collaboratively by the community, municipality, businesses, etc. In Europe, a growing list of metropolitan and rural areas is doing exactly this. Wolfgang Nagele, a core developer with the FunkFeuer.at network in Austria, writes, "The main difference for a municipal network as we try to achieve it in Vienna is the fact that it's citizen-owned. So there is no classical company-customer relation. This changes the understanding of the users into being a vital part of it. In most networks I know of, this also relies on a strong social connect between its members. This in turn strengthens the municipal community."

Glenn Strachan oversaw the Macedonia Connects project to build a wireless network bringing broadband to the entire country. Today he is an independent consultant and senior information and communication technologies adviser for Wireless Broadband in Developing Countries. Strachan defines the scope of municipal networks broadly: "A muni wireless network can encompass a small number of users or extend as far as an entire country." Yet even while he was building municipal wireless networks, the nomenclature remained unknown until after his return stateside. "The work I have done overseas never specifically used the word muni wireless, and it was not until I returned to the USA in late 2006 that I really heard the word used, he said. At USAID [United States Agency for International Development], we spoke about connectivity projects ranging from a single school, to a collection of colleges, and finally, in Macedonia, not only to 460 schools but the entire populations surrounding those individual schools."

Given its widespread misuse, the term "municipal wireless network" has become remarkably problematic. Anthony Townsend, research director at the Institute for the Future rarely uses the term. "I feel it really limits the discussion to those efforts with significant government sponsorship or oversight. To me, it's an artifact of the need for vendors to define a market," he said. "I prefer the term 'community wireless networks' which also embraces the rich grassroots of neighborhood-level ISPs that have emerged by exploiting the flexibility and low cost of unlicensed wireless broadband."

Dharma Dailey, a principal at wireless consultancy, The Ethos Group, said: 'municipal network' seems to be a catch-all for everything from a local government engaging in negotiations with an incumbent over service to a soup-to-nuts build-out at taxpayers' expense. "This lack of consistency really muddies our understanding of how local broadband is really rolling out," Dailey said. "I would reserve the use of a muni network to three instances: muni intranet -- that serves municipal operations such as meter readers, building inspectors, fire and police -- muni ownership of infrastructure; and/or muni decision-making power."

Dailey said municipalities are often overly focused on bottom-line accounting rather than the best interests of local residents. "Why should we predetermine what the right tool is for a network before we have defined who the network is for, where it is, and why it's needed?" she said. "Many of my colleagues want to cling to the term 'wireless' because it seems at the moment to represent something new, something that is in opposition to all of the problems that we have with legacy networks controlled by incumbents. But by emphasizing the technology, I think we fall into the same trap that created the legacy mess. We need to jettison the techno-centric, vendor-driven model of buying and selling networks."

Ramon Roca founded Guifi.net, a regional wireless network with more than 5,000 wireless nodes covering much of the Catalan region of Spain. Roca sees the traditional municipal wireless model as often leading to failure for similar reasons as we've seen in the United States. "Like in many other countries, we [have seen] many of those initiatives fail for many reasons: hype, overestimating the technology capabilities, etc.," Roca said. "In Spain [there] have been significant, multimillion [euro] failures, as an example, here in Catalonia, 'Flash10' (15,000,000), Zamora Wireless (about 500,000, sponsored by Intel)... Barcelona Sensefils."

What differentiates Guifi.net, which won Spain's 2007 National Telecommunications Award, from many other Spanish wireless endeavors is that it has found a way to coexist with private companies and municipalities. "The municipal projects don't have to be linked to a single contractor operator and should be able to connect to any other network in the neighborhood, and therefore, be 'open' in the sense of 'open network,'" Roca said. "The only solution for doing so is by considering the network as something open and neutral, out of the assets of anyone. A model where everyone [has] ownership of the physical infrastructure, but not the whole network itself." Roca points out that this ownership model, while seemingly a radical notion is "not very much distinct from the original Internet idea itself." For him, the real question is whether Guifi.net is "a singular exception -- or can this mutation also occur and be replicated elsewhere?"

Ideas for Better Municipal Networks

Corporations such as EarthLink, AT&T and MetroFi have staked a claim over "municipal wireless," but their business model is predicated on cities granting a private franchise to these companies. Many of these corporations blame the failures of multiple networking initiatives on municipalities, claiming that the problem with their model was the onerous and greedy requirements of the cities. This is how much of the media have reported it. But there's a far deeper conflict that can be boiled down to a simple phrase: liberation versus lock-in.

What cities want is an open platform to support public use and new applications. When The Economist reported in January that open networks are necessary to support next-generation networking and the global competitiveness of the United States, it opened up debate about the wisdom of our sole reliance on free-market solutions for broadband networking. What private corporations have implemented are closed systems using proprietary hardware, software and services. Such systems may seem good on paper, but as history is teaching us, their many points of failure makes them unreliable in practice.

In Philadelphia, the vision of a nonprofit-owned, open-access system gave way to an EarthLink-only network, which has struggled to become operational and attract subscribers. The original hardware underperformed and EarthLink appears to have all but given up on the business. Sadly the city also hitched its digital inclusion cart to EarthLink's franchise, tying its free hardware, and training programs and discounted subscriptions to the inadequate EarthLink service. As municipalities rethink their broadband strategies in 2008, they are looking to implement five best practices to support liberation and avoid lock-in:

Utilize open technology. The smart choice for municipalities is to require open standards that support interoperability and an easily upgradeable modular design. Too many wireless broadband networks in this country use proprietary technologies that are far more expensive and far less dynamic than other systems available today. Open technology alternatives like WiFiDog (Ile Sans Fil), Austin Wireless (LessNetworks), CUWiN (Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network), and FreiFunk/FunkFeuer (Berlin/Vienna) may not have the public relations or marketing budgets of proprietary solutions, but that should not excuse municipalities from seriously considering them. The success of the Internet itself is predicated on an open architecture with open protocols, and municipalities would be wise to support these principles in the wireless realm.

Build hybrid infrastructures. Infrastructures that support multiple, redundant delivery options are more robust than single-medium solutions. That means integrating fiber and incorporating other wireless systems whenever possible (Wi-Fi, WiMAX, 802.11n, EVDO, and others). Similarly, municipalities can create enormous synergies by interconnecting public-safety and public-access networks without compromising either goal. Single-use networks are far less efficient than hybridized and interconnected solutions, and are often more expensive. Hybridized, redundant networking requires a rethink about how to create reliability. Unfortunately too many decision-makers approach municipal networking with yesteryear's thinking.

Prioritize competition. One of the main failings of so-called municipal wireless networks has been the over-reliance on single-provider solutions. Wireless networking is a critical tool for municipalities struggling with the cable/telco duopoly. Open-access networks allow a city to support multiple market entrants, which enhances leverage far more than simply introducing a third competitor. Whether focusing on fiber optics (e.g., the UTOPIA project in Utah), or the wireless realm (e.g., Open Air Boston), municipalities should support an open platform that can serve as a level playing field for many competing service providers.

Think holistically. Municipalities must initiate dynamic, evolving digital inclusion initiatives rather than silver-bullet, one-off solutions. What might sound today like an ideal solution for the digital divide may tomorrow become the source of a new divide in speed, reliability or access. Solutions must promote ongoing public engagement and ensure long-term benefits to local constituencies. As examples, check out Minneapolis's Community Benefits Agreement and the Chicago Digital Access Alliance's Ten Principles for Digital Excellence, both of which were drafted by local community members to meet local community needs.

Embrace change as the new status quo. When it comes to high-speed Internet access, municipalities should embrace the constructive disruption coming from new technologies, applications and telecommunications policies. Due diligence for municipalities does not mean a one-time review of available technologies and community needs, but rather constant research and feedback. In 2008, we will see the advent of white space devices, open platform spectrum, and distributed device-as-infrastructure networking. Pro-municipal broadband legislation in Congress and the Broadband Census Act, and the growth of initiatives like the CAIDA COMMONS Project, which is creating an alternative, cooperative Internet backbone, will continue to impact the national telecommunications debate and carry with them the potential for transforming the broadband playing field. Municipalities need adaptable infrastructure and continued vigilance to keep pace with rapidly changing conditions and technologies.

Municipal networking proponents are not opposed to private investment in city-scale wireless networks. But they believe that municipalities have to take more responsibility and control over the broadband networks they're involved with. Regardless of who pays for the physical infrastructure, municipal networks will continue to struggle unless they provide reliable, open platforms for innovation that support diversity at the hardware, software and service-provision levels. Municipalities should choose liberation over lock-in as they continue to address growing Internet needs in 2008.

J.H. Snider Discusses Unlicensed Spectrum in Government Technology

Communications — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 01:36:00 -0400

When do we recognize a shift in the fundamental social fabric of civilization? Where do we look to find better exemplars of participatory democracy? When do we realize that notions of justice have to expand to include a new ways of thinking about human rights? How do we change our institutions to support a more just and equitable world? These are the questions that thought leaders in the community and municipal wireless movement have been asking themselves more and more over the past few years.

Many telecommunications scholars have written that the first decade of the 21st Century is a "critical juncture" in communications history....

However, certain tools were consistently mentioned by those interviewed for this series as useful to digital inclusion efforts -- "more unlicensed spectrum," "low-cost hardware," and "education initiatives" for the general public and local, state, and national policy makers were all discussed by multiple interviewees. As Jim Snider, Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation, warns, for wireless systems, "the network can ultimately only be as good as the spectrum it uses." Many thought leaders see one promising avenue as the growing support for "bipartisan legislation in Congress to open up the TV white spaces for… more

Government Technology Quotes J.H. Snider on the Internet's Role in Encouraging Democracy

Communications — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 23:50:00 -0400

An overarching theme that came up time and again during the interviews I conducted for this article is that we often think far too small when we talk about community networking. In a communications age, access to the resources, information, opportunities, and conversations that broadband services and community and municipal wireless networks facilitate is a vital element -- the foundation upon which the future of civil society rests...

Paralleling this analysis, Jim Snider, senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, states, "Democracy requires well educated citizens. The Internet has become a necessary foundation for a well educated, economically productive citizenry for the 21st century."

For the complete article, please visit the Government… more

E-Government vs. E-Democracy

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 01 Aug 2001 00:00:00 -0400

Why do government officials love e-government and hate e-democracy? The answer is implicit in the definition of the question. E-government uses information technology to make government operate more efficiently, often by copying techniques first developed in the private sector. E-democracy uses information technology to make elected officials more accountable to the public.

In the minds of elected officials, encouraging e-government is a win-win proposition. The public loves to cut waste while improving service, and politicians are happy to show that tax dollars are being spent more efficiently.

Encouraging e-democracy is less desirable to elected officials. On the contrary, most of what they do while in office is try to increase their chances for re-election. Consider a politician who has the opportunity to create easily accessible public records of public meetings, including his own roll call votes. The person most motivated to use such records would likely be an opponent who wants to embarrass the incumbent. The incumbent would generally be more than happy to keep history under wraps. It's no wonder, then, that the accessibility of public-meetings records, across all levels of government, is abysmal. The same reasoning explains why introducing free speech and dissenting voices into public meeting deliberation through the Internet has failed to take wing. Why should the politicians, who have iron control over public meeting deliberation, as opposed to newspaper or TV deliberation, want to give up that power?

Politicians are not the only ones with incentives to focus on e-government over e-democracy. Government employees with ambitions to seek higher paying jobs in the private sector see e-government as their ticket; it's their chance to partake of the glory associated with the dot-com revolution. And companies that provide e-commerce and other business software find it relatively easy to adapt their products and marketing plans to the government market. I've listened to dozens of e-government sales pitches to elected officials, but never once heard one that said, "This technology will make you more accountable to your constituents."

Often there is not a hard-and-fast distinction between e-government and e-democracy. Take voting technology. To the extent that improved voting technology reduces government's cost of conducting a reliable vote, it is e-government. But to the extent it systematically influences who votes, whose votes are actually counted or any other variable that affects the translation of voter preferences into public policy, it is e-democracy.

Getting elected officials to act against their own self-interest is not easy. Witness the current fight over campaign finance reform. Politicians are hesitant to change any institution that helped get them elected. Only public outrage and media pressure can get politicians to pass reforms making themselves more accountable to the public.

The same organizations that took up the recent crusade for campaign finance reform now need to take up the crusade for e-democracy, the building blocks of which are more accessible public records, public meetings and public votes.

Legislation recently introduced in the U.S. Senate typifies the way legislators often blend e-democracy and e-government rhetoric, but in concrete actions overwhelmingly focus on e-government. The bipartisan E-Government Act of 2001, co-sponsored by 12 senators, says two of its major goals are: "to enhance citizen access to government information" and "to increase citizen participation in government." But the actual legislation completely excludes reforms to the elective branches of government.

In contrast, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., authored the white paper "The Internet and the Future of Democratic Governance," which has some ideas to rally around, including federal funding of broadly defined e-democracy pilot projects at the local level. Their proposal expands upon the many proposals now in Congress, born out of the presidential voting fiasco, to fund local improvements in voting technology. The goal is to connect in the public mind the obsolete state of local voting institutions with the much more general problem of obsolete democratic institutions. It's not an easy task, but it's a worthy one.