Open Technology Initiative

As digital communications and the Internet become increasingly pervasive, Native Americans continue to lack access to this digital revolution.  Native Americans are among the last citizens to gain access to the Internet, with access to broadband often unavailable or overly expensive in Native communities.  Beyond that challenge, there is a fundamental lack of qualitative or quantitative empirical research on Native American Internet use, adoption, and access, stifling the Native voice in broadband and media policy.

On November 19, 2009, Native Public Media and the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative will release New Media, Technology and Internet Use in Indian Country: Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses, one of the most extensive studies of on the ground technology use, access, and adoption in Native American lands. Demonstrating the great need to include Native Americans in the discourse around the National Broadband Plan, the report combines both a survey of Native American technology

The New America Foundation today announced that Tom Glaisyer will be its first Knight Media Policy Fellow, focusing on national media policy changes and related developments under a new grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Application bias, the practice by network operators of placing applications into tiers of low and high priority and enforcing this prioritization through mechanisms in the middle of the network, poses hidden harms for the Internet that substantially outweigh its uncertain benefits.  Application bias degrades low priority applications, decreases overall network performance, and locks the Internet into typical usage patterns of 2009, frustrating both consumer choice and Internet innovation.  At the same time, the biggest hurdle to offering more powerful services… more

Chairman Julius Genachowski Federal Communications Commission 445 Twelfth Street, SW Washington, DC 20554

November 9, 2009

Dear Chairman Genachowski,

Dear Chairman Genachowski:

The New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative is hosting The Washington DC Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery Fall Lecture series.

"We trust Genachowski," said Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University and chairman of public interest group Free Press . Wu co-wrote the letter. ...