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Lobbying
Telecom Companies Score Early Successes In States
by Michael Martinez
The Democratic takeover of Congress may have complicated the federal lobbying plans of large telephone companies, but the year appears to be going well for them at the state level thus far.
Missouri lawmakers this week cleared legislation to speed the entry of telephone companies into the state's video market, and similar video-franchising rules changes are pending in about a half-dozen other states. Verizon Communications also joined forces with Comcast in Maryland to stop a requirement that high-speed Internet providers make information about the deployment of their services publicly available.
The Missouri measure sailed through the legislature after a similar proposal died last session in the state Senate. This year's version enjoyed the support of the state's cable companies because it would let them opt out of existing deals with localities and get new statewide franchises.
Gov. Matt Blunt is expected to sign the measure into law once he receives it.
Active franchising legislation also is on the table in Florida, Georgia, Illinois and Tennessee, and a hearing on franchising is expected in Wisconsin later this month.
Ben Scott, the policy director at the media reform group Free Press, said the deciding factor on franchising has been cable companies. "From the 10,000-foot perspective, where cable has been fighting, there has been a battle," he said. "Where they're not, legislation is moving."
In Maryland, meanwhile, Delegate Herman Taylor pulled the broadband bill last week. Telecommunications companies and policy advocates that opposed non-binding language for so-called network neutrality, or an assurance that all high-speed Internet content would be treated equally, declared victory.
FreedomWorks, an advocacy group partly funded by the Bell telecom companies, issued a statement this week boasting its grassroots campaign to defeat Taylor's measure. The head of the group, former Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, said the proposal would have amounted to state-level regulation of the Internet.
Scott, who attended a hearing on the issue last month, said widespread misinformation led to the bill's demise. He said the substance of the measure was reporting requirements on broadband deployment and redlining, the term for deploying services to higher-income neighborhoods but not to low-income areas.
The debate was misconstrued in what became a circus over the network neutrality language, Scott complained. "I'd never seen so much misinformation and outright lying," he said. "And I'm a cynic. I work on Capitol Hill every day."
In a recent post on his Web log, Public Knowledge Communications Director Art Brodsky also blamed an "uncertainty and doubt campaign from Verizon, Comcast and their acolytes in labor unions, business groups and conservative 'think tanks'" for the defeat of the proposal.
Scott said the state-level legislative battles have become particularly important as companies expand their business models to include broadband, telephone and video services.
He is concerned that not enough is being done to ensure that services are offered in low-income and rural neighborhoods. "These state franchising bills, unfortunately, are going to write the digital divide into law," he said.
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Politics
Conversation Or Control? The Dilemma Of Online Politics
by Heather Greenfield
Presidential candidates have unprecedented tools for two-way conversations with voters, and panelists at the Politics Online conference on Friday looked at what candidates are doing with the interactive media tools and why.
Jeff Jarvis, who runs the media blog BuzzMachine and the new PrezVid blog that tracks the use of online video in the 2008 presidential campaign, asked at the conference hosted by George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet whether a campaign really can have a conversation.
Jarvis noted that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said she wanted a conversation when she announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination on the Internet, but people have been critical about how robust that conversation actually is.
"They can try, but it's more of a job-interview conversation rather than a conversation you'd have with a friend over a beer," said Jim Brady, the executive editor of washingtonpost.com.
Jay Rosen, a journalism professor and author of the blog PressThink, said he doubts that candidates would engage in a real conversation because they could not control their messages.
Rosen predicted that candidates will use available interactive tools as a "symbolic gesture" but "keep things exactly the same" in terms of retaining message control. "That's what they want to do; that's what they will do," Rosen said.
During an earlier panel discussion, Michael Turk offered his own example of trying to create a conversation on the Web site for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a 2008 presidential candidate.
Turk, who previously helped the Republican National Committee with online strategy and was the e-campaign director for President Bush in 2004, said it took three weeks to get his turf at the McCainSpace social network approved. "That's horrid," he said, noting that the campaign lost time and momentum from someone helping them generate a conversation for free.
McCain also has asked supporters to use the video-sharing site YouTube to send video questions to the campaign. He plans to select some for video responses. "The beauty of that versus the Hillary method is we can figure out which questions he leaves unanswered," Jarvis said.
Andrew Rasiej, the founder of techPresident, which tracks how presidential candidates are using new media tools, told panelists that the most significant Web development so far this election cycle are tools that can be used to gauge the mood of the country.
Rasiej predicted that for candidates to succeed in the future, they will have to use new media to make their own actions more transparent -- like posting their schedules online, videotaping clips of their campaigns and becoming an unfiltered media outlet.
Panelists also talked about the possibility of using the Internet, bloggers and other communities to collectively develop better questions for candidates and then track how comprehensively and truthfully they answer them.
But they expressed little optimism that despite the new tools and bloggers working alongside journalists, the public would learn more about candidates, which has been the ongoing mission of campaign reporters every election cycle.
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Politics
The Forces Of Web Politics: Openness And Nastiness
by Heather Greenfield
Is it possible for political campaigns to be more open to people online yet keep the nastiness so often associated with the Internet at bay?
The 2008 presidential race eventually may answer that question with certainty, but campaign strategists and bloggers are eager to talk about it now. It was one of topics that emerged Thursday at the first day of the Politics Online conference at George Washington University.
Michael Turk, who previously worked as an online strategist for the Republican National Committee, said the ability of so many people to share information online makes it easy for the truth to emerge and spread.
He said if the Internet had been a political force in 1988, negative advertisements that featured furloughed murderer Willie Horton to show Democrat Michael Dukakis as soft on crime, would have been killed earlier. Turk said experts would have been able to investigate the issue and refute it more easily.
On the other hand, participants of various panels at the conference raised the issue of campaigns or their supporters spreading lies about opponents. "In the last few years, the Internet has experienced more drive-by character assassinations of any medium in history," said Elliot Schrage, the vice president of global communications for Google.
But what to do about it is problematic for companies like Google whose mission it is to just supply the platform, not judge how their technology is used.
Schrage said Google thought about removing what he described as a "disturbing video" about the late son of Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., who is running for the Democratic nomination for president. "But we ultimately decided we couldn't," Schrage said.
But Mike Liddell, the director of online communications for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, noted that there are natural disincentives to smear tactics -- namely that now "it's so easy to get caught and tracked."
Bloggers, meanwhile, had their own thoughts on screening nasty comments. Chris Lilik, who started the conservative Web log GrassrootsPA, said it is "beautiful to see comments [on his blog] coming from so many different angles," and he just edits racist and hate speech.
Ruby Sinreich, who founded the liberal blog OrangePolitics in Orange County, N.C., said she now has contributors register with real e-mail addresses, though they do not have to use their real names to post comments. She said people are not as combative and mean when they are less anonymous thanks to registration.
Matt Singer, who founded the liberal blog Left In The West in Montana, said he appreciates people being able to post comments without leaving their names because they are more free to reveal information that has sometimes become breaking news without fear of penalties at work.
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Intellectual Property
The Quest To Redefine Copyright Fairness
by Andrew Noyes
The 21st-century copyright fight between the content and high-tech industries would benefit from a mechanism by which parties could arrive at intellectual property fairness "fast-food style," an expert on the issue said at a Capitol Hill luncheon on Friday.
The Progress and Freedom Foundation's Solveig Singleton said theories of liability under the Supreme Court's 2005 landmark MGM v. Grokster ruling on file-sharing and a 1998 copyright law do not jive with the "almost total uselessness" of traditional enforcement methods.
The old IP protection regime is tied to "a very slow, very expensive court system," she said. Grokster and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which grants Internet providers liability for copyright infringement by third parties if the providers remove the content, arose after "an almost total collapse of traditional copyright enforcement."
The burden must be moved out of the courts and into the "more nimble, technologically sophisticated and low-cost" private sector, Singleton said. The reason the shift has not happened is because all the players have a shared interest in market viability, but new solutions to solving IP infringement are still experimental.
Meanwhile, cases like Viacom's new $1 billion lawsuit against the Internet firm Google and its YouTube video-sharing subsidiary will continue. The complaint, filed earlier this week, alleges that YouTube posted roughly 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom-owned content.
Viacom attorney Don Verrilli defended the media conglomerate's lawsuit. He said YouTube holds the promise for a number of social benefits, but there is an "enormous amount of copyrighted video" that is viewed at a "staggeringly high level."
The issue on which the litigation turns is not whether infringement exists on YouTube, he said; it is whether the piracy constitutes direct infringement by the company or secondary liability by users as defined by the Grokster case. Viacom believes YouTube is infringing because the clips are housed on its servers and the site is calling itself a "consumer media business," Verrilli said.
Christian Dawson of ServInt, an Internet service provider, does not know what the solution for the great IP debate will be but said it is critical to communicate with everyone that new processes or laws would impact. He also noted that an incident like the Viacom-Google suit "is the exception, not the rule."
Bill Rosenblatt, an expert in technologies to manage digital rights, added that technology will never solve "the issue of verification of identity of copyrighted work." Many years of work in that realm has led him to believe "there is no good answer to that."
PFF senior fellow James DeLong, a known copyright hawk, noted that the view of groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation was not represented on the panel.
DeLong said they think that content should go online and be freely transferred, and that content providers "should find out some way of making money out of it." He said he disagrees with that stance because it has yet to yield a sustainable business model.
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Education
Schools Weigh Merits Of Disclosing Pay Online
by Aliya Sternstein
The University of Wisconsin recently removed from its Web site data containing the individual salaries of its professors because the university felt that online access to the information enabled rival institutions to cherry-pick the low-paid professors and instructors.
"Recruitment and retention of teachers, scientists, researchers, extension agents and other faculty and academic staff continues to be a major problem every year across the UW system, primarily because salaries at our 15 institutions consistently lag salaries at peer institutions," UW spokesman David Giroux said.
UW erased the individual salary information from the Internet in December. However, that same pay information -- a matter of public record -- is still accessible through any UW system computer, the main library of each UW institution, human resource offices, and compact discs for sale. UW originally had published the individual salary information online to cut printing costs.
"It is impossible to determine whether this will have any impact on retention," Giroux said. "'The one thing that will make a meaningful impact is a reinvestment in high-quality education, to include salaries, benefits, facilities and other areas."
Other public institutions are confronting the same struggle: balancing the public's right to know and the university's need to retain its own faculty.
"We do not post, for the same reason UW cites," said Michael Reese, associate vice president for university affairs at the University of California system. "We think UW's fears are valid."
He cited an episode in 2005 when the San Francisco Chronicle posted online the compensation of every UC employee earning more than $100,000. "As a result, campus chancellors reported immediate attempted raids of faculty by competing institutions."
Private colleges and universities, which UC often competes against, are not mandated to publicly disclose salaries, Reese added.
"There is no question that salary information is very valuable for competing institutions, and further that it's an uneven playing field," he said. "Competition for faculty is fierce, and public institutions are losing ground because of declining state support and growing private endowments of private universities."
A search for "faculty salaries" on the homepage of the University of Florida, on the other hand, shows a document that lists the individual salaries of every employee. "They are public records, and the state of Florida has stronger open-records laws than most states," said Ron Wayne of the university's news bureau.
At the University of Illinois, where employee salaries are accessible only in hard copy, no one has had trouble finding the earnings of individual professors, University of Illinois spokesman Thomas Hardy said.
"As a public institution, we are required to make certain information public and accessible, and I believe our methods for doing so are transparent and work well for the institution and for the public," he said. "If compensation information is a public record, competing institutions are going to obtain it regardless of whatever roadblocks might be thrown in the way."
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On The Hill
GOP Seeks To Loosen Federal Rules For Schools
by Theresa Poulson
Republican lawmakers this week introduced legislation to give states more flexibility under the 2002 education law known as the No Child Left Behind Act.
The measures, H.R. 1539 and S. 893, would let each state submit a declaration of intent to the U.S. Education secretary to implement initiatives aimed at improving achievement in its schools while still receiving federal funding.
"We must move education decision-making out of Washington closer to where it belongs -- with parents and teachers," said Senate co-sponsor John Cornyn, R-Texas.
Lawmakers cited the cost, regulations, paperwork and testing associated with complying with the law as roadblocks to improving education and meeting the unique needs of students in each state. Under current law, schools soon must implement more standardized testing in science, among other subjects.
"We will soon have federal government schools should we continue to follow the current trajectory of adding more tests in more subjects," which will be accompanied by new mandates and penalties, said House co-sponsor Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich.
On another front, Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., added another measure to the growing pile of bills aimed at boosting U.S. competition in the world economy. The bill, H.R. 1492, would establish a National Science Foundation program to promote and assist the teaching of inventiveness and innovation.
Before a House hearing on legislation to combat secretly installed computer spyware, meanwhile, Reps. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., introduced a bill, H.R. 1525, to combat both spyware and "phishing" scams that use fake e-mails and Internet sites to trick people into revealing personal financial information.
The measure, Goodlatte said, would impose "stiff penalties on the truly bad actors while protecting the ability of legitimate companies to develop new and exciting products and services online for consumers."
And in the spirit of Sunshine Week, Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Cornyn co-sponsored a bill, S. 849, to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act. (See separate story)
Another measure, S. 886, would restore public access to certain presidential papers. The bill mirrors legislation in a package of open-government measures that the House passed Wednesday.
Other technology-related measures introduced this week were:
-- H.R. 1543, which would expand the program that waives visa requirements for U.S.-friendly countries on a probationary basis;
-- S. 850, which aims to improve sharing of immigration information among federal, state and local law enforcers;
-- H.R. 1493, which would authorize security grants to public transportation agencies, over-the-road bus operators, railroads and other entities;
-- S. 908, which would establish a Consortium on the Impact of Technology in Aging Health Services;
-- S. 887, which would restore agricultural inspection functions to the Agriculture Department;
-- And H.R. 1522, which would promote the availability and use of the Education Department's Web site for student financial aid.
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Today's Feature:
Executive Summary
The Senate this week passed a major homeland security bill after defeating two Republican-backed amendments.
Every Friday, read the Executive Summary by K. Daniel Glover.
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E-briefs
E-Government: Homeland Security Department Chief Information Officer Scott Charbo has been given expanded powers to manage and coordinate the department's $3 billion annual information technology investments. Under a new management directive, each Homeland Security component will have to submit its IT budget to Charbo, who will make recommendations for final inclusion in the department's annual budget request. Any IT acquisition project larger than $2.5 million will have to first be approved by the department's enterprise architecture board and then submitted to Charbo. He also will approve the hiring of other CIOs across the department, and set and approve their performance plans, ratings and annual award compensations. "I'm convinced after two years, as is my leadership team, that we must make this happen because it is necessary to get to the next level of effective and cost-effective management of our IT resources," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Thursday.
On The Hill: Lawmakers on Thursday demanded answers from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales after allegations surfaced that the Bush administration blocked a Justice Department probe of a domestic wiretapping program after learning that Gonzales could be a subject of the investigation. Democratic Sens. Richard Durbin of Illinois, Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Charles Schumer of New York wrote to Gonzales after a National Journal article broke the news. A handful of House members wrote a similar letter. The American Civil Liberties Union also renewed its call for a special prosecutor to be appointed to investigate the program. The ACLU's top lobbyist, Caroline Fredrickson, said the reports, if true, "raise serious questions about the attorney general's willingness to place himself and his actions above the law and above rebuke." She called the decision to suspend the probe "unprecedented."
Trade: Trade agreements are contributing to economic volatility, Lake Research Partners President Celinda Lake, a strategist for the Democratic Party, said during a Capitol Hill briefing organized by the Citizens Trade Campaign. Lake said 87 percent of Americans are worried about the outsourcing of jobs to other nations, and Republican-leaning states care more about the issue then Democratic-leaning ones. She said that the end of 2006, a third of voters said they believe free-trade agreements contribute to higher prices of goods, and 60 percent of voters said the deals are bad for U.S. jobs. Some people now feel that corporations are more powerful than individual governments, she noted. Many people are concerned about how trade will affect the lives of their children, she said. Chuck Harple, the political director of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, noted that trade is going to be a very important issue in the next election.
Culture: The use of traditional media by "Generation Y," Americans born between 1980 and 1993, will atrophy over time unless more focus is placed on addressing the needs and tastes of the modern 14- to 27-year-old, a new study by Bridge Ratings revealed. "Left unabated, future prospects for traditional radio's audience levels are dim," the entertainment analysis firm said this week. While nearly 90 percent of Gen-Y was listening to AM or FM radio in 2003, new options like Internet radio and personal digital players like iPods are driving down daily consumption rates, the study said. If over-the-air radio does not develop appealing content, weekly use is projected to drop to less than 40 percent by 2020, according to the report. Advertising campaigns have to evolve to deliver dozens of targeted "creatives" instead of a few "one-size-fits-all" commercials, Bridge said. They also need to employ instant-messaging in their outreach.
Television: The Consumer Electronics Association soon will release fresh statistics indicating that fewer analog televisions than expected will be impacted by the switch to digital signals on Feb. 17, 2009. CEA, whose members stand to profit from the digital TV transition, projects that 13.5 million households rely solely on over-the-air reception -- far less than the 21 million estimated by the National Association of Broadcasters. Overall, CEA said 36.5 million analog televisions will require converter boxes so they can remain operational after analog transmission ends. The boxes will enable analog sets not hooked to cable or satellite to display digital channels in an analog format. CEA spokesman Jason Oxman said an additional 30 million analog sets are used exclusively for other purposes, like playing videogames or watching digital videodiscs, and would not be impacted. By contrast, NAB estimates that roughly 73 million analog sets would go dark without converter boxes.
Net Governance: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which manages the Internet-addressing system, launched a Web site this week to spur public participation in advance of its next meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, that begins March 26. The site lets users converse in chat rooms and publish personal Web logs. The announcement is part of ICANN's ongoing effort to increase transparency of its processes. The site will remain in the same location for future meetings. The organization also will accept questions on the site before its meetings, which will be available for session moderators to review and include as they see fit, officials said. ICANN plans to move away from its mailing-list approach for asking questions of the board and instead will use two specific online forums to receive those queries.
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President -- John Fox Sullivan, 202-739-8468
Editor in Chief -- Louis Peck, 202-739-8481
Editor -- K. Daniel Glover (bio)
Assistant Editor -- Theresa Poulson
Senior Writers -- David Hatch (bio), Heather Greenfield (bio), Andrew Noyes (bio) and Aliya Sternstein (bio)
Special Correspondent -- Chris Strohm (bio)
Staff Writer -- Michael Martinez
Senior Business Affairs Manager -- Chris Hamby
Business Affairs Associate -- Anne TeBeest
Advertising Sales -- Alex Treadway
National Journal's Technology Daily is published every weekday, except holidays, by National Journal Group Inc., 600 New Hampshire Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20037.
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