The U.S. urgently needs an Internet that functions well, is accessible to all, and isn’t interfered with by incumbent communications providers, Roosevelt Institute Fellow Susan Crawford said in an interview Thursday. Backed by the institute’s Four Freedoms Center, Crawford, a former ICANN board member and special assistant to President Barack Obama for science, technology and innovation policy, is spearheading a multi-year project to bring high-speed fiber Internet services to the entire country. That means working at the local level to help communities build their own fiber networks, and fighting back on the national level against the major players who control access, she said.

Mobile phone technology can help developing communities improve access to healthcare information and improve education, said Isobel Coleman of the Council on Foreign Relations during a Time magazine event Wednesday. There’s “enormous” potential for mobile to improve and increase global health, she said.

Data collection for the FCC’s next broadband measurement report is more than halfway complete, and “it’s been going very, very well,” said Walter Johnston, chief of the Office of Technology and Engineering’s Electromagnetic Compatibility Division. “The smoothest experience we've had to date,” he told ISP and M-Lab representatives who met to discuss the progress Wednesday. The September data should be processed into a data set by the end of October, and the group plans to release its report in late November or early December, he said. That will be after first giving ISPs a multiple-day period to review the data for accuracy.

The Library of Congress’s new site, Congress.gov, is “a significant achievement,” said House Administration Committee Chairman Dan Lungren, R-Calif., at the site’s unveiling on Wednesday. The new site, still in beta, is a part of a three-pronged Web update for the Library of Congress, said Jim Karamanis, its chief of Web services. That includes updates made to the Library of Congress site, LOC.gov, and a new site for its U.S. Copyright Office, which will come next year.

A spectrum aggregation notice of proposed rulemaking, slated for a vote at the FCC’s Sept. 28 meeting, is expected to win easy approval, agency officials said. The NPRM is tied to a second rulemaking also tentatively scheduled for a vote at the monthly meeting. That second NPRM establishes rules for an incentive auction of broadcast spectrum, and potentially could be used to keep Verizon Wireless and AT&T from bidding in some markets where they already have substantial spectrum holdings. At this stage, all the FCC is doing is asking questions. The NPRM will likely get “yes” votes from all three FCC Democrats and at least one Republican, agency officials said.

Original programming could be 10 to 20 percent of Netflix’s TV-related content within three to five years as the video service takes a “measured approach” to expanding the category, Chief Financial Officer David Wells told us Wednesday at a Goldman Sachs investor conference.

The FCC is unlikely to even start collecting data on special access rates until next year, Wireline Bureau Chief Julie Veach conceded at an FCBA lunch Wednesday. She said the data collection order is almost ready, but once it’s finalized by the commission it still faces review by the Office of Management and Budget. The OMB must vet it under the Paperwork Reduction Act.

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai wants the agency to communicate more with broadcasters to help eliminate what he said some executives perceive as a regulator disinterested in radio and TV station priorities (CD March 5 p2). In the 25 meetings he’s had in his four months as a commissioner, “I keep hearing the same thing,” he told the NAB radio show in Dallas Wednesday. “Unfortunately, it seems there’s a widespread perception that today’s FCC is largely indifferent to the fate of your business.” As FCC members are preliminarily slated to vote next week on a notice of proposed rulemaking to hold a voluntary incentive auction of TV station frequencies (CD Bulletin, Sept 7) to free up airwaves for mobile broadband, Pai sought deregulation of media ownership and foreign investment rules and an initiative focused on AM.

GENEVA -- Policymaker submissions to an ITU Global Symposium for Regulators consultation on spurring the availability of cloud services internationally echoed the importance of the technology, though policy suggestions, definitions, concerns, and ideas on how best to provide regulatory certainty varied. The consultation to the Oct. 2-4 event in Colombo, Sri Lanka, aimed at identifying approaches that policymakers and regulators can use to spur access to digital opportunities through cloud services, the ITU website said.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency plans to update its list of Internet Protocol integrated public alert and warning system (IPAWS) developers (http://xrl.us/bnqhe6) to reflect uncertainty about whether vendors have completed successful tests of the system, a FEMA official said Wednesday on an agency webinar with developers. Currently, the list indicates which vendors have successfully posted a digitally signed IPAWS alert in the test environment FEMA’s set up for the open platform for emergency networks (OPEN) IP system. Because the list was initiated before FEMA began using unique digital certificates for Collaborative Operating Groups (COGs), FEMA can’t confirm whether any individual vendor has actually successfully tested the system, said Neil Graves, a technical requirements manager with FEMA’s IPAWS-OPEN.