The FCC and NTIA launched new Web sites Thursday as government agencies work to meet President Obama’s openness directive (WID Dec 9 p4). The FCC took the wraps off its long-awaited Reboot.FCC.gov site, which includes an official FCC blog and a discussion forum for users to submit, vote and comment on ideas for reforming FCC processes and redesigning the agency’s Web site. Meanwhile, NTIA and Rural Utilities Service (RUS) revealed BroadbandMatch, a forum for broadband stimulus applicants to connect and form partnerships.
A health exchange pilot in San Diego is paving the way for all institutions, large and small, to participate in a nationwide exchange, said officials from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Kaiser Permanente. They spoke about a month into the first “multi-party exchange” (WID Nov 27 p2), which should also include the Department of Defense within the next few months. The two health care institutions are exchanging basic data -- problem lists, allergies and medications -- using the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) protocols. The VA invited 1,144 veterans who were already receiving care at both places to participate, and about 40 percent responded, said Tim Cromwell, director of standards and operability at the VA.
The Department of Energy announced $47 million in stimulus grants for 14 projects to develop technologies to improve energy efficiency in the IT and telecommunications industries that use 120 billion kilowatt hours annually or 3 percent of U.S. electricity use. “The rapid growth of these industries has led to an increase in electricity use,” but improvements in energy efficiency can lead to significant energy and cost savings for them, Energy Secretary Steven Chu told reporters Wednesday.
The FCC has warned Congress that the National Broadband Plan won’t be ready in time, commission and Capitol Hill officials confirmed. The plan is supposed to be submitted to Congress Feb. 17, according to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The plan has been the focus of a huge push at the agency and is the major agenda item of Chairman Julius Genachowski. Officials said the regulator is having difficulty wrapping up the huge job by the due date. Genachowski has formally asked for more time from Congress.
TORONTO -- Canada’s two largest pay TV providers have each introduced multi-screen “TV Everywhere” services for their broadband and video subscribers, setting up a fresh battlefront between the nation’s leading cable operator and the nation’s leading phone company. Rogers Communications and BCE, the parent company of Bell Canada, launched the dueling multi-platform services in Toronto late last year after quietly testing them on small groups of customers earlier in the fall. Both companies’ plans call for much bigger service rollouts in 2010, accompanied by extensive marketing drives.
The FCC received at least nine proposals from companies to build and operate a TV white-spaces database. Google made headlines Monday night when it announced its proposal. But NeuStar, Spectrum Bridge, Comsearch, Key Bridge, WSdb, KB Enterprises along with LS telcom, Telcordia Technologies, and Frequency Finder with Mountain Tower also offered, in filings posted Tuesday on the FCC website, to set up databases.
The iPhone and the iPod Touch are increasingly affecting the game industry, which just exited a challenging year. But challenges abound for game makers that have supported Apple’s platform -- most prominently when it comes to turning a profit, say NPD and game makers.
Civil rights advocates lambasted the FCC’s defense for waiving sunshine rules in October only for blog comments. Last month, FCC Associate General Counsel Joel Kaufman told the civil rights group that differences between blog comments and ex parte filings made waiving sunshine restrictions appropriate for only the Open Internet blog in advance of the FCC’s Oct. 22 meeting on network neutrality (WID Dec 11 p7). In an application for review Tuesday, the League of United Latin American Citizens said the waiver unfairly locked out people without Internet access. “This is not just a question of some members of the public being relegated to ’steerage’ while others are given priority in first class; rather, it is about the Commission leaving members of the public at the dock while the net neutrality ship sails away."
Only when the major labels dropped their demand for DRM on iTunes in 2007 did consumers truly get a legitimate digital alternative to swapping songs illicitly, losing P2P defendant Joel Tenenbaum said in a motion for a new trial or reduction of a $675,000 award against him for copyright infringement (WID Aug 3 p1). U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner in Boston, the first judge to allow a fair-use defense in a P2P case, improperly decided that the arrival of paid downloads in iTunes in 2003 created a licensed digital market and precluded Tenenbaum’s attempt to justify his 2004 swapping, the brief said.
ICANN’s CEO has so little confidence in the security of online banking that he uses a “dedicated laptop” that’s connected to the Internet “maybe two minutes a week” for all financial transactions, Rod Beckstrom said on the C-SPAN program The Communicators over the weekend. He predicted, contrary to the vocal concerns of business groups and even the U.S. government (WID Dec 22/08 p2), that the expansion of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) would make the Internet safer for consumers and businesses.