Last updated: May 2009.
Broadband
Internet and Common Carrier Service
The availability and adoption of
broadband (high speed) Internet service is of critical importance to
the computing and telecommunications industries and the country.
Graphically intensive applications such as remote medical diagnosis,
enhanced e-commerce, personal data exchanges (e.g., sharing family
photos and videos), delivery of entertainment and gaming and augmented
user interfaces (e.g., a, possibly 3D, graphical view of where the user
is in a web structure would address the “lost in cyberspace” problem)
are highly dependent on the widespread deployment of broadband. In
addition, broadband shows great promise for inexpensive yet powerful
distributed computation utilizing widely geographically separated
computers.
I believe the best way to provide
widespread broadband Internet services is by meaningful competition. At
the same time the interests of the public using this essential form of
communication must be served. One possible mechanism to provide both
competition and serve the public interest is to classify Internet
services as common carrier services.
I've drafted a white paper that
explores this idea.
The
bibliography covers the popular press and computing
magazines, but not research or scholarly publications. The ACM
Digital Library is the best source for the latter. The articles
cited cover not only policy issues but also topics that have associated
policy issues as background.
Why provide
this bibliography when a more complete and less idiosyncratic search
could be done with a search engine such as Google? Using this
bibliography has several advantages: categorization into a taxonomy
that groups like articles together, a chronological presentation and a
selective number of hits. Entries in this bibliography could then
be used to generate a more complete search with a search engine.
The bibliography is divided into several categories (see below), each a separate page. The format for each category page is a directory:
Directory: Science Policy
02-06-14-WashPost-MITPreservesOpeness.txt
02-08-07-Wired-CongressReassessesOTA.txt
followed by the citation entries themselves:
==========>
02-06-14-WashPost-MITPreservesOpeness.txt==========
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48389-2002Jun13.html
MIT Seeks to Preserve Openness Amid
Security Measures
By Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 14, 2002; Page A06
The Massachusetts Institute of
Technology has become the first major
academic research institution to
outline a policy designed to
protect intellectual openness on
campus amid growing pressure to
==========>
02-08-07-Wired-CongressReassessesOTA.txt==========
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,54373,00.html
Congress Reassesses Tech Office
By Dan Mitchell
2:00 a.m. Aug. 7, 2002 PDT
WASHINGTON -- When former House
Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Republicans cut
off funding for the Office of
Technology Assessment in 1995, the move seemed
capricious to scientists who felt the
office did nothing less than help
legislators make informed decisions.
It would be
convenient if the directory entries were links to each citation entry,
but to save space and download times, the actual bibliography pages are
plain text with no formatting or other information in them. The
user can of course paste directory entries into their browser search
function and move to citation entries that way. Perhaps in the
future the pages will be HTML formatted and include features such as
internal links.
Directory
entries consist of a date (yy-mm-dd) followed by the name of the
publication where the article appeared and a title. The
title is not necessarily the title of the article but one chosen
by me to be concise and descriptive.
The
bibliographic entry starts with the directory entry, usually the URL,
citation information and the first 2-3 lines of the article. Due
to copyright restrictions we cannot provide the full text of cited
articles.
The current
bibliography contains approximately 12,000 citations in 22
categories. There are not 12,000
unique
citations because some have been assigned to more than one
category. The category with the most citations is Intellectual
Property with slightly more than 17% of the total. The next most
citations
appear in the Security category with almost 14%.
Privacy and Telecom each have slightly more the 10% of the citations
and Internet slightly less than 10%. The rest are all well
within single digit percentages.
The taxonomy:
There are two
kinds of access covered: access to government and access by users with
various impairments.
This category
covers all aspects of cryptography from the development of new
techniques through the deployment and use of cryptography to policy
issues.
Covered are
all issues related to digital rights management in general and
information about specific technologies.
In addition
to the obvious issues, this category covers sales tax and the
developing pay music sites. It also covers UCITA although there
hasn't been much activity lately on this issue.
All aspects
of electronic voting are represented in this category.
Coverage of
the emerging widespread problem of using computers
(primarily via the Internet) to commit fraudulent acts such as phishing
for
personal and private data.
Free speech
issue as related to computing are covered here.
This category
is self explanatory. But unlike many other technology policy
taxonomies you
will find that topics such as digital rights management, UCITA, etc.,
have their own categories.
All aspects
of the Internet are covered, ranging from governance to development of
new technology.
There has to
be
one of these also to cover topics not in any of the existing
categories. There are only a handful of citations here.
All aspects
of the impact of computing technology on privacy are covered.
Covers all
aspects of the growing concern over manufacturers liability for
errors in their products, primarily software.
This category covers articles about computing research support policy both government and industrial. It is not a source of research information or the availability of specific research programs and funding.
Topics from
protection of critical computing infrastructure to viruses are covered.
Covered are
all aspects of spam from technological anti-spam techniques to
legislation.
Covers all
aspects of the problem of snooping programs that are installed on a
user's computer, usually without the users knowledge or explicit
permission.
This
bibliography is probably unique because it covers the dull, boring
topic of regulatory issues, particularly as it relates to
telecommunications and specifically, broadband Internet access.
New technological developments are also covered.
Of particular
interest to computer graphics researchers and practitioners, this
category covers HDTV developments and legislation plus topics such as
using the Internet to provide television.
Covers USACM
activities and the Washington Update email newsletter.
Includes
lists of websites that are useful for technology policy issues.