Broadband & Community Broadband

President Obama announced a new initiative today aimed at providing far better Internet connectivity for American schools.

This blog post originally appeared on Higher Ed Watch, a blog fro

This week a group from the Open Technology Institute (OTI) will join the thousands of media makers and journalists, activists, advocates, policymakers, and technologists convening in Denver at the National Conference on Media Reform.

Since 2009, wireless mesh enthusiasts and community networking activists from across the globe have come together for a tournament of a social nature:  "Wireless Battle of the Mesh"

This paper examines the emerging global phenomenon of mobile leapfrogging in Internet access. Leapfrogging refers to the process in which new Internet users are obtaining access by mobile devices and are skipping the traditional means of access: personal computers. This leapfrogging of PC-based Internet access has been hailed in many quarters as an important means of rapidly and inexpensively reducing the gap in Internet access between developed and developing nations, thereby reducing the need for policy interventions to address this persistent digital divide.

“Information and data is the oil of our era,” explained telecom policy expert Susan Crawford at the New America Foundation on Thursday.

Last month my colleagues and I at the the Open Technology Institute released a paper titled “

Since 2009, the federal government has funded 232 Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) digital training and access projects nationwide. New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute (OTI) is a partner on two of them, in Detroit and Philadelphia. As these programs draw to a close at the end of 2012, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners are taking stock of the impact and outcomes of one of the largest and most comprehensive digital inclusion efforts ever undertaken.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is little known, but it wields a tremendous amount of power: It controls all of the Web’s top-level domains (those letters after the “dot,” like .com and .org). Currently, ICANN is in the midst of creating hundreds (and possibly thousands) of new, generic top-level domains (gTLDs) that span a host of different ideas, from .web to .cars to .anything_else_you_can_imagine. These new gTLDs have the potential to dramatically affect the future of Internet browsing, and they’re already stirring up some serious discussion.

In response to the Commission’s request in the November 18, 2011, Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for comment on the proposed Remote Areas Fund, New America Foundation, Public Knowledge, and Benton Foundation (collectively, “Public Interest Commenters”) ask the Commission to disperse any allocated funds in a way that opens the fund to community and locally-owned broadband providers seeking to offer service in a remote area, rather than only permit satellite broadband providers to receive support.