Bruce Edward Walker is managing editor of InfoTech & Telecom News. Prior to joining Heartland in 2010, Bruce worked at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy as science editor of the quarterly magazine MichiganScience and communications manager for the center’s Property Rights Network. In the latter position, Bruce won a Communicators Award of Distinction from the International Academy of the Visual Arts for a video he wrote, narrated, and produced, Boardman River Dams, Episode 1: Drawdown and Devastation in Grand Traverse County.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the PROTECT-IP/Stop Online Piracy Act (PIPA/SOPA) bill currently gaining momentum in Congress will cost taxpayers $47 million a year. In this video above from Fight for the Future, other major drawbacks beyond costs of PIPA/SOPA are enumerated, including empowering government and corporations with the ability to censor the Internet under the guise of protecting creative works.
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Under the bill, sharing a video with any copyrighted material could be considered illegal copyright infringement, subjecting the site to a shutdown without any recourse to the site owner.
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
The Daily Caller this weekend published my piece on why I think the AT&T/T-Mobile merger should be allowed to happen.
An excerpt:
… Third, charges that the merger will stifle innovation are bogus. AT&T repeatedly has stated the merger would allow it to deploy more quickly a 4G LTE network that would reach 97 percent of its customers nationwide. This would enable AT&T to compete with current top dog Verizon, at present the only wireless carrier with the spectrum and cash reserves to provide LTE technology. The FCC has determined that LTE technology “has the best potential ‘to make mobile wireless service a more viable competitor’ to landline broadband services,” as reported in Forbes magazine.
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Pummeled by tornadoes in April, North Carolina residents bravely soldiered forth to pick up the pieces, assist one another, and set the state aright. Not all disasters affecting Tar Heel citizens fall from the sky, however. Others are completely self-inflicted.
One such catastrophe plaguing this state and many others is municipal wi-fi and broadband boondoggles. Fortunately for North Carolinians, legislators in Raleigh are one step closer to lassoing the giant funnel cloud that has sucked millions of taxpayer dollars into these ill-advised and underperforming services.
On May 5 the state’s General Assembly showed its determination to remedy this disaster by passing House Bill 129, appropriately titled An Act to Protect Jobs and Investment by Regulating Government Competition with Private Business, by an 84-32 vote. Democrat Gov. Beverly Purdue has not indicated whether she will sign the bill or veto it.
Should it clear this last hurdle, the bill will mandate a public vote before cities can seek loans for municipal wi-fi or broadband cable systems that directly compete with private companies offering the same services. The bill also prohibits the use of utility funds to pay for community cable and wireless networks, a practice known as cross-subsidization.
Signing it should be a no-brainer, would require only a modicum of courage, would reveal a whole lot of heart, and would show that North Carolina isn’t in Oz anymore.
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America’s traditional “Tax Day” has arrived (though returns aren’t due until Monday, April 18). Not coincidentally April 15 also marks the cinematic release of Atlas Shrugged—Part 1. The timing could not have been planned more appropriately, as our federal government hovered on the brink of a shutdown just last week, states are unable to balance their budgets, and a malaise not witnessed since the Carter administration seems to have gripped our nation.
The film and the book it’s based on deal with steel industrialists, railroad magnates, and other captains of economic activity, but it’s not hard to see the themes of Atlas Shrugged as applying to current government policy toward the Internet. In fact, the artists who adapted Ayn Rand’s 1957 tome might’ve made the film more relevant to today’s audiences by updating key plot elements to apply them to the Internet.
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Tonight is the premiere of the long-awaited film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Go here to find out where part one of the trilogy is playing near you. Heartland’s Bruce Edward Walker has seen the film, and writes this review at The American Culture. An excerpt:
Whereas the book would have benefited from a heavy dose of editing, the film avoids Rand’s narrative pitfalls. So far, at least. If the next installments of the trilogy are as good as Part I, I offer my wholehearted endorsement.
Yes, the minuscule – by Hollywood standards – budget of $15 million means obscure actors in a story chock-a-block with characters. Bonnie Raitt’s ex-husband is in there. So are the tubby schlub who played Bill Paxton’s business partner on Big Love; the creepy guy in the diner from Mulholland Drive; the fat, bald guy who screams a lot in a couple of Coen brothers’ movies; a beleaguered wife from St. Elsewhere; and that alien Quark guy from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, too. Everyone else in the cast elevates Kathy Griffin to B-list.
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The National Journal reported Monday that the White House will likely veto any House attempts to scuttle the FCC’s net neutrality rules:
“If the president is presented with a resolution of disapproval that would not safeguard the free and open Internet, his senior advisers would recommend that he veto the resolution,” according to a Statement of Administrative Policy issued by the Office of Management and Budget.
This hardly comes as a surprise, as the Prez and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski have been carrying on like British boarding school mates in an E.M. Forster novel for the past two years. Or perhaps I’m granting too much literary credence to these two old Harvard Law School chums who more than likely never passed notes cribbed from Percy Shelley to one another.
I’m thinking a more fitting comparison might be Greg Marmalard and Chip Diller from the film “Animal House.” You know the type, brown-nosing, white wine-sipping Ivy League types conspiratorially performing the bidding of Dean “Google” Wormer to stifle Faber College – which, in this scenario, is a stand-in for the wild and wacky Internet.
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Full disclosure: I’m a snob. Increasingly, I shun popular culture for the esoteric film, theater, literature and music given far wider exposure on National Public Radio than on commercial stations. While I’m in confessional mode, I should add that I’m rooting for the future of the network, as I’ve been a daily listener of NPR for more than 30 years.
I do this despite what I perceive as an obvious left-leaning news bias, a perception that has increased since the release of James O’Keefe’s recent guerrilla video wherein NPR suit Ron Schiller has harsh words for Tea Partyers and Republicans and a negative assessment of conservatives in general. The more NPR staff protests, the more evidence surfaces displaying its decidedly liberal bent.
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Despite claims that public radio only costs each federal taxpayer $1.35 a year, the real-world costs are far higher. I interviewed several public radio station employees recently, and discovered state taxpayers cover far more of the costs it takes to bring A Prairie Home Companion and Car Talk to listeners.
This week, National Review Online published my essay, “‘Free’ Public Radio Is Anything But.” An excerpt: [click to continue…]
Sam Karnick, one of the most perceptive writers and thinkers in the free-market movement, has some interesting things to say about the recent kerfuffle over Keef Uberegoman at the Infotech & Telecom News. A sample:
Olbermann gave no specific reason for his decision to leave MSNBC at this time. The blogosphere, however, immediately lit up with posts blaming cable giant Comcast, which is planning to merge with MSNBC parent corporation NBC/Universal in a matter of days. Comcast issued a statement noting that it does not yet own NBCU and that it had “pledged from the day the deal was announced that we would not interfere with NBC Universal’s news operations. We have not and we will not.”
Read the remainder here.
Reading Tim Wu’s The Master Switch, one can’t help but conjecture the author and Columbia University professor looks under his bed each night to ensure no transactions are taking place wherein one party actually derives a profit. If they are, he cries “Monopoly” in the same fashion a frightened child would cry out for his mother in the middle of the night.
Or, perhaps he was terrified as a child by a man with a handlebar mustache wearing a monocle and top hat.
I, however, respectfully assert that every time a company succeeds against unfettered competition and government regulation, an angel gets its wings. Hey, it’s a stretch, but makes more sense to me than dropping the “M” bomb whenever a company exerts a competitive advantage.
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