Searching for "FCC"

FCC broadband mapping task force

https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-chair-rosenworcel-launches-broadband-mapping-task-force/

The FCC has acknowledged that the maps it uses to figure out how to distribute the billions of dollars in federal funding it offers each year to subsidize the cost of building out infrastructure are flawed.

+++++++++++
more on net neutrality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=netneutrality

New FCC Chief

New Acting FCC Chief Jessica Rosenworcel Supports Restoring Net Neutrality from r/technology

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7mxja/new-acting-fcc-chief-jessica-rosenworcel-supports-restoring-net-neutrality

Rosenworcel has long supported net neutrality, and opposed most Trump FCC policies, be it the steady dismantling of the agency’s consumer protection authority, or efforts to eliminate decades-old media consolidation rules designed to protect public discourse and smaller companies from massive media monopolies.

In 2019, Rosenworcel pressured telecom giants to come clean on their collection and sale of sensitive user location data to third parties, and consumer groups say she’s been a steady advocate of consumer rights throughout her tenure.

Roughly 42 million Americans—double official FCC estimates—lack access to any broadband connection whatsoever. Another 83 million only have the choice of one provider, usually Comcast or Charter. This lack of meaningful competition directly results in high US broadband prices, spotty coverage, and routinely terrible customer service.

++++++++++++
more on netneutrality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=netneutrality

FCC votes to kill net neutrality

FCC Votes to Kill Net Neutrality, Capping a Year of Endless Bullshit

https://gizmodo.com/fcc-votes-to-kill-net-neutrality-capping-a-year-of-end-1821257779

In a 3-2 vote along party lines, the Republican-led commission decided to eliminate the current net neutrality rules and remove the shackles that prevent ISPs from blocking online content, slowing a competitor’s website, or charging you extra just to access YouTube. (You can read the dissenting opinions here.) It paves the way for an ISP free-for-all, baby, and you can bet telecom executives have plenty of lucrative plans in mind that we haven’t even considered.

 

FCC and netneutrality

https://hackernoon.com/more-than-a-million-pro-repeal-net-neutrality-comments-were-likely-faked-e9f0e3ed36a6

Jeff Kao Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Language Nerd, Biglaw Refugee. jeffykao.com

More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely Faked

++++++++++++++++

The Federal Communications Commission released a plan on Tuesday to dismantle landmark regulations that ensure equal access to the internet, clearing the way for internet service companies to charge users more to see certain content and to curb access to some websites.

The proposal, made by the F.C.C. chairman, Ajit Pai, is a sweeping repeal of rules put in place by the Obama administration. The rules prohibit high-speed internet service providers, or I.S.P.s, from stopping or slowing down the delivery of websites. They also prevent the companies from charging customers extra fees for high-quality streaming and other services.

++++++++++

FCC chairman defends net neutrality repeal plan

“All we are simply doing is putting engineers and entrepreneurs, instead of bureaucrats and lawyers, back in charge of the internet,” Pai said on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends,”

Pai on Tuesday confirmed his plan to fully dismantle the Obama-era net neutrality rules, which were approved by the FCC’s previous Democratic majority in 2015. His order would remove bans on blocking and throttling web traffic and allow internet service providers to charge for internet “fast lanes” to consumers. The move sparked a barrage of criticism from Democrats and public interest groups who call it a giveaway to big telecom companies.

+++++++++++++++++

What Everyone Gets Wrong in the Debate Over Net Neutrality

DATE OF PUBLICATION: 06.23.14TIME OF PUBLICATION: 6:30 AM.

The only trouble is that, here in the year 2014, complaints about a fast-lane don’t make much sense. Today, privileged companies—including Google, Facebook, and Netflix—already benefit from what are essentially internet fast lanes, and this has been the case for years. Such web giants—and others—now have direct connections to big ISPs like Comcast and Verizon, and they run dedicated computer servers deep inside these ISPs. In technical lingo, these are known as “peering connections” and “content delivery servers,” and they’re a vital part of the way the internet works.

in today’s world, they don’t address the real issue with the country’s ISPs, and if we spend too much time worried about fast lanes, we could hurt the net’s progress rather than help it.

The real issue is that the Comcasts and Verizons are becoming too big and too powerful. Because every web company has no choice but to go through these ISPs, the Comcasts and the Verizons may eventually have too much freedom to decide how much companies must pay for fast speeds.

++++++++++++++++

FAKE AMERICANS ARE INFLUENCING THE DEBATE OVER NET NEUTRALITY, SAYS NEW YORK’S ATTORNEY GENERAL

http://www.newsweek.com/bots-influencing-debate-over-net-neutrality-says-new-york-attorney-general-719454
An analysis of the millions of comments conducted by the data company Gravwell in October found that just 17.4 percent of the comments to the FCC on the net neutrality rules came from real people.
+++++++++++++++
Finley, K. (2017, November 22). Here’s How the End of Net Neutrality Will Change the Internet. WIRED. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/heres-how-the-end-of-net-neutrality-will-change-the-internet/
Because many internet services for mobile devices include limits on data use, the changes will be visible there first. In one dramatic scenario, internet services would begin to resemble cable-TV packages, where subscriptions could be limited to a few dozen sites and services. Or, for big spenders, a few hundred. Fortunately, that’s not a likely scenario. Instead, expect a gradual shift towards subscriptions that provide unlimited access to certain preferred providers while charging extra for everything else.
Even Verizon’s “unlimited” plans impose limits. The company’s cheapest unlimited mobile plan limits video streaming quality to 480p resolution, which is DVD quality, on phones and 720p resolution, the lower tier of HD quality, on tablets. Customers can upgrade to a more expensive plan that enables 720p resolution on phones and 1080p on tablets, but the higher quality 4K video standard is effectively forbidden.
Meanwhile, Comcast customers in 28 states face 1 terabyte data caps. Going over that limit costs subscribers as much as an additional $50 a month. As 4K televisions become more common, more households may hit the limit. That could prompt some to stick with a traditional pay-TV package from Comcast.
Republican FCC Chair Ajit Pai argues that Federal Trade Commission will be able to protect consumers and small business from abuses by internet providers once the agency’s current rules are off the books. But that’s not clear.
The good news is the internet won’t change overnight, if it all. Blake Reid, a clinical professor at Colorado Law, says the big broadband providers will wait to see how the inevitable legal challenges to the new FCC order shakeout. They’ll probably keep an eye on 2018 and even 2020 elections as well.

++++++++++++++++
more on netneutrality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=netneutrality

cheaper internet for low-income Americans

A program for cheaper internet for low-income Americans launches today

The FCC extended assistance that started during the pandemic

https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/31/22861200/application-now-open-discounted-internet-bills-fcc-affordable-connectivity-program

There’s more funding on the way to close the digital divide in the US. The new $1 trillion infrastructure law includes $65 billion to boost broadband access. More than 30 million Americans live somewhere without adequate broadband infrastructure, according to a Biden administration fact sheet.

virtual school in rural areas

Some families don’t want to go back to in-person school. Here’s how one S.C. district is dealing with this demand

https://hechingerreport.org/some-families-dont-want-to-go-back-to-in-person-school-heres-how-one-s-c-district-is-dealing-with-this-demand/

When the pandemic arrived, the school district struggled to connect its students to remote learning, as nearly half its households didn’t have high-speed internet. Even when the district handed out personal hotspots, they didn’t work for many families due to poor cell service.

Research before the pandemic often showed poorer outcomes for students in virtual schools versus brick-and-mortar ones. Only 3 percent of parents, in another Rand survey conducted this July, said they would send their youngest school-age child to full-time virtual school if the pandemic were over.

Gov. Henry McMaster pushed hard to return all schools to in-person learning this fall, saying remote learning was “not as good.” This year’s state budget allows only 5 percent of a school district’s students to enroll virtually; if a district exceeds that limit, the state will give only about half as much per-pupil funding for any additional online students.

But administrators said they didn’t have much of a choice. If Fairfield County didn’t offer a virtual option, some families would leave the district entirely and instead enroll in an online charter school. Fairfield fits a national trend: 31 percent of leaders in districts that serve primarily students of color said that parents “strongly demanded” a fully remote option this year, compared with 17 percent in majority-white schools, according to Rand.

That last part is one of the biggest barriers to remote learning in rural areas. Almost one in five rural Americans don’t have access to broadband at the speed considered minimum for basic web use, according to a report this year from the FCC.

The National Education Policy Center, for example, found that the high school graduation rate last year was only 53 percent for virtual charters, which enroll the majority of online students, and 62 percent for district-run virtual schools. The overall national average is 85 percent. A Brown University study last year on virtual charter schools in Georgia found that full-time students lost the equivalent of around one to two years of learning and reduced their chances of graduating from high school by 10 percentage points.

Skylar has “thrived” academically since she started learning at home. “I think that was because of less distraction,” she said. “I think it’s a little bit more intimate because it’s just her in her room by herself.”

The flip side is that less unstructured time also means less time spent just hanging out with friends at the playground or in the hallway between classes.

Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities

Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities

Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies, Editors

Deadline for 500-word abstracts: December 15, 2021

For more info:
https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/page/cfp-critical-infrastructure-studies-digital-humanities

Part of the Debates in the Digital Humanities Series A book series from the University of Minnesota Press Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, Series Editors

Defintion
Critical infrastructure studies has emerged as a framework for linking thought on the complex relations between society and its material structures across fields such as science and technology studies, design, ethnography, media infrastructure studies, feminist theory, critical race and ethnicity studies, postcolonial studies, environmental studies, animal studies, literary studies, the creative arts, and others (see the CIstudies.org Bibliography )

CI Studies Bibliography

Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019

https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2019

teaching quantitative methods:
https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60/section/620caf9f-08a8-485e-a496-51400296ebcd#ch19

Problem 1: Programming Is Not an End in Itself

An informal consensus seems to have emerged that if students in the humanities are going to make use of quantitative methods, they should probably first learn to program. Introductions to this dimension of the field are organized around programming languages: The Programming Historian is built around an introduction to Python; Matthew Jockers’s Text Analysis with R is at its heart a tutorial in the R language; Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton’s Humanities Data in R begins with chapters on the language; Folgert Karsdorp’s Python Programming for the Humanities is a course in the language with examples from stylometry and information retrieval.[11] “On the basis of programming,” writes Moretti in “Literature, Measured,” a recent retrospective on the work of his Literary Lab, “much more becomes possible”

programming competence is not equivalent to competence in analytical methods. It might allow students to prepare data for some future analysis and to produce visual, tabular, numerical, or even interactive summaries; Humanities Data in R gives a fuller survey of the possibilities of exploratory data analysis than the other texts.[15] Yet students who have focused on programming will have to rely on their intuition when it comes to interpreting exploratory results. Intuition gives only a weak basis for arguing about whether apparent trends, groupings, or principles of variation are supported by the data. 

From Humanities to Scholarship: Librarians, Labor, and the Digital

Bobby L. Smiley

https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60/section/bf082d0f-e26b-4293-a7f6-a1ffdc10ba39#ch35

First hired as a “digital humanities librarian,” I saw my title changed within less than a year to “digital scholarship librarian,” with a subject specialty later appended (American History). Some three-plus years later at a different institution, I now find myself a digital-less “religion and theology librarian.” At the same time, in this position, my experience and expertise in digital humanities (or “digital scholarship”) are assumed, and any associated duties are already baked into the job description itself.

Jonathan Senchyne has written about the need to reimagine library and information science graduate education and develop its capacity to recognize, accommodate, and help train future library-based digital humanists in both computational research methods and discipline-focused humanities content (368–76). However, less attention has been paid to tracking where these digital humanities and digital scholarship librarians come from, the consequences and opportunities that arise from sourcing librarians from multiple professional and educational stations, and the more ontological issues associated with the nature of their labor—that is, what is understood as work for the digital humanist in the library and what librarians could be doing.

++++++++++++++++++++++
More on digital humanities in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=Digital+humanities

negative net neutrality comments were fake

NY AG report finds 18 million FCC net neutrality comments were fake

https://www-engadget-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.engadget.com/amp/new-york-state-report-fcc-net-neutrality-repeal-170517463.html

Before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to repeal net neutrality at the end of 2017, the agency collected public opinion on the policy. In all, it said it received nearly 22 million comments. Over the years, there’s been a fair amount of discussion surrounding where many of those came from, with a study from that same year suggesting that only six percent of the comments were unique.

report  found the “largest” broadband companies funded a secret astroturfing campaign to push the FCC toward repealing net neutrality. At the time, AT&T, Comcast, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon (Engadget’s parent company) were in favor of repealing the policy. The industry hired several third-party firms to build public support for their decision. Ostensibly, those companies were supposed to convince people to support the broadband industry with incentives like gift cards and prizes. Instead, they simply submitted 8.5 million fake comments. The attorney general has fined three of the companies involved in sending in those comments $4.4 million.

+++++++++++++++
more on net neutrality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=netneutrality

New York State require ISPs to offer $15 broadband

New York State just passed a law requiring ISPs to offer $15 broadband from r/technology

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22388184/new-york-affordable-internet-cost-low-income-price-cap-bill

Earlier in 2021, a bipartisan group of senators called on the FCC to redefine broadband as 100 Mbps down and 100 Mbps up, as that would better reflect how people actually use their internet.

Still, paying $15 a month for 25 Mbps down is a heckuva lot better than paying $50 a month for those same speeds. Better yet, for those living in urban areas such as New York City, where the internet tends to be much faster, the same bill caps the price of broadband up to 200 Mbps at just $20 a month.

++++++++++
more on netneutrality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=netneutrality

1 2 3 4