Last week the folks at Speed Matters published an interesting article about the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia denying Center for Public Integrity access to zip-code-by-zip-code data from the FCC on high speed connections.
Service providers submit this info to the FCC. In the Senate Session I watched last week (and in other instances – such as a bill submitted by Senator Daniel Inouye) the FCC has pretty much said that the numbers they have aren’t great. But apparently the court denied access to this data because it would be “likely to cause substantial competitive harm” to the telecom companies.
Ironically this happened exactly one week before the International Right to Know Day (Sept 28). I’m kind of an advocate for making information public – especially information like this that can be useful in the aggregate – that is to say info that doesn’t necessarily help anyone profile us as individuals but that does help paint a clearer picture for legislators so that they can make better informed decisions.
Our right to privacy is important, but without accurate data we will never be able to identify where the need to build out the infrastructure is. I think Senator Inouye’s Broadband Data Improvement Act is a good way the get the infromation we need without violating our privacy.
We need to act on this now before our Nation falls any more behind.
By: Roger Osburne on October 1, 2007
at 3:14 pm
I think if you check you can gain this info from county offices anyway on services that are delivered and where .By the way was good talks with a member of the state on providing services to regions we have previously talked about.
By: jamie on October 3, 2007
at 12:34 pm
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119128309597345795.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news
here is a good read for u
By: jamie on October 4, 2007
at 2:23 am