Barack Obama made his first public comment on Julius Genachowski's proposed open Internet -- a.k.a. net neutrality -- regulations, in a speech announcing the White House's new national innovation strategy delivered in Troy, New York. Obama drew a connection between reversing the hard-hit town's economic woes and the need for an Internet upon which anyone can compete...

Here's the full text of what Federal Communications Commission chair Julius Genechowski had to say at Brookings this morning, as he both announced the FCC's more aggressive approach to keeping the Internet open and provided a sketch of his ambitions for his tenure at the head of the commission...

Things just got interesting over on the BlogBand. That's the unfortunately named blog written by the folks ensconced within the FCC who are leading the effort, mandated by the stimulus package, to finally cobble together some sort of comprehensive national plan to bring more, faster, and cheaper broadband Internet to the United States.

Blair Levin, the sort of agent without title over on the commission, is pushing back against a criticism that the organization's broadband corps has focused its early efforts on shining a spotlight on the current state of Internet in the U.S., rather than actually coming up with a new, and needed, philosophy of connectivity. Yes, the commission's series of nearly two dozen workshops has been webcast. And yes, the FCC is joining the rest of us in the 21st century by getting jiggy with Twitter, Facebook, and more. Yes, chairperson Julius Genachowski is sitting in the spotlight at the Gov 2.0 Summit next to tech luminary Tim O'Reilly, talking up the sparkling appeal of broadband.

But, the argument you hear bubbling up goes, while the participation of the public is important -- critical, even -- what the commission has thus far failed to do is to really advocate with the full weight of the Obama Administration for a shift in the way that the government regulates, mandates, cajoles, and teases the U.S. towards actually putting more wire in the ground, more connections in the home, and more broadband in the pockets of more Americans. The FCC hasn't challenged what the telecom giants have done, and have failed to do, that has put us in our current state of connectivity. Most importantly, the Obama Administration hasn't even begun to articulate what a muscularly progressive approach to broadband looks like.

But that, blogs Levin, can wait...

The Federal Communications Commission has just launched an IdeaScale-powered section of their Broadband.gov site. You've seen these tools before. You vote ideas up, down, and you leave comments. Two thoughts, though. The first is that while it's a good step to invite more people into the process, we've reached the point of agreement amongst anyone who would actually leave a comment on this site that broadband is of phenomenal benefit and we really should be making it more available to more people more reliably at a lower cost. Yay, broadband. The sticky wicket, though, is how, exactly, you go about doing that. Neither the experts at the FCC nor the minds at America's telecom companies have managed to figure that out, so it would be enormously helpful to have a public discussion that focuses on that, rather than about how great it is to be able to remotely connect up with your doctor or take classes over high-speed broadband than you otherwise would be able to take.

The second point, and I think we're getting into "hobby horse" territory for me now, is that we musn't forget that, for all the new Twitter and blogging and IdeaScaling and online public workshops that the FCC is doing now, the FCC website is really, really bad. Chair Julius Genachowski joked at the Gov 2.0 Summit this week that the site was designed by Kevin Werbach back in 1996, and it hasn't changed since. If I'm a small advocacy group trying to arrange to get people in my city neighborhood or rural enclave high-speed Internet that they can afford, then I want to be able to reliably find, say, information on grants and programs that will actually put wire in the ground and dishes on rooftops, more than I care about the agency's banging new Twitter stream. As much as it's encouraging that some small section of the FCC, namely the new Broadband Plan wing, is experimenting and innovating online, it doesn't change the fact that the most basic building block of the FCC's public presence, the website, is 13 years outdated.

We're covering the FCC's on-going series of public workshops as it works to draft a National Broadband Plan. An archive of that coverage can be found here. -- the editors

Small businesses “are the heart of the American economy.” They employ about half of all U.S. workers.

The Small Business Administration reports that small businesses “have generated 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually over the last decade.”  Disadvantaged businesses (read: minority-owned) employ more than four million people.

It is said that necessity is the mother of invention. The jobless recovery, coupled with the changing demographics, make it imperative that small and disadvantaged businesses have affordable access to broadband and a fair chance to compete for federal contracts and funding opportunities.

High-speed Internet access is about more than bridging the digital divide. It’s also about access to a critical infrastructure. In short, broadband access matters to economic growth, job creation and civic participation...

It can be challenging to get people worked up to the appropriate level of passion over the importance of connecting Americans to high speed broadband Internet. Health insurance, "death panels" -- these things move the soul. Upload vs. downloads speeds and megabits-per-dollar can seem, well, bloodless.

That's a shame. At the same time the United States is obsessed with the debate over health care reform, it's also crafting the country's first ever plan to connect its citizens to high-speed Internet. Health reform and broadband reform share many of the same exciting factors. Entrenched interests with their tentacles wrapped around official Washington. Outdated business models. Convoluted incentives. Sure, health reform is objectively more important. Still, one wonders if the competing levels of interest in the debates are skewed even worse than their relative importances.

Part of the problem, of course, is that those best equipped to testify about how not having broadband drags on them aren't connected to the high-speed Internet. Thus, they aren't heard from as much. But that's why we have reports from the USDA! The agency is out with a new "twin" study that compares places in the rural U.S. of similar size and demographics, but one with broadband and one without. More broadband, finds the USDA, means more jobs and higher wages. ArsTechnica's Matthew Laser has the story.

I once, while writing a piece for the Center for American Progress on getting the economics of rural broadband to work, got a chance to interview people in Rose Hill, Virginia -- population 700 or so. (Oh, you want a link? Here you go.). Rose Hill is deep, deep in Appalachia. The Internet got there in 2006. (The state official spearheading that effort was, not incidentally, Aneesh Chopra, now U.S. CIO.)

What was amazing is that when I asked Rose Hill-ians what changed when the high-speed Internet came, the response was generally a pause and then, "Well, everything." What sort of work opportunities open up. Whether young people want to stay and build lives in Rose Hill. How many people turn out for the annual Black Bear Blast. Important stuff. Life changing stuff. Which you can forget when you're ambling through Brooklyn or Washington DC and are rarely not in a broadband hotspot, if not overlapping ones.

(Photo of broadband by satellite on California's Elk Flat Ranch by Gino.)

We're covering the FCC's on-going series of public workshops as it works to draft a National Broadband Plan. An archive of that coverage can be found here. -- the editors

It has been widely reported that the U.S. has fallen from broadband leadership to fourth in 2002, to twelfth, or sixteenth or 24th today, depending on whose numbers are cited.

But if that's true, it was not obvious at the FCC's International Lessons workshop yesterday...

Sure, it might look like a standard-issue DC tech policy event. But it's also something of a ritual cleansing. Today, the Free Press Summit is taking place in Washington to focus conversations around the future of the Internet and the prospects for a vibrant and diverse media landscape. But -- featuring DC policy people old and new who determine in large part how telecom policy plays out in Washington, including former FCC commissioner Michael Copps
and Susan Crawford, who is helping to guide the creation of a national broadband strategy from her post on President Obama's National Economic Council -- the event is also a chance to celebrate the declining health of the neoliberal, free-market approach to broadband that has reigned supreme in Washington for many a year now. Free Press is releasing a 123-page report called "Dismantling Digital Deregulation: Toward a National Broadband Strategy" that is a clear guide to the vision of Internet advocates who are looking to a future of a more hands-on government approach to broadband.

To follow along with the event, check out the Twitter channel @freepress and the Twitter hashtag: #fpdc. The day's events will be live streamed here.

It's a shame -- he'd probably already taken his suit to get pressed. Just a single day after putting Julius Genachowski's FCC chair confirmation hearing on the Senate Science Committee's schedule for next Tuesday, Senator Jay Rockefeller et al yanked it back off this afternoon. A committee spokesperson, reports the Wall Street Journal, attributed the abrupt change of plans to a "bipartisan" agreement to postpone Genachowski's congressional hazing until at least after the Memorial Day recess, meaning that there won't be a new lead on the Federal Communications Commission until at least the first week in June. The situation seems to be that Senate Republicans are reluctant to give Genachowski the thumbs up unless he's paired with a Republican counterpart. And they can't seem to make up their minds as to who that should be. The premature scheduling, in fact, may have been an attempt to light a fire under Republicans. Didn't work! Meanwhile, the FCC chugs along with a skeleton crew of three commissioners -- at the same time the commission is charged with coming up with a national broadband plan to direct the spending of some $7.2 billion in stimulus spending.

UPDATE: Mere seconds after posting this post, Congress Daily reported that Senate Republicans are "coalescing" around Meredith Baker, the (former?) acting administrator of the Commerce Department office that oversees broadband. A coincidence? Doubtful, my friends, doubtful.

Congress Daily's David Hatch has an interesting take on the crafting of a national broadband program that's happening right at the moment. The context: the stimulus package puts the spending of $20 billion in recovery monies to achieve greater broadband into the hands of agency officials -- USDA and offices within the Commerce Department in particular; meanwhile, the FCC is the point institution for developing the policy approach behind bringing more and better Internet to more Americans. Hatch notes, though, that a handful of White House officials have been taken the lead on shaping the early stages of the federal broadband program. Not wanting to step on agency toes, the White House is positioning its people -- the National Economic Council's Susan Crawford, and OSTP's Tom Kalil and Jim Kohlenberger among them -- as serving as liaisons and coordinators of the effort. If you're into federal broadband policy and practice, well worth a read.
(Actual photo of the Internet by Martin Deutsch)