In light of new developments in the Universal Service Fund, this press release about the Tribal Mobility Fund caught our eye…. March 5, 2014 – The Federal Communications Commission announced that Alaska’s largest telecommunication provider, General Communication, Inc. (NASDAQ:GNCMA), is eligible to receive $41.4 million for rural 3G/4G wireless projects as part of its Tribal [...]

Although it is the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC” or “Commission”) that is charged with implementing the ambitious universal service policy goals set forth in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (the “Act”), the FCC designated the Universal Service Administrative Company (“USAC”), an independent, not-for-profit corporation, to administer the day-to-day operations of federal universal service. USAC bills [...]

WASHINGTON, January 29, 2014 – President Obama highlighted the importance of broadband connectivity in his State of the Union address Tuesday, and announced that Apple, Microsoft, Sprint and Verizon were contributing funds to enable ultra-high-speed broadband connections “over the next two years, without adding a dime to the deficit.” The statement appears to be a [...]

January 23, 2014 – This press release come over the wire from the Internet Innovation Alliance: Ten years after he founded the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA) alongside still-Co-Chair Bruce Mehlman, Larry Irving this month returns to the coalition, the IIA today announced. In 2009, Irving stepped down from his role with IIA to join Hewlett [...]

PARK CITY, Utah, January 23, 2014 – On the internet, no one knows you’re a child.

That, at least, was the message I took from watching the film about the life of Aaron Swartz. The film, “The Internet’s Own Boy,” premiered this week here at the Sundance Film Festival, during which it received a sustained standing ovation.

The documentary is a biography of, and tribute to, the all-too-short life of Swartz, who died a year ago this month, at age 26.

Swartz had been under intense pressure from the federal prosecutors in Massachusetts. Criminal charges filed against him, if proven, could have imprisoned him for 35 years. Those charges stemmed from Swartz’s having downloaded millions of articles from JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals, onto a computer at the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While it is unclear what Swartz intended to do with the articles, it seems implausible that he would have republished them in an act of copyright infringement.

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