There are situations in which people cannot make a voice call to 911 but might be able to send a text message. This was the case in 2007 during the campus shootings at Virginia Tech. Unfortunately, text messages sent to 911 are not processed. Only voice calls are. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been working on something the call Next Generation 911 (NG911). The FCC announced a plan this week to deploy NG911.
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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has unveiled the beta version of its new website FCC.gov with an emphasis on consumer use and interactivity. It’s new, it’s splashy and it uses key words like “blog” and “citizen engagement platforms.” But is it really ‘government 2.0’ we can believe in?
The Writers Guild of America East launched Save the Internet, a multifaceted campaign in support of net neutrality.
The Web site created by WGAE allows users to send emails to all members of the Federal Communications Commission (urging them to support net neutrality and to share the video (below), Connection Terminated, written by WGAE member Guy Shahar and cautioning against abolishing the principles of net neutrality.
The Federal Communications Commission Chairman (and Obama’s Harvard classmate) Julius Genachowski outlined in his speech this morning the proposal to stop Internet providers from favoring or discriminating against Internet traffic over their networks. If it works, the FCC won’t allow, let’s say, Verizon from slowing down Skype to make their own applications seem faster.
Genachowski said the end goal here is to reserve the open Internet as a platform for innovation, investment, job creation, competition, and “free expression.”
And the “network neutruality” rules, if enacted, will mean the following for consumers:
The FCC seeks to regulate net neutrality, the principle that “the flow of content should remain open and unrestricted.”
But is the proposal airtight? Some are skeptical: New York calls the proposal “likely to disappoint,” while bloggers on Huffington Post label it “garbage.”
The findings from a new survey released last week tracking how people react to online content delivery are not surprising: consumers have little patience for slow websites and expect their mobile service to be just as fast, or faster, than their home computers.
But don’t discard the survey just yet. The real takeaway, and the reason so much attention was paid, is the impact the survey may have in driving the debate over net-neutrality by presenting the side of a voice not often heard in the debate: consumers.
