Re: [DDN] op/ed: Telecom reform needed to bridge Latino digital divide
On Fri, 6 Jan 2006, Andy Carvin wrote: Hi Stephen, It would be hypocritical of me to criticize any nonprofit simply for receiving corporate funding, as corporate funding has been key to DDN's survival. [...] Did LULAC receive this money specifically to advocate for these companies? That seems unlikely. Did they have one policy position before receiving funding and shift that position afterward? I have no reason to think so. My guess would be that prior to receiving funding, LULAC had not been developing op/ed pieces concerning whether VOIP providers should or should not contribute to the Universal Service Fund. Do they try to obscure the sources of their funding or are they transparent about it? I had asked: Do you think it would have beeen helpful for LULAC or the Miami Herald to have acknowledged that in 2004, LULAC received a $1 million dollar grant from SBC, and that LULAC's Corporate Alliance Members include: ATT, BellSouth, Verizon and Sprint: http://www.sbc.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800cdvn=newsnewsarticleid=21220 http://www.lulac.org/links.html#anchor551841: While LULAC's Web site identifies funding sources, I wouldn't imagine most Miami Herald readers knew that information while reading their op/ed on telecom policy. I'm not asking these questions to challenge your facts or anything - I just don't know the answers and would be interested in your perspective. All of this raises broader questions about the role of money in digital divide policy advocacy, of course. Is one organization's funding better than another's because it came from philanthropic sources rather than corporate sources? How do organizations sincerely committed to bridging the digital divide survive in lean times without accepting corporate money? Should this even be a goal? Or do these partnerships lead to better engagement with the private sector? Most would agree that there are many circumstances when it is helpful for nonprofits to receive corporate support. But on other occasions it's inappropriate due to conflicts of interest, such as when nonprofits are attempting to provide unbiased information to consumers on the merits of consumer goods and may wish to avoid receiving support from particular purveyors of such goods, or when corporate support will undermine the capacity of nonprofits to effectively advocate on behalf of their constituents' interests in the policy arena. I haven't had any great quarrel with the way that DDN, itself, has handled such issues over the years. One rare past concern that I perhaps should have voiced at the time: While DDN was at the Benton Foundation, we'd occasionally see on the Digital Divide list something like: The Alliance for Public Technology The Benton Foundation invite you to join them for a brown bag lunch and off-the-record conversation among friends... at The Benton Foundation. In that context, do you think that DDN list readers adequately understood the relationship between the Alliance for Public Technology, Issue Dynamics, and the major phone companies and, if not, do you think that Benton Foundation staff should have tried to ensure that they did? - Steve Ronan p.s. sorry for the delayed response. ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
Re: [DDN] op/ed: Telecom reform needed to bridge Latino digital divide
Andy, Do you think it would have beeen helpful for LULAC or the Miami Herald to have acknowledged that in 2004, LULAC received a $1 million dollar grant from SBC, and that LULAC's Corporate Alliance Members include: ATT, BellSouth, Verizon and Sprint: http://www.sbc.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800cdvn=newsnewsarticleid=21220 http://www.lulac.org/links.html#anchor551841: Should we celebrate the active engagement in telecommunications policy of nonprofits being intensively funded by a set of phone companies that have tended to mix philanthropy and politics, at times to the apparent detriment of consumers? Might it not be better for such nonprofits to stay on the sidelines, while members of the nonprofit sector free of such conflicts of interest lead efforts to promote telecommunications policy in the public interest? Principal LULAC arguments in the op/ed you cite include: 1) We need to streamline or otherwise eliminate unnecessary red-tape imposed by state and local governments in deciding whether an otherwise qualified company should be permitted to get into the phone or cable business. 'Mother, may I' is truly bad policy in this technologically dynamic era. What is LULAC getting at here? The phone companies urgently want to provide one-way transmission of video services to the public without needing to first agree to franchise terms with municipalities like the cable companies have had to do. And if I interpret correctly, LULAC would like both phone and cable companies to be exempt from negotiating franchises with cities. My sense is that in many cities, such as Cleveland, Seattle and San Francisco, those franchise agreements have given a major boost to efforts to provide equitable access to technology. At the same time there's a lot to be said for the efficiencies of a single statewide procedure, if the benefits of those efficiencies flow not just to corporations but also to disadvantaged citizens. It seems odd strategically that LULAC would at this stage of the game lead an attempt to cede the phone companies their desired goal, without making the case that cities and their citizens must get, as a result of any more efficient, streamlined process, a much better deal on average than they get through the current franchising system. It would be naive to assume that benefits accruing to phone and cable companies will naturally flow to consumers without explicit, enforceable provisions to ensure that. 2) According to LULAC, any company that wants to compete in the voice-telephone business should be required to contribute to the Universal Service Fund (to ensure affordable phone service in remote and low-income areas), to offer emergency 9-1-1 services and to offer services for the hearing impaired such as Telephone Relay Service. There is reason for concern, as many companies that offer Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services are trying to evade these obligations. The phone companies are having their profits eroded by VOIP providers and would love to slow them down with burdensome regulations. But presumably LULAC should want them to survive and thrive. I would guess that LULAC's constituents are in small but increasing numbers taking advantage of services such as Skype, Gizmo, Google Talk, and Free World Dialup that enable them to make VOIP calls within the U.S. and overseas without being charged for the service. In the quoted paragraph above, we see a LULAC position very much in sync with that of the phone companies. But just as LULAC thinks it efficient to skip municipal franchising, shouldn't it recognize that there are huge efficiencies to offering services at no cost, with no need to track and bill very minor payments. Does it really help achieve the goals of universal service to require services like Gizmo and Skype to bill each and every one of their users in order to send money to the universal service fund? And as far as the situations where those or other VOIP providers do charge some customers, shouldn't any call by LULAC for such companies to contribute to the universal service program be accompanied by a call for reforms to the universal service program itself, reforms that may be unappealing to the phone companies? According to David Hughes, the program has historically piled monies into the coffers of the wireline telcos while operating to the severe disadvantage of wireless broadband providers. http://www.comtechreview.org/summer-fall-1999/looking_at_erate.htm And Robert Atkinson argues, I think persuasively, that any universal service payments made by VoIP services should go to supporting the build-out of broadband telecommunications, not to the PSTN [The phone companies' public switched telephone network]. Atkinson writes that, Using these revenues to support the 20th century circuit-switched network will only delay that transition to a robust, packet-switched broadband network for the 21st
Re: [DDN] op/ed: Telecom reform needed to bridge Latino digital divide
Hi Stephen, It would be hypocritical of me to criticize any nonprofit simply for receiving corporate funding, as corporate funding has been key to DDN's survival. At various points in time, DDN has received funds from AOL, ATT, Verizon and SBC, among others. (Our last funders before shutting down at EDC were AOL, the Casey Foundation and Benton Foundation, for those who didn't know that. Our other funders, both for-profit and nonprofit, had whittled away in recent years.) DDN would never have been born, nor would it have survived, without corporate support. Having said that, we always felt it was important to be transparent and independent; our funders were always clearly identified on our website, and we also made sure that we could take positions on issues that were in opposition to some of our funders. Also, when DDN was founded, we accepted funds from donors in equal amounts so that none would have undue influence. Nothing we accomplished over the last six years would have been possible without private sector support. Did LULAC receive this money specifically to advocate for these companies? Did they have one policy position before receiving funding and shift that position afterward? Do they try to obscure the sources of their funding or are they transparent about it? I'm not asking these questions to challenge your facts or anything - I just don't know the answers and would be interested in your perspective. All of this raises broader questions about the role of money in digital divide policy advocacy, of course. Is one organization's funding better than another's because it came from philanthropic sources rather than corporate sources? How do organizations sincerely committed to bridging the digital divide survive in lean times without accepting corporate money? Should this even be a goal? Or do these partnerships lead to better engagement with the private sector? andy Stephen Ronan wrote: Andy, Do you think it would have beeen helpful for LULAC or the Miami Herald to have acknowledged that in 2004, LULAC received a $1 million dollar grant from SBC, and that LULAC's Corporate Alliance Members include: ATT, BellSouth, Verizon and Sprint: http://www.sbc.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800cdvn=newsnewsarticleid=21220 http://www.lulac.org/links.html#anchor551841: Should we celebrate the active engagement in telecommunications policy of nonprofits being intensively funded by a set of phone companies that have tended to mix philanthropy and politics, at times to the apparent detriment of consumers? Might it not be better for such nonprofits to stay on the sidelines, while members of the nonprofit sector free of such conflicts of interest lead efforts to promote telecommunications policy in the public interest? Principal LULAC arguments in the op/ed you cite include: 1) We need to streamline or otherwise eliminate unnecessary red-tape imposed by state and local governments in deciding whether an otherwise qualified company should be permitted to get into the phone or cable business. 'Mother, may I' is truly bad policy in this technologically dynamic era. What is LULAC getting at here? The phone companies urgently want to provide one-way transmission of video services to the public without needing to first agree to franchise terms with municipalities like the cable companies have had to do. And if I interpret correctly, LULAC would like both phone and cable companies to be exempt from negotiating franchises with cities. My sense is that in many cities, such as Cleveland, Seattle and San Francisco, those franchise agreements have given a major boost to efforts to provide equitable access to technology. At the same time there's a lot to be said for the efficiencies of a single statewide procedure, if the benefits of those efficiencies flow not just to corporations but also to disadvantaged citizens. It seems odd strategically that LULAC would at this stage of the game lead an attempt to cede the phone companies their desired goal, without making the case that cities and their citizens must get, as a result of any more efficient, streamlined process, a much better deal on average than they get through the current franchising system. It would be naive to assume that benefits accruing to phone and cable companies will naturally flow to consumers without explicit, enforceable provisions to ensure that. 2) According to LULAC, any company that wants to compete in the voice-telephone business should be required to contribute to the Universal Service Fund (to ensure affordable phone service in remote and low-income areas), to offer emergency 9-1-1 services and to offer services for the hearing impaired such as Telephone Relay Service. There is reason for concern, as many companies that offer Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services are trying to evade these obligations. The phone companies are having their profits eroded by VOIP
Re: [DDN] op/ed: Telecom reform needed to bridge Latino digital divide
Andy Carvin offered the following on 01/06/2006 10:38 AM: Hi Stephen, It would be hypocritical of me to criticize any nonprofit simply for receiving corporate funding, as corporate funding has been key to DDN's survival. At various points in time, DDN has received funds from AOL, ATT, Verizon and SBC, among others. (Our last funders before shutting down at EDC were AOL, the Casey Foundation and Benton Foundation, for those who didn't know that. Our other funders, both for-profit and nonprofit, had whittled away in recent years.) DDN would never have been born, nor would it have survived, without corporate support. Having said that, we always felt it was important to be transparent and independent; our funders were always clearly identified on our website, and we also made sure that we could take positions on issues that were in opposition to some of our funders. Also, when DDN was founded, we accepted funds from donors in equal amounts so that none would have undue influence. Nothing we accomplished over the last six years would have been possible without private sector support. Did LULAC receive this money specifically to advocate for these companies? Did they have one policy position before receiving funding and shift that position afterward? Do they try to obscure the sources of their funding or are they transparent about it? I'm not asking these questions to challenge your facts or anything - I just don't know the answers and would be interested in your perspective. All of this raises broader questions about the role of money in digital divide policy advocacy, of course. Is one organization's funding better than another's because it came from philanthropic sources rather than corporate sources? How do organizations sincerely committed to bridging the digital divide survive in lean times without accepting corporate money? Should this even be a goal? Or do these partnerships lead to better engagement with the private sector? andy Stephen Ronan wrote: Andy, Do you think it would have beeen helpful for LULAC or the Miami Herald to have acknowledged that in 2004, LULAC received a $1 million dollar grant from SBC, and that LULAC's Corporate Alliance Members include: ATT, BellSouth, Verizon and Sprint: http://www.sbc.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800cdvn=newsnewsarticleid=21220 http://www.lulac.org/links.html#anchor551841: Should we celebrate the active engagement in telecommunications policy of nonprofits being intensively funded by a set of phone companies that have tended to mix philanthropy and politics, at times to the apparent detriment of consumers? Might it not be better for such nonprofits to stay on the sidelines, while members of the nonprofit sector free of such conflicts of interest lead efforts to promote telecommunications policy in the public interest? Principal LULAC arguments in the op/ed you cite include: 1) We need to streamline or otherwise eliminate unnecessary red-tape imposed by state and local governments in deciding whether an otherwise qualified company should be permitted to get into the phone or cable business. 'Mother, may I' is truly bad policy in this technologically dynamic era. What is LULAC getting at here? The phone companies urgently want to provide one-way transmission of video services to the public without needing to first agree to franchise terms with municipalities like the cable companies have had to do. And if I interpret correctly, LULAC would like both phone and cable companies to be exempt from negotiating franchises with cities. My sense is that in many cities, such as Cleveland, Seattle and San Francisco, those franchise agreements have given a major boost to efforts to provide equitable access to technology. At the same time there's a lot to be said for the efficiencies of a single statewide procedure, if the benefits of those efficiencies flow not just to corporations but also to disadvantaged citizens. It seems odd strategically that LULAC would at this stage of the game lead an attempt to cede the phone companies their desired goal, without making the case that cities and their citizens must get, as a result of any more efficient, streamlined process, a much better deal on average than they get through the current franchising system. It would be naive to assume that benefits accruing to phone and cable companies will naturally flow to consumers without explicit, enforceable provisions to ensure that. 2) According to LULAC, any company that wants to compete in the voice-telephone business should be required to contribute to the Universal Service Fund (to ensure affordable phone service in remote and low-income areas), to offer emergency 9-1-1 services and to offer services for the hearing impaired such as Telephone Relay Service. There is reason for concern, as many companies that offer Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services are trying to evade these obligations.
Re: [DDN] op/ed: Telecom reform needed to bridge Latino digital divide
Andy: Why not avoid any appearance of sounding hypocritical by notifying readers when you contribute your criticism? How did you made sure that we could take positions on issues that were in opposition to some of our funders. . .? When we received funding from a private sector partner, we made clear to them we would keep editorial independence. So when AOL funded us, for example, nothing would stop us from writing an article critical of [EMAIL PROTECTED] We would always inform them of it, in case they wanted to write a public response. No funder ever interfered with our publishing, and they certainly never stopped DDN members from having their say on issues they cared about. It's also worth noting that DDN is now designed as a decentralized online community. I don't write the articles. DDN members do. They also post them directly to the site. So there's never been a situation where private sector entities interfered with that editorial independence. Ironically, the problem hasn't been private funding - it's been public funding. Because EDC is publicly funded, we were discouraged from picking fights with the federal government. And when DDN was based at the Benton Foundation, we were not allowed to lobby for policies we cared about because of Benton's legal status as a charitable foundation. But private funders never tried to interfere or discourage us from getting involved in one issue or another. On the topic you raised about whether one organization's funding is better than another's because it came from philanthropic sources, the answer should be obvious, I think. Corporate money is by definition given to any nonprofit project with but one goal in mind, that is, to further the image and thus enhance the corporation's profits. For example, any list that has Verizon as a contributor is fighting against itself, if it doesn't spell out the why's and wherefore's of the money contributed, so readers can understand the purpose of the partnership. Tom Sure, there's no doubt that companies give to make themselves look better. But as long as they don't dictate how that money gets spent and they don't interfere, why not? It never stopped us from writing about municipal wifi or another cause we thought relevant for greater public discussion or support. You're also forgetting DDN's original mandate - to create an online, multistakeholder, multi-sector network of activists seeking to bridge the digital divide. Multistakeholder and multi-sector, by definition, means working with the private sector. So it's not like this was some dirty dark secret - it was central to our founding and has always been a part of the mission. Like I said, DDN never have been created or lasted as long without support from various sectors, including the private sector. And what happened when we tried to focus on getting less money from the private sector and more from the public sector? We ran out of funding and lost our jobs. Sure, it would have been great if some noncommercial philanthropic benefactor had stepped up and bankrolled DDN so we could do our work and really mobilize, but that was never realistic. ac ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message. -- Andy Carvin acarvin (at) edc . org (until Jan 31) As of February 1: andycarvin (at) yahoo . com http://www.digitaldivide.net http://www.andycarvin.com ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
Re: [DDN] op/ed: Telecom reform needed to bridge Latino digital divide
I'm getting a semantics headache, so please bear with me. :-) Andy Carvin wrote: Ironically, the problem hasn't been private funding - it's been public funding. Because EDC is publicly funded, we were discouraged from picking fights with the federal government. When you say publicly funded, do you mean federally funded? Either way, I'd have to say it's been pretty balanced... And when DDN was based at the Benton Foundation, we were not allowed to lobby for policies we cared about because of Benton's legal status as a charitable foundation. Err... could you give an example of this? But private funders never tried to interfere or discourage us from getting involved in one issue or another. Do private funders include corporate funders? Like I said, DDN never have been created or lasted as long without support from various sectors, including the private sector. And what happened when we tried to focus on getting less money from the private sector and more from the public sector? We ran out of funding and lost our jobs. Sure, it would have been great if some noncommercial philanthropic benefactor had stepped up and bankrolled DDN so we could do our work and really mobilize, but that was never realistic. Just out of curiosity, was there ever a dollar amount estimated to keep DDN in funding? -- Taran Rampersad Presently in: San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago [EMAIL PROTECTED] Looking for contracts/work! http://www.knowprose.com/node/9786 New!: http://www.OpenDepth.com http://www.knowprose.com http://www.digitaldivide.net/profile/Taran Criticize by creating. — Michelangelo ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
Re: [DDN] op/ed: Telecom reform needed to bridge Latino digital divide
Taran Rampersad wrote: I'm getting a semantics headache, so please bear with me. :-) Andy Carvin wrote: Ironically, the problem hasn't been private funding - it's been public funding. Because EDC is publicly funded, we were discouraged from picking fights with the federal government. When you say publicly funded, do you mean federally funded? Either way, I'd have to say it's been pretty balanced... By publicly funded, I mean local and national government funding sources. According to EDC's 2004 annual report, which can be downloaded at www.edc.org, EDC received 81% of its funding from government sources, and 19% from private sources. EDC's biggest projects often involve funding from the NSF, US Dept of Ed, USAID, among other agencies. DDN, on the other hand, hasn't ever received government funding as far as I know, during our tenure at Benton and EDC. The same thing goes for our Center for Media Community at EDC. This meant we were an anomoly, since most EDC centers get funding from govt sources. Either way, it didn't matter - because other EDC centers relied on government funding, EDC asked us (DDN) to take a very hands-off role on policy issues. That's why we had to restrict members from using DDN resources to engage in lobbying or advocating specific policy outcomes in Congress. It put us between a rock and a hard place. Fortunately, moving DDN to takingITGlobal will take away this pressure, since they're based in Canada. And when DDN was based at the Benton Foundation, we were not allowed to lobby for policies we cared about because of Benton's legal status as a charitable foundation. Err... could you give an example of this? I don't know the specific federal statute, but basically, US foundations are prevented by law from lobbying members of Congress. We can educate them, but not lobby them. In practice, we could document the effects of certain policy outcomes on bridging the digital divide, but as a Benton staffer, I couldn't go to capitol hill and say vote for HR 123 or restore funding for the TOP program. We had to let other organizations do that work for us. But private funders never tried to interfere or discourage us from getting involved in one issue or another. Do private funders include corporate funders? In this instance, yes, I'm referring to corporate funders. They were always very hands-off with us. Sometimes a funder would pass along a press release for some digital divide project they funded and asked us to publicize it on DDN, and we resisted this. Instead, if there was media coverage of one of their projects, we'd cover that, since media coverage would be more likely to offer a balanced view. Like I said, DDN never have been created or lasted as long without support from various sectors, including the private sector. And what happened when we tried to focus on getting less money from the private sector and more from the public sector? We ran out of funding and lost our jobs. Sure, it would have been great if some noncommercial philanthropic benefactor had stepped up and bankrolled DDN so we could do our work and really mobilize, but that was never realistic. Just out of curiosity, was there ever a dollar amount estimated to keep DDN in funding? No, there wasn't, because it wasn't as simple as saying DDN costs 50k a year or 150k or 500k. The problem was that our institutional entity, the Center for Media Community, was no longer financially viable, and there wasn't the sense that the Center could survive simply running DDN. There's an expectation for centers to run multiple projects, so we couldn't just be DDN, per se. And because we were at EDC, we had to have enough money to cover EDC overhead and be on-par, budget-wise, with other centers. Some centers have dozens of staff and budgets of tens of millions of dollars a year. We had three staff and around half a mil a year to do all of our work. If we were just DDN, that would have been plenty. But trying to do other things just stretched us too thin. Complicating matters is the question of how DDN could be run. At the moment, it's running on zero budget - it has no staff, no financing, just the goodwill of EDC giving it the server space to host it. At times the DDN budget has ranged as high as half a million dollars a year, but that was when we had half a dozen staff working full time on editorial work, research, policy work, public campaigns, etc. But that was at the height of the dot-com boom, when we had more than a dozen funders at any given time. -- Andy Carvin acarvin (at) edc . org (until Jan 31) As of February 1: andycarvin (at) yahoo . com http://www.digitaldivide.net http://www.andycarvin.com ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide
[DDN] op/ed: Telecom reform needed to bridge Latino digital divide
Hi everyone, Yesterday's Miami Herald featured an op/ed by Hector Flores of the League of United Latin America Citizens (LULAC) offering a Latino policy perspective on the digital divide. In 2006, Congress will set out to rewrite the nation's telecommunications laws, Flores notes. And if federal lawmakers get it right, Hispanic Americans, and consumers generally, could have much to celebrate. But if lawmakers misfire, the digital divide could explode into a digital abyss. Among his recommendations is to have more telecom companies contributing to the Universal Service Fund, source of the E-Rate funding used to subsidize school and library Internet access around the US. I've written about the op/ed on my blog: http://www.andycarvin.com The full text of Flores' op/ed can be found here: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/13553457.htm -- --- Andy Carvin Program Director EDC Center for Media Community acarvin @ edc . org http://www.digitaldivide.net http://katrina05.blogspot.com Blog: http://www.andycarvin.com --- ___ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@mailman.edc.org http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
