Techdirt. Stories filed under "poor"

Comcast Lobbyist Admits To Holding Internet Service For The Poor Hostage To Get NBC Takeover Approved

Mike Masnick — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 09:46:00 PDT

The Washington Post has a profile piece about Washington DC power dealmaker David Cohen, who has led Comcast's policy and lobbying efforts for the past decade. It starts out (and ends) with a whopper of a story about Cohen explicitly had Comcast not offer a special internet offering for the poor since he wanted to use it as a bargaining chip in the NBC Universal purchase:

In fall 2009, Comcast planned to launch an Internet service for the poor that was sure to impress federal regulators. But David Cohen, the company's chief of lobbying, told the staff to wait.

At the time, Comcast was planning a controversial $30 billion bid to take over NBC Universal, and Cohen needed a bargaining chip for government negotiations.

"I held back because I knew it may be the type of voluntary commitment that would be attractive to the chairman" of the Federal Communications Commission, Cohen said in a recent interview.

At the end of the article, the reporter (Ceclia Kang) notes that the FCC later "took credit" for this program when it was launched:

The initiative may not have sealed the FCC's decision to approve the NBC merger. But it helped, Cohen said.

The proposal clearly captured the fancy of regulators. Late last month, Genachowski, the FCC chairman, touted the program, seemingly claiming some credit for its creation.

"This particular program came from our reviewing of the Comcast NBC-U transaction," Genachowski said in a speech. "Comcast embraced it as good for the country, as well as good for business. And I'm fine with that."

In other words, Cohen delayed a program to help the poor... in order to help make Comcast much, much richer in buying NBC... and then conveniently engineered it so that the FCC takes bogus credit for the program which would have been launched much earlier if Comcast hadn't used it as a bargaining chip. It's hard not to be cynical about politics in general and the FCC in particular when these kinds of stories hit the press. We've long been concerned about the FCC's ability to be played like a fiddle by industry lobbyists, and this only seems to confirm that point.

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Why Apple Will Not Be Part Of The Real Tablet Revolution

Glyn Moody — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:26:28 PST

You don't have to be a marketing genius or industry pundit to foresee that tablets will be an extremely hot sector in 2012. The launch of Apple's iPad in 2010 largely defined the category, just as the launch of the iPhone defined a new kind of smartphone in 2007; in 2012 we will probably begin to see Android tablets start to gain major market share just as Android smartphones have done this year.

Currently, the tablet is something of a cross between the hipster tech toy of choice and a trivially easy-to-use computing device for couch potatoes. But those early sectors are incidental to the tablet's real potential to revolutionize education, particularly in emerging economies.

The devices are perfect: they are compact, connect to the Net wirelessly, run off battery power for hours and can be used by children and adults alike with little or no training. There's just one problem, of course: the typical tablet's high-end pricing – hundreds of dollars – places it so far out of reach for most of the world's population that it might as well not exist for them. That is what makes India's Aakash tablet - basic cost around $50, but only $37 for Indian students thanks to a government subsidy – so remarkable, and so important.

Of course its specifications are somewhat limited compared to the iPad – 256M RAM, 2 GB Flash memory, 7" 800x480 pixel resistive touch screen – but that's not really the point. The key issue is whether it is good enough for the educational purposes governments around the world have in mind. For although the Aakash began as a project purely for India, it has been swiftly taken up by a number of other countries, as this fascinating feature about the creation of Aakash by the Canadian wireless device maker Datawind explains:

[Datawind's CEO] Suneet was invited to meet with Thailand’s Minister for Information Communications Technology (who was so interested in purchasing 10 million tablets that he attended their meeting even as flood waters descended on Bangkok). Calls arrived from Turkey (which wants 15 million tablets), Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, Panama and Egypt.

This gives an indication of the potential of the Aakash low-cost tablet: to provide portable computing devices and with them access to digital knowledge on a truly global scale. The feature also explains how exactly Datawind managed to produce a tablet for a tenth of the cost of an iPad: Part of the difficulty in engineering such a device is that the underlying goal—that its final price should be within the means of those who can’t afford high-priced tablets—dictates crucial engineering and component decisions. A piece of high-impact-resistant glass, such as the touchscreen face of an iPad, can cost upward of $20. Datawind’s touchscreen glass, which the company had engineered down the street, costs less than $2, though it won’t allow for luxuries like pinch-and-zoom finger swiping. There were also compromises on processing power: Datawind’s 366 megahertz processor costs less than $5, a fraction of the $15-plus price tag on the chips that power iPads and other comparable tablets. And while the decision to run Google’s free Android mobile operating system on the gadget saves money, it requires coders to dig deep into the Linux kernel that underpins the software, tweaking it until it runs smoothly on Datawind’s weaker processor.
As that makes clear, one key ingredient in the design of the Aakash was Android – and hence free software. This meant that Datawind's software engineers were able to build on several years' work by Google – and two decades of coding by the Linux community – rather than starting from scratch.

It's a reminder that even if – as seems likely – Apple's iPad retains its highly-profitable hold on the upper end of the market, it will never be able to offer a model that is competitive with minimalist tablets built around free software at the bottom. And since it is precisely those ultra-cheap models that will be sold in their hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions one day, that means that the real tablet revolution – the one that will transform education in emerging economies and with it, their societies - will not be one in which Apple plays a major part, despite its early leadership here.

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UK Gov't Admits That Protecting Big Record Labels More Important Than Getting Poor Online

Mike Masnick — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 18:20:00 PST

Via Glyn Moody, we learn that the UK government has responded to a question about how the Digital Economy Act might increase the price of internet access. The government's response? Yes, the Digital Economy Act might price poor people out of the internet, and that's "regrettable," but somehow necessary. Huh? So it's more important to protect the profits of a few obsolete record labels, than to help get more people connected to the internet? Remember, this is the UK, where it's already been determined -- by the music industry's own numbers -- that the music industry has grown quite a bit over the past few years. So there's no need for the Digital Economy Act to help the music industry. The only parties it really helps are a few record labels who refuse to adapt to the changing market. So, the only clear meaning of this statement from the government is an admission that protecting some obsolete businesses is more important than getting poor people online.

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Does Open Data Help The Rich Exploit The Poor?

Michael Costanza — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 15:23:03 PDT

JNomics points us to a Marshall Kirkpatrick post on ReadWriteWeb about "How Open Data is Used Against the Poor," in which Kirkpatrick discusses an article and research about the effects of the digitization of land records in Bangalore. Apparently, as a result of the increased access to the data (for those with computers), middle and upper income people were able to exploit details found in the records as leverage for gaining land ownership from the poor.

Kirkpatrick and the author of the original article, Mike Gurstein, use this example to make the point that simply opening up data is often not really enough to benefit the broader population, and further, that it can simply promote the widening of the divide between the rich and the poor. Both argue for coupling open data with efforts that insure "effective use" for the most people - i.e., leveling the playing field by essentially controlling access to the data or delaying openness until tools and policies are put in place to insure equal footing for everyone. Kirkpatrick concludes his post with the following warning:

... if you want all parts of society to benefit from the opening of public data, then simply opening it up and allowing the most ferociously competitive people in society to grab a hold of it may not be a good way to impact the world positively.

This seems like a bit of an overstatement. There are always going to be those who are better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities presented by new technologies. An example from history would be the invention of the printing press. Of course the greater availability of books that followed initially provided a much bigger benefit to the educated than to the illiterate. However, not only were more people able to take advantage of cheaper, more abundant, books as literacy rates increased -- the abundance itself helped to drive that increase. Similarly, while this example from Bangalore shows that, initially, the more well connected have been able to take better advantage of the opening up of land record data, it is not difficult to imagine how the less fortunate will also benefit. The opening up of the data has exposed many problems with the records, allowing for the possibility that those issues will be addressed, and more care will be taken to guard against such issues in the future. Also, there will certainly be opportunities for some enterprising people among the poor to take advantage of the newly available data -- opportunities which did not exist at all when the information was effectively hidden. After all, the "ferociously competitive people" didn't actually "grab hold of" the data -- it's still open for access by anyone.

This case does demonstrate how the growing divide between the digital haves and have-nots is self-perpetuating, and it is certainly worthwhile to pursue efforts to close that gap by promoting education and the development of more widely available, cheaper technology. And efforts should be made to insure that access to open data is not abused by the better off to gain advantage over the poor. But in the end, the open data itself is not the culprit.

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Scientist Makes Sure That No One Uses His Patent On Malaria Drug To Gouge The Poor

Mike Masnick — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 05:10:00 PDT

I've been doing a lot of research on the healthcare and pharmaceutical markets lately, getting a much better understanding of just how much damage patents have actually done to healthcare (contrary to the opinions of many). There's a lot of scary stuff, the more you dig into it -- but occasionally you come across a surprising story. For example, in the 1940s, the pharma company Merck basically agreed to give up its patent right to block others from making streptomycin, allowing others to create competing products, making it much easier (and cheaper) to treat tuberculosis patients. I would have thought that a similar story would be impossible today, but perhaps not. Against Monopoly points us to the news of a molecular biologist, Jay Keasling, who came up with a much more efficient way to create a malaria drug. And, while he did patent it, he negotiated with his university and drug companies to make sure that no one would gouge the poor with the drug. The drug is going into production and will be sold at cost by Sanofi-Aventis. Apparently such stories can still happen...

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