Grant Dobbe

Dear Mr. Dobbe :

Thank you for taking the time to contact me concerning Internet neutrality.

Like you, I recognize the importance of making broadband Internet available to all of Minnesota through fair and open competition.

On February 7, 2006, the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on Internet neutrality. Broadband providers, as well as application and content providers and telecommunications, experts testified before the Committee. At the hearing, broadband providers argued against Internet neutrality contending that application and content providers need to also assume the costs associated with providing broadband access. Application and content providers meanwhile advocated for Internet neutrality claiming that such neutrality enables consumers not broadband providers to choose among the various Internet content and application offerings.

Separately, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has issued Internet neutrality principles. The FCC does not believe that regulations are currently necessary.

Please know that I will continue to follow this important issue and look forward to reviewing the Committee’s work. I value your advice and will take it into consideration should any Internet neutrality related legislation come before the full Senate for a vote.

As a member of the Republican High-Tech Task force, I have been working closely on broadband related issues. For instance I introduced the Rural Renaissance II Act of 2005 (S. 1253) to support rural economic development. This bill would provide rural America loans and grants to rebuild and update its infrastructure, including high speed Internet, which is necessary to attract new residents and businesses. This legislation is now included in the Senate’s version of the Tax Relief Act of 2005 bill, which the Senate passed on November 18, 2005, and is in a conference committee with the House of Representatives.

You may also be interested to know that I am also a cosponsor of S. 1294, the Community Broadband Act of 2005. This legislation would allow municipalities to offer Internet broadband services, so long as they abide by state and federal telecommunications laws and do not discriminate against private competitors. S. 1294 has been referred to the Commerce Committee where it awaits further action.

I appreciate hearing from you and hope you will not hesitate to contact me on any issue of concern to you.

Sincerely,
Norm Coleman
United States Senate

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Norm, I like the way you roll. Don’t fuck this up, because I think you’re one of the few people in the Senate that understands how technology works and how counteractive things like the DMCA actually are.

I was reading about flash mobs the other night, and an idea came to me. This is going to require a little back story, so bear with me.

Sometime last week, I stumbled upon a story in Der Spiegel Online about the German Apple Front. The GAF is a group of young kids, some counter-cultural, who get together to watch movies, play games, and stop neo-Nazi marches and demonstrations. What makes them interesting is they don’t do it by a counter-protest; they do it by protesting in the same way that the neo-Nazis do, but instead calling for “the purity of German fruit”, chanting “Down with tropical fruit!” and “What’s good for German youth? Apple Juice! Apple Juice!” By parodying the neo-Nazis, they draw attention away from them and keep the hate message from spreading. I loved this idea, and tucked it away into the back of my head.

Back to flash mobs. While reading the Wikipedia article on flash mobs, I started remembering the German Apple Front’s methods of combating racism. When I got to the section about flash mobs being used as instruments of social and political change to varying degrees of success, a light bulb went off in my head. What if you combined the methods of the GAF with the medium of a flash mob, and used it to combat various social problems? Flash mobs have been organized in the past through email or a blog, but you could probably make it work faster by using one or more RSS feeds. It would require a dedicated group of people to start it off, and the RSS feed idea probably wouldn’t work at first, but if you stuck with it and could get enough people each time to make it work, I think you’d have the makings of a powerful vehicle for social and political change.

Think about it. What would happen if you scheduled a flash mob to “demonstrate” about something ridiculous (I dunno… the purity of American corn crops, or why Pepsi One is an agent of the anti-Christ, or something) every time the Reverend Fred Phelps staged an abortion protest? What if you syncronized a flash mob to visit FoxNews.com whenever the president made a speech to the press? What if you were sitting in a Washington coffee shop when a congressman walked in with an oil company lobbyist, and you sent email out to a group list telling people to meet and ask for Senator Doe at the intersection of Foo and Bar street at the Starbucks?

Grand ideas, I know. You’d probably have to start off with using RSS to organize another giant pillow fight in a public place, just as a proof of concept. But if you could get it to work, it would be a very powerful instrument indeed.

Thoughts? Comments? Talk to me — let me know if I’m crazy.

it’s thursday morning. i just got back from riding my bike down to the co-op and back up the gi-normous hill that our fair school is perched atop of, and now i’m sitting, just kind of looking out the window, zoning out and thinking.

i had this wonderful daydream of sitting on a patio somewhere, drinking a nice cold beer and grillling a whole bunch of good food. some sort of radio (or podcast) is playing in the background, people are having a good time, and life is good. soon, and very soon, i will make this daydream my reality. only

*counts*

24! 24 more days until graduation and the semester of hell is over! i am so incredibly happy right now that i could sing.

k, off to lunch. carry on.