New America in the News: 2007

By almost all reports, and there were a number of them yesterday, the attempt of EarthLink, Inc. to blanket Philadelphia with affordable wireless internet service is in trouble.

City Council is openly worried the city may be forced to take over and run the new citywide wireless network - perhaps as an exclusive provider for city employees without any public access.

Consumer and public advocacy groups are urging the Federal Communications Commission to declare that text messages deserve the same nondiscriminatory treatment by telephone carriers as e-mail and voice messages.

In a petition filed with the FCC on Dec. 11, the groups claim: "Mobile carriers currently can and do arbitrarily decide what customers to serve and which speech to allow on text messages, refusing to serve those that they find controversial or that compete with the mobile carriers' services."

A consortium of consumer groups is planning to urge federal regulators to clarify how much control cellphone companies can have over the messages and services delivered over their networks.

Los Angeles Times's John Healey wrote on Verizon Wireless' decision to open its network to independent developers and phone manufacturers. Here's an excerpt from Healey's Opinion Piece quoting New America's Sascha Meinrath:

“The first and second worlds are being reunited into something which has no name yet, nor a number,” wrote the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf back in 1990. “Perhaps it will just be the world.” Or perhaps not! The United States, China and the European Union seem to be forming an irritable triplet: no one of them can dominate either of the other two. They may make common cause, but it is just as likely that they will compete for control. And the places where they will compete have been labeled, by the New America Foundation analyst Parag Khanna, the second world.

Israel confirmed on Friday that the United States asked it to explain a plan to build new homes on occupied land in the Jerusalem area, a move Palestinians say could wreck peace talks launched just last week in Washington.

A senior aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said asking for explanations was not enough and demanded that U.S. President George W. Bush's administration force Israel to abide by an agreement to halt all Jewish settlement activity. ...

The New Republic Columnist Johnathan Cohn wrote about the presidential candidates' health care proposals, and explored a point made by Health Policy Director Len Nichols--individual mandate is necessary for achieving universal health coverage. An excerpt from Cohn's Column is below:

If the New America Foundation had hoped to umpire a snarled dispute between Democrats and Republicans on fixing the alternative minimum tax, its hopes were not advanced at a seminar today featuring advocates for both sides. The two parties are at swords' points over whether to hike other taxes in order to offset an estimated $50 billion revenue loss if Congress decides to prevent the AMT from biting some 23 million additional income taxpayers this calendar year.

Mortgage Expert Ellen Seidman interviewed with KPCC radio, please listen to the interview here.