US dropping in Broadband

One of the ironies of the current broadband situation in the US is that staunch free marketeers defend the status quo even though the result of their views has been duopoly and high prices. Meanwhile, other countries (including those with a reputation in some quarters for "socialism") have taken aggressive steps to create a robust, competitive, consumer-friendly marketplace with the help of regulation and national investment.

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Critics, it's time to stop the quibbling: the data collection practices that show the US dropping year-over-year in all sorts of broadband metrics from uptake to price per megabit might not prove solid enough to trust with your life, but we're out of good reasons to doubt their general meaning.

On March 26, 2004, George Bush talked up the importance of broadband. "This country needs a national goal for... the spread of broadband technology," he said. "We ought to have... universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007, and then we ought to make sure as soon as possible thereafter, consumers have got plenty of choices when it comes to [their] broadband carrier."

But multiple reports show that countries around the world are beating us at broadband, and we're putting our economy and technological leadership at risk through a truly stunning failure to cast a national vision. Other countries are doing better at this, and they're doing it through a combination of financing, fear (competition), and federal mandates.

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All the answers to all the questions you never had the chance to ask

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The slow road to energy independence

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush shocked world energy producers in 2006 when he pledged to slash America's reliance on Middle East oil.

But today one of every two barrels of oil consumed in the United States still comes from foreign suppliers like Saudi Arabia, and that picture is not likely to change much through 2030.

With Bush entering the final months of his presidency, the challenge of loosening the vise of U.S. import reliance will fall to his successors.

Bush entered the White House in 2001 as a Texas oil man with several energy experts on his Cabinet -- Vice President Dick Cheney was chief executive of oilfield services company Halliburton Co (HAL.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice served on Chevron Corp's (CVX.N: Quote, Profile, Research) board of directors until early 2001.

As oil prices rose ever higher, Bush sought to distance himself from the industry, insisting that oil companies did not need tax breaks from Uncle Sam with crude oil prices soaring.

But he has been unable to silence attacks from Democrats and others that his administration is cozy with Texas oil giants like Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N: Quote, Profile, Research), which reported the highest-ever profit for a U.S. company in the fourth quarter of 2007.

A DRY HOLE

One of Bush's first acts as president was to convene a secret panel of industry executives to help draft an energy policy blueprint.
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If you need to be mobile when you are not

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Italian parlament legalizes P2P

The Italian parliament may have unwittingly legalized sharing music over P2P networks. A new copyright law, passed by both houses of parliament, would allow Italians to freely share music over the Internet as long as it was noncommercial and the music degraded.

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Italian copyright attorney Andrea Monti told Italian paper la Repubblica (Google translation dug up on Slashdot) that whoever authored the law failed to take into account that the word "degraded" has a "very precise meaning." All music sold on the major music download sites is degraded, whether it's a 192kbps MP3 or 128kbps AAC file. Under the new law, music fans would be able to freely share their (not lossless) music libraries over P2P networks.

The law does limit such sharing to "educational or scientific" use, but the effect of the law will be to make prosecuting P2P use more difficult, Monti believes. Despite that, the president of the Italian counterpart to the RIAA told la Repubblica that the law doesn't faze his group because of those limits.

The new law is a another blow to the music industry, which has seen some significant legal setbacks in Europe over the past few months. Earlier this week, the European Court of Justice ruled that ISPs could not divulge the identities of their subscribers in civil copyright cases, just criminal cases. Such cases are increasingly difficult to bring in some EU nations, as German prosecutors have refused to pursue criminal infringement complaints, calling them "petty offenses." A Swiss antipiracy firm dodged this problem by filing criminal copyright infringement cases, then switching to civil actions once the identity of the 'Net user in question was obtained; the Swiss government has now told them to drop this practice.

Should Italian lawmakers decide that their inadvertent decriminalizing of music file-sharing isn't such a good idea, they'll have to pass another law. The legislation they just passed can no longer be altered, needing only publication in the Official Journal before becoming law.

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