 Well, it's really a pleasure and honor to be up here at Harvard and to talk to you about some of the things that we've been doing at the well-connected project of the Center for Public Integrity. And I understand it's very interactive here, so I won't talk for more than about 20 minutes so that we can have the maximum time to talk about what you want to talk about. But I guess I will talk through some of the things that we've done with the media tracker. One of the projects we have called FCC Watch, as well as some other initiatives in the realm of tracking telecom, media, and technology. So I wanted to start off by harkening back to 1934. That's of course when the Federal Communications Act was passed and the FCC was established. The FCC was preceded by the Federal Radio Commission, which was itself an independent regulatory agency created by Herbert Hoover. In fact, it's interesting because Herbert Hoover, before becoming president in 1928, elected in 28 and 29, took office, he was Secretary of Commerce. And he actually had a very significant role in some of the court decisions about the way airwaves were regarded or not regarded by the common law courts. And he effectively tilted the scale by deciding how the government would treat these decisions towards an approach that called for maximum government involvement in the radio space. And that, of course, was the mandate of the Federal Radio Commission to regulate all transmissions, to reward licenses, and to require the licensees act in the public interest. Now in 1934, when the Federal Communications Commission was established, it joined the Federal Radio Commission together with authority over the Bell System. It was just one company pretty much then. That had been part of the Interstate Commerce Commission, but it moved over jointly in the FCC. And so for many years in parallel, you had effectively two sides of the FCC. You had the wired side regulating AT&T and the wireless side regulating radio broadcasters and then subsequently radio and television broadcasters. Well, obviously, the last couple of decades have seen all kinds of challenges and changes to that. Where does cable television fall? Is that by wire or by airwave or by something else? Satellite, the introduction of satellites, not only did that create questions about the rules governing content traveling over satellite, but also on the back end, the issues of retransmission, issues of control, whether satellite companies could use the signals of cable systems to retransmit them widely over large parts of the United States. All of these questions that technological changes, even in those early days with cable and satellite and wireless, now, of course, with the internet and with new generations of the internet, all of these questions about how technology and our communications world are regulated are really front and center at the FCC. And it's still trying to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. So the FCC is what we watch. And I guess maybe the problem, to the problem that Colin asked, I'd say, well, who's minding the Washington watchers? Who's minding the net? Who's minding our communications infrastructure? And technology has truly created this chessboard of corporate and government interests in telecom and media. And they're battling it out in Congress at the FCC and state houses in international capitals. And what the well-connected project has done is track this inside influence game. So I want to start off by just walking you through the media tracker so that you and those who are listening via cast can see a little bit more about it. This is all publicly available for free at publicintegrity.org slash telecom. And the first thing you see, of course, is the media tracker. So let's take a zip code from somewhere outside of Boston. Who has one? That's three, one, or three. OK, nine, four, three, oh, six. Sorry, Doc. We do. We've got some Californians here. So you type in your zip code. And what the media tracker is doing is it's aggregating large sections of data. A 5 million record database is being assembled on the fly here. All of this is public information or information we've supplemented. And so we've released this information under a modified Creative Commons style license, which I'm also happy to talk about for those of you who are interested in copyright and data and the status of such. But anyway, so what you see here for Palo Alto is a summary of the media in various forms in that community. Television, the number of licensed TV stations, radio, cable systems, broadband providers, and newspapers. Obviously, the television radio and cable information we get from the FCC, broadband. I'll talk a little bit more about what we're not getting from the FCC. And the newspapers is, of course, not from any government agency. Because when I talked a little bit earlier about this question of the airwaves, and was the airwaves going to follow the telephone model, which was a common carrier model? Or was it going to follow a public interest model, which of course was the one chosen? Or would it be more truly a newspaper model? And again, these questions came all around again in 1996 when the Communications Decency Act was posed. Was the internet going to be treated as an electronic medium and regulated more intensively? Or as a print media and very free from regulations? Newspapers, of course, with the very interesting exception of newspaper broadcast cross ownership, are not regulated by the FCC. And that newspaper broadcast cross ownership is, of course, a question that is now, once again, back before the FCC. So I guess that's a long way of saying we don't get the newspaper data from the FCC. We go to a commercial provider who we've licensed the data from, and then we supplement it with our own data. So this here is just a linkage to mash up with the Yahoo map. We've put on located here the locations of the radio and television towers grouped by type AM-FM educational commercial. And I mean, this is a nifty little feature. You can actually see the towers by zooming in. But on another note, you can see more about these different types of media. So let's start with television, this types of media and ownership of this media. So the media tracker has effectively three different views of the data of media and policy. The first is this view. We call it the zip code view. And here you see really a look up the channel dial in the city and, of course, every city in the United States. And what we've assembled here is map on the zip codes with the contour maps. Every station has a grade B radius that is on file at the FCC of where its signal is supposed to reach and is not reaching. If that signal intersects with the zip code, we produce it here. And this is the licensee, their home community, the network, the license type. And then we link it up to the parent owner. And this is not always obvious. We have to look at hundreds of 10K forms at the Securities and Exchange Commission in order to ensure that we have these right. But what we do is link it to a company. So you want to see more about Hearst-Argerau? Well, so now this is the company view of data. This is the ownership summary for Hearst-Argerau television. They have, of course, the TV and radio stations. And increasingly, you're seeing this privatization of public companies in the communication space. The cable companies were the first to go down this road, allowing them to, if they're able to leverage the funds, avoid the public scrutiny of the stock markets. But what I just did is I popped up a level from the Hearst-Argerau television to the corporate, the parent. So now you see this is the full facility information for all of Hearst-Corps television, radio, newspapers, if they had cable systems, we'd list them too. And this is just a geographical breakdown of where their stations are, station by station, and radio station. But now let me show you a little bit more about Hearst-Corporation. So in addition to the Facilities tab, we also have articles that we've written about this company. The next phase of this operation is to effectively integrate this into a more web 2.0 environment. We're definitely challenged in this regard. But the goal is effectively to make this a repository for news and information of a political and policy-oriented nature about Hearst. So you see the facilities, the profile, corporate data. We had it for the public company that was junior, but for the private company, they don't have it there. But now we have political influence. And this is one of the key value ads of the media tracker is we collect from a variety of sources sometimes directly ourselves from the government agencies and sometimes through partners like the Center for Responsive Politics information about the political influence of Hearst. And this is a tracking of all of the contributions that employees of Hearst Corporation have given to every member of Congress who has run in the past 10 years. This is a more detailed listing of contributions than is available anywhere else to my knowledge. We actually list more detail than the Center for Responsive Politics, from whom we purchased this data. But the key value here is you can see exactly who is contributing to an individual company. And of course, if you want to see who is receiving, you click on the third level of the media track or the member of Congress view. And you can see the individual and PAC contributions they've received from employees and companies in this sector, the telecom, media, and technology sector. And we define that as broadly as possible. Precisely because of the convergence issues I was talking about at the start. If you want to analyze issues of media ownership, you need newspapers and movie studios in there that are frequently the parent owners of the networks. If you want to track network neutrality, you need to gauge the influence of an equipment provider like Cisco and internet search company like Google. If you want to examine what copyright controls are influencing debates, you certainly want Hollywood as well as the electronic companies money out there. And so this is what we've done here is we have a little pie chart so you can see an individual snapshot level who's the most generous, which sector has given the most to this particular member of Congress. Telecom in large part is above broadcast, but he actually receives more from broadcast than your average member of Congress. And then, of course, you can view individual contributions, just slicing the data another way. Instead of the company by member, this is members by company. And then the trips they've received. This is actually building off a prior project of the Center for Public Integrity power trips. Looks like members of his staff did not receive any privately funded trips, although most members have. So that's the different levels of the site. I want to go back to our zip code view and just show you a few more. Radio is very similar. Cable is similar, but it's not mapped in the same way. This is another FCC database, and it's taking the names of franchise holdings of a particular company mapped to a physical location. And since there's some room for error there, it's not as precise as the database for the radio and television, we also include all registered cable communities in the county. And then again, you can click in through to any of these company's views. Newspapers is great. If you want to know, if you want to see all of the newspapers that are published within 100 miles of a zip code anywhere in the country, go to this tab and you have a linkage to each of their websites. So it's just a convenient location for all this information. OK, the last thing I want to briefly mention about the media tracker here is the broadband information. One of the first things that I saw needed improvement in the media tracker when I joined the center in August of 2006 was to branch into broadband. And this really is the biggest area where we see room for growth. And I'd love to talk more about it with you all if you're interested in. But effectively, broadband is, of course, the new distribution method for all forms of media and telecommunications. And to some extent, the importance of broadcasting is diminished. I should emphasize, though, that broadcast enjoys a little bit of an undue influence because a lot of the prerogatives that they had by virtue of being the spectrum holders are carried over to the cable world through retransmission consent. So even though only about 13% of Americans watch television over the air versus the 87% or 88% that watch via cable or satellite, the broadcast channels are still most viewed because they're, of course, on all cable systems because of those retransmission and must-carry rules. But broadband, again, to come back to the point, is what's important. And I view broadband availability and competition and speed and service as being the most central issue in communications policy today because it influences net neutrality. If you don't have adequate competition, you're going to have a major debate over net neutrality. It impacts issues of the digital divide, who's going to be connected and who's not to the forms of communications that are available. It impacts questions of telephone service. I mean, there's a huge industry in Washington of telephone lobbyists that fight over this $8 billion pool of money called the Universal Service Fund that does not go to pay for broadband connections. Another little thing we can talk about if you're interested. It goes to pay for antiquated telephone service. Sometimes the rural phone companies are able to fudge it a little bit and say, oh, yeah, we did do some DSL service from the subsidies we got from Universal Service. But legally, they're not allowed to take this USF subsidy they get and build broadband. So that's a long way of saying that it's important to see where these broadband providers are, especially if the FCC justifies its policies on the ground that there's lots and lots of competition out there. And the FCC does indeed say there are 17 broadband providers in 9, 4, 3, 0, 6. And so is it Robert? Jason, OK, do you believe there are 17 broadband providers in your home? Yeah. It's probably somewhat less than 17. This is a list of all the people who file a particular form with the FCC claiming that they provide broadband service to any one person or business within that zip code. So it will include a lot of companies that just serve business. No doubt about it. What we did is we filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get this data on the grounds that it's important public information for the citizens and consumers to be able to see who these 17 providers are, just like you can see who the television, radio, cable, newspaper companies are. They have refused. We took them to court. We've gone back and forth. The FCC intervened, sorry, the Bell companies, AT&T, Verizon, USTA intervened in the lawsuit. And we actually lost at the district court level. But the judge relied on some erroneous information that the FCC provided them about so-called unique zip codes, zip codes that are used by only a single entity, like 20554, which is the zip code used by the FCC. And so we filed a real 53E motion clarifying this and asking for reconsideration. And we are still waiting to hear from the judge on that. And who knows what will happen after that. I would certainly like to think that this will be not just dropped but continued and appealed. Of course, I hope they don't appeal if we win, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. So this has been the media tracker. The other aspects of the Well-Connected Project are the investigative reports. We've done blogs, blog entries that we've posted, news stories. And actually something completely off-site of the center that we are involved in is the Congresspedia Wiki. How many of you are familiar with Congresspedia? OK, good crowd here. We've worked with the Center for Media and Democracy and the Sunlight Foundation, who have been running this for some years now, the Congresspedia. And they wanted to build out a series of issue portals. I hope I'm getting connectivity here. A series of issue portals on subjects. And if you just type in telecom, you should be able to get the portal. Obviously, like any Wiki, this is editable by anyone. We have a list of all the topics that we have here. We built these out, seeded them, so to speak, with our reporters, copyright, broadband data, Perform Act, patent reform. And we're just sort of seeing what happens. The difference with Wikipedia, of course, is that we're trying to keep it a little bit focused on policy, keep it focused not so much on the general issue of digital copyright, say, but on the legislative issues that have come up around this space. And you'll see here, this badge, this allows you to come right back to the center site by typing in your zip code. Again, I'm happy to talk more about this later. Well, I guess I promised to talk only 20 minutes, but I will extend for a few if you'd like to hear about FCC Watch. So that's what I'll talk about. All right, so I started off with the problem that Colin posed, and I answered, is who's watching the FCC? And we hope to answer, we are. This is a site that is not yet public, but it is something we've used for investigative reports. Let me, in fact, just go to the report that we did on this. So all right, another quick check. How many of you have heard of the 700 megahertz auction? OK, probably most of you have heard about it. I think it's the biggest FCC story this year, and it's really become a proxy for a lot of issues, including net neutrality, the competition debate, Carter phone for FCC regulatory administrative law folks. Carter phone has kind of been given a new life in the wireless world because of this issue. So the 700 megahertz auction provided us with kind of a sample test case of who is lobbying the FCC. And the FCC, to its credit, has a system called the X-Part A filing system. And I've just started to look into this, whether other agencies do this. And the answer I tend to get is not really, but I'd really welcome your thoughts on this, because it's a very valuable tool, or it can be, if you do something with it. As it is, what happens is when there's a proceeding at the FCC, obviously there's a comment period, and people file comments on the record, and then the FCC makes a decision. Of course, it never really makes the decisions on the comments. The way a court would make a decision on the pleadings, they make the decision based on the lobbying. They make the decision based on the X-Part A filings. And so whenever an industry or a company or a nonprofit group or really anyone with an interest in a proceeding comes and talks to by phone or in person with an FCC commissioner or officer, employee, they need to file an X-Part A form that is supposed to say in some degree of detail what they lobbied on. And there's some degree of wiggle room there. Well, what we've done is we've built this database that scrapes the X-Part A filings every hour and gives a summary after we go through, again, a data intensive effort of coding the information into our database who is lobbying a particular commissioner. And so you see Jonathan Adelson was the most lobbied of the five commissioners on this issue, Robert McDowell, second most. But you can also see some of the most active members of staff and the most active lobbyists. Frontline Wireless was the top lobbying entity on this, followed, these are individual people, but among companies, Frontline I think was followed by the CTIA, the Wireless Association, formerly known as Cellular Telecommunications and Industry and Internet Association. So what you see, just kind of a peek behind the curtain a little bit, this is a snapshot of the interface that you have that we have been building a public interface on for who has filed most recently at the FCC. And you can see by date or, more interestingly, by organization. So you want to see which organizations are lobbying on which issues, name a company. They probably get the title for Most Improved Lobbying Organization. These are Google's filings this year. We may have a couple in the last week or so off, but it's otherwise pretty complete. Conversation, telephone call. This may have been Sergey Brin's, no, Larry Page's call. He called Kevin Martin and said that timely and successful culmination of the pending TV white spaces proceeding is of considerable importance to consumers in the high tech industry. And he explained in particular that digital televisions and wireless microphones can be amply protected from any harmful interference by unlicensed personal portable devices using reasonable power levels and sensing thresholds. And we link to the form that you can get. You can find this. It's buried on the FCC website. You want to see what it looks like. I'll go ahead and open up another window here. But what's valuable now is you are able to sort through this. You can see, OK, this is what Larry Page has done. He called Kevin Martin twice. Let's see what Kevin Martin's done. Well, he's had quite a few meetings. And you can see, OK, well, who's he meeting with? Is he meeting with Bells? Is he meeting with the public interest groups? Is he meeting with Google? You can measure them, track them, quantify them. Municipalities, public safety agencies. You can see when he's meeting, start to put these on a timeline. I mean, this is really just a structure that needs to be flushed out. We need to integrate this into the kinds of interactive and, I keep saying, web 2.0 tools. Maybe I should start saying web 2.5 or web 3.0 tools. But that's really. Actually, pardon me. Don't. Well, web negative 0.5. But the point being is that we need your help, right? We need to know how we can more nicely package what we're dusting off and revealing to the public view here. So I think with that, I will stop and open it up for questions. OK, Drew. OK. OK. Oh, great. I see you've seen, like, connect my research to other states and news. I think you can be just judging by looking at the face when I say the name. Yeah. But in fact, what they got, they got a lot of good data when they come right down to the maps are pretty impressive. And I look at that, though. And I doubt that anyone will ever be able to get back to the data again. Try me. So but clearly, that's what you're going for. What do you think are the chances? And then maybe on the more positive side of things that seems like things that FCC are trending towards more granular data on broadband. That was what I mean by I said most of my sources are on the state level. But I've just seen here. Sure. I've had some interactions with Connect Kentucky. And I think there's a lot there to what you've asked. And so for those of us who don't know, could you just give a second to connect Kentucky? Absolutely. So Connect Kentucky is one of a variety of efforts to track broadband in some measure. On our home page, we have a report in June about some of the efforts we've been doing on the broadband front. And again, you can look at this. And this provides all of the legal filings in our lawsuit. But it also summarizes the work of other organizations. And so I will tell you a little bit about Connect Kentucky. So Connect Kentucky, I can spell, Connect Kentucky has really gained a lot of traction in the last year. And I think that there's some good reasons why. So Connect Kentucky is a state-led initiative. It's housed in a nonprofit organization. But government officials were involved in setting it up. It's been around about five or six years, as I recall. And they started off being not about broadband, but about getting technology deployed in communities that didn't have technological capabilities. So I mean, as we're all aware, broadband is an issue for this country. We were 15th in the world in the international telecommunications ranking of broadband penetration. And so we're beginning to see, and I think the center has contributed to this since I'm major, a lot more debate about, well, how can you address this problem one way is by getting better data about broadband. Now, Connect Kentucky has data about broadband availability. That's only one fourth of the picture in my mind. Not only do you need data about broadband availability, you need data about broadband competition, i.e. who are the other providers in your zip code or in your area, besides the fact that there is a provider, who, what are the speeds at which the service is offered, and what is the price at which those services are offered. And they can add on some other things, quality of service and so forth. And really the next direction that I'd like to head with this effort is to build up, from the ground up, a system for tracking broadband availability, competition, speed, and price. Now, there are a variety of initiatives out there. I've been in touch with a lot of them. I certainly welcome the opportunity to talk with you about others. But the goal here is really to get people together to collect all this information. Because while the availability is great, and I do applaud Connect Kentucky for the work they've done, it's just not going to be enough. Because it's not going to get at these other issues. It's not going to get at, well, is there really competition? What are the speeds? Is it anemic broadband? Or is it robust broadband? Or is it super fast broadband? Which is really not available in many places. Perhaps Fios is the only place there. And even that, maxed out 100 megabits a second until they upgrade the ponds. Well, let me back up. New user, got the max. 5.15 and 30 is what Verizon sells at right now. They claim the ability to go to 100 once the business case justifies it. And then the technology needs to be upgraded through a variety of back end things to get it higher, like the gigabit level like you see in Stockholm and many other places. So what backing up, what Connect Kentucky is doing is they started off being about getting technology available in areas like Kentucky that were less tech savvy. And they then gravitated towards, you know what? We're seeing that broadband is not available in a lot of these communities. And if you want people to be using the technologies, you need to have broadband. And so they basically said, we want to put together a map of where broadband is available. And so they go to the carriers and they sign non-disclosure agreements with the carriers. And the carriers give them the date as long as they don't publish who's the where and why. And they do a map, which is, again, a great map of availability, but nothing else. Not competition, not speed, not price. So there was another element I wanted to say there. So we can get to this one, because I'm sure All right, I'm sorry. Long answer to the question. I think that the chances of getting the data are good as long as you build it from the ground up. And if you are able to supplement it with data from this Freedom of Information Act, great. That just helps the legitimacy. It helps provide a platform for people to add on. OK, sorry, Ethan. So one of the things that I marveled in this presentation is how much data is already available. You guys have done a brilliant job of making it accessible and searchable and so on and so forth. But I was sort of dumbstruck to discover that FCC commissioners are required to register every telephone call that they've had and every meeting they've had. It's the companies that are required to register them. Interesting. OK. So I think what I'm curious about in all of this is in your field, and perhaps if you can broaden sort of beyond that, what are the data sets that you can't get that you're most excited about? You've done some amazing things based on having some of these data sets available. What, first of all, in your specific work on media and media ownership in FCC, do you most want? And if you can broaden out from that, do you have a sense for what are the crown jewels out there that should be available, should be mash-up-able, should be searchable, and aren't? And let me just say that my perspective on all of this is always I work in the developing world. I'm always amazed when I can find out who the parliamentarians are in Kenya. That's a huge step forward, is that we actually now have lists of who all the members of parliament are. And if we get a little bit further, we might actually successfully figure out which of them graduated from high school. So the idea that you can actually find out that Larry Page made a phone call at a particular time is utterly mind-blowing to me. So I'm fascinated by that aspect of it. Thank you very much, Ethan, for your comments there. So I'll give you four answers. The first data that I want that I don't have is broadband competition, speed, and price. And obviously, we wouldn't get the price and the speed, even from this Freedom Information Act lawsuit that we're pursuing, but we wouldn't get the competition. And then obviously, that can be supplemented by users. But there's another data set that I'm actually very anxiously chopping at the bit at. And I must admit I'm not 100% up to speed on whether the lobbying reform bill that passed Congress just a couple months ago, whether it ended up requiring the quarterly reporting or not. I know there was some dispute in the House and Senate. And I don't have the latest on that. If someone else knows, does anyone else know? The thing that we're missing on the lobbying end is more detailed reporting about the congressional lobbying. I mean, so you've got some good current lobbying on the agency. And we have lobbying forms as to what companies are spending. And they also list the issues that they're filing on. But that's, again, a very intensive process to go through. If we could get that quarterly, or even monthly, or even weekly, or that you start to get a real-time sense of not just the money, but the money and the issues together. Because that's what's important. It's not just, OK, that X companies spent this much money. Yes, of course. We know that they have got a lot of money, and they're willing to spend huge amounts of money because policy decisions depend, in fact, their bottom line greatly. But to be able to see, OK, so what issues are they pushing with that money? The two other things I say is, similarly, on the state side is to be able to replicate this data set. And the center in this project, prior to my joining it, has done a lot of work on the state transparency that I haven't had a chance to go and redo or duplicate. But then the next step is the international one. And that's definitely good. I mean, just put aside Kenya, Ethan. I mean, just let's get some lobbying disclosure in Europe. I mean, that's a real, another great opportunity. And I'd love to talk more about what's going to make that happen. Let's get back to Kenya, right? Because I mean, what's really interesting to me in all of this is when people are not just lobbying, but are actually passing envelopes of money at the table. I mean, one of the campaigns you may be aware about there is publish what you pay, which basically just goes out and says, look, we all understand that in the oil industry, to get oil contracts, we bribe people. We just want to know who's bribing who and how much. And it's fascinating to sort of stand up and sort of say, we all understand that this system is essentially based on bribery and not the sort of soft bribery of, yes, Ted Stevens got a trip to Disneyland for $865 that I looked up, but literally writing multi-million dollar checks that say that suddenly you're able to do business. That is great, Ethan. What I just realized there is what you can do is by going to Kenya and all these other countries, you can then collect back the company level information and you can collect the company level information back and sort of fill in the dots on globally what the companies are doing. Excellent. Excellent, I see. John wants to go ahead. You just follow on Ethan's line of thinking and actually channel my friend and colleague, Jonathan Citrin, who we're here and perhaps he is somewhere in the ether. Might be asking a question about the research project that we've distributed application for research to let people download, and we have an alpha version of this, but download onto your PC a non-badware, non-spyware tool. In the first instance, which might test for whether you have spyware and so forth on there, for a distributed research project, reporting back to your mother ship, we're looking at it for our internet filtering project as a way to, particularly for people in the field, to be able to say, is the site that I am going to or care about in a certain place, sunset here or elsewhere. So the third thing we've thought about is whether or not you could test broadband speeds. Excellent. Could have a deployed base, and I've mentioned this as a volunteer in Ethan's, mainly because if our interest is having it around the world, an easy way to just get users to do this, potentially with us, and to report back the very specific information. I wonder if you think that a distributed application of that sort could be helpful for the stuff that you're doing, and what would it collect if it were, could be successful and helpful? Excellent, that's why I'm up here, is to learn from efforts like this. And I am aware of a variety of organizations, both businesses and non-profit, that are doing stuff with speed tests, and that's absolutely where I'd like to go with broadband tracking. So one of them is the E-Corridors Project at Virginia Tech, and I've been in touch with them and working with them on the next version of broadband monitoring. They use a particular speed test, open-source NDT tool, I don't know if that's part of what you've contemplated, and I believe this is the same tool that CADA at University of California, San Diego has contemplated using, and this is focused on Virginia right now, but when you track broadband with a speed test, you find out a lot of information, and obviously you've got to be very clear about what you're collecting and why you're collecting it, and that's absolutely crucial, but it's precisely the way you can start to get information, distributed information collected. Now what E-Corridors is finding is they're finding a very close match to broadband availability and the number of providers that are listed on the FCC forms. So for instance, you can go down to Blacksburg here and see information about each of these connections. This is a particular location, Ambler Johnson, provider is Virginia Tech. Let's check out another one here. Anyway, I won't take more time to do this. I will mention that Communications Workers of America has a speed test called speedmatters.org and they also get that information, they don't yet publish it, they publish speeds. You see, they're taking it one step forward, they've got the availability and speed, but they're not doing the competition and the price. So it's putting all four of these pieces together in the puzzle, and there are a lot of people out there who are thinking about this and the global dimension is something that is definitely something I've been aware of and it does have natural tie-ins to the ability to monitor filtering and censorship and of course, you know, poor blocking and that neutrality issues as those arise not only in this country but overseas. Doc. Going back to your first item that you demonstrated with the tabs that have all of their media across the top, so forgive me if I don't remember. Media tracker. So, if you go back to that zip code or wherever, I was noticing as I looked through radio, for example, you don't have, say, translators in there. And I'm thinking, is your system open to having hackers among your readers help you scaffold together some of the additional data sources and automate that? Because I know like, for example, MIT has, or people around MIT have some of the radio locator.com that includes the translators and what they cover like Relevance, Santa Barbara, for example, all the public radio codes and translators and they have a lot of listeners and their towers are, you know, but they're missing on your database and they have influence, you know, so anyway, but the question really has to do with how open your system is to help from the outside. Yeah, no, great question. I was aware of this translator issue and, you know, the unfortunate answer is we're not there yet, but we're trying to get there and that's definitely a direction that I think, you know, this project needs to go in because, exactly, that's the only way you're gonna successfully collect broadband information and likewise, it's a way to fill in the gaps and the holes of all this other information. I mean, you do sometimes need to make certain assumptions and decisions about, okay, we include this or we don't include this. When you're taking data and I guess what I mean by that is you wanna be able to say, okay, this is a uniform policy you've applied and for whatever reason, translators didn't make the cut or low-power television or weekly newspapers don't make the cut, but that doesn't mean you can't start to have sort of like a two-level system. This is data we've vetted and checked and this is what kind of everyone's telling us that we haven't gotten double, double confirmation on and I think that's really where this project, the broadband tracking and increasingly journalism in general needs to go. You need to have kind of an open, friendly front page where this is, we're like totally as certain as we can be, 99% sure and this is stuff, hey, this is what you're telling us and we're not 100% sure about this but we think it's worth putting out there. I think for some, I've heard of this, it's very interesting to take this information. So is this global and do you just sort of remain within confines of what is US or can I just go in Iraq with code or something and you know? Yeah, it's not global yet. I mean, there's a long-standing goal to take the project more globally and I think broadband is really the way to start that. I mean, just like John was saying because you almost have a kind of a common protocols, common things you could test for. You just need to find the analog for the zip code in England or Kenya or wherever and be able to enable searching that way. But I mean, you have such different regulatory frameworks for broadcasting, for cable, et cetera. But for internet at least, there's some common technological. You need something to search on whether it was generated or not. Well, I think in that sense what's interesting about this is the extent to which this site can show as much as you're gonna hate this an exemplary policy as far as public disclosure of data. You couldn't build these tools if this data was not available. And what's interesting is showing how much data is available on broadcast and on broadcast TV and radio allows you to then make the case and say why the heck isn't it available on cable and on broadband. What's very, very interesting at that point is that you can then sort of hold this up and say, hey, government of Ghana, you have a lot fewer licensed providers. Why can't you provide this data? This is important data for people to understand what's going on. This is important data that responsible governments require to be reported so that people can make intelligent decisions. And then sort of hold this up as an exemplar and try to get people to align with this policy. And I think it's also worth putting out the marker for how this affects other parts of the economy, right? I mean, what other agencies are there out there that are doing this and have ex parte systems or other governments around the world when you have political players together? I think, again, the principle being one of disclosure. This is actually sort of a question for JP, although. Has O and I considered putting its bit of software which could do your work as well into Google tools? I mean, obviously, Google would have to make it an opt-in box. So one of the long-running conversations which we've been talking about in this shift, which for those who don't know, is our study to track censorship around the world and the place we find it online censorship, is right now we do only what we think of as old standard research. We use very contestant, in some cases, measures to test from within these countries, and it's fairly high-spy and careful and protective for people involved. And we sort of control those data, massage them, get to the place where we're confident of reporting when the system is over 99%. And one of the questions is, how and when, which I would assume, can we make a version of our tools available to let other people run it and then say, we don't vouch for these data, it's not the gold centers, somebody might come to know. So the primary effort of this sort is, we've had two tracks of development going, one by a student at MIT and one more, partially done, that is meant to do roughly, because we hadn't thought of it in the Google context, although we could, but this is what we call the distributed application project. And there would be two versions of distributed application. One would be one that anybody could use anytime and it would just be running on your machine and get a sense of, with the best guess, why something was blocked. And then the second one would be, could we use that actually as a way to do the core O&I research? I think the instinct of the principal investigators is not yet that we can't get enough data from that, that we can trust and report on. But I would love to see in the next months, not years, some sort of tool like this deployed. And I'm hopeful that we can do it. And frankly, Ethan and others have been pushing this for some time very hopefully to get us in construction. So if something like that were to happen, or even if it weren't, would it, I guess it's actually just a marketing question, would it make sense to try to bundle some of your needs into? It was exactly my question, was to say, one of the things that we've been doing is giving people an essence and application that would have three check boxes, right? One check box is PC health. Health is the stop network connection. The second is bundling the sensory-wire stuff. And third would be the net challenge. So that's been the grand idea. Yes? I sort of have a little bit of a continuation of Ethan's question in a more primitive way. And I understand that in Kenya, they're still comfortable that they give rise. But the civilized, and I don't know how long it's been available, but the civilized Europe that considers itself a democracy, how does it look at it and say we don't have anything similar for that? How does it look for that? Well, I actually have a former colleague and friend named William New, and I know he was through here just recently. And he has intellectual property watch right in front of me there. He's doing something like this from a journalistic sense of watching the intellectual property industry in Geneva. And of course, Geneva is really international center as opposed to Brussels, which is the European center. But he tells me that they're way behind, too. And so this is both a kind of a journalism effort and a citizen data effort. And it's going to involve the kinds of sunlight foundations, the wiki, pedia types, to really push in many ways. Now, I mean, you asked a question, why don't they? And I just I simply don't have the answer for that. I don't know how long it's been available, but if they look at it, and they consider themselves a democracy, not a country that takes bribe openly, how could they possibly? I don't understand the mentality of looking at them. Our democracy is lesser than yours. And that's a pretty good indication of that. I think one point that's worth making here is that one thing that all sides of the campaign finance debates agree on is that disclosure is good. I mean, people who want tighter rules, who wanted McCain-Feingold, perhaps want new rules on the so-called 527 groups, and those who take a different view that it's really not worth it to try to control this money in politics, because there's always going to be some other way it gets in. The only thing you can do about it is require disclosure. So that's one principle that kind of two diametrically opposing sides agree on in this country is that disclosure. And I think that comes from very strong traditions of First Amendment free press, but also a sense of, let me put it this way, we don't necessarily think that we have a privacy right against someone publishing information about us in this country. Like legislators in Europe, I know, because I've talked to them, say, oh, well, I have a privacy interest in the data that I do as a legislator. And I'm just going, what are you talking about? You're a public servant. Your data is, your life is a public life. And so there's a little bit of a disconnect that has to do with kind of privacy versus disclosure. So maybe that's just a hint at some of the different world views and mindsets that are creating this. But I think as we're more globalized, we're more interconnected, I think they're going to go towards the open society model, the open disclosure model. Drew, the Center for Public Integrity is a remarkable but relatively unique organization. And most investigative journalism in the past has been done by newspapers. And as newspaper circulation declines and revenues decline, their trimming staff and investigative is expensive. That's usually the first thing that goes. I know that the funding that comes for CPI is primarily grant funding. There's no advertising. You're not going out and seeking sponsors to do this work. Is that the model for creating smaller other CPIs? Is there another way to take this database, investigative journalism in the public interest and start doing it in other places? Well, let me offer two reactions on that. The first one is to say you're certainly correct that doing database journalism, doing computer system journalism does require an expenditure that you need some capital, some investment to do. And the Center has clearly played that role as have other large newspaper organizations. The New York Times has an excellent team of computer-assisted reporters, as the Washington Post, as do a variety of papers in Florida that I'm aware of and elsewhere. So yes, it does require an investment. And yes, you're right that people are very wary about whether newspapers will continue to be able to make that investment. The founder of the Center for Public Integrity, Chuck Lewis, has actually just written an article in CJR about the nonprofit model for journalism and investigative journalism, where he promotes the nonprofit approach. And I think there's a lot of legitimacy to that. The second point I would make, though, is that just, I mean, this is kind of a wealth of networks point, right? I mean, what used to be the theory of the firm and the optimal economical size for an entity is, in many ways, blown apart by the models of collaboration that the internet enables. And so your firm that acts as an entity was once kind of geographically fixed and located. And that's just, I mean, what is Wikipedia? I mean, that is a weird sort of firm. But it is. It is acting in some kind of concerted common effort. And I would like to see more effort put into getting bloggers to work together, to pool resources, even if it's just collaborative resources, that can get them doing this kind of stuff. Because I am very pessimistic about the global voices. There you go. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I'm very pessimistic. Well, don't say pessimistic. I'm optimistic that newspapers will not be around in 20 years. I think that it's kind of like, all right, let's say, taps and move on. I mean, journalism is going to go on. Wow. Newspaper, journalism is going to go on. Whether it's printed on dead, newsprint is not really a material question. And so what becomes of journalism? I think it now is a very exciting time for journalism because you have low entry bars to get started. But to do good stuff, we have to think creatively and work collaboratively and in some new ways. I don't want to take on the future of newspapers as a irrelevant question, precisely. But maybe the flip side to a bunch of questions that have been asked, including David's, is, so how does this work now? How is the word getting out there? Who's accessing these great data sets, these amazing tools? We did an event with sunlight in January that was around sort of tools like this, sort of the intersection of technology and politics and policy. And what we saw were a host of amazing tools, some really geeky and impenetrable, others prettier, but still, and I think Congress PD is one of them, but still you wonder why this stuff isn't, or you wonder whether it's making it into the mainstream consciousness. And if it's not, how do we get it there? What's the missing ingredient? Because clearly you can, I mean, I'd never heard of the FCC, or the corporate filings group where you expect FCC calls. It's usually interesting. I think one of the big questions, at least for me, the thing that's going on in the comments is, in addition to our other people accessing it is, why is it making it different? The question is, would anybody here raise their hand and say we have a great telecom policy in the United States? Probably not that many of us, right? And maybe it's better than the Ghanaian one if we do this analysis. But there is sort of a question of, okay, great, transparency is good, disclosure is good, so is Apple Pie, so is Openness, so are we actually doing something about it? Yeah, it's a good question, Colin and John. I mean, the difference question is always a hard one to tackle. But I think the answer really just comes down to, do you live in a world where you can investigate and know what's going on about you? And I mean, we can argue about different policies and the import of different policies, but I think that what the internet and the internet's evolution over the last two decades shows is that it has had a huge impact. And I think that the internet's been able to have this kind of openness style impact by virtue of the philosophical ideals of transparency, this notion of disclosure I was talking about earlier. I mean, I know we're sort of talking a little bit of mixed fruits here, but I think that the notion of openness that I know is central to Berkman and central to the internet is the same notion that our constitutional ideals of freedom of expression, freedom of speech, the ability to petition for grievances are built upon. So I mean, I guess sort of isn't making a difference well in the biggest sense of things, yes, maybe in the little marginal things, not yet. I mean, as to the practical question, I mean, we're trying to get the word out as well as we can about this database and other initiatives that are worthy of pursuing like this notion of broadband tracking in a really robust way. I want to continue this conversation with all of you about that and how we get these tools out there. And yeah, maybe it is working with people who have, at some point, with people who have real muscle like Google, right? I mean, you get something in Google. I mean, that's where the news is, right? I mean, back to our bomb question. Yeah? There's also a last question that we have to let people kind of perfect up there. There's also a wealth of possible news I mean, Google stuff would be great, of course, but there's also a wealth of possible news in going up a level, in looking at all the data that you've acquired and sort of pointing out to people what the significance of it is, that Comcast owns this percent of stations and that percent of Congress' time, or the FCC's time. So if you did that, if somebody could go in and do that work, but you're in a very good position to do it yourself and there's news in that, too, I think. I agree completely. And that's definitely what this is designed to do is to enable us and other people to go and do that kind of analysis. Okay, Comcast gave this much, lobbied this much, occupied this much of the telecom time, got this many votes on these issues. That's what the congressional issues will enable a lot more fine analysis of is which companies are pushing which particular bills. And I think the point I wanted to conclude on if I could is that what constitutes your front page is different now than it was 10 years ago. And what I've met by my comment about newspapers is that there are different sorts of front pages emerging out there. Google clearly has a very valuable front page, but I don't think it's the only front page. I think there are other ways that front pages will arise. I mean, RSS is a form of a front page, data aggregation tools that sunlight's putting together and are making available to all kinds of journalism and non-journalism organizations. Those are another type of front page that organizes your world in some way that you want to make sense of. And again, I think that journalism has a very bright future. It is clearly a very different future than it's had over the last couple decades. So with that, please join me in thanking Drew for a great lesson. Thank you. Thank you.