I'm happy to have a new article up and running at Science Progress, a branch of the Center for American Progress. The topic: the coming of the high-speed Internet to the width and breadth of Virginia. I'll give you a taste, if you promise to hop on over there and read the whole thing:

"Let me tell you how I decided to come live on the rural frontier," starts Joan Minor.

Minor is, improbably, the official blogger for Rose Hill, Va., a tiny mountain town tucked deep in Virginia's tobacco and coal-mining country, who came to live there because of the state's unique broadband policies. "You know the magazine Fast Company? They did this issue on people who work from all these bizarre locations -- like a monastery on an island somewhere," she explains with a hearty laugh. "What all those places had was a broadband hookup. And that was my inspiration."

Minor moved to her Appalachian oasis after catching word that high-speed Internet was on its way. As recently as two years ago, as Minor tells it, getting online to run her grant-writing business required actually meeting the Internet halfway. "I used to drive over the hills for 45 minutes to Duffield because that was the farthest point west the Internet went."

But while the federal government limps along with its fortune-cookie message of a broadband policy -- "The market will provide" -- in Virginia the global communications network is being pulled and cajoled into every corner of the state where Virginians want and need to get connected. This approach not only gives the state a much needed economic shot in the arm. It also demonstrates a realist approach to bringing broadband to Americans where they make their homes, giving them the tools to live the lives they want to lead.

So I'm skimming Planet Broadband, a book put out by Cisco in 2004 that lays out a vision of a tomorrow powered by ubiquitous high-speed Internet, and I had to laugh at one passage near the beginning which details just what our magical broadband future will look like:

When your phone rings, you'll know who's calling because your television set will display their name. When you want to watch the nightly news, you will decide when it starts, and you'll pause it in mid-stream whenever you want. Instead of reading e-mail messages, you'll hear them: It will be just as easy for your friend to send you a recorded voice message as a text message. The framed photograph of your nephews and nieces that hangs on the wall will change as soon as they upload a new image taken earlier that day from their vacation at the beach.

I come to you with a request. For a feature piece I'm working on, I'd like to talk to people living anywhere in the U.S. who, for either reasons of price or simple availability, don't have high-speed Internet access. They could either be using dial-up not going online at all (or at least not at home). If you have friends or relatives that fit the bill and would be willing to talk to me, please send them my way. My email address and IM contact info are listed here, and feel free to use either. Appreciate the help. Buy you a taco and some Internet next time I see you. (Thx to dro!d for the picture.)

I just finished Garrett Graff's The First Campaign. The first chunk of the book is sort of The World is Flat meets Crashing the Gate, and I was quite looking forward to Garrett laying out the argument for why in our brave new world electoral and governing success is going to require a firm understanding of technology and the forces it's unleashed. But Garrett morphs from reporter to pundit in the second part of the book, and I think loses that thread somewhat.

I'd still really like to read a book that really nails how and why getting the Internet and other new tech is the critical issue facing political campaigns and what gets done once you get in office. It's a tough nut to crack, no doubt. Why, I myself had a go at it in a talk called "Geek Politics" that I gave at SXSW in 2007, which Garrett kindly mentions:

Nancy Scola is another Democratic technology expert and five-year veteran of Capitol Hill, who at the 2007 South by Southwest technology conference in Austin, Texas, pleaded to a room of lap-top wielding geeks for more experts in the new world to become politically active. "You can't really overstate how poorly understood technology is in Washington," she told them. She pointed to the example of the 2006 Deleting Online Predators Act, whereby 410 House members voted to prohibit social-networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster from being used in libraries and schools so as to hinder the ability of child sex predators to gain access to them. It was a remarkably boneheaded bill that could have passed only in a body with no understanding of where the internet and online communities were headed.

But it's easy enough to poke fun when we have "boneheaded" bills like DOPA, senators who confuse email with the Internet, and a President who professes that he uses "the Google." It's tougher, I think, to figure out what technology means for governing once we've crossed the threshold of total ignorance.

Oh, one last thing. If you're a Mark Warner fan, The First Campaign reads like porn. The work he did to bring broadband access to rural Virginia forms the spine of the book, and his ability to articulate why bits and bytes matter to every Virginian is held up as a fluency that modern politicos should strive to attain. A moment of silence for what could have been...

(UPDATE: I should mention that all and all, the book is actually quite good, and a heck of a first book. I had forgotten for a moment my motto, stolen from a talk I heard Arjun Appadurai give: "Don't be so hard on those who try.")
broadband

April 6, 2007
Quarantining Verizon's Union Workers
(Crossposted on MyDD. I think I need to learn to write shorter.)

For the moment, let's forget the important recent debate over whether easing the joining of labor unions is a net good or a net bad for both American workers and American business. Let's instead look at how a Fortune 50 like Verizon might attempt to rid itself of an unwelcomed business reality: many of its workers currently belong to a union, either the Communication Workers of America or the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Verizon is a sophisticated, modern telecom behemoth. It isn't likely to resort to blunt-instrument union-avoidance techniques like summarily firing workers who are pro-collective representation.

So what's Verizon to do? Verizon Inc. CEO Ivan Seidenberg is attempting to restructure the telecommunications industry, or at least where Verizon fits into that industry. Verizon's approach to the future is to grow the business while lessening the impact of unionization. How? By quarantining already the unionized technicians, sales people, and service reps of core Verizon from the rest of the growing employee population by building cordon sanitaires around their unit. The end result: unionized Verizon lacks the density that ideas need to spread effectively.

As it stands now, unionization at core Verizon is concentrated to workers who handle POTS -- that's Plain Old Telephone Service. The Seidenberg approach is to not let that high rate of unionization in core Verizon infect the rest of the company as it grows or acquires new units. Verizon has long tried to keep the unions out of Verizon Wireless. Now it's attempting to do the same with other units as they are added to the amalgamation. Case in point is Verizon Business, aka VZB. VZB used to be part of MCI until last year or so, and is now operated as a separate, non-unionized business unit under the umbrella of Verizon Inc. Verizon is moving more and more services and clients and accounts to VZB -- so rather than getting rid of existing union jobs exactly, they're just growing the areas where non-union jobs currently thrive.

As part of my work with the AFL-CIO I've been meeting with the CWA, who along with the IBEW are running a joint campaign to organize about 400 VZB techs in the northeast. About 150 are right here in New York City. The VZB techs have signed cards saying that they want to join the union. Those cards were verified by John Kerry, Stephen Lynch, John Tierney, and others (watch the video). Verizon won't recognize them. Senators Clinton, Kerry, Edwards, and Schumer, and Reps. Slaughter, Weiner, and Nadler and others have pushed the company to recognize the employees' choice. Of course, were the Employee Free Choice Act to pass the Senate and become law, that card check would be enough to form a union here.

A big part of this picture is that Verizon is aiming to compete with the cable companies, particularly via FiOS, Verizon's fiber-optic cable service to the home. FiOS means super-speedy broadband Internet. (Like up to 50 Mbps under ideal conditions. At that speed I could fully download the next movie in my Netflix queue, which happens right at the minute to be "Harlan County, USA," in about 5 minutes.)

But FiOS also means that Verizon can compete with the cable cos in delivering custom digital television content. Not to draw too much into this discussion, but the buildout of resource-intense last 100-yards technologies like FiOS is one of the things that telecoms cite when they argue against net neutrality. Neutrality (they argue) threatens their ability to control their own revenue streams, and the buildout of FiOS is 'spensive, something like $18 million.

So Verizon wants to compete with the cable folks. But whereas the rate of unionization in the phone-line-in-the-ground business is around 90%, it's at just about 4% in the cable industry. By comparison, it's at something like 35% in the wireless industry, where Verizon also competes. But even in wireless there are other models. Cingular (now AT&T Wireless) has adopted a stance of neutrality when its workers want to join a union, and something more than half of its workers are unionized. Verizon's different approach means that Verizon Wireless and Verizon wireline are kept deliberately separate, including distinct websites at verizon.com and verizonwireless.com. Verizon customer service reps for the wireless service can't answer a question about wireline services. Instead, they'll transfer you to a unionized rep. Quarantined, see?

As I learn about labor, it seems to me that the whole field of union-avoidance is self-educating, in a way. Best practices get studied and copied. If Verizon is successful in quarantining its union workers as it diversifies and grows, then I'm thinking we'll see these techniques learned from and replicated by other employers in the same boat.
broadband