Coverage based on a news conference yestersday with the National Association of Manufacturers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Telecommunications Industry Association:

National Journal (blog), “Groups Want Closure On Net Neutrality Debate“:

Some of the nation’s largest business groups expressed hope Thursday that stakeholders involved in the debate over network neutrality can come to an agreement with the FCC that would provide broadband users and others soon with certainty about the rules of the road without imposing regulations that might stifle innovation, CongressDaily reported.

But they acknowledged that Congress ultimately may need to pass legislation to resolve the issue.

PC World, “Business Groups Question Net Neutrality Rules“:

NAM is also concerned with broadband deployment, said Marc-Anthony Signorino, director of technology policy at the trade group. “Right now, there are thousands of manufacturers in rural or underserved areas who are waiting for broadband services,” he said. “The faster we get it to them, the faster we can create jobs.” (continue reading…)

Cabinet officials were on the road last week, making announcements and promoting the Obama Administration’s priorities.

Des Moines Register blog, Aug. 17, “Vilsack: Estate tax won’t hurt most farmers“:

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today defended proposals to reinstate the estate tax, despite concerns raised at an Iowa State Fair roundtable about the need for more rural capital and incentives for young farmers.

Vilsack, the former Iowa governor, said he thinks the estate tax will be restored. The key is having appropriate exemptions for people who want to pass their farm down to a family member or someone else, he said. He expects to see a large enough exemption to cover the “vast majority” of farms and ranches in the country, he said.

St. Louis Post Dispatch, Aug. 20, “Salazar views Arch designs, says ‘We will get this done.’“:

Salazar called the five designs exciting and said that better use of the Arch grounds and connections to St. Louis and East St. Louis are important goals in even in a recession.

“We will make this one of our highest priorities,” he said. “I cannot find any place in the U.S. that has the frame for an urban park lilke you have here with the Arch and river.”

Tech Daily Dose, Aug. 17, “Broadband Grants Totaling $1.8 Billion Announced“:

(continue reading…)

Beloit College of Wisconsin has just issued its annual “mindset survey” for the college Class of 2014, a list of cultural touchstones for the incoming freshmen. The college began the survey in 1998 to help its professors avoid outdated references.

The list of 75 observations includes many references to technology, communications and trade, impressions that will shape the next generation of manufacturers and manufacturing employees.

The class of 2014 has never found Korean-made cars unusual on the Interstate and five hundred cable channels, of which they will watch a handful, have always been the norm. Since “digital” has always been in the cultural DNA, they’ve never written in cursive and with cell phones to tell them the time, there is no need for a wrist watch. …The America they have inherited is one of soaring American trade and budget deficits; Russia has presumably never aimed nukes at the United States and China has always posed an economic threat.

Nonetheless, they plan to enjoy college. The males among them are likely to be a minority. They will be armed with iPhones and BlackBerries, on which making a phone call will be only one of many, many functions they will perform. They will now be awash with a computerized technology that will not distinguish information and knowledge. So it will be up to their professors to help them. A generation accustomed to instant access will need to acquire the patience of scholarship. They will discover how to research information in books and journals and not just on-line. Their professors, who might be tempted to think that they are hip enough and therefore ready and relevant to teach the new generation, might remember that Kurt Cobain is now on the classic oldies station. The college class of 2014 reminds us, once again, that a generation comes and goes in the blink of our eyes, which are, like the rest of us, getting older and older.

And manufacturing in the United States has always …

P.S. Is the Class of 2014 even a relevant point of reference? From the College Board: “The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) tracked the progress of first-time students seeking a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent and attending a four-year institution full-time in the 2000-01 school year. It found that only 36 percent of these students graduated from college within four years. And only 57.5 percent of undergraduates who began that year had attained a degree or certificate six years later, in 2007.”

(Hat tip: Bridgett Wagner)

The homepage photo at Bing is very good today, in a manufacturing-oriented kind of way. Bing’s photos are striking almost every day.

Yesterday, the White House released the President’s Memorandum on spectrum policy and, in a refreshing change, it looks as if it’s actually geared to encourage investment. 

Thanks to every new gadget from Apple, Microsoft and Google, consumers are inhaling wireless spectrum as they demand more and more mobile broadband applications. The downside is that as more devices compete for a finite amount of spectrum, fewer opportunities to create innovative products and technologies will arise, thus limiting job growth and investment.  By signing the Presidential Memorandum, not only has President Obama doubled the amount of spectrum available for commercial purposes, but he’s set in motion a plan that has the potential to raise tens of billions of dollars that can go into public safety and infrastructure investments that will create jobs.  And we like jobs.

The plan calls for setting up an auction that will release 500 MHz of Federal and nonfederal spectrum over the next 10 years for both mobile and fixed wireless broadband use.  In addition, the FCC would be responsible for reorganizing how spectrum bands are released, so that they’ll be used for their most productive – and lucrative – use. 

The auction proceeds will then be funneled into various good ideas, such as the creation of an interoperable wireless broadband network for public safety use, investment in growth-enhancing infrastructure like NextGen air traffic control, high-speed rail, and Smart Grid,  and even – gasp – deficit reduction.

With the sudden surge of raw capitalism surrounding mobile broadband, it seems as if 44 is trying to put a new dust jacket on Hayek: The Road to Surfdom.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ decision to impose anti-consumer labeling on cell phones sold in the city is a remarkably anti-business move. CTIA–The Wireless Association — the cell phone industry’s trade association — issued a statement in response:

CTIA and the wireless industry are disappointed that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has approved the so-called ‘Cell Phone Right-to-Know’ ordinance. Rather than inform, the ordinance will potentially mislead consumers with point of sale requirements suggesting that some phones are ‘safer’ than others based on radiofrequency (RF) emissions. In fact, all phones sold legally in the U.S. must comply with the Federal Communications Commission’s safety standards for RF emissions. According to the FCC, all such compliant phones are safe phones as measured by these standards. The scientific evidence does not support point of sale requirements that would suggest some compliant phones are ‘safer’ than other compliant phones based on RF emissions.

“While we have enjoyed bringing our three day fall show to San Francisco five times in the last seven years, which has meant we’ve brought more than 68,000 exhibitors and attendees and had an economic impact of almost $80 million to the Bay Area economy, the Board of Supervisors’ action has led us to decide to relocate our show. We are disappointed to announce that the 2010 CTIA Enterprise and Applications show in October will be the last one we have in San Francisco for the foreseeable future.  We have already been contacted by several other cities that are eager to work with us and understand the tremendous benefits that wireless technology and our show can provide their area.”

The association also has a website that answers questions about the health effects of cell phone use: www.cellphonehealthfacts.org

Page 1 of today’s Washington Post carries this story, “Cellphone industry attacks San Francisco’s ruling on radiation”:

San Francisco, a city that banned the plastic bag, now has waded into the muddy territory of cellphone radiation, setting off a call to arms in the $153 billion wireless industry.

Last week, the Board of Supervisors passed a law — the first in the nation — requiring retailers to inform their customers how much radiation the cellphones on their shelves emit, so shoppers can figure out how close the devices come to the upper limits on radiation set by the Federal Communications Commission.

The law, which goes into effect early next year, didn’t mention the word, but it was all about one thing: cancer, and whether cellphones cause it.

Walter Olson at Overlawyered.com observes, “Study after study finds no health effects to worry about, but the city by the Bay wants warnings anyway.”

And Ted Frank of the Manhattan Institute comments at Point of Law:

Even aside from the foolishness of having municipalities regulate interstate commerce labeling requirements (what happens when Chicago decides that cell-phone warning labels should be in a different font than San Francisco does?), the San Francisco legislation is, as I noted in a January AOLNews piece, counterproductive to consumer safety and not, as Mayor Newsom would have it, “relatively benign.”

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We wonder: Do trial lawyers have any interest in undermining federal preemption and exacerbating public anxieties about cell phone radiation? Possibly.

When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 AD with his legions in tow, defying the Senates’ prohibitions on generals entering Italy proper with their troops, he uttered the famous words “the die is cast” (alea iacta est, to be specific).  Caesar being Caesar, he probably did so through gritted teeth, his sword to his breast, with his flinty stare focused firmly on the Capitoline Hill.

Two thousand years later a different die was cast, by another Julius with his eye on another Capitol Hill crossing his own Rubicon, and defying the will of another Senate.  At today’s Open FCC Meeting, Chairman Julius Genachowski led the Commission in voting in favor of moving forward with opening a proceeding that will inevitably redefine how the FCC regulates broadband services by imposing common carrier rules to the Internet.

Of course, what’s at stake with the roll of today’s die is a bit different from Caesar’s toss: with Old Julius, it was only the fate of Roman Empire.  Today’s stakes are far bigger – the fate of the nation’s information structure.  Why is this bigger you ask?  Let’s put it this way: the manufacturers who build the networks, the manufacturers who own the networks, the manufacturers who rely on new networks being built, could all see up to $62 billion in broadband investment dry up, costing over half-a million jobs.

According to a study released by New York Law School, the report estimates that if New Julius’s “Third Way” broadband plan is instituted, broadband providers and related industries may cut their investments by 10 percent to 30 percent from 2010 to 2015 in response to additional regulation. At 30 percent, the economy might sustain an $80 billion hit, according to Charles Davidson, director of the law school’s Advanced Communications Law & Policy Institute, which released the report on June 16.

What about the pesky Senate?  New Julius is facing his own dilemma as 282 Members of Congress, including 77 Democrats demanded the FCC leave its troops at the banks of the…er…drop its plan to reclassify broadband and allow Congress to do what it was elected to do. But, hey, Congress knew about the National Broadband Plan, and that was blessed by the President. Who we hear was elected by lots of people, too.

Unless Congress decides to defund the FCC, there will be a pretty quick process in which rounds of comments, reply comments, notices of proposed rules, and more comments are flitted through in less than six months.  In fact, the first round of comments are due July 15, reply comments due August 12. And again, unless Congress defunds the FCC, it’s highly probable that New Julius will get his way, only to find that the litigious Visigoths of industry will be banging down the doors of the Commission.

How is this going to end?  Hopefully better for New Julius than it did for Old Julius.  We’d be happy if he just crossed back over the Potomac and dropped his cockamamie plan over the Memorial Bridge.

Internet denizens across America will be watching today as the FCC takes the first big step in granting itself the authority to regulate the Internet.  An act, we’d like to add, that is something many manufacturers will be viewing with the same interest as, say, watching someone eat their own foot.  By that, I mean mostly in horror, aghast that such an overt exercise of power would be done at all, figuratively and literally cannibalizing our nation’s best means of moving forward.

This all comes in the wake of the DC Circuit’s Comcast decision that held the FCC didn’t have the authority to chastise Comcast for violating rules that were never actually…um…rules. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has been wracking the collective brains of his attorneys to figure out how he can get that authority.  Without having to go to Congress, that is, because they might disagree.  Well, that’s not true; they do disagree.  As a matter of fact, more than 77 Democratic Members of Congress – including Commerce Chairman Emeritus John Dingell who authored the Telecom Act of 1996 – have publicly disagreed with Chmn. Genachowski and asked him not to move forward with this scheme.

It seems as if Congress has this quaint idea that a light regulatory touch on the Internet might have something to do with its phenomenal success and growth, and that regulating it will just stifle innovation and economic growth. 

The FCC extravaganza today is the first salvo in the war: The Commission will publicly ponder the issue and then vote on whether or not they’ll issue a Notice of Inquiry to begin the process of locking down the Internet.  Of course, it’ll pass on party lines by a vote of 3-2 which, for an esoteric issue, will post a higher score than most World Cup matches this week.

Here’s the info for today’s meeting.

Irritation is now sufficient cause for federal legislation.

In its Wednesday mark-up session, the Senate Commerce Committee briefly discussed and then approved S. 2847, the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act.

Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) described the bill and commented:

Excessively loud television advertisements may seem like a small thing, but to parents of young children, that is not a small matter, and it is distinctively obvious when advertising, all of a sudden the volume goes way up, and you have to adjust your remote control to punch it down and the program…it doesn’t make any sense, it’s unnecessary and they’re a big source of irritation for many television viewers.

This bill will help put a stop to the annoying practice of featuring television advertisements that are many times louder than television programming, and again I thank Sen. Whitehouse – not on this committee — for this bill and I’m happy to be a cosponsor.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) commented (at the 64:20 mark in the video):

This is one of those bills that all of us have gotten letters it, all of us have experienced it. It’s one of those deals that we all want to change it, and sometimes we forget that little things are a big deal in people’s lives. We weigh really serious, weighty matters here, but especially for a senior who does not – there are people who don’t have remote controls, or don’t have access to remote control – they have to sit through and listen to the blaring of these commercials. It is beyond irritating. It just infuriates me every time they do that.

The committee clearly stopped short of the real solution — subsidized remote controls.