Digital Future of Public Media

On Dec. 20, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg -- who was recently named Time's 2010 "Person of the Year" -- stopped by the Beijing offices of Baidu, China's leading web-search company, to chat with co-founder Robin Li. The two men, both youthful, energetic, self-made billionaires, have much in common.

“The revolution will be Twittered!” declared journalist Andrew Sullivan after protests erupted in Iran in June 2009. Yet for all the talk about the democratizing power of the Internet, regimes in Iran and China are as stable and repressive as ever. In fact, authoritarian governments are effectively using the Internet to suppress free speech, hone their surveillance techniques, disseminate cutting-edge propaganda, and pacify their populations with digital entertainment. Could the recent Western obsession with promoting democracy by digital means backfire?

2010 was the year that removed all doubt that cybersecurity is now a geopolitical problem.

We learned from diplomatic cables exposed by WikiLeaks that from Europe to the Middle East to China and beyond, Washington is having an even tougher time than we thought getting what it wants. The leaks themselves have only made matters more delicate, not just by embarrassing some of America’s friends, but by fueling conspiracy theories that Washington was somehow behind the leaks.

Judging by the last two weeks, being an enemy of Julian Assange is only marginally less stressful than being Julian Assange. Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa, which all moved to cut ties with Assange's WikiLeaks after the site's release of diplomatic cables, have been the targets of distributed denial-of-service attacks from a group that calls itself "Anonymous." There is nothing fancy going on here. DDoS attacks simply aim to send more traffic to a target site than it can handle, slowing it down or making it temporarily unavailable.

This paper, developed by the Open Technology Initiative of the New America Foundation at the request of the Alliance for Community Media (ACM), offers a policy framework that responds to the situation ACM finds itself thrust into and recommends actions to secure the future of community media.

Leading lights in the international broadcasting space will be congregating at New America this afternoon to weigh in on the subject of International Broadcasting and

Before we all become completely distracted by the Thanksgiving turkey, here is a pre-holiday rundown of MPI’s many activities.

My book, "The Master Switch" asks a simple, age-old question: Is history destined to repeat itself? Is the great revolutionary medium of our times, the Internet, destined to follow the path of its ancestors, radio and the telephone, a path of increasing consolidation and uncompetitiveness, leading over time, to slow stagnation? Or is there something fundamentally different about our times that will keep the network open and competitive for the foreseeable future?

Just before U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Hanoi late last month, Vietnamese authorities redoubled their assault on Internet dissent. Two more bloggers were arrested and another due to be released had his sentence extended. Dissident websites came under cyber attack, taking them offline at a time when they most needed to be visible.

Today's consumers have unprecedented choice in terms of the technologies and platforms that access, produce, and distribute media content. The development and overlap of television, the internet, and other media technologies is fragmenting and empowering media audiences more than ever. Building on his award-winning book, Audience Economics, Philip M. Napoli maps the landscape of our current media environment and describes its challenge to traditional conceptions of the audience.