Technology

A group of city and state elected officials urged the state’s Public Service Commission, in a letter, to require that Comcast commit to universal broadband in New York City before it approves the cable giant’s $45 billion merger with Time Warner Cable (TWC). 

The merger is currently undergoing review by federal agencies, but the state commission is also authorized to block changes in the ownership of cable companies if they don’t meet public interest standards. 

The letter demands that Comcast provide free broadband Internet access in the city’s public housing complexes, community centers, and homeless and domestic violence shelters as well as free Wi-Fi in public parks. 

“The single unemployed mother spending money she doesn’t have on broadband just so she can apply for jobs, the elderly who must sit outside, in a library, or in a park in the cold of winter just to communicate with loved ones,” said City Council member Ben Kallos, a signatory of the letter. “Every New Yorker must have the opportunity to access the world-knowledge on the Internet.” 

A group of New York politicians is lobbying Comcast to provide free broadband to all city public housing residents and expand other low-cost Internet offerings as a condition for the cable operator’s proposed $45 billion merger with Time Warner Cable.

Led by New York City’s public advocate, Letitia James, and City Councilman Ben Kallos, the group of state and local politicians is calling on Comcast to help bridge the so-called digital divide between people who have access to broadband connections and those who do not. About a third of New York City families do not have broadband, according to the Knight Foundation.

“With every second we wait, the digital divide is widening,” Mr. Kallos said. “What we have with the Internet is literally a portal to the world’s knowledge. One third of our city can’t get on the Internet and can’t learn whatever, whenever they want.”

Code runs our world. Whether legal or software lines of code, we live by rules that dictate what can and cannot be done. While software code has grown exponentially more advanced in recent years, our legal code lags behind. Courts struggle to resuscitate laws as living by applying them to facts and technologies that were not possible when those laws were written. The Legislature must stand up to the challenge of upgrading our legal code and systems to keep pace with our software code—to build a government as modern and innovative as the rest of the world we live in.

New York City— the largest in the country—is in a unique position to lead on the most exciting developments in technology and transparency

Elected officials want to make sure that even the city’s pizza joints get their own slices of New York City-branded internet real estate.  

Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and City Councilman Benjamin Kallos are launching a campaign Friday to inform local small businesses about the availability of .nyc domain names.

Their offices will be distributing flyers, emailing businesses and coordinating with chambers of commerce to get the word out.

"The new .nyc web address will help businesses succeed in the world’s greatest, most competitive city,” Kallos said In an email.

If you happen to visit New York City Council Member Ben Kallos' website on Wednesday you may notice a loading icon at the top of the page. No, he's not having website troubles and you are not experiencing internet problems. Kallos, who is also a software developer and chair of the council's government operations committee, is participating in the worldwide "Internet Slowdown" protest.

Kallos is joining the likes of reddit, Vimeo, and Wordpress (to name just a few of the many) who are protesting rules currently being proposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that would create tiered internet speeds. If passed, companies or citizens willing and able to pay more could use "fast lanes" whereas companies or citizens with more modest financial means would be relegated to using "slow lanes."

"Under possible new rules to be determined by the FCC, the sites that most New Yorkers enjoy would likely be slowed down," Kallos said in a statement. "Instead of a divided Internet, New York City and this country want one Internet that works."

"The Board of Elections has taken the positive step of implementing CityTime to prevent possible fraud, waste and abuse. Executive Director Mike Ryan is showing himself to be the kind of leader we need to clean up the Board of Elections,” Kallos told the News.

“On February 28, Council Member [Vincent] Gentile and I held a hearing to investigate the disturbing Department of Investigations findings on the [Board]," Kallos added.

"This is the first major step we’ve seen resulting from the hearing, and I look forward to many more — including the adoption of an anti-nepotism policy and public postings for jobs.”

The legislation was co-sponsored by New York City Council members Brad Lander, who chairs the Rules, Privileges and Elections Committee, and Ben Kallos, who chairs the Governmental Affairs Committee.

Kallos, is also a member of the Free Law Founders, a coalition of local government officials and open-government advocates around the country who have recently joined forces to push for open-data reform on the city and state level and are working on common data standards and open-source tools for local governments.

“The agility of code is pushing government to be more responsive,”Kallos told GovExec State & Local earlier this summer.

During the meeting Friday, she said she was surprised at how just staffers' participation "demystified [Wikipedia] for them" and illustrated how "it was simple and not scary." That kind of conversation should happen in every congressional office, she said, to move beyond using Wikipedia as a reference tool, spread awareness of concepts such as open source and civic technology, and also help staffers access institutional knowledge better. "It's not shared in a way that's useful," she said, adding that the role of a wiki-like platform could be " helping Congress access its own support system more effectively," sharing knowledge between district offices, communications offices, policy offices and committees, which could draw on stack-exchange like platform to get real-time input during hearings. In many ways, her vision echoes local efforts, such as open and participatory government pushes by New York City Council member Ben Kallos.

Councilmember Ben Kallos, who represents Manhattan's Upper East Side and has a background in software development, says that the first priority is “making sure that phone booths remain,” rather than uprooting them entirely as might be tempting in an era of ubiquitous cell phones.

During Hurricane Sandy, which devastated low-lying coastal areas of New York City, payphones became a lifeline for residents in need of help. With cell phone networks out of commission, payphones, with their old-fashioned copper wire infrastructure, were often the only way residents in distress could call for help or communicate with loved ones.

“We have these phone booths that have become under-utilized,” says Kallos. “If you walk around my district, you'll see that many of these booths don't even have phones in them. And when you're talking about a brave new world with Sandy, we need to know that everyone has copper to the home and copper to the street corner.”

On this, the last day of the FCC's public comment period on its "Open Internet" rulemaking, nearly every point for or against net neutrality regulations has been made, and often many, many times. And yet there's a late entrant in the field offering a somewhat novel take.

Nine members of the New York City Council, led by councilmember Ben Kallos of Roosevelt Island and the Upper East Side, have signed onto a last-minute filing supporting net neutrality.

The councilmembers' pro-neutrality starting point isn't the city's considerable new tech scene but the fact that about one-third of the city's population was born somewhere other than in the United States. Of course, New York City has long been a magnet for immigrants. But  the immigrant existence takes on a different texture in an era when long-distance calling fees and hard-to-find native newspapers have been replaced by cheap and easy digital communications.