If you’re reading Minnov8 you use, understand and undoubtedly rely upon the internet and your broadband connection. You may also be building a business or revenue stream upon the internet-as-a-platform for innovation, and as such you absolutely must stay close to net neutrality, FCC rulings and, most importantly, what our Minnesota Ultra High-Speed Broadband Task Force is doing to meet their legislative mandate (the task force site is now live and definitely worth checking out).

Ironically in a day when early adopters, influencers and the Minnesota tech cognescenti long ago embraced RSS as an efficient means of staying informed easily, the task force site doesn’t even have a feed, but instead asks you to sign up for an “e-newsletter” (how quaint….but I digress).

Thankfully I follow the task force member representing Twin Cities interests, Mike O’Connor, and the UrbanBroadbandUsers blog via his RSS feed, and I was pleased to have a heads-up on the first meeting minutes (PDF) and, especially, his compiled links on today’s feed:

• CLICK HERE for the FCC document.
• CLICK HERE for Susan Crawford’s commentary
• CLICK HERE for Harold Feld’s commentary
• CLICK HERE for Larry Lessig’s letter to the FCC commending them on their decision.

If you do nothing else this weekend but invest even a half an hour reading these, you’ll have a pretty good handle on the issue, the importance of this August 1st ruling by the FCC, and why this matters to you if the internet is at all central to your life or you see it as important to your business or Minnesota’s future.

Anyone who understands that the internet is a platform, social media is fundamentally shifting the way we connect and communicate with one another, and that application and computing functionality is rapidly shifting to the cloud, will instantly appreciate the efforts of a broadband public policy initiative by the non-profit Blandin Foundation in Grand Rapids, Minnesota: Blandin on Broadband.

When I wrote a post analogically comparing what happened to a small Minnesota town bypassed by the railroad in the 1880’s, to the effect of being bypassed by ultra high speed broadband today, (see “The Railroad and Minnesota Broadband“), several people emailed me citing the following passage as the key reason why initiatives like Blandin’s Broadband one are so imperative for Minnesota, and specifically those towns and rural areas that lie outside the metro:

If you buy in to the premise that we’re living in a time of the greatest shift in communication and connection in history driven by the internet — and that the transport of digital bits is as important (if not more so) than the movement of physical goods over the past 100 years or so — it almost goes without saying that location is not only less important today, in many ways it’s irrelevant unless you don’t have access to the internet and fast access at that.

In 2003, Blandin crafted a vision (PDF) for Minnesota ultra high speed broadband “…designed to catalyze broadband investment and use, raise awareness about the value of broadband and encourage public and private investment in rural broadband capacity. Expanding the use of broadband technology increases the potential to retain jobs in rural areas, grows new markets for business, strengthens health care, enhances educational access and improves the quality-of-life” and I had a chance to interview Bill Coleman of Community Technology Advisors Corp. about what they’ve done, achieved, and what’s next….  [Read More…]