Two days early, a crew of engineers and volunteers re-wired our transmission facilities to install WEFT's new 10,000-watt transmitter. Coverage has not only returned to normal, but increased slightly, and the fidelity provided by the solid-state unit we now have has noticeably improved our signal.

According to a story in the daily newspaper, WEFT's station manager says we'll be "raising funds to replace more aging equipment as well." Just in time for our fall fundraising drive....

Through the fortuitous circumstance of happening upon a fellow Wisconsinite while attending the ESF workshop (Paul the Mediageek just produced a show of us discussing that event in greater detail), who was also very interested in community radio, we ended up making contact with representatives from two community stationsin Budapest, which we visited after the conference was over.

The first was Civil Radio, a forum specifically designed to provide a voice for "the social life and civic associations of the districts [in which its 50-watt signal can be heard], analyses the contacts between local governments and civic organisations, and reports on different NGO-support systems developed by different democratic governments." The station's programming is an eclectic mix of public affairs - on the afternoon we arrived, a news-analysis program was just wrapping up, and some teenage girls were waiting outside the studio to speak for an hour on their own issues.

At the same time, Civil Radio is also attached to a local cultural center, and often broadcasts its events live. This gives local performers of all genres of music, theatre, and spoken word the chance to be heard in (most of) Budapest. The station is run on a shoestring budget, mostly by volunteers, and although it receives some government support its direct identification with and representation of Hungarian civil society makes its relationship with the authorities not as smooth as it might otherwise be.

Interestingly, Civil Radio broadcasts from a tower left over from the country's Communist rule. The tower happens to be located on land owned by the local water utility, which has no use for it, so the station appropriated it. The utility and station now have an informal agreement allowing the practice to continue.

The second station we visited was Radio C, which stands for "cigányok," or "Roma" in Hungarian. Radio C represents the voice of the Roma people, a marginalized population found in all the countries of Europe and beyond (also referred to as "gypsies"). In Hungary, the Roma that we spoke with at the station characterize their situation as "of your Blacks in the 1940s" - ostensibly separate but equal, segregated, and treated with relative disdain by the rest of society.

Radio C is helping to lay the framework for what the Roma see as a bridge of understanding, justice, and eventual equality between themselves and the rest of Hungary - the station as foundation for a larger civil rights movement. Most Hungarians don't realize it, but much of their musical tradition stems from Roma culture; many of the country's most talented musicians happen to be Roma people. In this manner, the station serves a dual function: it is the quasi-official representation of Roma culture, but it also enlightens Hungarians more generally to the commonalities they all share but might not naturally recognize.

Radio C also makes sure it represents the voice of the Roma in civil discourse; the station began without a license after Hungary's capitalist transformation, but was begrudgingly legalized by the new government. Since then, the station has patiently and persistently leveraged its voice in order to gain access to and a place of power within society at large. The Hungarian government has reluctantly recognized the Roma as an important part of the country's civil and cultural heritage; some now serve in government; and the government itself has promised to fund Radio C directly (though it has yet to make good on this).

Regardless, the station perseveres, though it's not quite clear just how. It has plenty of paid staff, but no real recognizably consistent income stream. Yet enough people obviously recognize the importance of the station and do whatever it takes to keep the lights on. In that sense, Radio C embodies the self-sustaining spirit of the Roma people themselves. It would seem to be paying off: the 10-kilowatt Radio C is the eighth-most listened-to station in Budapest, serves more then 250,000 online listeners a month, and has ambitious plans to extend its range with a network of stations throughout Hungary.

The personalities of the Roma we met were amazingly affable and generous. Hank (the fellow Wisconsinite) and I were somewhat conspicuous in the neighborhood, but having the Radio C folks with us invoked magic acceptance by everyone we met. Many thanks especially to the station's general manager and operations director, Tivadar Fátyol and Ferenc Szénási, for making us feel such at home.

It's anyone's guess as to when the FCC will consider this proposal, but if the history of the entire HD Radio rulemaking is any indication, the power increase will be rubber-stamped, and we will suffer the consequences as they unfold.

My problem with Comcast, however, has had nothing to do with BitTorrent, Skype, Gnutella, or Lotus Notes. It has everything to do with the most important application for which I use the Internet - e-mail.

The problem began a couple of months ago, when those of us in Champaign-Urbana began to be assimilated into the larger Comcast network-borg. I expected an increase in intermittent service outages, but I did not expect my e-mail to stop coming in. But it did, and after two months of sleuthing with Comcast's evasive and mostly-impotent technical support, I think I have figured out the problem.

My main e-mail address - the one you can find all over this site - is not the e-mail address that I use to technically send and receive messages. Rather, it is a "transparent alias" - I've set up a single e-mail address on diymedia.net (mine), and that address is set to forward to whatever Internet service provider I have. Therefore, when I do things like, say, move, I don't have to send out mass-mails to everyone in my address book, asking them to update my contact information. As far as the world is concerned, I'm phlegm@diymedia.net, and I always will be.

Since I've set up this web site, I've moved three times and changed ISPs three times. Each time I got a new e-mail address, I simply went into diymedia.net's administrative controls and changed the ultimate forwarding destination for "phlegm." Then, I use a mail client (Mac Mail) to pull the messages off my ISP's POP server and send replies through their SMTP server. To the world, my return address never changes - but the network through which I send and receive e-mail does.

After Comcast informed us in Champaign that we were to set up our new comcast.net e-mail addresses,I followed the company's instructions, and made the forwarding change here. Everything worked fine for about a week - then, suddenly, I no longer received any e-mail. I have a backup (and very kludgy) webmail interface on diymedia.net (to check messages from the road, as I own no laptop), and I noticed that shortly after my mail stopped I began receiving bounce-back messages from mail.comcast.net. My public e-mail address had been "blocked for spam."

I can understand how an ISP may suspect this. Because I'm old-school and make my e-mail address not only publicly available, but clickable, it is both a magnet for spam address-harvesting bots and a victim of spam address-spoofing. On regular days, it's not uncommon for me to receive more than 100 messages, many of them spam. On bad days, I can be flooded with up to 2,000 e-mails in 24 hours, for as long as a week - many of them bounce-backs from a spammer who's appropriated my e-mail address as his/her "reply-to" contact info for hawking porn, dubious health remedies, and enticements to watch tantalizing celebrity videos that contain a link which actually opens dozens of pop-up advert-windows.

As much of a hassle as this can be, e-mail, relative to many other Internet communication protocols, is not bandwidth-intensive: 2,000 e-mails take up less bandwidth than a single, medium-quality MP3 file, and e-mail messages come in trickles and waves - it is not a constant-use application, file filesharing or streaming media. With prior ISPs, I simply filtered out all the junk locally (Mac Mail is really good at that). Any reasonable ISP has more than enough capacity to handle such detritus. The problem is, Comcast is not a reasonable ISP.

I've worked with Comcast tech support repeatedly, getting them to un-block the IP address from which diymedia.net originates (it's as simple as changing a single line in a text file in the spam-filter on Comcast's mail servers). Which has worked - but only temporarily. Depending on my inbox-flow at the time, Comcast automatically re-blocks messages from diymedia.net within a matter of hours or days. The problem is thus fixable - but it keeps coming back.

This leads me to one conclusion: Comcast has a metric for what it considers "appropriate use" of its e-mail addresses, and if you receive more than X amount of messages from a single external address in Y amount of time, incoming messages from that address become automatically blocked as spam. In a nutshell, the stream of messages from phlegm@diymedia.net to my Comcast address keeps tripping an auto spam-block rule in Comcast's mail system.

It is not a block driven by simple capacity - a single comcast.net e-mail address is allocated up to 250 megabytes of storage space, enough for hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages. I get nowhere near that particular limit.

Therefore, this is not a technical issue; it is one of network management policy. Unfortunately, it may simply be par for the course for Comcast. But it's a troublesome twist on the principle of network neutrality for two reasons. The first is that e-mail, as described above, is not a bandwidth-intensive use of network capacity. If Comcast can't handle, on average, a few hundred e-mails coming into a single inbox, then its network capacity is much more strained than any of us realize.

The second problem is that Comcast has set an arbitrarily low metric for what it considers to be "acceptable use" of its e-mail service. What if you're a real celebrity, the kind that has to employ people to answer your fan-mail? Obviously, Comcast is not for you (and on that, at least one of the company's tech-support folks and I agree).

I spent an hour and 17 minutes on the phone with Comcast one last time today to see if I could get an answer to my question about the metrics of their e-mail and spam-blocking policy. To no surprise, there is no answer. "The folks in the back are really busy," said the very helpful man I spoke with, who generated yet another trouble-ticket, this time with a note that someone involved in Comcast's mail network-management department should contact me to discuss this further.

I'm not holding my breath. Instead, I'm unfortunately considering switching back to the Death Star, as Comcast and AT&T are the only two ISPs in my market. AT&T may snoop on me, but since a majority of Internet traffic transits at least one AT&T router, it already does; at least it has the capacity to handle such a simple service.

I would much rather risk alienating you than fail to maintain the expectation of excellence that has launched Free Press into a formidable national force. If you’re impugning my leadership of this organization, I think you'll have a steep and lonely challenge that will not have a positive net effect for you.

Translation: "F*ck with me, and you'll never work in this town again." Not the type of response you expect from the grinning, boyish, well-coiffed mug featured regularly in the Huffington Post. And definitely not the proper response from someone working to build a democratic, inclusive movement that is still fighting defensive actions and cannot afford to alienate its most natural allies. It is despicable.

Please allow me to be clear. This is not a blanket indictment of Free Press. There are some wonderfully talented, committed, and honest people working for the organization, which in and of itself continues to do good works. I use FP research and reportage in my classes, more often than Bob's own books. But the organization is growing at such a rate right now that the evidence of institutional expansion is being internally translated in its upper echelon as external power, and that's a premature assumption.

These are the primary reasons why I'm not attending this weekend's National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis. I realize I'm missing out on the chance to meet and learn from from some truly good-hearted people, engaged in real change for media democracy. I know I'll definitely be missing an A-list progressive love-fest of the highest order. But it's time to take a break from that scene.

I'm way past tired of the egos and the gold-digging. This is a lesson I already knew, but had painfully reinforced this academic year. Activism is not a career-choice, it's a vocation. You don't fight your battles to work your way up a ladder to secure stature, notoriety, and a place of power within the status quo. You fight your battles and hope that your knowledge, talent, and drive will sort out the rest to let you live to continue fighting. You may not ever see the change you seek, but there is value in the struggle.

Free Press and its ilk, while a necessary part of the process of reforming the U.S. media environment, do not represent the end-state. The media reform movement itself is just one larger aspect of contemporary life-struggle. Losing sight of these truths opens the door to mistakenly aligning your priorities to perpetuate the very problems you purport to seek change.

While FCC assesses the impact of its enforcement program by periodically reviewing certain program outputs, it lacks the management tools needed to fully measure its outputs and manage its program. Specifically, FCC’s Enforcement Bureau has not set specific enforcement goals, developed a well-defined enforcement strategy, or established performance measures that are linked to the enforcement goals. FCC measures outputs, such as the extent to which it takes enforcement action within its statute of limitations requirement for assessing fines or the time it takes to close investigations, but it does not measure outcomes such as the effects of its enforcement actions on levels of compliance in certain areas.

Enforcement Bureau officials told us that the bureau has not set specific goals and performance measures because its priorities are constantly changing. Officials explained that the Enforcement Bureau is responsive to a number of stakeholders—Congress, Commissioners, the public—and the priorities of those stakeholders change. In addition, the Enforcement Bureau is responsible for enforcing a wide range of rules and issues, and current enforcement priorities may not be future enforcement priorities.

This is a first in a series of site updates to take place this weekend, as I prepare to embark on another hiatus: I have my final preliminary exam to take, a dissertation proposal to write, and must defend those and all my other work to-date in order to remain in grad school. This "ABD" decision process will conclude in early May. Then, immediately, I'm heading abroad for a conference.

So, get your fix now, because the next one probably won't be ready for another couple of months.

You can imagine my dismay when I read last spring that Comcast declared its intent to buy out Insight, and recently I received a letter in the mail informing me that I would officially become a Comcast customer in short order.

Although AT&T may be bureaucratically and technically inept, Comcast is the most aggressively arrogant of the broadband-trust bunch. For example, the company's instituted mysterious "bandwidth caps" on users who use "too much" of their connections, and has now been conclusively indicted in the court of public opinion for interfering with and/or cutting off the connections of customers who use applications Comcast doesn't like, such as peer-to-peer and video-streaming software - even business-friendly applications like Lotus Notes.

So, upon formal notice that I was now, for all intents and purposes, another one of Comcast's bitches, I called the company's customer support system (1-800-COMCAST) to ask three simple questions:

1. What is the "mystery bandwidth cap" which I must not exceed to lose my service?

2. Can I use peer-to-peer software on my Comcast connection if I am using it for legitimate purposes, such as sharing music I made myself that has no copyright?

3. Will Comcast's terms of service prohibit me from publicly disparaging the company at the risk of losing my Internet connection, as AT&T has previously tried to do?

My first call to Comcast got me transferred to six different departments, none of whom could answer my questions. Upon the sixth transfer, I was put into Comcast's "circular hold" file, where I waited for ~30 minutes before hanging up.

I called again. This time I was only transferred twice, to someone in "Internet tech support," who informed me that, indeed, the use of peer-to-peer and other software is prohibited on Comcast's network. My specific question was, "If I use peer-to-peer software to share information that is NOT copyrighted, can you put a notation on my account or something to stop your network security people from resetting or otherwise interfering with my connection?" The Comcast representative's answer was, "No." So I followed up: "Does this explicitly mean that the use of such software is prohibited on your network?" The answer: "Yes."

This is new: in the past, Comcast has publicly reserved the right to "shape" or "throttle" network traffic in order to reduce "network congestion," but this is the first I've heard of a Comcast rep telling a customer NOT to use peer-to-peer software AT ALL.

I then asked (again) about Comcast's mystery bandwidth cap. And again, I was transferred several times, eventually to a woman who told me there WAS a cap, but she didn't know what it was, especially since I was a newly-assimilated Comcast customer. This leads me to believe that Comcast's bandwidth cap is variable, depending on which portion/region of Comcast's network you're connected to, and whether or not that portion of their network is robust enough to handle heavy traffic.

Finally, I asked the woman if she could answer a terms-of-service question. She told me to hold again - and then hung up on me.

Comcast and AT&T are not alone in shredding Internet freedom so blatantly now: Time-Warner is trial-testing metered bandwidth usage, and Verizon and Qwest aren't exactly friendly to the principle of network neutrality, either. At a time in our nation's history when "freedom of choice" has been conflated to something akin to a Constitutional right, the country's broadband environment belies the hype.