EOW March 2014

Transatlantic cable

Even so, Mr Obama was able to point to a pilot project in Youngstown, Ohio, that he said had turned a shuttered factory into a lab where workers were honing skills in three-dimensional printing. Of related interest… † The Cleveland International Fund takes advantage of a federal programme that enables a wealthy foreigner to gain an expedited visa to the US in return for an investment of $500,000 or more. Cited as a national model, the fund seeks out immigrant investors and connects them to job-creating projects in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County. The e ort has helped to build a hotel and an o ce tower and to fund expansions at a hospital. Robert L Smith, who covers economic development for the Cleveland Plain Dealer , reported that the fund was founded in 2010 by an entrepreneur who went to prison for fraud. Its executives took ownership and, in 2012, with the support of Cleveland business leaders, they gained federal approval to resume matching investors with local initiatives that need nancing. (“International Investment Flows into Cleveland,” 10 th January). “The fund’s renewed e orts to boost a Heartland economy with international money impressed the consulting group,” Mr Smith wrote. “So did its growing portfolio.” In 2013, the fund attracted about $40 million from overseas and has commitments for $90 million worth of local projects in 2014. Its chief executive o cer told the Plain Dealer that, while his team is also seeking investors from Eastern Europe and South America, most of the interest in the fund comes from Chinese businessmen.

Telecom

A court decision favours the telecom operators on Internet neutrality – but on a technicality that sidesteps the main issue A federal appeals court on 14 th January overturned neutrality (“open-access”) rules for the Internet set by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2010 – rules meant to prevent service providers from controlling Internet tra c, blocking or slowing access to websites at will or whim. Immediate reaction to the 2-to-1 decision exposed what has become a predictable divide. ID Scales of TelecomTV described “the usual pat responses from the usual suspects.” On the US right wing, he wrote, the talk was of “so-called net neutrality” (inferring that the very concept is meaningless) and the defeat of “FCC regulation.” The left produced “the usual high- own rhetoric” about a threat to innovation and freedom of expression. In fact the court took only glancing notice of net neutrality and the case for its enforcement. It held that, given the original classi cation of the Internet as an information service – as distinguished from a telecommunications provider – the FCC had denied itself any regulatory power over the net.

Dorothy Fabian USA Editor

47

www.read-eurowire.com

March 2014