Digital Beat

Our big story of the week comes from across the pond, in London Town where, for many months, regulators have been examining the business practices of one of the world’s largest media empires.

Fueled in no small part by a Congressional hearing, the need for more spectrum devoted to wireless telecommunications services was a big topic this week. AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint say they need more spectrum to meet the exploding demands for mobile data. If they don’t get more soon, they warn, mobile users will experience slower, spottier connections – and higher prices.

America, we have a problem: billions of anonymous dollars pouring into a tsunami of negative TV advertising aimed at distorting political campaigns and manipulating election outcomes. Our civic dialogue—the prerequisite of successful self-government—is being short-circuited by deep-pocketed individuals, corporations and other groups operating on the smug premise that elections should be bought by the power of money rather than fought by the power of ideas.

With a two-week Spring Recess looming, Washington communications policymakers were busy this week. Here’s some highlights.

On March 21, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights held a hearing on Verizon’s proposed acquisition of spectrum from cable companies and related commercial agreements.

On the day after Apple unveiled the newest iPad, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Justice Department has warned Apple and five of the biggest US publishers that it plans to sue them for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books. In just a few short years, e-books have gone from fringe product to mainstay of the publishing industry, exploding in popularity.

The Mobile World Congress convened in Barcelona, Spain, this week. The agenda-setting event is where wireless network operators, cellphone manufacturers, content providers, advertising gurus, and Internet players industry gather to assess the nearly $2 trillion wireless industry. Although we like the shiny new devices launched at the event as much as anyone, we’ll focus instead on trends in the business and the changes sought in regulation of the industry.

As we hope Headlines readers well know, on December 19, 2011, Verizon Wireless and SpectrumCo filed an application for the consent of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to the assignment of 122 Advanced Wireless Services (“AWS” -- the 1710-1755/2110-2155 MHz bands) licenses from SpectrumCo to Verizon Wireless. The 122 licenses cover 120 markets. This past week was a first deadline for the public to tell the FCC about their concerns about the transaction.

A Michael Rigley video called “Network” recently caught our eye. A caption describing the video reads, “Information technology has become a ubiquitous presence. By visualizing the processes that underlie our interactions with this technology we can trace what happens to the information we feed into the network.” For policy wonks like us, this generally translates into one word: privacy. For a country seemingly obsessed with reality television and tabloid journalism, the United States is suddenly very worried about privacy, wrote The Verge’s Joshua Topolsky in the Washington Post this week. And not celebrity privacy, but your privacy.