March 6, 2012 (FCC Process Reform)

BENTON'S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2012

Reimagine Learning; FCC Reform Bills; and Research and Development on today’s agenda http://benton.org/calendar/2012-03-06/

FCC REFORM
   FCC Process Reforms Receive Widespread Support - press release

ELECTIONS AND MEDIA
   A Laurel to the Toledo Blade
   Networks Plan Blanket Coverage of Super Tuesday
   SuperPAC Ads Fill Airwaves On Eve Of Super Tuesday
   Can social media predict election outcomes? [links to web]
   Facebook IPO Could Fill Political Coffers [links to web]
   Was That Twitter Blast False, or Just Honest Hyperbole? [links to web]

TELEVISION/RADIO
   Free Press Opposes FCC Proposal to Relax Ownership Rules
   NAB: FCC Should Allow More Duopolies in More Markets
   Gray Asks FCC to Repeal TV Duopoly Rule
   The Missed Opportunity In Cable VOD [links to web]
   Sorry, the Internet Can't Fix TV's Reach Problem [links to web]
   Where are the dominant local TV news stations? [links to web]
   Cheaper By the Dozen: TVB Challenges Broadcast Efficiencies [links to web]

PRIVACY
   Privacy not in Eric Schmidt's vision of the future
   National Consumer Protection Week: Spotlight on Privacy - press release [links to web]
   Apple and Google to Meet With Senator Schumer Over Privacy [links to web]

WIRELESS/SPECTRUM
   Verizon urges FCC to approve deal with cable companies
   FCC avoiding LightSquared mistakes with Dish - analysis
   How Apple could screw the U.S. wireless industry

CYBERSECURITY
   The Bright Side of Being Hacked

HEALTH
   Digital Records May Not Cut Health Costs, Study Cautions
   California drivers finally put down those cellphones and are living to tell the tale

CONTENT
   Disney’s YouTube Deal Kicks In, So Free Kids’ TV Starts Showing Up [links to web]

JOURNALISM
   4 Survival Strategies For Struggling Newspapers [links to web]
   A Laurel to the Toledo Blade
   Networks Plan Blanket Coverage of Super Tuesday
   Where are the dominant local TV news stations? [links to web]

PATENTS
   International Trade Commission to review Microsoft, Motorola decision [links to web]
   Apple Sued by Firm in Patent Deal With Microsoft [links to web]

FUNDING
   USDA Inviting Applications for the Rural Economic Development Loan and Grant Program for Fiscal Year 2012 - public notice

STORIES FROM ABROAD
These headlines presented in partnership with:

   Ireland Signs Controversial 'Irish SOPA' Into Law; Kicks Off New Censorship Regime
   UK Broadband Map About As Awful as U.S. Version
   France Launches Google-style Plan To Scan And Sell Out-of-Print Books [links to web]
   Julian Assange could face charges in the US according to leaked e-mails [links to web]

MORE ONLINE
   Google, AT&T sign deal for access to utility poles in Missouri, Kansas [links to web]

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FCC REFORM

FCC PROCESS REFORM
[SOURCE: House of Representatives Commerce Committee]
The House Commerce Committee began consideration of the Federal Communications Commission Process Reform Act and the Federal Communications Commission Consolidated Reporting Act, which aim to improve the way the FCC operates by strengthening transparency and predictability. A wide range of stakeholders, including representatives from small community-based communications providers, state utility commissioners, wireless associations and providers, broadcasters, and cable associations, lauded these reforms that help the American public and regulated parties interact with the FCC. “Today’s fast-changing marketplace requires careful deliberation before government intervention,” said Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), Chairman of the House Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. “The communications industry is one of the few sectors still firing on all cylinders in this economy, the market is more competitive than it has ever been before, and the underlying technologies and business models are evolving at a rapid and accelerating pace. The FCC has improved its processes under Chairman Genachowski; however, even this commission has overreached its statutory authority and been less than open and transparent in its rulemaking, and we need to lock in reform with legislation to ensure that good government practices continue from one administration to the next.”
benton.org/node/116522 | House of Representatives Commerce Committee
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ELECTIONS AND MEDIA

TOLEDO BLADE AND ROMNEY
[SOURCE: Columbia Journalism Review, AUTHOR: TC Brown]
There’s a well-known truism that you can’t have it both ways. But that’s never stopped politicians, especially in the heat of a presidential campaign, from giving it a go. And when they do, it’s the job of the press to call them out. That’s just what The Blade of Toledo did this week, when GOP candidate Mitt Romney made a stop at a Toledo manufacturing plant. The article, by Tony Cook with contributions from Jim Provance, the paper’s Columbus bureau chief, notes that the Romney campaign selected the home of steel distributor Universal Metals as the site for a stump speech about job creation. It was a logical choice: after all, Romney has begun to sharpen his message on the importance of manufacturing, with an eye to the Ohio primary. But the article also immediately points out an incongruity in Romney’s choice of venue: Universal Metals has benefited heavily from the federal government’s bailout of the auto industry, which Romney opposed.
benton.org/node/116490 | Columbia Journalism Review
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PLANNED COVERAGE
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
Voters will go to the polls in 10 states on March 6 in the biggest day yet for the Republican presidential primary race, and news networks have made extensive coverage plans to follow the election returns that night. On ABC, Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos will anchor election updates to the network starting at 7 p.m. ET. Scott Pelley will lead CBS News' coverage from New York, providing live updates in primetime. CNN's coverage will start at 7 p.m. ET headlined by Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Erin Burnett, John King and Candy Crowley. Brian Williams will anchor a one-hour primetime special on NBC from 10-11 p.m. ET and 8-9 p.m. PT. MSNBC's coverage will begin at 6 p.m. PBS will also cover Super Tuesday on its news and public affairs programs, with PBS NewsHour's Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff co-anchoring special coverage during the program’s 7 p.m. ET timeslot and another 30-minute update at 11 p.m.
benton.org/node/116498 | Broadcasting&Cable
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ELECTION ADS
[SOURCE: National Public Radio, AUTHOR: Brian Naylor]
With ten states holding Republican primaries or caucuses on March 6 — Super Tuesday — a lot of money is being spent on TV ads. The superPACs supporting the remaining GOP candidates have doled out some $12 million for ads in those states. Leading the way is Restore Our Future, the superPAC that backs former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. According to Federal Election Commission numbers, Restore Our Future has spent some $6.9 million on the Super Tuesday states.
"The groups have clearly taken the lead in advertising for the whole Republican primary. They're very much taking the lead in advertising for Super Tuesday. It's mostly the 'Restore Our Future show,' followed by Winning Our Future, which is the Gingrich group, and Red, White and Blue, which is the Santorum group," says Ken Goldstein, who tracks political ad spending for Kantar Media CMAG.
benton.org/node/116512 | National Public Radio
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TELEVISION/RADIO

FREE PRESS OWNERSHIP COMMENTS
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
Media consolidation foes took aim at the Federal Communications Commission for proposing to loosen newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rules and scrapping the ban on TV-radio cross-ownership. "[T]he FCC has no business relaxing its ownership rules when it has shown it can't even hold broadcasters to the letter of existing law," said Free Press. "The local TV ownership rule is supposed to promote competition between local stations, but some broadcasters are skirting the rules by entering into secret deals to combine local newsrooms and station operations," said Free Press. "If it walks like a duopoly and talks like a duopoly, it should be treated like a duopoly under the Commission's rules." Media Access Project and Prometheus Radio Project gave the FCC props for not lifting the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban and saying that restrictions were still needed to promote viewpoint diversity. They also said that they were "heartened" that the FCC had concluded that the Internet "only confirmed the need for diversity in local news since the most frequently visited sites were affiliated with legacy media.
benton.org/node/116528 | Broadcasting&Cable
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NAB OWNERSHIP COMMENTS
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
The National Association of Broadcasters said the Federal Communications Commission's proposed modifications to its media ownership rules do not go nearly far enough. The FCC has proposed loosening, but not lifting, the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban but leaving local ownership limits in place. It has proposed scrapping the ban on radio-TV cross-ownership, but broadcasters weren't exactly clamoring for that. In its comments filed in the FCC's quadrennial media ownership review, the NAB asked for repealing or at least relaxing all the FCC's ownership rules, saying that would promote competition, diversity and localism.
benton.org/node/116527 | Broadcasting&Cable
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FCC’S DUOPOLY RULE
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
Gray Television told the Federal Communications Commission that it should repeal, or at least relax, its TV duopoly rule, using its recent coverage of deadly twisters to argue that "innovative cost-sharing and services arrangements" would help provide even more such life-saving coverage. Gray pointed to its WKYT TV Lexington (KY) reporting on the tornadoes that hit too close to home last week, including its five hour of commercial-free coverage during the height of the storms. expanding the 11 p.m. newscast to continue tracking them, and adding three hours of news in the morning to follow up on the storm's aftermath. Gray takes issue with what it says is the FCC's implicit suggestion that broadband penetration must be 100% before the Internet will be included as a competitor to broadcast TV when it comes to ownership rule reviews. The company argues that the Internet, including blogs and twitter, are already having a major impact that the FCC has to take into account.
benton.org/node/116521 | Broadcasting&Cable
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PRIVACY

A FUTURE WITHOUT PRIVACY?
[SOURCE: IDG News Service, AUTHOR: Peter Sayer]
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt painted a messianic picture of our technological future, involving holographic telepresence, self-driving cars, automatic translation, and the widespread deployment of 1Gbps Internet access over optical fiber, bringing transnational peace and communication to all. Schmidt was speaking at the opening ceremony of the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, the theme of which this year is "managing trust." However, Schmidt said nothing about privacy, the area where users of Google's services in Germany and elsewhere in Europe seem to be most concerned about the trust they can afford to place in the Internet giant. Last week Google introduced a new privacy policy despite calls from European data protection authorities to wait while they completed an investigation of the company's privacy practices.
benton.org/node/116515 | IDG News Service
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WIRELESS/SPECTRUM

VERIZON FILING
[SOURCE: The Hill, AUTHOR: Brendan Sasso]
Verizon urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to approve its $3.6 billion deal with a group of cable of companies, including Comcast and Time Warner, in a filing on March 2. Verizon argued the additional airwave licenses will allow it to meet the growing demands of data-intensive smartphones and tablet computers. Verizon argued that it is one of the most efficient companies in its use of spectrum and that the deal will help it meet the needs of its customers. It also said competition in the wireless industry would remain "robust" with the deal. Although the consumer groups have claimed that the cross-marketing agreements between Verizon and the cable companies would lead to anticompetitive behavior, Verizon argued the FCC has no authority to review those deals. The company said the FCC only has the right to examine deals that involve transfers of airwave licenses. "Consideration of the Commercial Agreements is not necessary for — or even relevant to — the review of the spectrum license assignments here," Verizon claimed. It also noted that the Justice Department is already investigating the cross-marketing agreements in its own review. Public Knowledge, a consumer group that opposes the deal, called Verizon's arguments "absurd."
benton.org/node/116502 | Hill, The | Public Knowledge | Dow Jones | National Journal | B&C
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FCC AND DISH
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Kevin Fitchard]
After dealing with the political agony of LightSquared for the last year, the Federal Communications Commission clearly is in no rush to re-air that soap opera with Dish. Dish’s S-band spectrum doesn’t have the GPS interference problems of LightSquared’s lower-frequency L-band airwaves, but it’s not exactly controversy-free either. AT&T and other operators claim that Dish’s 2 GHz frequencies could create interference problems for their mobile networks. Rather than risk another political firestorm, the FCC is going to explore all of the interference issues of a full-bore LTE network in the satellite bands before it signs off on any new networks. It’s a cautious approach that could delay the launch of new competing mobile broadband networks, but perhaps it’s a step the FCC should have taken from the start. At the end of the rule-making process, there’s a good chance Dish will get its waiver. The obstacles it faces are much smaller than the GPS problems LightSquared had to cope with, and the rule-making process could establish a definite process for overcoming whatever interference problems emerge. Dish would have to wait a year or more, but despite the company’s protests, it had no plans to launch a network in that time frame in the first place.
benton.org/node/116495 | GigaOm
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IPAD3 AND CARRIERS
[SOURCE: GigaOm, AUTHOR: Kevin Fitchard]
All signs point to Apple unveiling its 3rd generation iPad on March 7, and while millions of consumers will follow Apple’s San Francisco event in anticipation, operators around the world will watch with trepidation. New reports emerge daily that the iPad 3 will be the first iOS device with LTE connectivity, but Apple hasn’t given any official confirmation. There’s a lot riding on that spec sheet. If the new iPad — and more importantly the next iPhone – doesn’t support LTE, then Apple will have struck huge blow to wireless industry and impeded mobile broadband’s progress. The simple fact is that LTE is a much more efficient way of delivering mobile data than its HSPA and EV-DO predecessors. There’s so much attention focused on the speed of LTE networks, and while 10- to 20 Mbps connections are nothing to scoff at, the hidden, yet very real, value of LTE is its ability to deliver a bit of data far more cheaply than previous generation technology. That means operators not only have more capacity to offer their customers, they can – theoretically at least – sell that capacity at a lower price.
benton.org/node/116530 | GigaOm
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CYBERSECURITY

BIGHT SIDE OF BEING HACKED
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Somini Sengupta, Nicole Perlroth]
Hackers operating under the banner Anonymous have been poking a finger in the eye of one private company after another for two years now. They steal files from inside corporate computer systems and occasionally, as in the case of Stratfor last week, dump company e-mail online for all to see. The Stratfor hack, in which Anonymous claimed to have joined forces with WikiLeaks, drove home a clear lesson about the era of ubiquitous “hactivism,” or hacking as a form of protest. Despite the arrests of dozens of suspected members of Anonymous and its offshoots worldwide, it is far from diminished. Nor have most of its corporate targets been irreparably damaged by the attacks. Rather, what Anonymous has done, experts said at the big RSA computer security conference, is raise the alarm about the unguarded state of corporate computer systems.
benton.org/node/116500 | New York Times
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HEALTH

DIGITAL HEALTH RECORDS STUDY
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Steve Lohr]
Computerized patient records are unlikely to cut health care costs and may actually encourage doctors to order expensive tests more often. Industry experts have said that electronic health records could generate huge savings — as much as $80 billion a year, according to a RAND Corporation estimate. The promise of cost savings has been a major justification for billions of dollars in federal spending to encourage doctors to embrace digital health records. But research published in the journal Health Affairs found that doctors using computers to track tests, like X-rays and magnetic resonance imaging, ordered far more tests than doctors relying on paper records. The use of costly image-taking tests has increased sharply in recent years. Many experts contend that electronic health records will help reduce unnecessary and duplicative tests by giving doctors more comprehensive and up-to-date information when making diagnoses. The study showed, however, that doctors with computerized access to a patient’s previous image results ordered tests on 18 percent of the visits, while those without the tracking technology ordered tests on 12.9 percent of visits. That is a 40 percent higher rate of image testing by doctors using electronic technology instead of paper records.
benton.org/node/116550 | New York Times
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CALIFORNIA DRIVERS
[SOURCE: San Jose Mercury News, AUTHOR: Bruce Newman]
California drivers squawked, they talked, and one or two -- could it have been you? -- even balked at having cellphones ripped from their hands when the state law forbidding the use of handheld phones on the road went into effect in 2008. But according to a study announced by the state Office of Traffic Safety, since that time, the number of traffic deaths in California declined by 22 percent. With fewer drivers yakking into handheld phones, the death-by-cellphone rate dropped an even more stunning 47 percent. "Those are huge numbers," said Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), author of the bill whose outcome the study tracked, while taking a (hands-free) victory lap after the announcement. During a two-year period after the law was implemented, there were 53 deaths caused by drivers holding cellphones, compared with 100 in the two years before the law took effect. This came as total accidents and fatalities were down overall for reasons as varied as more cars having air bags. "The drop in collisions was the biggest, single, year-to-year drop in the history of the state since the CHP began keeping the data," Simitian said. The report examined state crash records two years before and two years after the handheld ban went into effect.
benton.org/node/116545 | San Jose Mercury News
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FUNDING

USDA GRANTS
[SOURCE: Department of Agriculture, AUTHOR: Judith Canales]
The Department of Agriculture is inviting applications for loans and grants under the Rural Economic Development Loan and Grant (REDLG) program. The primary objective of the program is to promote rural economic development and job creation projects. Assistance provided to rural areas, as defined, under this program may include business startup costs, business expansion, business incubators, technical assistance feasibility studies, advanced telecommunications services and computer networks for medical, educational, and job training services and community facilities projects for economic development. Awards are made on a competitive basis.
The deadline for receipt of applications in the USDA Rural Development State Office is no later than 4:30 p.m. (local time) on the last business day of each month in FY 2012.
benton.org/node/116518 | Department of Agriculture
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STORIES FROM ABROAD
These headlines presented in partnership with:


IRELAND PASSES VERSION OF SOPA
[SOURCE: TechDirt, AUTHOR: Mike Masnick]
Remember how EMI sued the Irish government for failing to pass a SOPA-like law that will force ISPs to act as copyright cops and censor and block access to websites that the entertainment industry doesn't like? Well, apparently, the end result is that the Irish government has now signed the bill into law. This happened despite widespread protests in Ireland against the bill. The Irish Minister for Research and Innovation, Sean Sherlock, is insisting that the final version of the bill is much more limited than earlier proposals, and that it took guidance from recent EU Court of Justice rulings that say ISPs shouldn't have to be proactive about blocking. That still means that copyright holders can petition to force ISPs to block all access to various websites, and as we've seen in other countries in Europe, you can bet that the major record labels and studios will be doing just that very soon (if they haven't already) -- though their track record on properly calling out infringement isn't very good.
benton.org/node/116536 | TechDirt
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UK BROADBAND MAP ABOUT AS AWFUL AS U.S. VERSION
[SOURCE: DSLReports, AUTHOR: J Kukiewicz]
The United States spent $300 million on a broadband map that doesn't come close to showing reality, and the UK looks to duplicate that "success." Last week the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) published a new map showing broadband availability in the UK’s 36 largest towns and cities. It’s interesting for a peruse although the data isn’t exactly new, it comes from regulator Ofcom’s Communications Infrastructure Report 2011, released last July, a standard report on the country’s broadband progress that it is required to present to Government. But the Minister for DCMS, Jeremy Hunt, tweeted that it was “shocking [that] no-one in Hull or Aberdeen can get superfast #broadband according to most recent stats”. Well, yes. Except that two fairly shocking cities – to which we will, in any case return in a moment – are as nothing to the fairly misleading cheerful picture of superfast broadband availability that the map gives elsewhere.
benton.org/node/116535 | DSLReports
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